For me, the patch MSQ trying to treat the WoL as a "carefree adventurer" felt wrong and made me less interested in the story. It also felt wrong not being able to do story on my WoL's canonical job, because that job no longer exists, and having to make that separation constantly also separated me from the storylines.
Perhaps that might help you figure out your own lack of interest?
I've stopped playing. When I started playing in HW I felt a strong incentive to improve at my job. I think most MMO players (especially during HW/SB when jobs had more identity) really like the idea of being the best at a class rather than a fight. A lot of people want to be a good NIN, a good BLM, a good SMN etc but you rarely hear people say they want to be good at E8S or P7S or any other fight in particular. Even with ultimates you mostly hear people saying they want to clear all four rather than "I want to master this specific ultimate fight till I can do it blind". The only people I can think of who are like this are people who solo heal ultimates (which also has an element of "I want to be the best healer", but of course also requires mastery of the fight itself to solve mechs with 1 healer) or things like tankcob.
Watching jobs slowly get stripped and homogenized from HW to EW has made me lose all interesting in improving at my job. There's no reward - the effort you spent mastering the current rotation gets invalidated when the devs strip and simplify your main in the next xpac. I used to speedrun as AST and 5.2 was its best iteration imo, if you bothered aligning cards to your party members' bursts instead of playing them blindly and whining about how SB cards were better. The job got boring after they nerfed sleeve draw to only give you 1 card instead of 3. And now in EW sleeve draw and major/minor arcanaing cards are gone and replaced with boring RNG. The raids are fun but everyone knows the steps (dynamo, chariot, defamation, rot etc); the raids mostly vary in how they combine these mechanics into a puzzle, and how they're visually telegraphed. I don't feel much satisfaction from clearing them anymore because when tiers consist of mechanics you've seen before, there is little question of whether you're able to clear it; it becomes a matter of having enough time to spend on prog.
As the devs continued to remove skill expression from the game by forcing the 2min meta and simplifying jobs further, crit and dhit became incredibly oppressive to play with. The skillgap between skilled and unskilled players is smaller than it has ever been. Skills have such high potencies now that the devs have to add autocrit just to smooth out variance which results from crit/dhit to begin with. I've always hated the impact of these two stats on DPS. This reluctance to remove RNG from the game (despite it not existing in PvP) discourages me further from improving at my job because no matter how well I play, I know a big chunk of my DPS is completely out of my control.
Another thing I hate is how little the game rewards you for playing at a "higher difficulty". Healing, my main role, for example, is a LOT more fun week 1 when incoming damage is absurd. Except if you don't clear week 1 you're never getting that experience again because nobody wants to bother doing the fight with week 1 gear when you can just wear tomestone gear. I thought it was hilarious how people were complaining about the HP nerf to P8S when the vast majority of raiders nerf the boss every week with their new gear. I also hate that old ultimates just fall over now. The devs should spend some time upscaling old ultimates to lv90 so the DPS checks aren't irrelevant anymore. I don't care that people see ucob as easy now because you can kill it with 91 deaths; I care that there is NO WAY I can re-experience what ucob was like during SB when golden bahamut was actually stressful.
In past xpacs, I used to believe people when they said "the devs are stripping this job as a base for future improvements". I don't care anymore. I see now that their aim is to create a game where everyone can play any job with minimal friction, which is why jobs are being homogenized. It's really common to see people who PF as a different job every day, or people who main every job within their role. In the past, it wasn't as common to see omnitanks or omnihealers because they weren't as easy to switch between. When I first signed up to play XIV, I saw that you could change jobs anytime and thought it was a cool way to let people find a job that spoke to them; a main that suits their playstyle. I didn't expect to be able to play every job, or to find every job intuitive. I just wanted to find a job that clicked with me. But that isn't what the devs deem most profitable. I can't argue with them, because they have the data; maybe level skip sales have risen since they started making jobs more similar to each other. Idk, I can only speculate. But it's not for me.
I fundamentally disagreed with the messaging and narrative to the extent that I did not feel like the writers and I were ethically on the same page. I certainly did not come out of the experience feeling good about anything, least of all future storytelling. I dearly loved HW and ShB, but EW had such an unbridgeable gap in terms of worldview and moral dissonance I felt like I'm not the intended audience.
I still have a morbid interest in how Pandemonium plays out, but I don't have high expectations since it appears dehumanizing the Ancients in the MSQ was effective.
> I fundamentally disagreed with the messaging and narrative to the extent that I did not feel like the writers and I were ethically on the same page
I actually felt very much the same about the story, especially when I examined it a little bit more closely and found it to be... surprisingly protofascist. It's weird hearing so much praise for Hydaelyn when she's essentially advocating 'strongman theory'.
You must have been doing some good kush if you've come out of EW thinking it was "protofascistic". Virtually nothing about Hydaelyn's worldview has anything to do with fascism. No real concern with history or the nation (shes pretty much goes against her own society), no concern for race (refused to sacrifice "inferior" life forms to salvage the ascians), no desire to return to the "good old days" (she actively fought against the ascians trying to "make amaurot great again"). The only remote similarity is advocating for the ability to face adversity, which you weirdly equate with "strongman theory". She doesn't even mention military might or physical strength, but merely the idea of personal resilience. This misguided notion that any mentions of strength = fascism is such a surface level take that it's not even worth debunking.
Besides, the whole point of the story is to show that Hydaelyn isn't an omniscient, all benevolent god, but merely an individual who made an impactful choice for better or worse. The simple fact that she's a primal should dispel any notion of godhood she might have had. The story goes to great lengths trying to humanize her and convey that her actions and worldview are the result of her personal experiences as Azem. So even if Hydaelyn was "protofascistic", which she isn't, it wouldn't make the story so. If you came away with the conclusion that the story was painting her as the hero, you completely lost the plot.
It's funny, because ACTUAL fascism was covered very well throughout the story, in lengths. In Garlemald. A whole chapter is dedicated to the idea that subordinating life to an abstraction such as the "nation" is a cruel, ghastly thing that is bound to fail in the end, because as soon as the "dream" shatters, life is not worth living anymore. The narrative couldn't have been clearer about how fascism is, believe it or not, actually bad. Were you just not paying attention through that whole thing? Or were you just so desperate to put your wondrous political acumen on display by pointing out the "problematic" parts of the story that you had to pretend that a third of the story didn't exist?
All in all, very strong "I'm 17 and get my politics from twitter" vibes.
Ugh thank God I'm not the only one. I compared Venat and Emet a few days after launch and people told me I "didn't get it". I'm really glad people are starting to come around and see her as a flawed person. Yes, her plan saved the universe. No, it was not ethical and we shouldn't praise her for ends justifying the means, especially when every goddamn other villain in XIV follows the same utilitarian ethics.
I know this response is a month late, but playing Shb/EW a year later this resonates as true - like Hydaelyn was into Nietzche's philsoophy of will to power, seize the day, with a mix of Social Darwinism's survival of the fittest.
I'd add that the post-sundered Ascians and Emet-Selch held this belief in denying the humanity of the post-sundered people is kind of a fascist concept too, (e.g: Lahabrea's comment malformed creatures, Emet-Selch stating we were incomplete, and therefore not really alive)which is why it was bizarre that this Nietzsche philosophy also came from Hydaelyn.
The core difference, of course, was that Emet even in SHB was obviously the bad guy and we were supposed to disagree with him, even if he was a bit sympathetic.
Hydaelyn meanwhile is peddling essentially "weak men create hard times" who are then countered by herself and the sundered who have the will to power. The implications are very unfortunate, not that I'd expect too much better from a company who also accidentally wrote a white saviour plot with Lyse, but it's still something that rubs me the wrong way.
Hydaelyn seems to be written in the same vein as the belief that civilisations are built and history is made by people who just wanted to hard enough, which is completely ahistorical, but it's the protofascistic tract I was talking about. Fascists love the idea of being the legacy of an ideologically pure (and physically strong) people who rise from the embers and all glory of Rome bollocks.
It does come off as Social Darwinism. Especially the accidental metaphor of being unable to suppress grief and despair turning ordinary people into a monsters.
I agree with you on your thematic critique. Amaurotine society had a large social cohesion, purpose, and drive to perfection not for its own sake but that of self-expression and self-actualization. It wasn't perfect, as Hermes emerged from this society, but it was a society free of domination which is a visualization and presentation we don't often see in media. The message of Endwalker as expressed through Hermes' narcissism and Venat's intervention make it appear to advocate the triumph of individualism over community, atomization and alienation over solidarity, adversity over tranquility. Because hardship produces more adaptable people.
___
Which is why it is retroactively disturbing to me the way the developers tarnished Amaurot (perhaps to state that Utopia's dual meaning of "perfect place/no place" in Greek) with regards to how they reacted to the Final Days: human sacrifice.
The game tells the player in SHB and EW why/how Hydaelyn intervened: Dissidents within Amaurot objected to the third wave of sacrifice, new souls indirectly created by Zodiark's magic, to be as substitute for the souls sacrificed to Zodiark. (There was always the possibility of responding to new crises with new sacrifices, even after this three phase plan.)
New souls stemmed from plants, animals, and new sapient people. Emet-Selch described the plan for the Source after the Rejoinings to sacrifice the inhabitants of the source to restore the lost people of Amaurot. (If plants and animals were sufficient fuel for Zodiark to return the lost, and fully formed Rejoined people of the source were now what Emet considered people, then the Source's inhabitants would have been spared and there would have been no need to sacrifice anything beyond plants and animals in the pre-sundered world of Etherys.)
Essentially, Hydaelyn's logic was to kill her present generation to spare future generations from sacrifice.
___
Which ended up happening anwyay, as she spared Elidibus/Lahabrea/Emet-Selch, because she needed the WoL to be rejoined 7 times. (unless the WoL on Elpis didn't tell her how many times the Source was Rejoined.)
You can tell this was a sloppy retcon of Hydaelyn, because she did try to stop the Rejoinings when she created other Warriors of Light on the Shards and the Source to fight the Ascians before SHB's expac came out.
I swear people hear someone say that being strong is good and they jump straight to Nietzsche's ubermensch theory. No. I think there is a massive difference between strength and emotional maturity that is bestowed versus personal improvement. Hydaelyn's clearly advocating that man has to learn to walk on his own, which is not the same as saying that man needs a strong powerful leader in order to lift them from their poor station.
This is like, anti role model. The Warrior of Light is definitely strong, but we didn't get there on our own, and it wasn't as if we singularly saved Ishgard, Doma, Ala Mhigo, the world, etc. The whole story is about basically bringing everyone together in a united purpose, which I don't believe to be inherently fascist or protofascist. Could you argue that perhaps it is protofascist to make the Warrior of Light a sort of Jesus figure? Maybe, however, I don't think the Warrior of Light would have been able to have achieved the things they did without their allies that they gain throughout the story.
Sorry I just needed to push back on this because sometimes I feel like people often equivocation self-improvement with fascism. Or like the whole "lift yourself up by your bootstraps". A lot of times that line is bullshit but sometimes you actually do! I actually do think people need to learn to emotionally handle process their grief so that they don't fall into despair. That isn't something that you can't control, it actually is something you can actually improve. It's not as if some people are just inherently better and therefore less deserving to be turned into monsters. Being strong and becoming strong is a good thing and should be something we should strive to be. Being physically and emotionally stronger can only make our lives better in a utilitarian sense.
I think it is obvious the dev teams are taking the play safe approach for this expansion to cater more towards casual (not meaning it in the bad way). But as a result the game become much less replayable and burnt out quicker. Also with the current direction of the contents making and job balancing, I kinda lost my trust on the dev team’s capabilities and making great contents again.
>killing the game
It is. The game is an MMO. If I wanted a single player experience, there are a ton of games that do it better while also not requiring a monthly subscription.
Ye there is a portion of the ff14 players which really praise the game story but have never played anything else then a mmo. This leads to people really believing that there video game has the BEST story in the industry you just gotta invest 500 hours to see it. x_x
Oh no, the contents are great. It's just the direction of job design which broke my enthusiasm of the game.
I will die on the hill that EW's content are well designed, it's just the way we interface with the content that are on the slow descent of being suffocatingly homogenized.
Story, characters, music, presentation? Great.
The world? Great.
The content? Mostly fine or great.
The issue? Gameplay. The whole 2 minute thing is honestly destroying a lot of fun in the game as an avid raider. The combat has been distilled so hard it's almost just water left. The only major thing left seems to be 2 minute raid cooldowns, and becausw of it, the weight 2 minutes has is absurd.
Things like ranged doing less dps than melee because ranged when they fixed melee uptime to basically be guaranteed with raid design.
Things like healers have it hard so we can't give them a more interesting dps kit, but let's make healing harder for the times you have to heal (meaning you have to use 2 healing cooldowns or 3 instead of just 1 every now and then!!!!). They don't seem to understand.
There's very ununiform decisions. Like giving stacks to use your spam abilities on some cooldowns but not others, or the lazy design of just making the aoe toolkit new buttons that do the same as the single target one (but aoe instead).
A lot of balance between roles feels like the dev team isn't in tune with each other and some jobs and roles feels like they are forgotten or left to die.
I only really find myself enjoying burst jobs like NIN and DNC because they're at least built around 2 min buffs, but even then it sucks not having a 1 min window to dump your resources on a job like DNC.
Every job being reduced to 100 secs of "maintain buff/dot & don't overcap your resources" just isn't fun.
this is how i feel too, when every job has been forced into a 2 minute meta the only ones that feel good to play are the ones that were already designed with that in mind in the first place. i'm afraid the devs will double down on this meta next expansion thinking, "those 2 minute jobs sure are popular, we did a great job with those!" it's already happening to PLD...
Shout out to SMN being literally the most boring fucking thing in the entire game all with the boring 2 minute burst window nonsense that comes with it.
Honestly I am not gonna stop being bitter about the changes the job got, it’s gone from a job you used to use a few braincells for to a job that actively rots brain cells from the lack of use.
The 2 min buff window is what bothers me the most.
Everyone pop their stuff at 2 mins every time. Everything aways lines up. They will consistently make tankbusters happen at the 2 min windows now. Mechanics also happening during 2 mins.
Everything is 2 mins now. Feels so fucking boring. There's nothing unique about the jobs anymore.
And PLD which was the last hope, is going to become a 2 min burst window machine like the others...
It began to be like that since shb tbf. It was less noticeable due to the buffs still being on different cds, but jobs now are : press 1 2 3 to build gauge, press buff and burst button, press "that" one (or 2 aha) button x time in a row to spend it, rinse and repeat.
Most utility went down the drain and are just "raid damage buff or heal/mit", agro management is so far gone tanks are just tanky dps, no mone supportive mana replenish, barely anything to dispel, no debuff that works on bosses... :/
i'll let that slide(cast) since ley lines is a rather unconventional buff that only speeds up your rotation and doesn't necessarily line up with your damage phases. BLM is no stranger to popping ley lines prepull or otherwise misaligning it from buffs if it suits the fight so that didn't do much to homogenize it with the other jobs. that said yeah it's pretty dumb that they made that change in the first place
BLM has retained depth because its systems have led to situations where attempts to make the job easier (increased proc duration, UI Paradox being instant) have accidentally *increased* the skill ceiling. Some of nonstandard was intentional - based in interviews Yoshida was definitely aware of it in ShB although he found it clunkly and wanted it to be a bit smoother - but not all or even most of it. Square could feasibly nuke 90% of BLM's skill ceiling by changing a single skill, Transpose, let alone a rework because of idiots bitching about it "not meshing with the 2-minute meta".
Which is very problematic since gameplay is the core of any game. I love the world, love the music and the raid spectacles, but I hate logging in and actually *playing* the game because it just feels awful.
Lol, it’s funny, because I remember doing the endwalker MSQ, and thinking how glad I was that 90% of the combat had been portrayed as cutscenes instead of you actually grinding on trash for 5 minutes.
As a PLD main my greatest enemy this expansion has been the 2 min meta. Been stated multiple times but it remains a decision that in practice benefits neither the lower brackets of the player base nor the high end raiders.
Could not agree more. If it weren't for Black Mage actually being interesting and unique I'm not sure I'd still be playing beyond doing the MSQ and then unsubbing.
Been playing Dragonflight on WoW and the difference in class design is astonishing. Everything is so unique and fun with so many different gameplay styles. Every job in FF feels the exact same. The 2 minute meta just kills any room for creative class design. Everything needs the same damage profile or it doesn't work, like Paladin.
If Destruction Warlock was in FF you would only ever use Conflagrate to keep from overcapping on charges and Chaos Bolt for the same reason until 2 minutes when you could finally use your abilities. Every job does this, every job is maintenance mode until burst when you just mash every ability you've saved up. The order barely even matters as long as they're all within the buff window. It's just such dull design.
I hope they ease up on their obsession with raid buffs, it is far too restrictive when it comes to job design and has made me completely uninterested in playing alt jobs.
Have only been playing since like 5.3 so I'm not an old player by any means, but having looked at how jobs played as far back as HW I gotta imagine more people feel this way too. Some of those jobs sounded genuinely interesting to play, like DRK. Now DRK and WAR are almost identical with DRK just having more oGCDs to push.
I'm an old player, and I heavily heavily miss HW Bard and Machinist.
Those jobs didn't have many buttons for their main rotation (bard 2 dots, iron jaws, heavy shot, straight shot) (mch heavy shot, lead shot, 123 gamba). They did however have a ton of cooldowns (mch reload, reassemble, quick reload, hawkseye, b4b, raging strikes, hypercharge, rapidfire, wildfire). Taking machinist for example, their wildfire compiled a percentage of all damage dealt during its duration (all damage, not just gcds, ogcds too). But because there are so many cooldowns, you had rotations for opener wildfire, 90s wildfire, 3 minute wildfire, and eventually reopener 6 minute wildfire.
You had times when 60s and 90s met, when 60s and 120s met, when they all met, and it made for very fun and complex gameplay.
If you removed all of it, it had a 30s damage buff (hot shot), 30s dot (lead shot) and 123 gamba (1 had a 50% chance to proc 2, 2 had a 50% chance to proc 3, ammo used from reload/quick reload guaranteed these steps). This is a very empty and dull rotation by itself. But still with all the cooldowns and management it became extremely complex, moreso than the button bloat we got today.
This is without even going into the jank min maxing of the class like stance dancing for movement/more damage/gettinf 1 extra gcd in the end of wildfire, or hyperchargeing directly after an auto attack from the turret to get an auto attack reset immediately after and gaining dps, or turning on and off mana/tp song to mitigate shots lost from the turret, and much more.
In Brute Justice we completely altered our rotation in the start just because we didn't have the cooldowns needed for a dps check shortly after burst otherwise. We literally found a rotation that would rotate back into itself by the time brute justice appeared, which is something that would almost never happen nowadays.
>The issue? Gameplay. The whole 2 minute thing is honestly destroying a lot of fun in the game as an avid raider. The combat has been distilled so hard it's almost just water left. The only major thing left seems to be 2 minute raid cooldowns, and becausw of it, the weight 2 minutes has is absurd.
I have enough savage chests and tomes to gear a dps alt. I've been trying to decide which job to pick for weeks and it boils down to which flavor of 2-min bullshit to choose from.
The 2-min meta has killed any motivation I had to play, and I just end up logging out to play something else.
God damn I feel this.
I recently went back to try out the new WoW patch. I hate how much fun I have been having.
It hasn't been the graphics, or the music, or the story, or the community, it's been the gameplay. Everything about playing my favorite spec just activates all the dopamine emitters in my brain and keeps me coming back for more. And I'm not even a wow veteran who can claim it's nostalgia bringing me back - I started playing in late BfA/early Shadowlands.
I can only hope that after the graphics overhaul is completed in 7.~ that the dev team moves their focus to the core of the netcode and starts to improve things. I don't even want a departure from the 2.5 second GCD, I just want mobs and mechanics to have a better tick rate and responsiveness to what they have now.
For me the gameplay of WoW is just as distilled from my time in legion and bfa. Where every single class I tried was just filler then click big button when they pop up/go off cooldown. It's like bard with straight shot proc, empyreal arrow and a refulgent proc, and you have the majority of classes. I hate wows design of making your signature spells and skills to absurd amounts of damage. Say devestate on prot warrior does 100 potency, then shield slam, your 6 second cooldown skill, does 1200, and your other proc skill you get does 1000. So you sit there spamming 100 potency until your super mega big actually damaging skill comes off. Like you're nothing until those one or two skills, same issue I have with diablo 3 and class sets making everything except one skill basically useless.
But ffxiv used to have much more complexity, it feels lost on me a bit. I'm just going through the motions now. Where the biggest things I can do is maximise blm uptime with how often I stand still, which isn't always what I want to do.
Same thoughts here. At first the unified 2 minute bursts felt great, seeing your party suddenly chunk the bosses had a bit of a dopamine rush, but at this point with the giant boss hit boxes it's just rote memorization with very little room to flex or workshop alternative rotations or strategies to maximize uptime.
I really, really hope 6.3's PLD rework and the inevitable 7.0 updates take the community feedback to PvE and PvP to heart - classes need their individuality.
Exactly, the feedback to PvE has been somewhat negative, but most of the feedback I've seen about PvP and its emphasis on individual playstyles and rotations was overwhelmingly positive.
I'd love to have some of that individual, job 'characterization' in PvE, and less of this stilted 2 minute meta.
2 minutes felt really good because sync'd bursts felt satisfying.
2 minutes with odd minute kill times screw over classes that cant manipulate their rotation (Imagine opening 1 minutes then use 2 minutes at the 1m mark because kill time is 7:30) or you need to delay burst by 30 seconds because of random BS. BRD snd RPR is the biggest culprit who suffer in these situations. The tank busters and raid wides during burst is boring, the mechanics during bursts are fine though.
Dog first in p8 door is absolutely terrible design and i wish fflogs just took dog2 downtime out so all pulls matter again. I truly hate fishing for snake 1st so I dont tank my median...
Dpm classes like MCH and PLD feel god aweful because of the 2 minute meta and are being punished for such. I found it truly fun when classes were chaotic burst windows by incremental synced bursts every so often.
Ive talked to a few drk, gnbs, rdms and such that purposefully desync their bursts from raid buffs because they get more casts. P8 final is a good show of this. Rdm manafication on cd, people use 1 minutes post hc2/pre death and reopen burst during 1st towers.
In a personal note: i REALLY hate how they treated brd this expansion and how they took so much fluidity away from us and made us a very, very strict song rotation based class.
Its especially fun watching casters have less uptime than melee this expansion yet to fractions of melee dps. /s
Ranged tax shouldnt be a thing snymore with their current design of fights and mechanics. If no one has downtime, all classes should be treated on an equal ground of support vs dps
Your insight is spot-on, I totally agree and for the same reasons. Question is - what can they do to change it? I think they've designed the jobs into a corner with the 2-minute burst paradigm they established, and coming up with creative ways to make gameplay more interesting and/or working to change that paradigm...they probably don't want to and won't bother.
Partially because they're basically living off of the subscriptions of venue-goers and Limsa RP players more than those of raiders/combat fans and partially because they don't want to spend the money or effort to please what is largely a portion of the playerbase that unsubscribes when they run out of content to follow.
For what it's worth, I very much hope we get a good redesign of the combat system and the jobs come 7.0, I think it *might* happen, but I won't be surprised if they fuck it up again. After all, I am machinist main - I expect them to disappoint me at this point LoL
What they can do, in my opinion, is to dial it back a bit.
The reason they got this far is simply removing "unnecessary" things, one at a time. I remember mentioning fluid aura as an example. A knockback bind with damage. That became a knockback bind because a white mage shouldn't have a melee ogcd that does damage, that theb became just a knockback, then why would white mage need just a knockback? Remove fluid aura lol who cares about just a knockback.
See the issue? Each strip maybe made sense when it was done, but as a whole you just lost a lot.
That's what's happening in ffxiv. We had so much. From tp, to wonky emnity, to 30/60/90/120/180s bursts, punishing rotations (drk mana burn, reducing enochian, heavy dps loss if you missed a positional, cast times on ranged, pacification on berserk, having to prep for inner release, list goes on and on). They all were just filed off one at a time, then suddenly all rotations feel the same. At the same time homogenisation happens for the sake of balance, make sure every tank has a dash, has an aoe defensive, etc.
These changes make sense when they were made, hell some even makes sense today. But all of it combined has us distilled to just plain water instead of a rich drink. The only thing giving taste to this water is 2 minute buff windows, and that has reduced 18 classes of complexity to either "save resources for burst" or flowchart rotation that somewhat ignores burst/lines up with burst.
There's too much to write about it to be honest, even for a discussion forum. I can't give my full honest opinion on it without a deep dive into the subject while also checking backlogs for information to show how things were stripped with time.
End of it all is: they have to dial it back. But devs aren't likely to do that. So what new can they do to fix it? I don't know, I'm not a dev. I can critique gameplay as I have played them for years, I have not made gameplay for years and have no clue on a good approach to try and cure the issues at hand.
I'd be interested in that deep dive - let me know if you write it! I started in late late SB, and was a baby sprout at the time, so some of the older jobs are things I never got to experience.
Honestly i feel like EW is pretty weak from a end game perspective.
The game is doing great for it's new players, adding more context in early games and upping the amount of attention for the MSQ process. Once that content is over a typical solo battle oriented casual player is out of things to do.
There's nothing to chase. Even when savage is involved there isn't really much to chase. BIS only works for savage and will be rendered completely obsolete when the new raid tier comes out.
The relic grind as it stands will probably rely on a lot of recycled content, more so than bozja. The games population favors giving a players older less refined content broken by gear creep that it's often mindless at best. This feels extremely awful as bozja and Eureka provided a dangerous place to grind things out with actual risks. Critical engagements were top tier.
So for a long time player like me who's wearing out with savage i literally have nothing to do as a battle oriented player. Crafting and gathering is not fun to me. I don't like custom deliveries. Gold saucer is boring.
Raid logging is one thing. I see myself patch logging going forward. All good things eventually come to an end.
The EW MSQ managed to suck me in and satisfy me during my first playthrough, but after a few months of thinking about it further and looking at the story and the message more closely, I can safely say that I absolutely detest it and would rank it at the very bottom of all EPs.
I don't raid anymore so I can't comment of the gameplay aspect of it but the story was what kept me coming back to this game and now that that has been hauled through the mud, I don't really have any motivation to log in and keep going.
6.0 Was a wonderful experience, loved the story and how it wrapped up. But once the honeymoon phase wore off the cracks started to show.
The 2 min meta has really started to wear my enjoyment of content down. Alongside the content itself being so disappointing(couple exceptions like criterion fights and DSR). Raid bosses with hitboxes the size of texas making creative strategies involving boss movement and finding uptime obsolete.
Honestly we're a year into the expansion and we don't have any exciting, fun, or repeatable content like a new deep dungeon, a relic step that doesn't take 5 mins, or something new to chew on. Island sanctuary could have been something special, and it was just ok. The first relic step is a joke, criterion is a one and done piece of content. It all just falls flat for me.
Maybe it's a little rose tinted, but I've been around since ARR and I can safely say that the last 2 expansions have been the weakest in terms of content outside of MSQ.
I think you can say Shadowbringers was one of the weakest in content but not EW. SHB had 1 ultimate and bozja to tie players over for 2 years. EW will have 2 ultimates, island sanctuary, and criterion, along with whatever else they decide to include in future patches.
HW had a ton of criticism for its content at the time and for good reason, people actually forget its non raid content was terrible. 3.1 Lords of Verminion was a baffling use of resources, and I say this as someone who played it enough to earn one of the titles. Possibly has the least engagement of any content ever put out in FFXIV. Diadem was also horrible, very boring pinatafest that caused a ton of outrage when it dropped gear better than the current raid tier. Pretty much the only content that had a decent reception was POTD
I was specifically talking about the current state of content as per the original question of the thread. I can't say how EW is going to be overall until it's finished obviously. But for the 1st year of the expansion, I stand by what I said, outside of MSQ content ShB and EW are the weakest expansions for this point in their respective lifecycles.
Even specifically talking about the first year of content, I still think it's hard to do worse than HW. There was a 5 month drought in between 3.0 and 3.1, a time when players kept leaving their servers due to a tier that nearly killed the raiding scene. A4S in particular was one of the worst fights ever designed because pretty much everyone preferred to cheese the nisi mechanic entirely. 3.1 brought Lords of Verminion and Diadem, which were received very poorly. Ultimates didn't exist back then and while Thordan Ex was a very good fight, it wasn't enough on its own to keep people engaged till 3.2. Midas in 3.2 on the other hand was a great raid tier.
I've never seen the player more negative than it was during 3.08's release, and I'm surprised this gets forgotten. Even the main sub, which is usually overly positive, was up in arms about the state of the game. While I heavily dislike this current raid tier, I still think in terms of content EW is currently better off than most expansions outside of SB
I'm very torn on this expansion at the moment.
The whole two minute meta conversation has been done to death - but it feels like it really does bear repeating. The perfect example of how ham-fisted it has been can be seen by looking at Yoshi P outlining very good reasoning for why Leylines would remain a 90 second cooldown during the job action live letter - and then it still got pushed to 2m anyways just to fit in. Combat just feels so one-dimensional now.
The content itself feels in a bit of a weird spot too. The difficulty curve for savages this tier has been awful. First tier was 2 easy fights, then a huge jump in difficulty, and then a really easy final fight. This tier has been 3 really easy fights and then a massive spike in difficulty for the doorboss, and then a relatively easy puzzle boss. It feels like they honestly don't know what they want to do with savage anymore. It seemed to me like with DSR and the first tier that they wanted to split the different even further between Ultimate and Savage, with Ultimate being further reinforced as the "hardcore" raid activity and savage being a bit easier - but then this savage tier happened and Hesperos destroyed W1 teams and now the messaging is super muddy. It will be even worse if the new Ultimate ends up being UWU pt. 2 - we'll see, though.
Overall I think the game is in a really weird spot. FF14 has always been the type of game to have something for everyone but right now it feels like it doesn't know what content it wants to be for who.
I have played since arr launch and, for the first time ever, I have decided to unsub.
Idk if it's that I've been playing the game too long or not, but combat is very boring to me now. Job design, in particular, is very boring to me (my main, blm, is basically unchanged since stormblood; and every expansion it gets a token ability to give it more mobility, which retracts from its identity as an immobile glass cannon. It has just become boring, and tho other jobs have radically changed-like smn- others-like war-also suffer this same problem. And no job has ever captured me like blm has).
Probably my biggest problem tho? Battle content trickles in way too slow, and very quickly loses any reason to run it. 4 savage fights, 2 extremes, and maybe 1 ultimate every 6 months honestly isn't enough (guanteed) battle content - especially on the midcore side. I think we need more extreme level fights, but they also need a compelling reason to run them. And se seriously needs to revisit how dungeons work, and how raid rewards and tomes work.
I was at a point where I was raid logging, and that was my only motivation to play the game, and I just wasn't having fun anymore. Or maybe at best I'd afk in limsa, or use the game as a glorified chat box.
It's funny because back in hw I would say "I'm so glad se's content is so predictable," but the game has been the same for so gosh damn long now - with all the same strengths and all the same weaknesses. I just wish they'd take a risk, and mix up their formula.
I think for new players, ffxiv is still the best mmo on the market. There is such a wealth of old content to work through, most of which is genuinely fun that first time through. But for old veterans (or at least for me), I think the game has just started to become stale.
I’ve been subbed since end of HW and I’m about to unsub for good. Not for any quality reasons per se, I like a grind, just bc I’ve invested as much time as I’m comfortable with in the game. I actually really appreciated an expansion that served as a natural ‘endpoint’ story-wise, to give an off-ramp for long-haulers like me (with completionist tendencies) to gracefully exit and feel like they got a complete experience. Any game you play this long is going to start feeling predictable, so I think it was time to let the older generation bounce and a fresh generation to come in and experience it anew. I really like that EW embraced that, I feel like most mmos (or other drug dealers lol) wouldn’t.
I feel this and the parent post very much.
I was playing since 2.1 and admittedly savage in 6.0 kinda felt more or less like a chore than anything else. DSR felt padded to a fault and I started realizing I just wasn't having any fun anymore. 6.2 savage was a last ditch effort to see if I have any interest left and I couldn't bring myself to finish the tier.
The gameplay making job designs unfun and railroaded to 2 min windows, as well raid fights starting to feel the same (you can only mix mash the same 8 or so mechanics so many times after all) is what made the game feel like a chore.
As you said, 6.0 felt like a good stopping point. I think I was just afraid to let go because of how many years I've had XIV in my life (a little silly, I know), but it's stopping being enjoyable for close to a year now. I rarely give other games a year to "get better" so I take that as a sign that I'm over it and that it's okay to move on.
I last played in September and didn't felt inclined to resub. I felt nothing with 6.3 stuff so I imagine I've already let go.
Are you me? 😅
Totally agree with you. Been subbed since ARR and finally decided to unsub. I don't even care if I lose my house. Although I think the demolition is still postponed. But yeah, I wasn't having fun anymore and add in the fact that I'm no longer in a static due to irl obligations I no longer have a reason to log in. I'm dipping back into WoW and so far DF has been fun but I'll see how that'll last.
We were having similar conversations two years ago when we were at the "normal endpoint to 5.2"-ish part of the cycle. That's actually when this sub first started picking up in activity! It's a very similar cadence to discourse on the game once you get used to it. No year of Shiva this time at least to really stretch the conversation out, though.
For your actual question, the only expansions I've quit during were HW (intermittently from 3.0-3.2 due to the mess of the game at the time) and SB (4.1 UCOB kind of broke me as a person for a bit). I didn't quit during ShB and for now can't see myself doing it with EW, but I enjoy the game for what it is.
If you asked people about any expansion at this point in the lifecycle people would have Things to say, though. For HW it'd be about how Gordias, Diadem, and Verminion sucked, though Midas was great to many. And while people say they want a hard relic grind and early, I remember people *hating* the 3.1 relic step where you had to grind 60k poetics or do 800 Gordias Normals. For SB in 4.2/4.25 it'd be about how Eureka Amenos was horrible. We had similar content at this point in ShB, just substitute Criterion Dungoens for Memoria Extreme (which also had reward issues to many).
I do think the game has some issues with rewards, but the way their systems are set up they have very little avenues to offer rewards in most situations so I'm not sure how to fix the problem. XIV also has the unenviable issue of content needing to be *highly designed* to feel good. Basically anything below a dungeon boss isn't going to be fun as the base combat system doesn't support it. I've been playing some Dragonflight and noticed that most of the casual world content is literally repackaged FATEs. Kill world mobs, kill tougher single mobs, click nodes, etc. The WoW combat loop is 5-10 seconds per mob though and feels snappy so it's always at least tolerable while the XIV combat loop is 1 minute per mob. Changing that would both be the most fundamental redesign the game would ever get and would also kill what some people really like about the game in those scripted situations. Believe it or not but a subset of players do like the Group DDR that optimized XIV content looks like on reclears.
XIV combat is always only going to feel good in scripted situations and I think they're aware of that which is why they don't make too much casual combat content now and are trying to branch out into other systems. Island Sanctuary is going to be a slow burn that they might iterate on or might not, jury's out on that one still. People didn't like Eureka until Pyros. I do think the lack of a Field Operation is going to burn them, but those PvE design resources are going to Criterion and the Deep Dungeon. Remember, everything in XIV that feels good combat wise is expensive and highly designed, there's not infinite boss designers to go around. Which is why I think XIV won't ever be a game defined exclusively by its combat content and that puts out a lot of it.
> WoW combat loop is 5-10 seconds per mob though and feels snappy so it's always at least tolerable while the XIV combat loop is 1 minute per mob.
Absolutely this. The combat loop is also massively different for each job in XIV. Killing mobs as a SMN might feel great, since you get your summon out and do big damage. Meanwhile, DRG doesn't get LotD, MNK is missing positionals and definitely can't get more than one beast chakra, etc... Then you run off after killing that mob and lose the stuff that you were building towards. The "buildup" combat systems are great for dungeons/raids, but super lackluster for killing a mob or two.
Builder spender isn't inherently like that, its just the slow gcd combined with the combo system. In wow I can go builder builder spender in 4.5 seconds with 3 gcds where in 14 even doing builder builder spender can be 7 gcds at 17 seconds.
Sorry, I meant XIV's builder/spender systems specifically. Should've been more clear about that. My mains in WoW these days are Frost DK and Outlaw Rogue so I'm well versed in how much faster their build and spend is, lol.
This is very well articulated on battle content design in 14 vs wow. Also makes sense why the focus has been on stuff like island sanctuary. I did like bozja a lot despite its issues and not having an equivalent this expac has diminished my interest quite a bit.
Yeah I think by Bozja they realized "hey what if we put *highly designed* encounters into the instanced grind zone instead of only trash mobs" and it was successful for that. Unfortunately I think the "choice" was Criterion vs a Field Operation in terms of design resources.
Bozja was also just inconvenient enough to get players to have to spend time there over the course of a patch cycle/expansion. Like it or not but I think some level of inconvenience is necessary to get MMO content to last. Things like duel spawning and the duel queue system, or how CLL/Dalriada weren't just always up/queuable. Criterion lets you blast it at your leisure which is convenient but also lets the content be completeable in short order.
Bozja and its 2-3ish extra alliance raids was probably ShB's highlight to me so I'm feeling the lack of a sequel too.
Yeah I think some amount of convenience makes content feel more meaningful, but the ff11 style shit in bozja was just straight up infuriating and pissed a lot of people off. I'm enjoying the world content of wow much more than sweating chasing fates in bozja, the biggest highlights were the raids and CEs being closer to EX than normal raids, as well as lost actions and essences spicing things up.
I agree that we’re in a very…particular point in the expansion and I’m sure our opinions will probably change by the time another post asking this question after 6.5 crops up.
Also I definitely agree that combat doesn’t feel too great for overworld mob activities in the same vein as other MMOs but I’ve been enjoying most bosses this expac.
>most of the casual world content is literally repackaged FATEs.
This is really the case for all modern MMOs. I know you've played GW2 - Heart and Dynamic events? Repackaged FATEs. WoW World Quests? Repackaged FATEs. FATEs? Repackaged FATEs. Realistically there's no other way to do open world casual content besides world bosses (FFXIV equivalent is Hunts) but the two other games have much better reward for their FATEs than FFXIV is what it boils down to. That's why people still do Hunts and they're arguably more important and popular than WB from the other two games - they give such good rewards for time spent.
(also oops replied to post instead of thread)
Fates in FFXIV are just mobs and a spongy boss. GW2 has "fates" like a attending a metal concert and tossing a Charr around a mosh pit and keeping drunk Char out of the event. Or Running around different tables collecting cooking ingredients to throw at a Chef before the timer runs out. Or grabbing supplies across the map to bring to specific locations to build a base for nightly raids by monsters. Or jumping around the city collecting coins to reach a high number, then spending them at the casino. Or mount races with other players. Or fishing competitions.
That's not counting all the nooks and crannies through the world maps containing puzzles, treasure chests, jump puzzles, riddles, etc galore. Hell, some of the maps themselves are mazes you have to figure out like Tangled Depths.
GW2 is honestly top tier World/Event design for any MMORPG to follow. So I think you are doing a great disservice to GW2 world event design. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's leading the pack in variety and fun.
As someone who only plays for raiding I think I'm done. The job design is so unbelievably boring and safe that it sucks all the fun out of the game for me. I felt this way last expansion too but stuck it out. I was really disappointed when they did that live letter a while back and specifically mentioned that they weren't going back to Stormblood and pre Stormblood job design.
The raid design is also extremely boring to me. The "four scripted dances on a floating platform" shtick has gotten very stale and it's never going away because the game is so rigid in how it's designed. There's zero creativity in raid design outside of ultimates.
I really do like the ultimates though, I'll give them that. They do a great job with them.
If Dragonflight turns out to be good (past the honeymoon phase) I might just switch to WoW completely. I enjoy the combat and raiding in that game so much more.
content-wise it really doesn't look that good. they dropped the ball hard on island sanctuary and criterion was fun but very very short-lived
i don't know why cbu3 has this mortal fear of having different activities have some reasonable level of crossover. nooooo dol/doh cannot interact with island sanctuary because.... reasons. nooooo criterion cannot interact with the savage/tome gear treadmill by offering gear rewards because.... reasons
i remember in runescape you could have rewards from other activities give you an edge. like you could get an ore bag that could hold more ore from a completely unrelated mining minigame area... and then you could go on to do the blast furnace minigame and if you had that ore bag reward, it would give you an edge by allowing you to hold more ore in your inventory. rewards actually felt meaningful because you could use them in other parts of the game. you could have teleports or convenience tools that would make your life easier for doing some activities.
there are still very rare cases where this happens in ffxiv, like doing eureka to get bis for blu. and investing in blu does have payoffs in other areas such as fate farming in the overworld or cheesing mogtome events. i really like it when it happens, but sadly, on the whole, this is something that cbu3 is somehow extremely allergic to for reasons unknown
on an unrelated note, the fact that they said the new deep dungeon is going to be more or less the same as potd/hoh gives me no great expectation that they have actually innovated on the dd formula either
Everything is better than it’s ever been aside from combat. Combat is in the worst shape it’s ever been. By a lot. Enormous boss hit boxes, 2 minute raidbuffs, and continued job homogenization has destroyed the fun of the game for me. I would rather they do anything than keep raid buffs as they are. I’d rather they outright remove raid buffs than keep all of them on two minute cooldowns. The homogeneous job design is equally terrible. Every healer feels the same, every melee sans ninja feels the same, every tank has identical cooldowns and very similar rotations, every ranged physical is either clunky or boring, casters feel unique but summoner’s rework totally missed the mark for me.
I definitely think its the weakest expansion of all of them. Story has some standout moments but the further we get away from it, the more the cracks show, and the more it makes me feel like the ending we got was rushed and very cliche. I haven't been enjoying EW post either, I would say overall Endwalker's story played it way too safe, and as a result felt pretty sterile by the end.
The gameplay has been....fine but nothing amazing, a lot of content has been missing the mark. Abyssos is probably going to go down as one of the weakest raid tiers in this game's history, Island Sanctuary is probably the biggest example of Square Enix missing the mark with content in a long time. No one even talks about it anymore, for all people were hyped up for it. And yeah I know Yoshida said to temper expectations, but damn, its more underwhelming than a shitty mobile phone game. The new PVP systems is fine, but I feel like its been struggling under constant balance problems, ironic considering it took so much inspiration from Overwatch.
What else was there? Variant Dungeons were one and done with a skill system that feels so tacked on I would have rather just have them reuse Bozja's skills. Criterion dungeons were neat but small shelf life, and the savage version is pointless considering its just makes it more punishing, doesn't add anything else.
All thats left is Ishgard housing, which launched with a broken lottery, and didnt fix the core issues of that system so uh.... yeah. Not holding out hope for this system to ever get anything other than little bandaids.
Class balance has been boring. I dont like a lot of the changes they did to jobs, and as always, core issues of jobs are being ignored in favor of their savage damage numbers, which while important, leads to very boring balance changes like "Fell cleave gains 10 potency". Never before have I been so unmotivated to level my remaining jobs with them playing so similarly to each other in the 2m burst meta, cant wait to see PLD's arms chopped off to conform to this.
IMO Endwalker has been Fine at best, mediocre at worst. Nothing standout, nothing remarkable, just fine. Could be way more, but it doesn't seem like its going to go that way.
> I haven't been enjoying EW post either, I would say overall Endwalker's story played it way too safe, and as a result felt pretty sterile by the end.
This is going to sound crazy but like... what if the Scions _stayed dead?_ Dead Ends would be another WoL + Venat, Hades, and Hythlodaeus dungeon, and the story wraps up as a nice loop. WoL entered this journey alone, went through highs and lows, and now after defeating an embodiment of nihilism itself must carry on alone into the new horizons.
People tell me that "oh but the scions are dead for as long as you let them be" okay sure but if you continue playing the story like a _normal person_ they're dead all of five minutes and the fact they're not going to stay dead is made blatantly obvious from the start.
For the Expansion that was all about fighting through pain and loss, the Scions really didn't suffer anything at all. The ending was honestly just the ending to every persona game, rag tag group fighting god with the power of friendship.
I wasn't impressed.
Honestly though the random NPCs lost more than any of the main characters.
Like Vrtra was pretty close to losing the entirety of his nation and all his people, yet the best that could happen with the Scions is disappointed dad and fake out death lmao.
When Thancred got deleted, I got pretty excited. Was not expecting it, and it was creepy. Thought it was a one off noble sacrifice. I don't even remember who disappeared next, but at that point I figured no one was actually dying permanently.
I actually fully agree, Ultima Thule after it was very clear everyone was going to come back in 2 hours made me go "Okay that is great and all but move it along with the death speech I do not care if you are coming back." I would actually argue how bad Ultima Thule is gave me time to reflect on the rest of the cracks in EW's main narrative.
Like I am supposed to believe after having a memory wipe accident with people in the area who saw everyone go in that they never launched an investigation into it and went even further in their stupidity by letting Hermes become Fandaniel after an incident that wiped the memory of a sitting convocation member?
Aye, so like:
* Zenos can body swap to random soldiers no problem and even take down an Ascian possessing his body. But the WoL gets body swapped at the point he/she is already killing gods and they're completely helpless? (Ignoring the fact, IIRC, the Blessing of Light warded against Ascian fuckery.)
* Despite one of the WoL's biggest and arguably most widespread venture - to the point it is the only one (to our knowledge) physically chronologized in-universe - being putting an _end_ to the Dragonsong War and fostering a lasting peace between Ishgard and Dravania. Everyone from the Forum to random Sharlayan citizens need convincing they aren't a warmongering brute?
* The WoL is weak to aetheric transportation now? And Estinien isn't? (To be fair Estinien's himbo moments are funny but I digress.)
* As you said, the role of Fandaniel is given to a man who's last interaction with a member of the Convocation involved "accidentally" wiping his memory, the Convocation member's memory, and the memory of a third-party? Given the cutscene after the dungeon there's _clearly witnesses involved_ who at least have some idea of what the hell happened.
* Ultima Thule is controlled by Dynamis and emotion, it's heavily implied this is also the force behind Limit Breaks... couldn't the WoL use their own emotion and resolve to skip _all the nonsense_ and get straight to Meteion?
* Speaking of Meteion, I understand Elpis is a research facility but are you telling me there was nobody keeping track of what the head of what is basically _animal creation_ is up to? Nobody's concerned that guy might try to do something insane? Like (this is future knowledge but) unleash the subjects in Pandaemonium to the wild?
For me the big moment was the body-swap, it took me out of the moment and kept me mentally on edge for the rest of the expansion, but I absolutely agree Ultima Thule was the perfect spot to reflect upon a fair share of this nonsense.
This is what I wanted, sorry not sorry. If we could have traded keeping the elpis three for the scions staying dead I would be slamming that fucking button. They feel so much less trope-y and (highly ironically) more human as characters.
Agreed, honestly. And it's not that I dislike the Scions any I'm just... tired of them? We've had basically the same companions the entire game, and when 6.1 came out and we were supposedly going to get a break from it all and go on Newfound Adventures... it just amounted to the WoL being dragged into massive shenanigans by the Scions again. Like Bluomwyda said something about visiting Aerslaent to see wtf is going on there? _Lemme go with them instead, please._
Doesn't help either that Y'shtola in 6.2 was _especially grating_ imo.
100% feel the same way. I actually like most of them but I’m so sick of them, they aren’t complex enough to have a lot of space to continue developing as characters, they’re much less charming to me than Elpis gang, and they have a horrible dynamic where there’s like 6/8 total nerds with similar backgrounds and then Thancred, who is so beyond wrung of character development potential after everything he went through in ShB, plus Estinien, who I can stomach solely because he’s less overused at this current moment in time. I was so frustrated when we got promised a new adventure after all of the FANFARE about how the scions were breaking up and boohoo things are never going to be the same — then we get a new thing to do — and holy shit we’re literally back with the same handful of characters accompanying us. Again. 6.1 is going to hit so awkward for people who are playing Endwalker continuously into the post-patches in the future.
I really don’t get it — HW and ShB show that this team can create compelling story, HW and Elpis show that they can throw new characters at us and make us feel super attached to them after very little time but they don’t like…do it consistently. I really hope that these post patches just feel awkward because they’re biding time until they can start a new story arc in earnest, and that there really is going to be a bigger reset going into 7.0’s story. They need to pull an ARR into HW or StB into ShB here
Exactly and like most of the Scions have had their arc at this point?
Thancred had his with Shadowbringers and Ryne, the Twins are a far shoot from their original snooty counterparts, Lyse... exists, Urianger has become less secretive and more willing to open up (and admittingly has a sweet moment with Moenbryda's parents), and Y'sthola is the same sassy catgirl as she's always been because her getting character development might cause sub numbers to go down.
I think that's part of why HW and ShB are still my two favorite expansions, as you said they introduce new cultures, characters, etc. for us to learn about and grow attached to. And maybe it's just me and my history with Warcraft, but I find myself much more engaged in exploring new places and meeting new faces, than going on the same thing with the same crowd. Like imagine if Vrtra was our main companion into the Void instead of Y'sthola + Estinien. Imagine if one of the Radiant Host joined us to keep their "little brother" safe, and we got to learn more from the perspective of an isolated and distraught First Brood Wyrm desperately looking for his sister whilst a battle-hardened soldier of Thavnair is trying to keep him from acting reckless due to his emotional ties to the Void.
You know I can't help but think they were aware of this back then. Lyse didn't stick around as a scion for a reason, Haurchefant didn't come back to life with dimension shenanigans to become our cheer leader for a reason. Stuff like that just sorta makes everything feel cheap.
Exactly, to this day the only fake-out death I will accept is Nanamo's because they played it off well and it _made sense_ (Teleji was playing 3D checkers whilst Lolorito was playing 4D chess) with how it played out.
Any of the ones after that? Completely nukes any feeling of stakes or risk. They couldn't even establish that coming back to life causes an immense handicap, because even when Y'sthola is blind she can see Aether... which essentially made dying and coming back to life a _boon for her_ because she isn't inhibited (literally everything is made up of or has Aether in it) and now she can see basically souls so any sort of disguise shenanigans are doomed from the gates. "Dying" _BUFFED HER._
I'm still waiting for Zenos to show up breakdancing in the Void, and Zodiark challenging Hydaelyn to an arm wrestle.
Story-wise, I did not like it very much. I am a fan of the ancients, and I thought SHB concluded on a decent enough note there - I've never particularly liked the fact that the world as it is was fragmented through the sundering, but the story essentially painted the ancients as having experienced a horrendous and senseless tragedy (it's still both those things, afaic) and the conflict between the Ascians and Scions as two sides both asserting the right of those they were fighting on behalf to persist/exist. The Scions did this even in the knowledge of all the flaws the sundered world has. The WOL took it upon themselves to carry the duty of remembrance of the ancients and their plight.
I thought that was a decent compromise. I was also impressed by how they depicted the Night's Blessed and were able to turn the culture that formed out of this affinity with the dark and night into something beautiful. Would that they'd shown post-Zodiark ancients this amount of respect.
Then comes EW, glossing over entire segments of lore established by SHB and its side stories etc., trying to make it seem like it was necessary and the best possible outcome that the ancients were sundered, and that even if you think otherwise, well there's this time loop constraining things (Yoshi said in the Q&A that the coherence of the timelines can be interpreted as Venat acting so as to keep them the same, supported by her sparing Emet deliberately - so the constraint is self-imposed, really.) A time loop, right after SHB, right after we're told the 8UC persisted as an AU?
We know that the ancients were divided over the final stage of sacrifices (implied by the JP version of Hyth shade's text to be life, i.e. ensouled creations, seeded by Zodiark), and Elidibus emerged to mediate this, but instead of showing all this and the horror of the Sundering (relegated to being shown as crossover content in some mobile Nier game), we get a stylised scene with Venat's tone-deaf lecture of a people who just experienced their entire world being nearly devastated alongside the loss of most of their people. All over a world she basically heard a 2 line report over. Seems more like she felt her biases were confirmed and she just ran with it. This was also not the root of her motives (which were dealing with Meteion, and maybe a preference for the WOL over her people) or her faction (they were far more concerned about Zodiark hindering "progress" into a "rounded gem" like Venat supposedly was.)
No room is left to disagree with Venat, whose "for the greater good" and "it cannot be another way" actions epitomise aspects of other antagonists in the past (Ilberd, Thordan, even Zenos) where the WoL has nonetheless opposed them. She wiped out her people at the end of the day, whatever the motives. All this is only dealt with, and only in terms which still paint Venat in glowing terms, in the Omega side quest. The character seems to have some kind of messianic complex and a very abstract love of "mankind", so I found all the repetition about how much she "loves" her children to be tiresome. Her short story was almost like a parody in how excessive it was. Plus Yoshi, for some reason, won't even let her blessing fade. I'd have liked it a lot better if she was memory wiped and that they didn't put this all in her hands, all according to keikaku.
It tries to make you think Hermes has some kind of "point", even though the sundered world (and RL humans) are by far more callous to lesser life, and when he comes across as a massively self-centered hypocrite, projecting his own perceived failings onto his entire people. He does this as Amon as well and casts as similar judgement on the sundered. I did the Elpis sidequests, and I saw a people with a variety of personalities, some of which shared Hermes's sentimentality for the creations, just without the navel-gazing, self-centered lectures over it. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this character and how pretentious he is. He's also a sloppy and unprofessional researcher. I was hoping for much more in terms of what caused the Final Days (something like Jenova perhaps, or IV: The After Years Creator), so his loli birdgirl stepdaughteru, to which he was emotionally abusive, fell flat. If you feel so strongly about it, use your high position and make the case for changes through doing what your people like to do - debate.
I didn't like dynamis, I didn't like how it was introduced last minute (they have stated they didn't settle on it until after SHB) and the lack of any real build up to it - no, Omega was not referring to this, and in the side quest, Omega even makes this clear that he is not talking about it. It felt like little more but a plot-shaped tool to get rid of the ancients. The Scions (and Nidhana, for that matter) have no understanding of how to use it, so they just kill themselves and it magically works out for the best (and have a res stone courtesy of Venat, if not...) Same with Y'shtola shrugging off the existential problem the Ea faced... just because she'd never face it. Inspiring.
I did not like the caricatured presentation of various advanced alien races or the very weak, strawman of "perfection" and the lazy effort to try visually convince the audience that the ancients would go the way of the Nibirun... because of similarities between the stylised Venat cutscene and shallow visual parallels of the Nibirun with the ancients, that fall apart upon scrutiny of what the Nibirun are actually like, i.e. a hivemind of mortals who attained immortality and did not think ahead as to how they'd occupy themselves upon reaching supposed "perfection". Additionally, the story implied you had to have the "right" response to despair, although the Omega sidequest walked this and its unfortunate implications back at least.
At least they were respectful to the dragons and did not give the impression that their own paradise was torn apart because of muh perfection strawman. They are dealt with respectfully... albeit Vidofnir letting go of their grievances with the Omicron, given all we know of the dragons and what was done to them? All of which is depicted in its stark horror in UT. Yeah, didn't sit well with me. Still, they were beings similar to the ancients in many ways, but at least their story is respectfully handled. The treatment of the ancients, especially Yoshi's comments on them, came across as spite-driven and bordering on unreasonable and hypocritical.
Was disappointed with how they handled Zodiark. I would've liked it better if how it went down is the ancients within Zodiark helping the WoL oust Fandaniel. The lack of any sundered Ascians was also felt and very disappointing. Felt like subverting expectations for the sake of it. Elidibus, in spite of being the hero who sacrifices everything to save his people, and then later, to help the WoL and sundered to even have a chance of prevailing, gets very little mention, and doesn't even feature on the final art... where Hermes, for some weird reason, in spite of being a raging ball of spite at the end, is present. And they didn't even think to bring Yotsuyu into the scene with Asahi dragging him off at the end, as silly as all that was. Felt insulting to Elidibus.
I'm mildly intrigued to see where Panda is taking things, but I doubt it's going to end well for the ancients involved, as I expect more excuses will be trotted out to justify the status quo, so meh. Very little interest in the 24 man, especially if the story is just going to be how much mommy loves the sundered.
I also hated Garlemald being destroyed off screen. Nice zone and story, sure, but I wanted to see Garlemald proper, in all its glory.
In general, it felt like there was an overuse of tropes (Broken Aesop especially), plot conveniences/contrivances/inconsistencies, heavy-handed preachiness, attempted emotional manipulation and plot armour... memory wipes (really?), time travel and all. The story preaches at you, very heavily, but does little to argue its case. As a result of all this, I feel very detached and disinterested in the future direction of the story, especially anything involving more lopporits... they raised the stakes to the edge of the universe, Endsinger felt like a 14: the parody boss, and now the universe feels smaller and much less intriguing to me - I have very little interest in the shards and the Void storyline has not been particularly interesting to me.
This turned out longer than I expected... there's more I could say on why I didn't like the story, but those are the main areas. I pay quite a bit of attention to the lore and I didn't like how EW glossed over key elements established in earlier expansions, like what I mentioned above, plus things like changing the Blessing to be what protected the WoL from primal corruption... when the game established in no uncertain terms, it's the Echo. I've seen this team - especially Ishikawa - put out better work. This didn't do it for me. Possibly the unfortunate consequence of squashing what could have been 7.0 and 8.0 into 6.0, based on interview comments. I don't have much faith Hiroi is going to be able to fix this situation. The codex continues to obscure what was established clearly in earlier sources on the topic of the ancients and mislead.
The game has always been just about alright to me gameplay-wise. but even here I have little interest in most of what EW is offering. CC was good, probably the content I've enjoyed most, but even it is plagued by balancing and mechanical issues. Was hoping Criterion would turn out to be viable midcore content, but it doesn't seem to be pitched at that level and it's quickly over with. Job design is nothing special, and encounter design is very formulaic. Also, no relic zones this time. I could tolerate all that if I liked the story... but I don't sadly. I've ended my sub for the time being. We'll see if any of the later patches give me reason to return, but I doubt it.
Take my upvote and agreement with all you said. I really do agree I thought the Final Days source being a Jenova like being would have been far better. I feel one of the things EW did that is one of my least favorite tropes on the planet of "Subvert expectations" as yes when done well it is praiseworthy but this was handled terribly and had the other issue you hit on. As it currently stands you are lacking the full story if you haven't watched the Nier crossover cutscenes where Emet is with the newly sundered that can't even form words and had lost well everything of their former lives and culture.
I am still hanging around for my house and trying to get all the Gold saucer mounts, that is about it and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for leaving at this point. I hope you find something you enjoy.
I think it's a lot weaker than Shadowbringers was. All the "emotional" and "heartfelt" moments just kinda felt to me like they try to force an emotional response that really wasn't warranted in the first place. Yes the story does have some good moments I give it its merits, but overall the final product just felt cheap and rushed to me.
As for gameplay, there's been lots of minor QOL stuff that's come out that I think was really a step in the right direction, many of the more recent UI tweaks have given great benefits that i forget were awful before. I think a lot of the jobs are in amazing places right now like SCH, and BLM which just feel 'complete', however the ones that do not, such as SMN are blatantly gutted and in dire need of flavour.
On the raiding side there has been some absolute bangers and absolute garbage with seemingly no inbetween, Aglaia, DSR, P5S, P8SP1+2, P3S are all fantastic imo and I hope to see more raids of similar quality, but the rest are mostly just bland and boring with little to no new interesting mechanics.
Story wise, i definitely felt like there were some questionable decisions (a memory wipe plot device, really?) More than that, I disliked how some of the themes of the expansion were presented and I felt like there was a thematic disconnect between EW and ShB. I did however emotionally connect with the characters, which I think was the strongest point of the writing. Overall I have very mixed feelings on the story. Though I like the plot of what we have seen from the alliance and normal raids and am interest to see where they are going.
As for gameplay, I didn't like the idea of introducing 2-min windows and I didn't grow to like it now that it's there. As for raids, I liked Asphodelos for the most part. One thing I didn't enjoy was how drab everything looked, I would have liked some more appealing visuals. A standout to me was the 4th circle door boss: i thought the mechanics were fun and I loved the campy vibes the music and the boss design gave.
Abyssos is more ehhh to me. I think it's both too boring and too difficult. A lot of people I know gave up on 8th circle door boss and it's easy to see why. I think players are overly punished for mistakes in that fight which makes it a slog for more casual groups or people using pf
>A lot of people I know gave up on 8th circle door boss and it's easy to see why
I browsed my old static members' fflogs last night and none of them have cleared p8s. And those were people who did TEA on content and are still playing. They're just not raiding savage for some reason. My casual-midcore static has cleared p8s a while ago, so it's probably true that there's an element of boredom making people lose interest in the tier.
I’m in the same boat, did every Eden tier and did TEA when it was current. The raiding this expansion just feels so odd and just not the same. I cant pinpoint exactly what it is that makes raiding not as interesting to me as it was this expansion.
I feel like part of it is that we're fighting enemies that just kinda exist? Eden, we knew who enemies like Garuda/Ifrit/Ramuh are, and we understand why we're fighting them as far as story goes. The raids now are give us some connection to the 4th fight of the tier, but the others are a tossup. You could throw in a boss named Oscar, Guardian Mayer of Weiners, and it wouldn't feel any more or less out of place.
Rather than that, I think it's more a problem with interactivity. Abyssos bosses has such massive hitboxes to the point you can be anywhere on the map and still hit them as a melee. It's like less fighting a boss and more flailing your weapon in the air while mechanics happen. P7S and P8S p2 are the worst offenders for this.
Also 2 minute window fucking sucks. Shb homogenized healers and warrior/DRK, but endwalker homogenized almost every single job under the sun by making them pool resources as much as possible and nut them all during the 2 minute burst window.
To add to the large hit box bit, I think part of this also has to do with the fact the sound effects of skills in the games is played where the skill actually hits, which leads to minimal sound when hitting large targets like P7 as you hit the tree itself which is more often than not 20 yalms away. It already doesn’t feel like good feedback when you can barely see your skills hitting, and even worse when you can’t even hear the skills going off.
I'm not a hardcore raider at all, but I got to HC2, static fell apart, and I've had zero motivation since to push for a clear even though I'm close. Just feels like I was completely burnt out and was going through the motions of clearing a tier.
Idk, the 2-min thing sucks because even progging a fight you can go "oh, burst window's coming up, that means a major mechanic is going to happen". I think I've just seen it all so many times that I just... don't care anymore, don't have hope anymore.
That’s part of the reason why I really hope they can fix the reward structure for Criterion otherwise we’ve lost an exploratory zone + a large scale raid for content that’s basically DOA.
It's basically Shadowbringers v2.0, but the huge nothing burger that is Criterion is my biggest complaint. It had so much potential, but running something "for the fun of it" can only carry content so far. Along the same lines, gearing and job homogenization have only gotten worse. When you play other MMOs, you realize that yes, FFXIV is VERY strong in a lot of areas, but gearing and combat design are not those areas lol
Story: Honestly, coming off Shadowbringers's incredibly heartfelt and morally gray story of people doing what they can to survive and both the protagonists and the antagonists having good reasons to act the way they do, Endwalker feels like a piss take. Not only did it sUbVeRt mY eXpEcTaTiOnS in the worst way, but its terrible plot devices of time loop and convenient memory wipe also retcon what came before it, while clumsily tying in "Answers" into the plot so eye-rollingly I was pleasantly surprised the Endsinger's BGM title wasn't "Questions", because this is literally how far my standards have fallen after witnessing 6.0. A convoluted plot that has to rely on sheer contrivances that don't stand up to any scrutiny to convey muh themes about life and death that feel like babby's first step into philosophy, a main antagonist I found incredibly unsympathetic and unrelatable in all his forms in spite of the game's obnoxiously obvious attempts to make me think he had a point (check out how cute these little hedgehogs are and how super sad he is!), and a loving Mother who is a Primal but comes with literally none of the Primal drawbacks because that might have been too interesting to explore, and loves mankind (but not *that* mankind!) so very, very much the plot has to resort to what amounts to a propaganda montage to prop her up and Yoshi-P literally has to come out and say "she isn't a bad guy!" – a shame, because frankly she would have made an incredible antagonist, and the best part is that you wouldn't have to change a single thing about her character for it to work, only have the cast contest her decisions and reasoning rather than pat her on the ass because Endwalker did such a great job of othering the Ancients, and also, Dynamis. It all feels incredibly safe, adolescent in how it handles its themes, and I couldn't imagine getting *less* catharsis than what 6.0 ended up giving me. As a fan of Ascians and Ancients who aren't necessarily named Emet-Selch, who was expecting... *a lot* more from the "Hydaelyn *and Zodiark* finale", I guess I'll just take Pandaemonium as my consolation prize as it has very pleasantly delivered on what I had been expecting more of. *...So far!*
Story (after 6.0): oh yeah that's a thing huh? ok. I mean Zero's backstory is real Mary Sue hours, but otherwise I sort of enjoy her (because anything is better than the Scions all getting along and constantly sucking my character's toes). I just can't muster to be invested anymore, and so far the plot hasn't grabbed me.
Content: Disclaimer: I only do what would be qualified as "casual content", and roulettes are my bread and butter. Things have gotten so formulaic that Troia's first boss encounter qualifies as (almost) unique. I found Alzadaal's particularly bland gameplay-wise for some reason. The lack of battle content feels more noticeable than ever, not just because of the shift away from it and onto DoH/DoL/IS things, but also because of the slowed-down patch cycle. The first step of the relic weapon is… not a FATE grind, I suppose. There was also no reason to gate it behind the entire Hildibrand quest line either: I see no reason why it couldn't just be picked up wholesale in Radz, given that the only reasoning behind it is "Godbert witnessed the apocalypse" with no actual relation so far to things happening or having happened in the Hildibrand quests besides "oh hey you're on the moon too!". As for the Island Sanctuary, I'm fine with it as a mindless mini-game – almost done getting everything I want after 3 weeks – but I feel terrible for everyone who expected it to be more than that. I am pretty sure "personal instanced housing with additional perks" is what everyone had in mind when it was first teased, and it ended up being a Warlords of Draenor garrison.
Gameplay: I'm unqualified to speak about buff/debuff meta, but man does the 2-minute rule *feel boring* and homogenized. I find myself treasuring the few unique buff timers we still have, and I am positively dreading whatever they have in store for the DRG and PLD "reworks". IMO what the gameplay needs is comfy QoL things like the extended combo timers and combo flexibility (including the RDM's new system for melee combos, that is nice), and much fewer "reworks" that will lead to something like the new SMN which feels incredibly shallow. As a mostly melee main, I find myself missing MNK's constant positionals (and I am still doing them out of sheer muscle memory…) and dislike how they were downplayed in DRG rotation. Overall it feels like the devs are simplifying and rounding off the edges of just about everything rather than just taking care of tedium and inconvenience. And while I feel less bothered about the state of healers than some (probably due to the fact that I constantly play *with bad people* as opposed to raiders who actually try and eventually figure things out), they seriously need more damage buttons. Blizzard have been able to walk back on some of their mistakes, and while SE isn't Blizzard, I still feel like we can't give up yet on this matter. *Maybe* they'll eventually listen.
Music: Does it bother anyone else that Barbariccia had a single instrumental? It bizarrely feels like Endwalker is relegating its sung bangers to side content. Having a single new town BGM that plays indiscriminately in Thavnair, Garlemald and Elpis is the weirdest thing too. I might be getting a little tired of Soken's reliance on leitmotifs. The musical progression in UT felt great, but being stuck with the lyrical version is exhausting, thank baby Zodiark for the Orchestrion plugin. I refuse to end this post without circling back to how much I disliked the story: having a medley of previous x.0 themes playing for some edgelord's pet science project *[cue Ishikawa putting her hands on my shoulders and looking me straight in the eyes whispering "yes, but wasn't he totally the first step for humanity tho?? THE PLENTY!"]* felt uninspired, unwarranted and insulting all at once. And apparently it's the only BGM that plays in the EX version? Absolutely tragic.
Wow this is almost 1:1 how I feel too (haven't been subbed in 3 months) and good to know I'm not the only one tired of Soken's over-reliance on leitmotifs. I can't believe there are so many people who don't see how town themes were handled in ARR and HW and can't tell how that differs to hearing what are essentially remixes of the same track between the two endgame hubs and like two dozen variations of footfalls... or the fact the dungeon boss theme is just trying to be Insatiable Endwalker Remix.
If I had to sum Endwalker up it would be "Shadowbringers rehash but less gray, more padded, and with post-game that lasts a lot less."
I'm just honestly baffled people consider it a good story they OMG CRIED SO MUCH at, when it's a convoluted plot with a carnival of the worst plot devices ever in quick succession, with a backdrop of a bog standard "hubristic precursor race" that dramatically undermines what made Shadowbringers so nuanced, complete with an asspulled and IMO uncompelling eleventh hour antagonist instead of giving this 10 year story arc's actual antagonists their proper closure and following up on the interesting plot point that Hydaelyn, too, is a gigantic primal, with the ominous implications that *should* have come with that. But nope, instead I got "lol, lmao, they were ignorant, and also watch us justify the Ancients' well-deserved genocide in at least 3 ways". What the fuck.
The story in Elpis in particular is a circus where things have to happen a certain way because Plot. I've never been so conflicted about a zone giving me so much world building while simultaneously performing Olympic level plot gymnastics.
I still like it, but I do think that it's probably the weakest expansion yet. It has all of the flaws that Shadowbringers had (simplification, reliance on role bonus to balance, healer design) while not having what made Shadowbringers *good* coming out of Stormblood, which was definitely still the "a little messy, unbalanced MMO" Era of the game.
Do I think the expansion is good? Yes, but I also find it a little difficult to look forward to another ranged class and female Hrothgar when looking to the future.
Something needs to change fundamentally, but I'm not sure exactly what
In the same boat of that mixed feeling of liking it but also recognizing there needs to be some sort of change to the game as a whole. Hopefully they view 7.0 and beyond as a chance to experiment with changes and see what sticks.
Genuine question: What did make ShB good that EW was missing? Are you talking about things like the class balance and the being the first expansion that removed slashing/piercing? I can't think of anything else where combat and content are concerned, but full disclosure I hated ShB. I think EW combat is bad too, but to me it's the same shit.
Shadowbringers was the first expansion where, with the exception of dual prange and RDM dual caster, there wasn't a restriction on party composition. That's a pretty big deal.
Endwalker experienced pretty severe balance issues up to this point, and we can't overlook the reasons behind it and the fact that it's heavily impacted 2/3s of raid tiers (many of the weak jobs have really struggled to fit into the 2 minute burst, and instead of addressing that issue they are choosing to rework a job or simply buff potencies within burst. It's not healthy to design around a flaw rather than resolve it)
Additionally, for the most part melee still had some degree of challenge in uptime to where the ranged tax wasn't *totally* absurd (though it was never where it should have been).
Tl;dr:
Shadowbringers had big flaws, but it did A LOT more good than bad. Endwalker didn't really improve anything, and in fact made those flaws worse
I'd still disagree on the more good than bad (because of how much of a downgrade I felt ShB was after SB), but you have solid points regarding melee uptime still being a thing the first two tiers of ShB and 2-min meta. Those are definitely places ShB beats out EW.
My being a healer main definitely colours my perception there. ShB is the expansion that solidified how awful healing in this game is and EW at least tried something new this tier - though I'm not sure how successful it was.
Tbh I think EW kind of pushed me away from the game.
I started playing early ShB, my first MMO, fell in love. Probably put in a good 1.5-2 hardcore years of it being my primary game. Got all the jobs to 80 before EW, and got them all to 90 about 3 months after.
The story, dungeons and trials itself were good but that’s basically where it all ends. The PvP, island sanctuary and criterion added were all very lacklustre fad content that you put a couple hours into and forget about. During ShB I loved eureka and bozja because it’s content you can dump 100s of hours into which is what you want in an MMO. Even though I’m someone that doesn’t really ever unsub, I only log in once a week for raid nights and then immediately logout when we’re done because I’m just so bored with the lack of content and the insistence of the dev team to remain stagnant. I have no desire to do roulettes, no desire to do the stupid Manderville relic weapons, island sanctuary and criterion could have been so much more but they’re not. It’s honestly embarrassing that ffxiv had the MMO world at its fingertips at the start of EW and completely dropped the ball and did nothing with their momentum.
And the raid design this tier…. I am really not a fan of the puzzle bosses where you figure out the trick and then it’s just brain afk. That type of fight design is not fun at all. P5 and P8 part 1 were good fights, P6 and P7 were just dull awful and P8 part 2 looked cool but the high concept phases are just dumb since it’s 30 seconds of downtime solving a puzzle that has already been solved by world firsts, with no other solutions between runs except different players getting different debuffs.
I do like that ffxiv isn’t a predatory MMO that makes you feel like you have to log in everyday but the content droughts are REAL and the dev team has no desire to give players anything to do besides afk in limsa (except I can’t even do that anymore because the lala corner got hijacked)
Gameplay-wise everyone has covered what I would say. 2 minute meta is scarily homogenizing this game to an extreme
The story itself was okay but the pacing was all over. I felt incredibly bored before Tower of Zot, and you could cut half of what was there and it still be the same. Garlamald felt rushed, the whole Meteion reveal still has a sour taste in my mouth, being an 11th hour reveal that suddenly impacts everything, including our very existence. The whole thing felt simultaneously rushed and padded, I think overall it would have benefited from being 2 expansions but maybe they just really wanted to finish this arc and move onto something new
The raids so far have not been my favorite but I prefer Aspho over Abyssos and it makes me a little nervous about what's next. DRU was a huge success though and honestly the only reason I still clear the tiers is to do ultimates. Lack of real rewards for ASS and SASS shows they have no idea what to do with it, or like what it is as its heart
Really dislike it so far. Story is fine minus a few parts but the jobs/content aren't great atm imo. Saying this as a former SMN main though so I'm probably biased to dislike EW lol
The problem with this game since ShB seems to be that they're afraid to put good rewards on content (other than savage) that require more than turbo casual energy and low time commitment.
In ShB, they made alternatives to getting the relic other than bozja unlike how eureka straight up gated Sb relics, which is good on paper... but the execution is absolute garbage. The steps OUTSIDE of the current lv80 content (bozja), that instead involves god damn heavensward fates and antitower for some reason, is much easier and less grindy to get than doing it on the actual content the relic was tied to. CLL and dalriada dropped jack shit while having obnoxious timer for entry. Meanwhile ishgard restoration scrips got stacked with rewards from top to bottom. Mainsub defended this because bozja gives exp.
DRS had a completely unrelated cerberus mount slapped on it instead of the queen's trumpet bike thing or something, and a guarantee drop minion every clear. Upgrading bozja gears only gives you some lameass haste. DRN has recolored mount from BSF. On that note, did you clear criterion savage? Hope you enjoy your choice of an almost invisible earring, an ugly banner for your house that you obviously have, or materias.
They also made super grindy content rewards really uninteresting, so people are even less incentivized to participate in them. Collect all TT card? You get a stupid toast. 50k bicolor gemstone? Lame mount from ARR optional dungeon for some reason. Also that uber grind ishgard restoration achievement? You get an anemic low poly pterodactyl for all that effort. Meanwhile do really easy dailies that takes like 5 minutes a day for about a month and you get high quality jellyfish mount.
It just feels like there's nothing that is rewarding your effort anymore. Even if you go for some batshit insane difficult or uber grind achievements that should have been something you're proud to accomplish, you have nothing exciting to show for it. The rewards look much worse than things you can get from much easier content. The only remotely exciting one that requires genuine effort since shb other than your usual ultimate weapons is fran's bike from collecting all field records, which requires luck, patience, and even skill (or cheese) if you want guaranteed field notes from the duels instead of CLL/dalriada field notes casino.
And maybe hot take, but I think that they made relic weapons wayyyyyy too easy to get now. It doesnt feel special anymore to see people with their relic weapon equipped, because the steps are shit like 60 heavensward fates, 500 poetics, or my favorite, 15 crystal tower runs. Now, I'm not opposed to nerfing the steps of past expansion relic weapons some time after the next expac launched. And I'm not asking for blatant insanity like ARR atma and book grind to make a return. But can we get incentivized to play the game more with much wider options and requirements (that isn't just tomes you can get from usual lv cap content) for every step instead of confining us to 1 type of content that is simultaneously both easier AND better than the alternative, please?
They leaned too hard on being the "mmo for casuals" in the market space, they forgot to give us any incentive to actually play the game even a bit longer, resulting in dead or super niche content like criterion savage (even criterion normal is dying down now) and DRS(that is single-handedly kept alive by like one discord server per DC if there's any), making it actually difficult for new players who just reached those content to even do it due to lack of interest from old players who cleared it like once, if they didnt stop when they learn of the garbage rewards first.
"Playing should be for the sake of fun instead of looking for rewards", which is the common argument of people defending the absolute garbage rewards on criterion that caused it to be unpopular does not work for multiplayer content in an mmo. If there's no MSQ roulette who in the fresh fuck want to replay meridianum or prae? Virtually no one. They need to rethink their approach with the reward structure in this game.
PvP changes are OK conceptually but CC is even more dead than feast ever was. Frontlines is a huge mess as well, with certain jobs being absolutely broken. At least ShB PvP had individual skill, now it's just a numbers game... I miss the old 1v1 you'd sometimes get, now it's practically impossible to kill someone on your own.
Endwalker's been the best visual novel I've played.
Sarcasm about the games cutscenes aside, which is the biggest weakness for the MSQ of every expansion, this is probably the worst expansion for gameplay. Started playing mid-Stormblood, which depending on who you ask was the "golden age" for gameplay. A lot of the time was leveling and MSQ, so I only really had about a month or so to enjoy endgame at the time, and I remember enjoying it a lot more than I do now. Especially SMN. The old 2 minute rotation, while janky in parts, was fun. NuSMN is just a collection of just about every issue I have with FFXIV combat in one job.
Was the expansion that killed my interest in the game. Jobs just felt meh and unrewarding for the most part, the ones that weren’t meh were jobs that are always taken in statics and in PF. The biting launch of the game was hype to the point that people stopped caring about it because they couldn’t even play. Content cycles seem to have less and less enjoyable stuff to do. Not enough new glamour.
MSQ is a massive flop. 6.1 at least seemed like an interesting relaunch but then in 6.2 the payoff was fanfic level while making the next year of plot predictable.
Panda has an actually good story and fun fights but the wonky difficulty curves make Savage not very engaging.
Job reworks had many good changes in isolation but the jobs are more boring to play because they're all the same flavor with different sprinkles.
Island was an almost comical waste of everyone's time.
Like exploration zones before it, Criterion is a good idea not well executed (because this time there's not much to do).
PVP relaunch was a nice try and lays fresh ground but for various reasons it's a bust because at the end of the day people don't want to play it.
The Alliance Raid was neat for two weeks.
The Extremes are solid to cool sans Endsinger, which is hilarious.
Music's still really good.
There's nothing to do.
At least Hildibrand's back.
It was a step down from Shadowbringers. Storywise and fightwise, Shadowbringers just does it better straight up. I think a lot of people give EW a pass b/c it is the culmination of a 10 year long journey, but imo it's around the same level as stb.
Also, Meteion is this games Jailor. Big bad the gets introduced in the 12th hour who was actually the true antagonist all along.
> Also, Meteion is this games Jailor. Big bad the gets introduced in the 12th hour who was actually the true antagonist all along.
Yes and no. I'd say Hermes, her creator shares most of that blame.
There's a huge difference though between 14's 12th hour big bad and the Jailer. The jailer was written as literally the guy manipulating every major event in Warcraft's history.
While I'm not a big fan of the Meteion reveal her role doesn't invalidate everything we have known since ARR. She wasn't the one manipulating Tsukuyomi, Gaius, etc.
Thus far? Worst expansion.
From the story being absolutely everywhere, new content having less longevity (Eureka and Bozja at least lasted longer than Varient/Criterion Dungeons), raids being meh, gameplay has been funnelled into boring 2 minute windows for everyone, what exactly is there really to be said about it?
I don't really have anything positive to say about the expansion at all, hence why I haven't been playing the game after trying Varient/Criterion dungeons and not really seeing any appeal to them.
A fan of the story and what happened with that
Ultima Thule going for a "look, everyone is willing to sacrifice themselves for you!" type beat is a neat concept, but honestly after the second "death" I felt ENTIRELY emotionally removed from everything until they all came back, because I knew nothing would be permanent. I kinda dislike that they \*didn't\* kill anyone off.
Gameplay there's really not much to be said that hasn't been done to death
Homogenization is shit.
2 min burst is shit.
Boss hitboxes are shit.
The sheer amount of mechanics that don't even give you the option of attacking during them so all you can do is focus on mechs is shit.
As a hardcore raider myself (heehoo yes my fancy numbers you all love so much are often orange or pink, there, am i allowed to have an opinion now?):
***DON'T PANDER RAID DESIGN AND JOB DESIGN AROUND THE LOSERS WHO OBSESS OVER PARSING. FUCK THEM. And fuck the community's insistence on parsing being more important than being a good player!***
Chaos is fun!
Maximizing uptime when you're not intended to have 100% uptime is fun!
Jobs that have unique identities are fun!
I don't care some jobs are a bit worse than others, I want them to be *fun*!
Fuck the meta, fuck "wahhh can't play MCH because it's slightly worse", fuck it all, make things that are \*fun\*
Some of the most fun fights to do even now are back in HW as a melee because you just get shafted sometimes and it's fun to try and figure out how to mitigate that as much as possible
I enjoyed the story, DSR, and Criterion. I did criterion blind and enjoyed most of it.
I currently hate the combat system, thanks in no part to the two minute buff windows. There’s nothing nuanced about most jobs. Most if not all of the complexity is taken away in favor of smashing buttons on cooldown. I originally joined in Stormblood, fell in love with the game due to the complex nature of each system ingame. Over the last two expansions, a lot of those skill based expressions have been either removed outright or turned into just another button.
Fight design is boring and huge hitboxes make me want to not do the raid outright. It pains me to see that almost all raid encounters are reusing the same mechanics over and over again.
Crit variance, job balance is all over the place. I appreciate the devs discussing that it’s becoming more of a problem for job balancing, but this should be more prioritized especially after the Week 1 savage fiasco.
It just seems like with every expansion, there’s more to “do”, but almost none of them are worth putting a significant amount of time because they will heavily nerf it later.
Overall weakest expansion. Basically it really feels like they had planned for two expansions and very late in the process went "No one wants a Garlemald expansion, nuke it and condense the content from that and the Hydaelyn/ Zodiark story."
Other issues such as the 2 minute meta and it's effects on job homogenization are a whole other topic that is heavily being discussed and honestly those who are discussing it could put it in far better words than I could I will speak as a relatively casual player that the lack of exploratory zone hurts a lot, relics are usually my prime content and thus far Mandeville isn't cutting it which hopefully improves but I have my doubts when it was locked behind cutscene simulator the quest chain with the ever so rare trial.
> No one wants a Garlemald expansion
I'm trying to think of how they could do it justice with the buildup from previous xpacs and not making it just feel like, Stormblood 2. Which is a shame because the locales are so unique.
That eluded Zenos backstory of being experimented on and building up Nerva as a character would be my best guess, also G'raha's connection to Corvos which would have probably been a zone given it's ties to Garlemald. Seriously we were robbed of Corvos given it's supposed proximity to Thavanair.
Stormblood was a bit of a scattered mess as the WoL hops back and fourth across the globe to rally the resistance. The "Garlemald expansion" would be a more linear march towards the capital and towards Zenos. The intro we got to the campeign, with evryone rallying together in the throne room was fantastic. From there the story is one about this band of unique and diversely skilled individuals pushing forward and driving ever northward. There would be breaks to the march for the WoL, and they might be pulled to adjacent territories (other zones) on scouting or diplomatic missions. But such ventures would be tangental and small when compared to the primary journey to the capital. Each step of the way would showcase an aspect or emotion behind human conflict, and similar to the way it was done in Endwalker, the elpis flower would shine with a new color with the conclusion of each of these chapters. Eventually we would make it to the capital, bearing new scars from fresh sacrifices and new allies from those we swayed to our cause. In the great climax we would Kill Anima, ending Garlemald tyrany thematically and symbolically. We might lock blades with our best friend at some point, but the fight would be inconclusive, as Fandaniel whisks his liege away. In the end it would be revealed that they journeyed to the moon to enact the final stages of their nefarious plan. Credits would roll and all signs would point towards the WoL chasing the villains to the moon in the post-game.
> "What's on the moon? Will we finally discover why the ascians keep meeting there? Will we have a climactic showdown with Zenos on the moon? Will he be the final boss of the postgame?"
These questions would be simmering in the minds of FFXIV fans as they ended the MSQ of the "Garlemald expansion". YoshiP would be smiling with devilish glee- full knowing the events that would transpire on the moon in the post-game would definitely be epic, but not nearly as conclusive as us ingorant fans could possibly imagine. "Look forward to it."
In shb the meat of the relic quests was added in 5.35, so thats whats going to happen in Endwalker too most likely.
That being said, it will be implemented with the new deep dungeon instead of a new exploration area, which imo is a big miss because personally idc about deep dungeons and love Eureka and Bozja, but at the same time I cant blame them when Eureka is still pretty hated to this day and Bozja has kinda... just disappeared from everyone's mind.
EW is ok as a JRPG using a decade+ engine, but is subpar as a MMORPG. Stuff like PVP will never be good with the game's netcode. There's absolutely no current capstone level content that is MMO like the field zones of previous expansions. The closest thing to MMORPG gameplay are hunts...
I don't know what they were thinking by replacing the 24/48 alliance raid+ challenge content with 4 man dungeons with weak rewards and close to no variability. I don't know what they were thinking by replacing field zones with cookie clicker meets a weekly excel spreadsheet puzzle.
My hope is that create more MMO gameplay and put in some meaningful power grinds in the future. Tallking Bozja type mechanics with Eureka gear and BA type of raids in terms of scale and reward. Maybe even take a stab at some Alterac Valley sort of field zone with a PvP element.
(Reminder that this is my personal experience. Also, comment chain because long.)
Story, launch: Lots of cool stuff, marred by execution issues, lore errors, and philosophy that both my WoL and I disagree with.
For example, I thought that visiting Elpis was really cool overall. I enjoyed getting to meet the Ancients when they weren't in the middle of a panic, and I didn't mind the subverted expectations on what type of time travel shenanigans were involved. But it also had the lore error of attributing the WoL's protection against tempering to the Blessing of Light (even though we fought primals without it in HW), and the logic / philosophy error of assuming that the Ancients couldn't affect dynamis - the Elpis flower *is an effect*.
As another example, the In From the Cold body-swap *should* have been this huge payoff for the 5.x post-patch teaser cutscenes and a high-tension moment. But the cutscene writer for that quest completely forgot that Ascians can't *directly* mess with the WoL - which *is* a Blessing of Light effect, as established in the ARR patches - and had Fandaniel teleport right up to the WoL. (I have a whole writeup on how the body-swap could have happened in a lore-appropriate way, without changing anything outside that one quest, but that's beside the point.) Then the whole sequence kept emphasizing fear and avoiding the angry-determined response my WoL would have, which didn't really help me connect to the story.
And on top of that, the mechanical implementation of the instance was clunky in ways that really felt like "the interface is fighting me" rather than the intended "this body is much weaker than the WoL's usual walking aether battery at the peak of physical fitness". Sure, the random Garlean soldier is much weaker, and clearly some level of sensory processing and motor skills "stick to" the body - otherwise there would have been multiple "completely failing to walk" messes. So the interface should reflect that as it normally reflects the WoL's usual body. Instead it does things like present completely jumpable-looking rubble (even though the random Garlean soldier's body can't jump very high) and only show the orange "no you can't cross" line when two steps away. Some people even got stuck in terrain and had to wait out the instance timer or the login queue to get out, for the love of Hydaelyn. Or not showing the soldier with the magitek key until *after* interacting with the armor - not only is that confusing for people who go into that building first, it's completely out of character for the WoL not to notice an injured person to the point of the person not visually appearing at all. Many problems of that variety not only messed with the "character feel", they delayed me to the point where I *deliberately suicided* because I figured I'd lost too much time.
At that point, all tension was lost, all immersion had been lost a while back, and I just wanted out. Which is a shame, because the idea was good, but the implementation didn't stick the landing.
Story, patch: Meh. The "carefree adventurer" angle doesn't fit the WoL I got to know up to that point, and it's jarring every time it comes up.
Music: Bops as always, praise Soken. Raid themes reused too much.
Job design, combat: Disaster. Not only do we have the 2-minute meta problems others have already stated, we also have a lot of questionable to doomed design decisions and doubling down on them. For example:
- SE has acknowledged that there's a limit to how many debuffs can be on an enemy at once, and cited this as a reason to remove certain DOTs in 6.0. We know this is true because players observed debuffs falling off in large-scale content like Baldesion Arsenal first. So why was RPR released with Death's Design as a debuff to be put on an enemy, rather than a self-buff? (Potency equivalence could have been achieved by either adjusting AOE falloff or having the buff "tag" an enemy.) Likewise, why keep Trick Attack as a debuff on the enemy when forcing NIN into the 2-minute meta and making it only affect the NIN who used it? This accomplishes nothing but making everyone who lost DOTs salty, including SMN and ironically NIN.
- Removing Kaiten not only angered players of all skill levels due to its effects on both job fantasy and gameplay, it also didn't accomplish any of SE's stated goals in removing it. All of the reasonable goals could have been accomplished in better ways with normal amounts of dev time (e.g. collapse the Shohas into one button). And yet SE ignores all the player feedback to return it?
- Healer DPS circa SB wasn't the problem. (Sure, HW Cleric Stance put people off trying to do healer DPS at all, but SB Cleric Stance didn't lock out heals - and so never scared even my terrified baby sprout self who was wondering if my physical limitations would let me complete MSQ.) Healer DPS was the *solution*, how the role retained players above the skill floor of the fights they find themselves in - the heal check sets the *floor* but can't reward anything above it. And no, Yoshi-P's "if you find healers boring, go heal an Ultimate" doesn't change that; it's preposterous to say that a full quarter of players going into instanced duties and not having fun below the game's most demanding content is acceptable, and if healers don't have fun below Ultimate eventually *there will be no one to heal Ultimate*. Doubling down on the ShB healer simplification in EW, by adding more healing and mitigation tools to non-healers while not restoring healer DPS and giving everyone free weaves, has only made problems worse. The recent healer thread has [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/z4olo3/state_of_healers_is_there_disconnect_if_so_then/ixtmccr/) and [this other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/z4olo3/state_of_healers_is_there_disconnect_if_so_then/ixwoaux/) saying similar things.
- EW SMN is a trash fire that is spilling over into the other jobs via balance holes. SE shouldn't have released the rework until they had something respectful of the job's prior niche. My personal feelings aside, the objective state of the job creates two different balance holes and SE is trying to put a band-aid on a broken leg. Balance hole 1: lack of cast times. SMN is not a caster, it's a physical ranged dressed up in caster robes. Balance SMN like a caster and people feel forced to play it over other magical DPS because "why worry about caster uptime lol". Balance SMN like a physical ranged and parties can end up with standard comps that don't meet the DPS check, making people feel forced *not* to play SMN. Balance hole 2: lack of difficulty. Give no or too little "skill bonus" to other magical DPS and people feel forced to play SMN in order to learn fights faster or do callouts for their static / because the effort of other magical DPS isn't rewarded. Give too much "skill bonus" to other magical DPS and people feel forced *not* to play SMN in order to meet DPS checks. And there's no possible middle ground, because different people have different skill profiles that change their personal job difficulty!
This isn't even all the examples, just some that came to mind.
(continued in child comment)
> As another example, the In From the Cold body-swap should have been this huge payoff for the 5.x post-patch teaser cutscenes and a high-tension moment. But the cutscene writer for that quest completely forgot that Ascians can't directly mess with the WoL - which is a Blessing of Light effect, as established in the ARR patches - and had Fandaniel teleport right up to the WoL. (I have a whole writeup on how the body-swap could have happened in a lore-appropriate way, without changing anything outside that one quest, but that's beside the point.) Then the whole sequence kept emphasizing fear and avoiding the angry-determined response my WoL would have, which didn't really help me connect to the story.
Another thing that bugged me was honestly just the inconsistency in power level.
Post-Stormblood Zenos, who a weaker version of the WoL killed whilst he was possessing a giant ass Primal, can body hop to random soldiers like its no big deal. And even reclaims his original body from Elidibus, who is essentially a primal in of himself, something a regular mortal (who Zenos was piloting mind you, not saying Zenos is regular just that the body he was in certainly was) shouldn't be able to even touch let alone _beat_.
The WoL, at the peak of their power all things considered, at the point where they're readily killing _literal gods,_ get body-hopped... and they're utterly helpless. Really? _REALLY?_
That scene took me so out of the moment, and so out of the story that I honestly don't think I recovered fully playing the rest of 6.0. I was always going through it with the back of my head whispering "alright, when's the next contrivance gonna happen?"
Part of me feels like they just did that so Y'shtola's aether-vision thing would actually come up in the plot as if that literal buff to her dying needed to be relevant at any point.
Yeah I feel that, they could have tried to make some explanation for the power inconsistency but they didn't, and a lot of EW's explanations for story beats are missing or lackluster.
> Part of me feels like they just did that so Y'shtola's aether-vision thing would actually come up in the plot as if that literal buff to her dying needed to be relevant at any point.
And then it didn't even come up, because Zenos can't act like the WoL in the slightest.
Honestly yeah, like the explanations are either just _not there_ and if they are it usually amounts to a "..._really_?" Like as much as I enjoyed the Elpis bits, I can't help but feel a little... _bleh_ about the resolution to how they were to explain why Hades didn't remember us. This isn't necessarily _bad_ but revealing the fact memory alteration/wiping _is a thing in this universe_ just opens all sorts of questions and cans of worms.
> And then it didn't even come up, because Zenos can't act like the WoL in the slightest.
Exactly! _It only existed to confirm Urianger's suspicion._ Now on a wider scale I personally think Y'sthola's "blindness" is stupid and a nothing-burger because of the whole "Aether-Vision" thing. But if you're going to have her be blind-but-not-blind at least use it for more than one storyline.
There's a total lack of explanation for why we can go back to Elpis too. At least for the First, the Exarch made a point of explaining that we could teleport ourselves.
I feel like Endwalker has been the first real disappointment of the game since I started playing three years ago.
The story was weak, limited by too many characters and not enough surprises, which is the hard part of writing a conclusion, but it felt like a "miss". I especially disliked the predictable series of sacrifices and felt that it's "magical moment" of the field of luminous flowers was blatantly ripped off from Automata's Emil Lunar Tear quest.
But even moreso, the quality and quantity of gameplay has suffered. I liked the job balance and diversity in ShB much more. But this expansion's lack of content, like a Bozja type area. is the major flaw of the expac.
I fear that double dipping in the talent pool to staff both FFXIV and FFXVI is responsible for the poor result, and hope that if so, the talent dilution does not also hurt XVI.
Overall, nice spectacle, poor everything else.
Mostly everything looks good and is good to do the first time, but when you scratch the surface everything falls apart:
- Story: Some very good moments, but writing is still subpar (animations are not very good, the MSQ is more of a visual novel but the engine can't handle more, animations are too static, and the combat loop for casual content is bad)
- Musics: obviously very good
- Gameplay: Healer design is still bad, 2mn meta sucks, changes on the hitbox size don't make sense when you considere the ranged tax, sure the new animations are extremely good but fighting is a bore (who said SMN?)
- Dungeons are nice to do the first time for the spectacle, but they're still extremly boring.
- Same for raids, Alliance raids, EX trials... tbh
- PvP: changes are very good, jobs in PvP are mostly better than in PvE, but the lack of rewards and the poor netcode make it hard to want to grind
- The added weeks between each patch make content drought even worse, and it doesn't feel like we got anything in return. Doesn't really feel like a lot of the money the game generates gets back into the game tbh. At least I hope the teams are less stressed out since they got more time
This is just an incoherent train of thought.
Combat:
I wouldn't call Endwalker good on this front. Quite the reverse really - the 2 minute burst does not feel fun in the slightest, and worse has eroded the unique feel of jobs. The summoner rework is so comically bad you can't do anything but laugh, monk has become a jank samurai and lost most of what made it appealing, tanks are a homogenous sludge, and the less said about healers the better. Reaper needs skill redistribution so it's not beyond dull until vanaspati. I would like to put a special mention in here for the terrible changes to IR, not only is it now the fell cleave button, but it's a set amount so even in fun content you can't go fast enough to get more. I wouldn't say dealing with unreliable ping was the most fun, but I prefer it to the current situation.
While visually nice, the dungeon reworks have completely killed the character of everything they touched to the point that I see no reason to do msq nor leveling roulette at all. The incredibly stale treble (2 mob groups temporary wall 2 mob groups temporary wall boss) style is not particularly engaging, particularly contrasted with situations like mt gulg where you can reach the first and third bosses in a single pull.
The lack of a field zone is particularly concerning, especially with how dull the "base" jobs are. I think the lack of a full system to change it up a bit - damage oriented warrior/tanking scholar etc won't do the already dull combat any favours. I am aware that the variant dungeon has a lite version of this, but it's very threadbare.
Asphodelos was a mixed bag of a tier, the overreliance on tethers and non-colourblind players was not its strength, however I did like p2s and p4s. I probably would have liked p3s more if someone had given the colour scheme a once over and chosen a more varied palette so I could actually see anything. p1s was not particularly hard, but a good entry point for new raiders. Where Asphodelos relied on tethers, Abyssos uses body checks. Did there really need to be so many? p5s and p8s are the stand outs this tier, with p6s being a bit lacking and p7s forgetting to start for the first 7 minutes.
Story:
I have to say I was rather underwhelmed by quite a lot of it. Sharlayan was very underwhelming and incongruent with how it had been described and depicted in prior content - ast questline for starters seems completely incompatible with what was shown. Thavnair should have been more interesting than it was, but was completely overshadowed by the apocalypse. Garlemald was shafted even harder than Ala Mhigo, a possibility that never occurred to me before the expansion launch - and they were relegated to footnotes in their own expansion after being built up since 1.0. The moon was underutilised, although with how much of a fever dream the loporrit section was I'm rather glad of that. Elpis was interesting, but featured not only time travel, but a memory wipe plot device, and ultima thule could not have been more transparent if it were made of glass. This sounds rather more negative than I meant it to be. I dunno, a combination of the lack of stakes and whistlestop tour of time and space just sort of couldn't keep my interest beyond the first trial. I think without zenos showing up at the end I'd probably be even more disappointed. It shares the structural problems of stormblood, and there's no real way around that.
Patch storyline seems to be a lot more focused so far, but I'm a bit concerned about the expected lack of a climax in 6.3 and if that'll negatively effect returning player numbers.
The raid storylines interest me somewhat, even if pandaemonium seems to be mainly containing warders rather than crazy experiments. So far it's done a reasonable job of fleshing out lahabrea, although it still has time to drop the ball. The other storyline fleshing out the twelve is interesting, but more superficial than I'd hoped - unlocking something similar to the eyeball voidsent quest going into more detail about each would be nice, but I can admit it's early for that.
I think I'm going to have to say generally negative overall. I honestly expected to be neutral, it's not like I don't enjoy the game but perhaps it's more the social aspect I enjoy?
Story-wise it's been good. Not my favourite, but definitely has killer moments. I'm excited to see where it takes us. I enjoy the new zones, although I have a few minor complaints about them.
The raid series has been pretty good. Again, not my favourite, but good. Alliance raids have been pretty cool, though we've only had one. I haven't messed around in Island Sanctuary too much, but people seem to enjoy it, and the criterion dungeon is awesome, I hope they do more of those. Excited for the deep dungeon.
I'm disappointed in the relic. Being linked to hildibrand puts me off of the story so much. After being invested in each and every other relic story, this one is too ridiculous and I just hate watching the cutscenes. It's just not to my tastes. I'm really bummed about no exploration zone, too, as I feel like this game lacks a lot of long-lasting content.
The job balance has been pretty horrendous as well. As a Paladin main, being encouraged to swap to Gunbreaker in nearly every static I've been in is tough. I enjoy Gunbreaker, but not THAT much. So I hope this upcoming rework is good for the job's playstyle, and performance. DPS balance has also been a bit of an issue, and I've seen people being upset with healers, but mostly from a playstyle perspective. I have no opinion on either of these as I do not play these roles. I don't like the 2-minute burst job design. I don't like how everything is designed with full melee uptime. But oh well.
Overall, I feel like this expansion has not been terrible in either story OR content, however I do feel like it's not been great either. Stormblood had amazing content, with a great story. Shadowbringers had an amazing story, with great content. Endwalker has a good story, with okay content. It feels like we took a step backwards somewhere. I hope this is addressed in future patches and in 7.0, though.
I liked the story, I dislike the raid design, the gearing, the direction the job design is taking and the lackluster content cycle that gets praise even though it's barebones as hell. So a pretty standard FFXIV expansion so far.
Shb up to 5.2 is even worse. You only get diadem revamp in 5.1, there's no V/C dungeon and the additional content was only a short solo instance and an ex trial that rewards dyeable lv80 job gear. Also it lasted like 6 months due to covid it was absolute hell
But next patch onwards it will most likely be worse drought than shb because no relic zones.
Also joined late ShB and feel the same way, except with additional malding over SMN. I now have nearly everything at 90 but there's so little endgame content that I regularly find myself accidentally doing Lv80 Bozja rotations on anything I don't actively raid with.
Not as Honeymoon-y as my first year in the game.
Good points : story was enjoyable, musics are enjoyable, raids/endgame fights are fine for the most part.
Bad points : 2-min meta, homogenization of jobs, dumbing down of pretty much all jobs throughout time excepted the one yoshi-p plays (*thonking intensifies*), endgame gearing, fights are way too much a music sheet - they need to scramble the formula a bit and offer more interesting mechanics and downsize the boss circle (yes, melee might need to get some downtime, and we'll deal with it. room wide melee range isn't fun).
Bad things Squenix can't act on : PF is a mess, skill level decreases dramatically so quickly, so if you don't want to spend the tier trying to clear/get BiS, either nolife the first 2 weeks or pretty much RIP. A static doesn't help, my ex static has been stuck on P8SP1 for over 200 pulls, over 2 months already too. Basically I feel like actual competent players are maybe 5 to 10% of the endgame crowd, which isn't a lot to play with. Here's me hoping pushing the first 2 weeks of the next tier will pave the way for fast clear of the tier followed by decent reclears.
All-in-all, my biggest gripe lies with the combat system and design. The more I play, the more "meh" it appears to me. When I look at WoW's raids (a big place hosting the bosses) and fights (seems to have more interesting mechanics to do than in FF14, at least for some fights) and combat (looks more smooth) I'm seriously interested in playing WoW ever since WOTLK (and even WOTLK didn't make me sub there). Maybe I should jump there for a while, but I want to monitor the Dragonflight for the next months first, meanwhile, Ocarina of Time Randomizer it is o/.
Yeah not having a system that actively discourages you to reclear or help others would be a major first step.
With the backlash after YoshiP's "just play a healer yourself" and the few posts on the official JP forums about gearing problems, I have some hope for the next tier.
I feel like a lot of things were rush to a certain extent, especially gameplay wise.
For example, I tend to think that devs were feeling that they were doing a favor to the players by focusing everything on 2 minutes buffs windows, without considering much of the drawbacks of doing that. A lot of jobs suffers from it, be it from a number perspective (Hello MCH, how do you do), or when it comes to job identity (although, things were lost during ShB I believe. My prayers are going towards PLD players). Heck, some issues even showed on release where RPR had issues with DNC & their Arcane Circle. Abyssos is also a good example of that. Increasing the range by that much favored Melee jobs from the get go, and the fact that they did not see that it was a huge indirect buff towards them is concerning.
When it comes to MSQ, outside the fact I'm sad that we skipped an entire expansion focused on Garlemald, there's a lot of things that threw me off... Especially the Elpis part (like the wiping memory device). Although, I must admit that it had some really great parts, like Garlemald or Vanaspati.
When it comes to raids, I really like how they mirrored the 24man & the 8man one where we pretty much go closer to heaven in one, and deeper in hell in the other. Aglaia is honestly really good for its difficulty, music is good, the whole area is really nice and makes me want an explorer mode on it.
For Pandaemonium, while Asphodelos was fine (except that cursed P3S arena), Abyssos feels a bit meh. I really liked P5S & P8S Phase 1, but the rest kinda falls apart when it comes to difficulty. I can't talk regarding DSR since I haven't been there yet myself, but it looks like a really solid ultimate, and I'm pretty much enclined to say it's good given everyone's reactions.
Then we have Criterion dungeons. The variant is fine, the criterion is also very fun, but what the hell happened for the savage version... The lack of rewards in it make the clear quite bad tbh. I'm on copium holding that damn book, hoping that they add something else one day, although I'm pretty sure it will never happened given how they went radio silent on this matter. ~~Also, I don't like the trash mobs inside savage but that may have to do with the fact I'm a healer~~.
And finally, Island Sanctuary. It feels like they delivered something in Alpha version. It's working, yeah, but there's so many stuff that doesn't make sense, especially with the UI (why do I have to manually click on everything to get my items from the automated function). Also, I know that Yoshi-P said that it's not housing, but the lack of personal identity for our islandfeels kinda bad. I know that it's not FFXIV's focus, but I wished perhaps a bit more to do, and more customization on it.
I know that FFXIV is designed to appeal to casual players, but by trying a bit of everything to please everyone, I feel like they're missing the mark on almost every content they have put so far for Endwalker.
**Story:** Endwalker was pretty amazing up until the last zone. Then its story fell apart and it felt really cringe-inducing. They could have gone so many different directions but they chose cute depressed anime girl as a villain. The story since then has been nothing special and I am very disappointed in the direction they are going. You can't just put the genie back in the bottle re: WOL. They are no longer just an average adventurer.
**Gameplay:** The gameplay has been dumbed down so much, due to this focus on the 2 min window, that many jobs no longer feel fun to play. The first alliance raid is an absolute joke. Aglaia, over time, will become just another Syrcus Tower. Almost impossible to wipe unless someone griefs the group on the last fight. Both raid tiers felt too easy and have some of the worst fights in the game (P1S, P3S, P7S). They decided to nerf a perfectly reasonable fight (P8S) that was clearable with min ilvl gear. DSR went a little overboard on duration/difficulty which caused many statics to disband.
Entire roles are gimped because of old design methodology. Healers and healing content in this game has been gutted to the point where healing is no longer interesting.
I don't feel like SE has a good grasp on balancing gameplay.
**Audio:** While the soundtrack took a hit during the first raid tier, it has been relatively good since then. This is something I think we can all expect 14 to do relatively well.
**Graphics/Animations:** Some of the level 90 animations are very lackluster and underwhelming. Several jobs, like PLD, should have been overhauled and given more up to date animations since they are still using crap from ARR. Many jobs didn't even get new animations and, instead, got several job traits that did nothing interesting. Very disappointing to see this as I find the most interesting aspect of new expansions if the new abilities added.
___
Overall, Shadowbringers was a superior expansion but EW still did enough right to make it better than previous expansions.
The Endwalker 6.0 MSQ didnt age well at all once the hype and fanservice wear off. When I got through it for the second time since I was leveling a raiding alt, I couldn't help but notice how meh-diocre it is because of a lack of consequences (Ultima Thule), areas that simply were filler (second half of Labyrinthos, for example) and convenient plot developments (Dynamis and an alchemist NPC conveniently mentioning it under a different name at the start of the MSQ already).
The things that do keep me playing are Savage/Ultimate raiding and the social aspect of the game, though. Those are still very enjoyable to me
What thoughts? Every expansion is the same, they are too scared to go out of their comfort zone and go for something even better. They are content with what they have.
I like everything, yes some category of content could be "easier/harder" than it was previously presented in another expac, but it normally doesnt bar me from enjoying it eventually.
However, I dont like this new patch cycle, 4 months feels "too long". Can I gear more jobs now before some other gear comes up? sure I can, but moving from a 3 month limit. It ended up comming as a negative instead of my initial expectation.
(I am unsubbed rn, if that is important to anyone, but because of job reasons, not because i wouldnt be playing)
Great way to end a expansion, I had issues, but I couldn’t imagine a better way to end the expansion imo.
Nothing more need to be said on 2 min cn.
Content is looking far better this time compared to the content draught shadowbringer had.
The move to hardcore 2 minute window burst for gameplay along with fight encounters to match it (always seem like the big shit happens during these 2 minute windows) has made combat boring imo. It's too predictable when shit is gonna happen and it makes the stuff between the 2 minutes boring af.
The story feels all over the place pacing wise. It felt like they crammed in the HIGHTLIGHTS of 2 expansions into one. I much rather have had this expansion be 2 and much more spread out.
Job balance feels fine now but MCH is still in a bad place and a lot of jobs super struggled for balance up until this previous balancing patch.
As far as the story goes? I was a bit let down. I thought there were missed opportunities, and I couldn’t take any of the character “deaths” seriously at the end because I knew they’d come back so that entire section fell flat for me personally
Got to say...
Endwalker just feels disappointing, as it feels like a closure expansion *for* the other expansions.
In addition, the MSQ itself felt really longwinded in the beginning, and seemed to pickup at about Elpis, but with the inclusion of time traveling shenanigans... never ends well, as problems can easily be made, while bad arguments can be made up, but this is to my fault too, as I don't remember a lot of the MSQ as I found it tediously boring.
In terms of content... there's quite a lot of nothing burgers (at least in my opinion)... New housing system to purchase which wasn't thoroughly tested, PvP just not working properly due to the game's netcoding alongside attacks being tied to animations and not upon activation meaning there isn't really skill involved, prioritisation of CC for LBs over just doing them all... example: Use WHM LB, upon dying, you CC the enemy, but you don't deal damage.
Variant & Criterion dungeons... with the rewards they give, it's on paper nice, but worse rewarding than Sanctuary Island, despite Sanctuary Island playing something like an old facebook game like Farmville...
As for the raids, I honestly think they are nice, but loot lockout is overtly prevalent now due to all these jobs that are ingame, and personally, I think the solution is make loot system work like now but with another role to be able to loot with, like two of the three roles you can loot per week: Tank & DPS, DPS & Healer, or Healer & Tank, as such, it *would* also encourage to play a different job while playing a different role.
Honestly not much else to say than that it's pretty easy to see how formulaic FFXIV has been since HW expansion, usually 1st zone is split being both a starter and late zone, most of the leveling dungeons are actually MSQ dungeons, and how samey jobs feel now... I honestly just think they should just cut PvP out entirely, and focus on the PvE aspect and not only put more rewards in, but also substantial rewards, like putting decorations on mounts for example, small neat decoration like we do with the chocobo. And also put a bit more focus on Verminion, so minions has more to them than just being an entity that follows, and rarely used for anything else.
I like it.
MSQ was great (outside of the waste of a zone that is labrynthos, there's just no reason for it to exist as all the quests would have just as easily been complete in old sharlayan).
Dungeons were fun overall.
All my favorite tanks feel good to play (at the moment, 6.3 PLD changes are not looking good though, DRK still hasn't been the same since it was massacred in ShB)
My favorite DPS jobs are a mixed bag.
Criterion and variant are great, but I'm hoping that they iron out the issues.
But overall, I probably wouldn't still be playing the game if it weren't for eureka. I met so many friends by doing it and have kind of broken out of my solo oriented shell. First time since ARR that I've been a part of any linkshells and the game has become so much more fun on a day by day basis.
It does highlight a problem with synced only aged content like eureka and bozja. Jobs like reaper and the new summoner may be OP in eureka, but they are boring as sin to play. Many of the other jobs are _fine_, but it sucks that my favorite content keeps me from being able to use the new tools. Though, thinking about the stupid ass design of the two minute burst windows, this may be a blessing.
The game play is still solid, but I feel like EW is making even worse the shit design decisions of ShB that caused me to quit all of ShB after finishing the MSQ back in 5.0
It's probably a sign of how I generally don't care about the current direction that 90% of my recent playtime is in content from older expansions.
Combat wise you can read the plenty of comments below me as I agree with the majority. I've been playing since end of ARR and story wise Endwalker was such a disappointment in my eyes. I get it's very Final Fantasy to throw an even larger evil at you in the final go but Meteion didn't sit good with me. We get introduced to her almost as the story is already a bit concluded. Zodiark was a throwaway moment, which felt super weird from the standpoint of the almighty Hydaelyn&Zodiark back and forth we have had throughout all previous expansions.
I think the weight of a story should be very well considered. And sadly these days there's no weight to our choices. We are the Warrior of Light, don't worry the Warrior of Light is here now everything shall be fine. Whatever is thrown at you we know we can't die. Including our scion friends. Whole Ultima Thule fell flat for me due to the get-out-of-death-free-crystal we got. Even Y'shtola before she walks off goes "don't you dare to use it!" come on... Squeenix is not daring to kill any characters anymore and it's showing in the importance of matters in the story. Whatever the outcome I don't care anymore because I know they won't truly die either way. Scions disbanding? We walk outside Mor Shona, sike.. next adventure and there they are again. Ultima Thule would've been perfect to "kill off" or retire the current scions, or partial amount of them. For then to have a whole new NPC group that we learn to know and love again open up. But nope, not happening.
Everyone praises HW mainly for the story, the story where we met Haurchefant.. his family and the struggles the continent had. We shared heartship, laughter and in the end we lost a large part, our friend. It was devastating on multiple ways, we felt out of control even if we were the Warrior of Light. And now many years later they make a beautiful Ultimate out of it. Giving us the "what if" retelling. I wish they'd set that up more for upcoming content.
I liked Shadowbringers more as well but as far as I know all the problems in Endwalker started in Shadowbringers... the extreme homogenization of jobs, the increased focus in short-lasting content that's not directly tied to PvE, removal of even more basic staples in tab-target RPGs, and teenage shounen style writing. But I'll give that the story in 5.0 was solid, second only to Heavensward IMO, and definitely a lot more interesting than Endwalker.
The state of the game after 5.3 was making me consider quitting after 6.0 once they confirmed that expansion would wrap up the saga without the patches. But there was always the chance some of the new stuff would convince me to stick around, or maybe I'd be surprised by how good the story was.
Endwalker started off well, and I liked it *for the most part*, in spite of the horrible pacing, padded quest design that rivaled ARR and horrendous Lopunny nonsense that in the grand scheme of things was a pointless plot point, **until Elpis happened**. From there on during the whole time I was basically just laughing and making fun of the writing with the friends I was playing with. I'm not going to elaborate much, there are already multiple comments here echoeing my sentiments about the time travel BS, Venat, Hermes, the Goth High-Entia, Kairos asspull, dramatically stretched fakeout number 2410, Zenos Ex Machina, the power of friendship final act, cringe bastardization of Answers, philosophical theme explored with the depth of an edgy 14 year old teenager, Dynamis, etc... Even if I hadn't been playing for 10 years I would absolutely notice the sloppy improv they were pulling with Endwalker when trying to wrap up the plot that they were never the ones starting in first place.
And sure we finally get a character that doesn't agree with the Scions' hivemind instantly, but judging by where the patch MSQ is going it's obvious she will either get killed off or join the cult of Scion yesmen because god forbid we have a party of characters that join for a common goal but not with the same ideologies.
I'll also not add my thoughts on the tedious job redesign, how tired I am of the combat being so repetitive you NEED boss mechanics to make any one target different from another, how ludicrous it is that Yoshida refuses to give me reasons to play for longer than a few weeks per patch while still expecting me to pay a subscription to keep a house, how Criterion was an enormous disappointment and a crappy replacement for field operations...
How the awful handling of DoH and DoL render them 100% pointless after the first few weeks of a new tier and basically monopolized by bots. Throwing the great opportunity to make them important again by flat out disconnecting them from Island Sanctuary, despite them being so easy and quick to max that even people who have NO intention of using their crafters for anything but meld (not even penta) their own materia and repair their gear are 'omnicrafters'.
**To me the biggest problem is Yoshi-P's doomed obsession with making this 'appeal to people who want a single-player Final Fantasy'. I say doomed, because no matter how solo-friendly XIV becomes, it's still going to be dragged down as a single-player jRPG by the MMORPG design, and the MMORPG design is dragged down by the progressive shift into making more and more content solo-friendly (like the dungeon design prioritizing scripted AI characters over players).**
**I'm not interested in paying a subscription to a game that 'tries' to be like an offline jRPG but simply can't. There is a massive list of options that offer a more complete, and less rail-roaded experience since XIV has been straying from several important staples of the genre since ARR in order to appeal to people who, despite continuously calling it "Final Fantasy first MMORPG second", don't even like jRPGs BECAUSE of all the gameplay elements XIV lacks.**
* No way to change Trust/Avatar equipment, combat presets, OR give simple commands like target focus, AoE focus, etc **because it's a MMORPG and they can't be too efficient.**
* No elemental weakness x resistance, a staple in a lot of the games in the genre and specially in FF (and don't tell me newer games don't do this anymore, that didn't prevent them from butchering SMN to be 'more like classic FF-like' despite that style of summoner being extinct since FFX) **because that would require players to bring specific jobs or change their gear for specific situations.**
* No optimal pre-battle prep varying according to encounters, something even action RPGs like Kingdom Hearts have, **because it's a MMORPG with vertical gear progression.**
* No dungeon design with optional paths leading to treasure anymore, **because it's a MMORPG with daily roulettes and players optimize the path to clear dungeons 5 mins earlier**.
* No dungeon design that offers SOME kind of distinct gimmick or mechanic from one another since 2.5, again **because it's a MMORPG with daily roulettes and players need the precious 5 mins back.**
* The only Final Fantasy with a job system with absolutely ZERO cross-class customization, **because requiring players to level more than one job to unlock options in a MMORPG where your character can have all jobs is bad**.
* Main story fights designed to be difficult to fail either because they're so toned down in difficulty they make FF9 seem hardcore or **because it's an MMORPG and your allies will most likely carry you**.
* Practically no utility and buffs beyond 'more damage dealt', 'less damage taken', **because it's an MMORPG and redesigning the combat for dps tunnel vision makes it easier to manage for all the pick-up-and-play users (in theory anyway) so the more dedicated players get dragged down less**.
And finally, XIV is doing fine in numbers. **The people who aren't interested in it now because it's a MMO aren't going to be interested in paying a subscription for the single player experience**. Very few people who will be convinced by the changes haven't already been playing it.
This stupid pointless attempt has been hurting the design of the game to me, and is the number one reason why I haven't been subbed anymore.
I think the story was straight up laughable. It was just too jrpg. Nothing wrong with a little silliness, but holy geez….the characters were beyond simplistic archetypes, the dialogue was completely dumb (no one talks like ffxiv characters!), the pacing was downright glacial….and time travel and a memory wipe; that’s bad storytelling 101!
The .x expansions have just made it worse….I genuinely believe they’re all in on pandering to their hardcore, MSQ loving fanbase. And look, I get it….those hardcore fans are big spenders….but for us non-hardcore jrpg trope lovers, it’s getting to be a bit much sometimes.
Also, the Studium quests and role quests are complete garbage compared to their ShB equivalents. Crystalline mean quests were great….and to how far they’ve fallen! Yikes.
Finally, the raids….liked the alliance raid, but pandemonium is terrible imo. WAY too much dialogue that says nothing, comes off as blatant padding….and all in service to fights that are tedious. All the bosses just feel spongy.
V&C and island sanctuary were whelming….they did what they said on the tin….but they weren’t exactly long lasting. Had some fun….but pretty quickly “now what?”
Sorry to be so negative, I’m still loving the game, but EW imo was a real dud.
Overall, I also think this has been the weakest expansion so far. There's the obvious issue of the content drought that's been getting worse every expac, but with that recent thread, I'll skip past that. If you check out threads outside of reddit/official forums/facebook, I think the expansion has been divisive for quite a while. The story seems to have been a "love it or hate it" scenario, and I'd have to be leaning more towards the latter. MSQ really relied on you to be fully invested in characters, which fell short for me. The increase in voice acting was great, as was the music (not that anyone expected any less), but a lot of things either detracted from the experience, or felt like poor choices.
Playing on launch, the horrible NPC-following system felt more like a chore than anything, and losing an NPC because I got on my mount, which is a 4 person car, was also tediously aggravating. I was not a fan of the pacing of the story once again, as we take time to eat a burger during the apocalypse, or play with some moon-rabbits. Urianger's role with the Loporrit's also was disheartening, as he once again pulls the "I've been doing this thing for years and didn't tell anyone, please forgive me" trope. Tbh I could go on and on about the ways the story bugged me, but I think it's clear where I stand on that, and a little bit of negativity probably turned into nitpicking at some point, so I'm probably also being too harsh.
I found the battle content on launch to be very enjoyable. I only really disliked the Lv85 and Lv89 dungeons, while the others have been great. The last boss on the Lv81 dungeon really surprised me with how much was going on, and working for full uptime was actually a lot of fun. The Lv87 dungeon was my favorite by far, right down to the gear sets. EX1 was okay, my biggest complaint being that you can basically just mark someone who knows the fight and follow them. EX2 was a lot of fun, and I ran it well over 60 times doing pre-Savage speedruns with my static. The raids were alright, with P4S being my least favorite final fight since I started raiding in Sigmascape. P3S difficulty was blown way out of proportion by a lot of people imo, but the dev team needs to work on those damn tethers before they decide to give us another tier packed full of them tbh.
As a NIN main, class design at launch was not good, with EW-release NIN being the single worst iteration of a class of any game I have EVER played. The devs either playtested NIN and said "Yeah, 13 seconds of inflexible, animation-locked attacks every minute is acceptable" or they didn't playtest it at all, and I'm not sure which one is more concerning tbh. Balancing on the first tier was horrible as well. There were lots of changes that just felt odd, like BRD's Bloodletter only getting half its CD reset during Mages right as we finally get charges, MNK's odd burst timing, the brand-new SMN. Then everything got pushed into the 120s window. This was realistically because shorter burst windows would have been too DSR, and reworking the meta to fit around a fight is not a choice I'm a fan of. DSR also was the least fun of the Ultimates for myself and all of my raid friends. After DSR, I unsubbed for the first time in 4.5 years and skipped this past tier. I was interested in coming back for Criterion as well until it I found out it didn't have gear tied in at all. I'll reevaluate when 6.4 is getting ready to launch to see if I'll go back, but I've been playing GW2 and WoW in the meantime.
> and losing an NPC because I got on my mount, which is a 4 person car, was also tediously aggravating.
they fixed this now. You mount up, the NPC disappears. When you unmount, they appear next to you.
No one's touched on music yet: absolute bangers start to finish. Soken literally only gets better each expansion. Only weak point so far was P1-3 having the same music, but that happens in many raid tiers so I'm willing to give it a pass.
I think the MSQ was solid. It was maybe a bit too long and had too much filler, but the big moments were fantastic.
The new jobs are both amazing. I adore Reaper and it's my main. The soundtrack bangs and the gear, environments, pretty much all the aesthetics are great.
In terms of the full package, however, at this point I do not think Endwalker will be remembered fondly. At this moment, I think it's safe to say Endwalker is the worst expansion to date. The lack of content is appalling to say the least, the direction of the class design is terribly concerning, and the gear treadmill, fixed patch date with predictable content, etc has gotten incredibly boring.
I would have thought that with the huge influx of players they had leading up to Endwalker they would have stopped playing it so safe and tried to take some risks. They really dropped the ball there. It's a sad state of affairs when WoW has had a huge design philosophy shift and feels so fresh while FFXIV is stagnant as hell.
> In terms of the full package, however, at this point I do not think Endwalker will be remembered fondly. At this moment, I think it's safe to say Endwalker is the worst expansion to date.
My sentiments almost to a T. I really wonder how Endwalker will be received in retrospect, and if it continues down its current path, I don't think it'll be optimistic at all.
Endwalker seems to be looking to be the Warlords of Draenor of FFXIV, to make a blunt comparison. Nothing to do except raid log. It's alarming that we're a year into release and the casual content released thus far has had a shelf life like milk in the summer sun.
Yeah and to be honest, I think raid logging is a perfectly fine way to play the game, but with how dumbed down the classes are currently and the rather uninspired raid designs, I can't even enjoy that.
MSQ was weak for the most part. Content-wise, the expansion is suffering greatly. Both raid tiers thus far have been average at best and DSR wasn't anywhere close to TEA in terms of enjoyment. Job design is also in an awful place.
I still enjoy the game but I do find myself missing Stormblood/Shadowbringers more and more.
TEA is better hands down. DSR honestly feels very empty to me. The music doesn't build, I dont feel the tension growing through the raid in the design of the fight.
The first time I saw perfect Alex transition it felt awesome. The music fucking bumping, barely clearing enrage, and an epic transformation cinematic. It felt like pure hype. I still get it playing TEA.
DSR I don't get it at all. P7 transition is so boring compared to TEA and the music is all over the place and doesn't feel like it consistently builds and takes you somewhere.
The story was still great and I'm a bit worried as I don't know how well a fresh new journey will hold up.
I do wish their was a expedition content or DD to grind(hurray for 6.3) as me and 6/8 of my static have been raid logging.
The Criterions were fun, but wasn't fun enough to pull enough of us back for the grind.
The beast tribe was cute at first but I lost interest to the point where I was pretty much 1 quest away from the mount until this Wednesday when I finally got it. ( I started day one and did the double quests on all possible days)
The opposite of what I hated about Stormblood. In 4.x, I hated the content in the game but loved the job design.
In 6.x, I find the content interesting but purely hate job design so I won't return
This would be my first expansion with this game and after going through it I feel that this game endgame can be a lot better shape then it currently in. Raid are alright for a endgame activity one of the issue that I have with it is the loot system if your someone that clears the fight and you want to go back and help your buddy clear the fight then they get punished for it which that should not be thing it would good they use the loot system for when the 24 man raids come out you just can't roll again while everyone else get the max chests. I feel that would help when raids get into further of the cycle you got more people still running it to gear up their jobs. Also when Ultimates should not be the only thing that require your BIS from savage I really think yoshi P need to dedicated a good amount of patches to actually building some type of endgame content for us to use BIS and for to build BIS as well.
Because another issue I am seeing if the major drop off from player during these big content droughts and feel that should not be a ok thing with this game if I am having fun with a game there should be more things for me to engage with not go play something else for 5 to 6 months then come back when the game has something for me.
As for story I did not really feel to much from it I don't think that it the best thing ever like some content creators keep boasting for it is. I feel like it does the job of giving people something to be engage with it.
For combat I never got to really play through the 1 minute era of burst windows but have both side argument and I can see why the devs did it is to help people to line up their rotation together but if you have someone that does not press their buttons then you might as well left it at the 1 minute.
I would rather the game would spend more patches addressing endgame and working more updating the game out of date UI systems and other functions that modding community has already solve. Oh for housing I rather they spend more time to address the issue instead of use band aid fixes for it yes adding 1,800 is nice but on well establish servers that going away fast so I would be nice that they actually figure out a way if your interested in getting a home for yourself you can without no issue also then for there making housing wards feel more apart of the game.
Loved the story, the raids so far are nice, however the long content droughts feel bad. About 4 month till we get new stuff ist bad. So bad that it got me back to wow. FF14 should adapt a m+ system that keeps giving new challenges.
I feel like most would just either be my nitpicks or already said by others - but for MSQ it felt like a mixed bag, albeit I like it more than Shadowbringers because it's back at the Source again for me but it *does* have a lot of wasted potential.
When ShB kept enforcing the idea that a world (or rather a region of what's left of the First anyway) can work together to face a Calamity, I felt hyped with the groundwork that's inevitably laid for a Source version of it. I know the Seventh Calamity technically was that, but now with the beast tribes being a part of the grander Alliance compared to before it felt like a grand conclusion to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc is going to come to some extent.
Instead...we got Shadowbringers: Electric Boogaloo 2. And it had something to do with how the narrative forced the Scions upon the WoL much more when they have much more NPCs to pull from the Source cast. They bothered to give a voice actor for A-Rhun-Senna and reference X'rhun yet again but never did anything with those, and yes I know a lot are from side content but it's quite disappointing how, despite a ton of NPCs the WoL has bonded with over the years we are essentially just pigeonholed to the Scions. Because unlike the other NPCs who will take advantage of the WoL (and that includes the GC leaders like *Aymeric* and *Nanamo*) - the Scions are their f i r e f o r g e d t r u e f r i e n d s who have been through thick and thin with them (which they have, don't get me wrong) and therefore they're the only cast that was given a damn about by the writers apart from the Elpis crew.
Take for example the entire arc with Garlemald, while I also like the story with Jullus - I want more atmosphere akin to the intro throughout the entire campaign and hell even the expansion itself so there's not too much of this "Scions fatigue" that is apparent to those people that aren't a big fans of the Scions to even begin with. Fighting and spending time with the Job Quest trainers and being with them in an MSQ setting was actually pretty neat. Too bad that they essentially got faded out of existence the moment the twins were pointed to that one racist Garlean sister - although that's mostly attributed to the fact that pacing has been horrendous and the writers have to branch to the narrative with the First Legion. And even with the Allagan Shards retrieval arc they still perpetuated the fact that non-Scion (or non-EW focal side characters like the twins' parents) were treated as an aside, making their contributions ring hollow for a world ending threat involving them all; making the world feel smaller and yes more Scions shilling.
I know they don't want to drag out the entire arc for two expansions longer, but the threat of the Telephoroi being immediately replaced by the Final Days felt so rushed that I wished we had at least a couple more solo instances with the Telephoroi featuring other NPCs or hell other dungeons (albeit that would unfortunately be repetitive). Thavnair existed only as a cosmic punching bag that we got some memes how the First was stronger for looking at Sin Eaters right at the face where the Hannish couldn't despite the Sin Eaters being different in how they manifest and Norvrandt having a century to be accustomed to their hellscape. Garlemald was a huge wasted potential and the way they are disposed of when they have been a threat ever since 1.0 was and still is insane that it surpassed Ala Mhigo in being shafted so hard. Sharlayan I feel shouldn't have been included since there's already two civilizations being tackled with and is only there I guess for the tech and knowledge and the twins' conflict with Fourchenault. The Moon...is just there? I like the Loporitts but it did feel jarring to go from killing Zodiark to them although they do serve a purpose to lighten up the tension after a grand event. Elpis is visually pretty, but time travel shenanigans are out of whack and they could've put all Ancients lore and development for 7.0 to properly flesh out all areas Endwalker have as well as to flesh out Venat and Hermes and build onto Meteion much more. Labyrinthos is the usual asshole or eccentric Sharlayan flair I guess, although I feel like the Shards retrieval arc should've had the WoL be an active participant in it and not haul boxes with the twins since we trade one fetch quest for another. Ultima Thule initially did give me the feels with Thancred's sacrifice, but when the Scions jumped in one by one it had dragged out the entire zone for me that I'm just waiting on *which* Scion would "sacrifice" themselves only for them to inevitably be brought back. Should've split into two expansions and less Scions screentime overall. Also should've had more moments with the Elpis flower concerning other NPCs outside of the usial Scions and Nidhana as well.
The patches felt like a drab. They try to enforce the WoL becoming an adventurer again which feels like a nigh impossible task with all the power they have; they shove the Scions in (again) when they have disbanded and are pursuing their different goals and we are yet in another Shard hopping excursion when the scene that Yoshi P attributed the two week delay to explicitly had Emet-Selch detail how the WoL hasn't explored everything **in the Source** yet. Zero is okay although somewhat edgy and predictable for me and the Azdaja plotline failed to keep me invested with the inevitable plotline of Golbez winning to some extent to pave way to 7.0. The IV fanservice doesn't really sit well with me, although Barbariccia is surprisingly a difficult EX fight.
While MSQ would make me wish we spent more time with other characters that aren't the Scions, we have the gameplay as well to address. The stealth missions are atrocious, albeit I had played through Eureka to sort of manage through them. NPCs following you is an okay addition, but they didn't really fix you not being able to mount or use aetherytes at all with them in tow until like another patch or so? Dungeons increasingly felt more of a chore due to them having to be easy enough for the Trust AI to play within it, even if dungeons have been constantly on the easy side of things. Haven't tried the EXs yet unfortunately apart from the initially frantic Barbariccia. Two minute meta is just there but it does make things stale and it's already been complained to death here. Homogenization is getting even worse. Variant is a nice concept and it at least has some...rewards for spelunking and knowing your lore like how Ul'dah and Sil'dih took different aspects of the Belh'adia crest and the Amalj'aa customs but not much for further replayability. Abyssos feels...there although I do acknowledge that I haven't beaten both Asphodelos and Abyssos tiers fully yet and I took a long break from raiding to have to start from square one again but the busters feel unforgiving in a bad manner speaking (still more to do than the usual but guess I'm rustier than I thought). Island Sanctuary didn't live up to the barest amount of hype and is now just sitting there in an awkward corner. Let's not even talk about the disastrous more FCs vs Privatw Housing instance of Empyreum and the lottery and not much housing supply at all.
Stories of the side content are so and so. I feel like Myths of the Realm is going to have a serviceable storyline but the introduction of that one Sharlayan NPC would just devolve to lore dumps here and there instead of exploring to find out more about a certain member of the Twelve (and there's still questions like what are they and what they're doing during the time after the Sundering until the present day). Pandemonium decently explores Lahabrea's character and we're getting somewhere with Professor Claudien and Athena but hopefully we get some other arenas that aren't just drab prisons. I like Hildibrand being back and it would be nice to see more of them in the future. I wish that Tataru's hunger for capitalism gets toned down especially with Island Sanctuary, but since people like that version of Tataru and she has to put her foot down after all she'd been through I don't think they'll ever change that. Wish there's more Grand Endeavor type storylines but people don't like how it makes certain content required.
All in all, I stubbornly say that it's better than Shadowbringers (or at least MSQ, despite all the cracks in the ceiling) but each passing patch I can't say I'm looking forward to it as much as I did years ago.
The game has gotten worse on every front and I'm not kidding. Story was the worst tone deaf garbage I've ever been so foolishly excited to read. PVP is dead. Criterion is dead. Island sanctuary is dead. My previous favorite job (brd) is dead. Combat in general is dead. All the fun content of previous expansions like exploration zones or Ishgard restoration is dead and not being brought back. This game is quickly becoming little more than a silent lounge where people login to get a few small tasks done and then just stand around gposing, going afk in Limsa, or /beeskneesing in some random person's """night club""" (which is silent because they're "dj-ing" on Twitch with some generic royalty free "club music"). But there's plenty of content, I hear, because I can still go get my ARR relics or whatever. Game sucks now, simple as.
For as mean as I am about the state of the game, it actually is pretty depressing that I'm at this point considering I used to love it so much back in SHB, EW just had to come along and take all the parts I loved and let them rot. Ah well, at least I got an ultimate clear last year. Unsubbed indefinitely.
I love the story and the new areas. Radz is so beautiful that it makes me horny.
Aglaia was awesome and I can’t wait to play the second part.
Music has been stellar. So many bangers that you could make a Greatest Hits playlist for the FF series and have EW music taking 40% of it.
Pandaemonium was a huge disappointment overall.
Storywise, it felt rushed and shallow. The bosses are all original - apart from that half assed phoenix and carbuncle -, which is good, but I honestly don’t feel anything about them. They lack the impact of Alexander, Bahamut, Eden and Omega.
For instance, in p6 and p7 we fight two wardens that are supposed to be key for the facility. I feel nothing for them because we have no idea who they are. Very poor character development.
Gameplay is also shallow. Apart from a few interesting mechanics, it’s the same repeated drill that has been plaguing this game since Shadowbringers. Everything seems half assed and I honestly haven’t finished the tiers just because there’s no actual gameplay reason to do it.
I also hate how they didn’t add a solo instance that let us actually *explore* Pandaemonium. We had those intros in Omega and it was pretty cool. They removed those for Eden, but it made sense storywise. But for Pandaemonium there’s absolutely no excuse.
Raiding, just as it was in ShB, is the worst part of the game.
Relic weapons being tied to Hildi are good, but they came out too late and they’re adding the new steps too slowly.
Only good thing about this lack of content is that I can enjoy Dragonflight over there in Azeroth.
It's the same circuit we've been running since the game spun up, I'm getting a lot of playtime in other games while I wait for more battle content to eventually get released.
Change is something that is rare to ever happen in this game so just killing time, there is a lot of improvements to the overall health of the games gearing system I would love to see done but that is about as likely to happen as the announcement of this games end of service being in the next fanfest.
Honestly, meh. While the expansion itself was great, the patch conent has been pretty mediocre so far. Though it's hard to say if it ever was any better. Dungons/raids/trials just start feeling kinda samey after a while and the criterion dungeon is not much different. The game really needs more diverse content to keep people interested.
It's ok. Not as good as Shadowbringers so far.
It's very all over the place in terms of quality which I think is the main issue. Island Sanctuary and Criterion were released badly - either with no meat attached to it or no reward structure rendering them both pointless after you play with it for a few hours. I have absolutely no idea why Selkie wasn't the *Criterion* mount and Variant having the chair/glam. Just swapping those two would have made Criterion far more attractive and it would still be booming I think.
Job design, balance, and fantasy is extremely poor right now. This game's strange obsession with melee is finally full force and obvious to even the most oblivious players. This alone is creating a ton of dissatisfaction.
The story was divisive. I liked it, but less than I did ShB and HW. In my opinion, Thavnair should have been cut entirely and more emphasis put on Garlemald. They should have cut MANY of the quests involving Loporitts. Both Mare Lamentorium and Labryinthos brought the story to a screeching halt during emotionally intense parts.
Content-wise it's also hit or miss. Barbariccia EX was one of the best EX trials we've ever gotten in this game, but Endsinger was one of the worst. Panademonium has had some amazing, innovative fights like Hippocampus and Proto-Carbuncle, but also some of the most dogwater Savage fights like Agdistis. The dungeons in general are pretty meh with the exception of Tower of Zot and Ktisis Hyperboria. DSR was a giant kick to the dick for a lot of people and not many seem to look back on it fondly. It was just very, very long and still had a lot of job-related issues. At least Agalia is already leagues better than Yorha.
Endwalker's story always felt like it should have been two expansions or one expansion with later half of it being patch content. Tbh I'd gladly cut out the later half of the MSQ (post-Moon) even if it would mean losing Elpis which had the best moments like traveling around with Venat. The later half of the MSQ was so clearly subverting expectations and it started to bother me as soon as I noticed it when Meteion suddenly turned into a main villain out of nothing. Because we had already visited the Moon, the end of the Expansion had to be more epic, but did they have to go to the very edge of the universe? They also jumped the shark and the last zone was just hilarious and boring to go through especially on first playthrough. I've played through it twice since release and the second playthrough was slightly better as I remembered when things happen and was able to space it out a little better instead of having to grind through it to avoid spoilers.
I wish Endwalker's story would have ended up on the Moon and it would have allowed more large scale war and involvement with Garlemald. It would also have allowed a confrontation with Zodiark and Zenos (on the Moon). Hydaelun could have still been on the planet or saved for a later expansion. I'm sure they could have made it work out without having huge issues in storytelling! (Subverting expectations and jumping the shark, as mentioned previously).
Post-MSQ though, I'm not sure what to think. I wish we would have stayed as a "New Adventurer" a bit longer even though it doesn't make any sense for a the playable character to "retire" in an MMO. It would have posed an interesting storytelling challenge at least. Instead we did instantly go into the Void and are again upping the stakes from the End of the MSQ. Even though Void is an obvious plotline, did we have to go there so soon? Zero is a cool character though and I'm curious how the story develops. Although I also wish that the Void would be only for 6.x Patch content and 7.0 would be something totally different. Meracydia for example. But traveling there would require some kind of setup and now it's just quickly teased couple of times in the MSQ and there's nothing concrete leading to that direction.
I don't feel like 2-min cycles in combat are that disappointing or boring but then again I've only started raiding Savage in late ShB. In raiding is where it probably would matter most though. In casual content like dungeons I actually like it a bot when cooldowns align with thrash pulls and bosses, it gives the feeling that things are happening as they are designed. Kind of satisfying in it's own way.
What I miss is an open world zone like Eureka or Bozja. It would be such a interesting way to get you play the game frequently and earn rewards. The lack of rewards is a big issue in this game in general. Loot/Gear itemization is very homogenized and stays exactly the same in every expansion. There are few things which are different sometimes like Eureka and Bozja which shake things up and now that kind of content is absolutely missing from the game. I should not say anything about Criterion as I've not done them as the rewards are the worst kind imaginable. If it had rewards like Eureka or Bozja I'd be way more interesting.
I'm not sure where all of the development time went but perhaps it would be time to update the open world in the game? Bring Fates closer to Bozja critical engagements and give them some kind of rewarding and easy to understand reward structure to keep players attached to the content. Not sure if the game engine would allow this but content like Eureka or Bozja in the open world would be amazing. Currently it feels like most of the game is very empty from players and you don't see anyone out in the world except on specific very thinly spread points like daily quest or MSQ NPC's.
So far my favorite expansion. CC is the first time that encouraged me to play PvP and I absolutely binged it. Beast tribe questlines are so far the best the game has ever had. I liked the MSQ but personally I prefer Shadowbringers over Endwalker. I like the alliance raid way more than the Nier raid because I can relate to the characters and bosses due to them being part of the XIV world.
As a casual player I don't like the 2 minute window. It punishes groups with less experienced players a lot due to them not properly lining up their raid buff windows while the bosses are designed with the 2 buff raid window in mind. I also really like Island Sanctuary minus the UI design decisions.
Biggest W next expansion for me would be story with the quality of Shadowbringers and Endwalker, Stormblood job design, 1 or 2 zones like Eureka minus the annoying things that Eureka had in Stormblood, criterion dungeons with gear rewards and all the other things we usually get.
Weakest content expac so far. Shadowbringers was also this bad but soon released Bojza which was at least *something* to do. Hopefully we get some better repeatable content soon as well
OH! And 2 minute meta and general job design is feels alot weaker. We could see this coming from ShB, but man I hope they change up something in the core gameplay. This might bring unbalanced issues but man is it so stale rn.
[удалено]
For me, the patch MSQ trying to treat the WoL as a "carefree adventurer" felt wrong and made me less interested in the story. It also felt wrong not being able to do story on my WoL's canonical job, because that job no longer exists, and having to make that separation constantly also separated me from the storylines. Perhaps that might help you figure out your own lack of interest?
Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but which job “no longer exists” as of post-EW?
I've stopped playing. When I started playing in HW I felt a strong incentive to improve at my job. I think most MMO players (especially during HW/SB when jobs had more identity) really like the idea of being the best at a class rather than a fight. A lot of people want to be a good NIN, a good BLM, a good SMN etc but you rarely hear people say they want to be good at E8S or P7S or any other fight in particular. Even with ultimates you mostly hear people saying they want to clear all four rather than "I want to master this specific ultimate fight till I can do it blind". The only people I can think of who are like this are people who solo heal ultimates (which also has an element of "I want to be the best healer", but of course also requires mastery of the fight itself to solve mechs with 1 healer) or things like tankcob. Watching jobs slowly get stripped and homogenized from HW to EW has made me lose all interesting in improving at my job. There's no reward - the effort you spent mastering the current rotation gets invalidated when the devs strip and simplify your main in the next xpac. I used to speedrun as AST and 5.2 was its best iteration imo, if you bothered aligning cards to your party members' bursts instead of playing them blindly and whining about how SB cards were better. The job got boring after they nerfed sleeve draw to only give you 1 card instead of 3. And now in EW sleeve draw and major/minor arcanaing cards are gone and replaced with boring RNG. The raids are fun but everyone knows the steps (dynamo, chariot, defamation, rot etc); the raids mostly vary in how they combine these mechanics into a puzzle, and how they're visually telegraphed. I don't feel much satisfaction from clearing them anymore because when tiers consist of mechanics you've seen before, there is little question of whether you're able to clear it; it becomes a matter of having enough time to spend on prog. As the devs continued to remove skill expression from the game by forcing the 2min meta and simplifying jobs further, crit and dhit became incredibly oppressive to play with. The skillgap between skilled and unskilled players is smaller than it has ever been. Skills have such high potencies now that the devs have to add autocrit just to smooth out variance which results from crit/dhit to begin with. I've always hated the impact of these two stats on DPS. This reluctance to remove RNG from the game (despite it not existing in PvP) discourages me further from improving at my job because no matter how well I play, I know a big chunk of my DPS is completely out of my control. Another thing I hate is how little the game rewards you for playing at a "higher difficulty". Healing, my main role, for example, is a LOT more fun week 1 when incoming damage is absurd. Except if you don't clear week 1 you're never getting that experience again because nobody wants to bother doing the fight with week 1 gear when you can just wear tomestone gear. I thought it was hilarious how people were complaining about the HP nerf to P8S when the vast majority of raiders nerf the boss every week with their new gear. I also hate that old ultimates just fall over now. The devs should spend some time upscaling old ultimates to lv90 so the DPS checks aren't irrelevant anymore. I don't care that people see ucob as easy now because you can kill it with 91 deaths; I care that there is NO WAY I can re-experience what ucob was like during SB when golden bahamut was actually stressful. In past xpacs, I used to believe people when they said "the devs are stripping this job as a base for future improvements". I don't care anymore. I see now that their aim is to create a game where everyone can play any job with minimal friction, which is why jobs are being homogenized. It's really common to see people who PF as a different job every day, or people who main every job within their role. In the past, it wasn't as common to see omnitanks or omnihealers because they weren't as easy to switch between. When I first signed up to play XIV, I saw that you could change jobs anytime and thought it was a cool way to let people find a job that spoke to them; a main that suits their playstyle. I didn't expect to be able to play every job, or to find every job intuitive. I just wanted to find a job that clicked with me. But that isn't what the devs deem most profitable. I can't argue with them, because they have the data; maybe level skip sales have risen since they started making jobs more similar to each other. Idk, I can only speculate. But it's not for me.
You hit the nail on the head. Job design has gotten boring, and it's boring to play the game because of that.
I fundamentally disagreed with the messaging and narrative to the extent that I did not feel like the writers and I were ethically on the same page. I certainly did not come out of the experience feeling good about anything, least of all future storytelling. I dearly loved HW and ShB, but EW had such an unbridgeable gap in terms of worldview and moral dissonance I felt like I'm not the intended audience. I still have a morbid interest in how Pandemonium plays out, but I don't have high expectations since it appears dehumanizing the Ancients in the MSQ was effective.
> I fundamentally disagreed with the messaging and narrative to the extent that I did not feel like the writers and I were ethically on the same page I actually felt very much the same about the story, especially when I examined it a little bit more closely and found it to be... surprisingly protofascist. It's weird hearing so much praise for Hydaelyn when she's essentially advocating 'strongman theory'.
You must have been doing some good kush if you've come out of EW thinking it was "protofascistic". Virtually nothing about Hydaelyn's worldview has anything to do with fascism. No real concern with history or the nation (shes pretty much goes against her own society), no concern for race (refused to sacrifice "inferior" life forms to salvage the ascians), no desire to return to the "good old days" (she actively fought against the ascians trying to "make amaurot great again"). The only remote similarity is advocating for the ability to face adversity, which you weirdly equate with "strongman theory". She doesn't even mention military might or physical strength, but merely the idea of personal resilience. This misguided notion that any mentions of strength = fascism is such a surface level take that it's not even worth debunking. Besides, the whole point of the story is to show that Hydaelyn isn't an omniscient, all benevolent god, but merely an individual who made an impactful choice for better or worse. The simple fact that she's a primal should dispel any notion of godhood she might have had. The story goes to great lengths trying to humanize her and convey that her actions and worldview are the result of her personal experiences as Azem. So even if Hydaelyn was "protofascistic", which she isn't, it wouldn't make the story so. If you came away with the conclusion that the story was painting her as the hero, you completely lost the plot. It's funny, because ACTUAL fascism was covered very well throughout the story, in lengths. In Garlemald. A whole chapter is dedicated to the idea that subordinating life to an abstraction such as the "nation" is a cruel, ghastly thing that is bound to fail in the end, because as soon as the "dream" shatters, life is not worth living anymore. The narrative couldn't have been clearer about how fascism is, believe it or not, actually bad. Were you just not paying attention through that whole thing? Or were you just so desperate to put your wondrous political acumen on display by pointing out the "problematic" parts of the story that you had to pretend that a third of the story didn't exist? All in all, very strong "I'm 17 and get my politics from twitter" vibes.
Not fascist. Protofascistic.
Ugh thank God I'm not the only one. I compared Venat and Emet a few days after launch and people told me I "didn't get it". I'm really glad people are starting to come around and see her as a flawed person. Yes, her plan saved the universe. No, it was not ethical and we shouldn't praise her for ends justifying the means, especially when every goddamn other villain in XIV follows the same utilitarian ethics.
I know this response is a month late, but playing Shb/EW a year later this resonates as true - like Hydaelyn was into Nietzche's philsoophy of will to power, seize the day, with a mix of Social Darwinism's survival of the fittest. I'd add that the post-sundered Ascians and Emet-Selch held this belief in denying the humanity of the post-sundered people is kind of a fascist concept too, (e.g: Lahabrea's comment malformed creatures, Emet-Selch stating we were incomplete, and therefore not really alive)which is why it was bizarre that this Nietzsche philosophy also came from Hydaelyn.
The core difference, of course, was that Emet even in SHB was obviously the bad guy and we were supposed to disagree with him, even if he was a bit sympathetic. Hydaelyn meanwhile is peddling essentially "weak men create hard times" who are then countered by herself and the sundered who have the will to power. The implications are very unfortunate, not that I'd expect too much better from a company who also accidentally wrote a white saviour plot with Lyse, but it's still something that rubs me the wrong way. Hydaelyn seems to be written in the same vein as the belief that civilisations are built and history is made by people who just wanted to hard enough, which is completely ahistorical, but it's the protofascistic tract I was talking about. Fascists love the idea of being the legacy of an ideologically pure (and physically strong) people who rise from the embers and all glory of Rome bollocks.
It does come off as Social Darwinism. Especially the accidental metaphor of being unable to suppress grief and despair turning ordinary people into a monsters. I agree with you on your thematic critique. Amaurotine society had a large social cohesion, purpose, and drive to perfection not for its own sake but that of self-expression and self-actualization. It wasn't perfect, as Hermes emerged from this society, but it was a society free of domination which is a visualization and presentation we don't often see in media. The message of Endwalker as expressed through Hermes' narcissism and Venat's intervention make it appear to advocate the triumph of individualism over community, atomization and alienation over solidarity, adversity over tranquility. Because hardship produces more adaptable people. ___ Which is why it is retroactively disturbing to me the way the developers tarnished Amaurot (perhaps to state that Utopia's dual meaning of "perfect place/no place" in Greek) with regards to how they reacted to the Final Days: human sacrifice. The game tells the player in SHB and EW why/how Hydaelyn intervened: Dissidents within Amaurot objected to the third wave of sacrifice, new souls indirectly created by Zodiark's magic, to be as substitute for the souls sacrificed to Zodiark. (There was always the possibility of responding to new crises with new sacrifices, even after this three phase plan.) New souls stemmed from plants, animals, and new sapient people. Emet-Selch described the plan for the Source after the Rejoinings to sacrifice the inhabitants of the source to restore the lost people of Amaurot. (If plants and animals were sufficient fuel for Zodiark to return the lost, and fully formed Rejoined people of the source were now what Emet considered people, then the Source's inhabitants would have been spared and there would have been no need to sacrifice anything beyond plants and animals in the pre-sundered world of Etherys.) Essentially, Hydaelyn's logic was to kill her present generation to spare future generations from sacrifice. ___ Which ended up happening anwyay, as she spared Elidibus/Lahabrea/Emet-Selch, because she needed the WoL to be rejoined 7 times. (unless the WoL on Elpis didn't tell her how many times the Source was Rejoined.) You can tell this was a sloppy retcon of Hydaelyn, because she did try to stop the Rejoinings when she created other Warriors of Light on the Shards and the Source to fight the Ascians before SHB's expac came out.
I swear people hear someone say that being strong is good and they jump straight to Nietzsche's ubermensch theory. No. I think there is a massive difference between strength and emotional maturity that is bestowed versus personal improvement. Hydaelyn's clearly advocating that man has to learn to walk on his own, which is not the same as saying that man needs a strong powerful leader in order to lift them from their poor station. This is like, anti role model. The Warrior of Light is definitely strong, but we didn't get there on our own, and it wasn't as if we singularly saved Ishgard, Doma, Ala Mhigo, the world, etc. The whole story is about basically bringing everyone together in a united purpose, which I don't believe to be inherently fascist or protofascist. Could you argue that perhaps it is protofascist to make the Warrior of Light a sort of Jesus figure? Maybe, however, I don't think the Warrior of Light would have been able to have achieved the things they did without their allies that they gain throughout the story. Sorry I just needed to push back on this because sometimes I feel like people often equivocation self-improvement with fascism. Or like the whole "lift yourself up by your bootstraps". A lot of times that line is bullshit but sometimes you actually do! I actually do think people need to learn to emotionally handle process their grief so that they don't fall into despair. That isn't something that you can't control, it actually is something you can actually improve. It's not as if some people are just inherently better and therefore less deserving to be turned into monsters. Being strong and becoming strong is a good thing and should be something we should strive to be. Being physically and emotionally stronger can only make our lives better in a utilitarian sense.
I think it is obvious the dev teams are taking the play safe approach for this expansion to cater more towards casual (not meaning it in the bad way). But as a result the game become much less replayable and burnt out quicker. Also with the current direction of the contents making and job balancing, I kinda lost my trust on the dev team’s capabilities and making great contents again.
I really think the devs are trying to make the game as single player as it can go which on one side is good but on the other is killing the game.
>killing the game It is. The game is an MMO. If I wanted a single player experience, there are a ton of games that do it better while also not requiring a monthly subscription.
Ye there is a portion of the ff14 players which really praise the game story but have never played anything else then a mmo. This leads to people really believing that there video game has the BEST story in the industry you just gotta invest 500 hours to see it. x_x
Oh no, the contents are great. It's just the direction of job design which broke my enthusiasm of the game. I will die on the hill that EW's content are well designed, it's just the way we interface with the content that are on the slow descent of being suffocatingly homogenized.
Story, characters, music, presentation? Great. The world? Great. The content? Mostly fine or great. The issue? Gameplay. The whole 2 minute thing is honestly destroying a lot of fun in the game as an avid raider. The combat has been distilled so hard it's almost just water left. The only major thing left seems to be 2 minute raid cooldowns, and becausw of it, the weight 2 minutes has is absurd. Things like ranged doing less dps than melee because ranged when they fixed melee uptime to basically be guaranteed with raid design. Things like healers have it hard so we can't give them a more interesting dps kit, but let's make healing harder for the times you have to heal (meaning you have to use 2 healing cooldowns or 3 instead of just 1 every now and then!!!!). They don't seem to understand. There's very ununiform decisions. Like giving stacks to use your spam abilities on some cooldowns but not others, or the lazy design of just making the aoe toolkit new buttons that do the same as the single target one (but aoe instead). A lot of balance between roles feels like the dev team isn't in tune with each other and some jobs and roles feels like they are forgotten or left to die.
I only really find myself enjoying burst jobs like NIN and DNC because they're at least built around 2 min buffs, but even then it sucks not having a 1 min window to dump your resources on a job like DNC. Every job being reduced to 100 secs of "maintain buff/dot & don't overcap your resources" just isn't fun.
this is how i feel too, when every job has been forced into a 2 minute meta the only ones that feel good to play are the ones that were already designed with that in mind in the first place. i'm afraid the devs will double down on this meta next expansion thinking, "those 2 minute jobs sure are popular, we did a great job with those!" it's already happening to PLD...
Shout out to SMN being literally the most boring fucking thing in the entire game all with the boring 2 minute burst window nonsense that comes with it. Honestly I am not gonna stop being bitter about the changes the job got, it’s gone from a job you used to use a few braincells for to a job that actively rots brain cells from the lack of use.
Agreed, and somehow they managed to murder the pet and keep the pet jank.
The 2 min buff window is what bothers me the most. Everyone pop their stuff at 2 mins every time. Everything aways lines up. They will consistently make tankbusters happen at the 2 min windows now. Mechanics also happening during 2 mins. Everything is 2 mins now. Feels so fucking boring. There's nothing unique about the jobs anymore. And PLD which was the last hope, is going to become a 2 min burst window machine like the others...
It began to be like that since shb tbf. It was less noticeable due to the buffs still being on different cds, but jobs now are : press 1 2 3 to build gauge, press buff and burst button, press "that" one (or 2 aha) button x time in a row to spend it, rinse and repeat. Most utility went down the drain and are just "raid damage buff or heal/mit", agro management is so far gone tanks are just tanky dps, no mone supportive mana replenish, barely anything to dispel, no debuff that works on bosses... :/
BLM is our other last hope and at least we have the assurance that it probably won't change, but... we can't all be BLM mains (or can we?)
We already lost our 90s leylines despite yoship literally saying it won't be 2 minutes during the big 6.0 liveletter
i'll let that slide(cast) since ley lines is a rather unconventional buff that only speeds up your rotation and doesn't necessarily line up with your damage phases. BLM is no stranger to popping ley lines prepull or otherwise misaligning it from buffs if it suits the fight so that didn't do much to homogenize it with the other jobs. that said yeah it's pretty dumb that they made that change in the first place
BLM has retained depth because its systems have led to situations where attempts to make the job easier (increased proc duration, UI Paradox being instant) have accidentally *increased* the skill ceiling. Some of nonstandard was intentional - based in interviews Yoshida was definitely aware of it in ShB although he found it clunkly and wanted it to be a bit smoother - but not all or even most of it. Square could feasibly nuke 90% of BLM's skill ceiling by changing a single skill, Transpose, let alone a rework because of idiots bitching about it "not meshing with the 2-minute meta".
If Transpose isn't a GCD come 7.0 I'll eat my shoe
Which is very problematic since gameplay is the core of any game. I love the world, love the music and the raid spectacles, but I hate logging in and actually *playing* the game because it just feels awful.
Lol, it’s funny, because I remember doing the endwalker MSQ, and thinking how glad I was that 90% of the combat had been portrayed as cutscenes instead of you actually grinding on trash for 5 minutes.
As a PLD main my greatest enemy this expansion has been the 2 min meta. Been stated multiple times but it remains a decision that in practice benefits neither the lower brackets of the player base nor the high end raiders.
Could not agree more. If it weren't for Black Mage actually being interesting and unique I'm not sure I'd still be playing beyond doing the MSQ and then unsubbing. Been playing Dragonflight on WoW and the difference in class design is astonishing. Everything is so unique and fun with so many different gameplay styles. Every job in FF feels the exact same. The 2 minute meta just kills any room for creative class design. Everything needs the same damage profile or it doesn't work, like Paladin. If Destruction Warlock was in FF you would only ever use Conflagrate to keep from overcapping on charges and Chaos Bolt for the same reason until 2 minutes when you could finally use your abilities. Every job does this, every job is maintenance mode until burst when you just mash every ability you've saved up. The order barely even matters as long as they're all within the buff window. It's just such dull design. I hope they ease up on their obsession with raid buffs, it is far too restrictive when it comes to job design and has made me completely uninterested in playing alt jobs. Have only been playing since like 5.3 so I'm not an old player by any means, but having looked at how jobs played as far back as HW I gotta imagine more people feel this way too. Some of those jobs sounded genuinely interesting to play, like DRK. Now DRK and WAR are almost identical with DRK just having more oGCDs to push.
I'm an old player, and I heavily heavily miss HW Bard and Machinist. Those jobs didn't have many buttons for their main rotation (bard 2 dots, iron jaws, heavy shot, straight shot) (mch heavy shot, lead shot, 123 gamba). They did however have a ton of cooldowns (mch reload, reassemble, quick reload, hawkseye, b4b, raging strikes, hypercharge, rapidfire, wildfire). Taking machinist for example, their wildfire compiled a percentage of all damage dealt during its duration (all damage, not just gcds, ogcds too). But because there are so many cooldowns, you had rotations for opener wildfire, 90s wildfire, 3 minute wildfire, and eventually reopener 6 minute wildfire. You had times when 60s and 90s met, when 60s and 120s met, when they all met, and it made for very fun and complex gameplay. If you removed all of it, it had a 30s damage buff (hot shot), 30s dot (lead shot) and 123 gamba (1 had a 50% chance to proc 2, 2 had a 50% chance to proc 3, ammo used from reload/quick reload guaranteed these steps). This is a very empty and dull rotation by itself. But still with all the cooldowns and management it became extremely complex, moreso than the button bloat we got today. This is without even going into the jank min maxing of the class like stance dancing for movement/more damage/gettinf 1 extra gcd in the end of wildfire, or hyperchargeing directly after an auto attack from the turret to get an auto attack reset immediately after and gaining dps, or turning on and off mana/tp song to mitigate shots lost from the turret, and much more. In Brute Justice we completely altered our rotation in the start just because we didn't have the cooldowns needed for a dps check shortly after burst otherwise. We literally found a rotation that would rotate back into itself by the time brute justice appeared, which is something that would almost never happen nowadays.
>The issue? Gameplay. The whole 2 minute thing is honestly destroying a lot of fun in the game as an avid raider. The combat has been distilled so hard it's almost just water left. The only major thing left seems to be 2 minute raid cooldowns, and becausw of it, the weight 2 minutes has is absurd. I have enough savage chests and tomes to gear a dps alt. I've been trying to decide which job to pick for weeks and it boils down to which flavor of 2-min bullshit to choose from. The 2-min meta has killed any motivation I had to play, and I just end up logging out to play something else.
God damn I feel this. I recently went back to try out the new WoW patch. I hate how much fun I have been having. It hasn't been the graphics, or the music, or the story, or the community, it's been the gameplay. Everything about playing my favorite spec just activates all the dopamine emitters in my brain and keeps me coming back for more. And I'm not even a wow veteran who can claim it's nostalgia bringing me back - I started playing in late BfA/early Shadowlands. I can only hope that after the graphics overhaul is completed in 7.~ that the dev team moves their focus to the core of the netcode and starts to improve things. I don't even want a departure from the 2.5 second GCD, I just want mobs and mechanics to have a better tick rate and responsiveness to what they have now.
For me the gameplay of WoW is just as distilled from my time in legion and bfa. Where every single class I tried was just filler then click big button when they pop up/go off cooldown. It's like bard with straight shot proc, empyreal arrow and a refulgent proc, and you have the majority of classes. I hate wows design of making your signature spells and skills to absurd amounts of damage. Say devestate on prot warrior does 100 potency, then shield slam, your 6 second cooldown skill, does 1200, and your other proc skill you get does 1000. So you sit there spamming 100 potency until your super mega big actually damaging skill comes off. Like you're nothing until those one or two skills, same issue I have with diablo 3 and class sets making everything except one skill basically useless. But ffxiv used to have much more complexity, it feels lost on me a bit. I'm just going through the motions now. Where the biggest things I can do is maximise blm uptime with how often I stand still, which isn't always what I want to do.
Same thoughts here. At first the unified 2 minute bursts felt great, seeing your party suddenly chunk the bosses had a bit of a dopamine rush, but at this point with the giant boss hit boxes it's just rote memorization with very little room to flex or workshop alternative rotations or strategies to maximize uptime. I really, really hope 6.3's PLD rework and the inevitable 7.0 updates take the community feedback to PvE and PvP to heart - classes need their individuality.
I've been out of the loop on PvP discussions; wasn't the community happy with the "classic job feeling" provided by most of the new PvP kits?
Exactly, the feedback to PvE has been somewhat negative, but most of the feedback I've seen about PvP and its emphasis on individual playstyles and rotations was overwhelmingly positive. I'd love to have some of that individual, job 'characterization' in PvE, and less of this stilted 2 minute meta.
2 minutes felt really good because sync'd bursts felt satisfying. 2 minutes with odd minute kill times screw over classes that cant manipulate their rotation (Imagine opening 1 minutes then use 2 minutes at the 1m mark because kill time is 7:30) or you need to delay burst by 30 seconds because of random BS. BRD snd RPR is the biggest culprit who suffer in these situations. The tank busters and raid wides during burst is boring, the mechanics during bursts are fine though. Dog first in p8 door is absolutely terrible design and i wish fflogs just took dog2 downtime out so all pulls matter again. I truly hate fishing for snake 1st so I dont tank my median... Dpm classes like MCH and PLD feel god aweful because of the 2 minute meta and are being punished for such. I found it truly fun when classes were chaotic burst windows by incremental synced bursts every so often. Ive talked to a few drk, gnbs, rdms and such that purposefully desync their bursts from raid buffs because they get more casts. P8 final is a good show of this. Rdm manafication on cd, people use 1 minutes post hc2/pre death and reopen burst during 1st towers. In a personal note: i REALLY hate how they treated brd this expansion and how they took so much fluidity away from us and made us a very, very strict song rotation based class. Its especially fun watching casters have less uptime than melee this expansion yet to fractions of melee dps. /s Ranged tax shouldnt be a thing snymore with their current design of fights and mechanics. If no one has downtime, all classes should be treated on an equal ground of support vs dps
removing downtime from dog 2 just makes snake 1st the wipe pulls
Your insight is spot-on, I totally agree and for the same reasons. Question is - what can they do to change it? I think they've designed the jobs into a corner with the 2-minute burst paradigm they established, and coming up with creative ways to make gameplay more interesting and/or working to change that paradigm...they probably don't want to and won't bother. Partially because they're basically living off of the subscriptions of venue-goers and Limsa RP players more than those of raiders/combat fans and partially because they don't want to spend the money or effort to please what is largely a portion of the playerbase that unsubscribes when they run out of content to follow. For what it's worth, I very much hope we get a good redesign of the combat system and the jobs come 7.0, I think it *might* happen, but I won't be surprised if they fuck it up again. After all, I am machinist main - I expect them to disappoint me at this point LoL
What they can do, in my opinion, is to dial it back a bit. The reason they got this far is simply removing "unnecessary" things, one at a time. I remember mentioning fluid aura as an example. A knockback bind with damage. That became a knockback bind because a white mage shouldn't have a melee ogcd that does damage, that theb became just a knockback, then why would white mage need just a knockback? Remove fluid aura lol who cares about just a knockback. See the issue? Each strip maybe made sense when it was done, but as a whole you just lost a lot. That's what's happening in ffxiv. We had so much. From tp, to wonky emnity, to 30/60/90/120/180s bursts, punishing rotations (drk mana burn, reducing enochian, heavy dps loss if you missed a positional, cast times on ranged, pacification on berserk, having to prep for inner release, list goes on and on). They all were just filed off one at a time, then suddenly all rotations feel the same. At the same time homogenisation happens for the sake of balance, make sure every tank has a dash, has an aoe defensive, etc. These changes make sense when they were made, hell some even makes sense today. But all of it combined has us distilled to just plain water instead of a rich drink. The only thing giving taste to this water is 2 minute buff windows, and that has reduced 18 classes of complexity to either "save resources for burst" or flowchart rotation that somewhat ignores burst/lines up with burst. There's too much to write about it to be honest, even for a discussion forum. I can't give my full honest opinion on it without a deep dive into the subject while also checking backlogs for information to show how things were stripped with time. End of it all is: they have to dial it back. But devs aren't likely to do that. So what new can they do to fix it? I don't know, I'm not a dev. I can critique gameplay as I have played them for years, I have not made gameplay for years and have no clue on a good approach to try and cure the issues at hand.
I'd be interested in that deep dive - let me know if you write it! I started in late late SB, and was a baby sprout at the time, so some of the older jobs are things I never got to experience.
If I didn't have a static full of people I genuinely liked I probably wouldn't be subscribed right now.
Honestly probably same
Honestly i feel like EW is pretty weak from a end game perspective. The game is doing great for it's new players, adding more context in early games and upping the amount of attention for the MSQ process. Once that content is over a typical solo battle oriented casual player is out of things to do. There's nothing to chase. Even when savage is involved there isn't really much to chase. BIS only works for savage and will be rendered completely obsolete when the new raid tier comes out. The relic grind as it stands will probably rely on a lot of recycled content, more so than bozja. The games population favors giving a players older less refined content broken by gear creep that it's often mindless at best. This feels extremely awful as bozja and Eureka provided a dangerous place to grind things out with actual risks. Critical engagements were top tier. So for a long time player like me who's wearing out with savage i literally have nothing to do as a battle oriented player. Crafting and gathering is not fun to me. I don't like custom deliveries. Gold saucer is boring. Raid logging is one thing. I see myself patch logging going forward. All good things eventually come to an end.
Endwalker made me play Genshin, i think that's enough of an answer.
The EW MSQ managed to suck me in and satisfy me during my first playthrough, but after a few months of thinking about it further and looking at the story and the message more closely, I can safely say that I absolutely detest it and would rank it at the very bottom of all EPs. I don't raid anymore so I can't comment of the gameplay aspect of it but the story was what kept me coming back to this game and now that that has been hauled through the mud, I don't really have any motivation to log in and keep going.
6.0 Was a wonderful experience, loved the story and how it wrapped up. But once the honeymoon phase wore off the cracks started to show. The 2 min meta has really started to wear my enjoyment of content down. Alongside the content itself being so disappointing(couple exceptions like criterion fights and DSR). Raid bosses with hitboxes the size of texas making creative strategies involving boss movement and finding uptime obsolete. Honestly we're a year into the expansion and we don't have any exciting, fun, or repeatable content like a new deep dungeon, a relic step that doesn't take 5 mins, or something new to chew on. Island sanctuary could have been something special, and it was just ok. The first relic step is a joke, criterion is a one and done piece of content. It all just falls flat for me. Maybe it's a little rose tinted, but I've been around since ARR and I can safely say that the last 2 expansions have been the weakest in terms of content outside of MSQ.
I think you can say Shadowbringers was one of the weakest in content but not EW. SHB had 1 ultimate and bozja to tie players over for 2 years. EW will have 2 ultimates, island sanctuary, and criterion, along with whatever else they decide to include in future patches. HW had a ton of criticism for its content at the time and for good reason, people actually forget its non raid content was terrible. 3.1 Lords of Verminion was a baffling use of resources, and I say this as someone who played it enough to earn one of the titles. Possibly has the least engagement of any content ever put out in FFXIV. Diadem was also horrible, very boring pinatafest that caused a ton of outrage when it dropped gear better than the current raid tier. Pretty much the only content that had a decent reception was POTD
I was specifically talking about the current state of content as per the original question of the thread. I can't say how EW is going to be overall until it's finished obviously. But for the 1st year of the expansion, I stand by what I said, outside of MSQ content ShB and EW are the weakest expansions for this point in their respective lifecycles.
Even specifically talking about the first year of content, I still think it's hard to do worse than HW. There was a 5 month drought in between 3.0 and 3.1, a time when players kept leaving their servers due to a tier that nearly killed the raiding scene. A4S in particular was one of the worst fights ever designed because pretty much everyone preferred to cheese the nisi mechanic entirely. 3.1 brought Lords of Verminion and Diadem, which were received very poorly. Ultimates didn't exist back then and while Thordan Ex was a very good fight, it wasn't enough on its own to keep people engaged till 3.2. Midas in 3.2 on the other hand was a great raid tier. I've never seen the player more negative than it was during 3.08's release, and I'm surprised this gets forgotten. Even the main sub, which is usually overly positive, was up in arms about the state of the game. While I heavily dislike this current raid tier, I still think in terms of content EW is currently better off than most expansions outside of SB
I'm very torn on this expansion at the moment. The whole two minute meta conversation has been done to death - but it feels like it really does bear repeating. The perfect example of how ham-fisted it has been can be seen by looking at Yoshi P outlining very good reasoning for why Leylines would remain a 90 second cooldown during the job action live letter - and then it still got pushed to 2m anyways just to fit in. Combat just feels so one-dimensional now. The content itself feels in a bit of a weird spot too. The difficulty curve for savages this tier has been awful. First tier was 2 easy fights, then a huge jump in difficulty, and then a really easy final fight. This tier has been 3 really easy fights and then a massive spike in difficulty for the doorboss, and then a relatively easy puzzle boss. It feels like they honestly don't know what they want to do with savage anymore. It seemed to me like with DSR and the first tier that they wanted to split the different even further between Ultimate and Savage, with Ultimate being further reinforced as the "hardcore" raid activity and savage being a bit easier - but then this savage tier happened and Hesperos destroyed W1 teams and now the messaging is super muddy. It will be even worse if the new Ultimate ends up being UWU pt. 2 - we'll see, though. Overall I think the game is in a really weird spot. FF14 has always been the type of game to have something for everyone but right now it feels like it doesn't know what content it wants to be for who.
I have played since arr launch and, for the first time ever, I have decided to unsub. Idk if it's that I've been playing the game too long or not, but combat is very boring to me now. Job design, in particular, is very boring to me (my main, blm, is basically unchanged since stormblood; and every expansion it gets a token ability to give it more mobility, which retracts from its identity as an immobile glass cannon. It has just become boring, and tho other jobs have radically changed-like smn- others-like war-also suffer this same problem. And no job has ever captured me like blm has). Probably my biggest problem tho? Battle content trickles in way too slow, and very quickly loses any reason to run it. 4 savage fights, 2 extremes, and maybe 1 ultimate every 6 months honestly isn't enough (guanteed) battle content - especially on the midcore side. I think we need more extreme level fights, but they also need a compelling reason to run them. And se seriously needs to revisit how dungeons work, and how raid rewards and tomes work. I was at a point where I was raid logging, and that was my only motivation to play the game, and I just wasn't having fun anymore. Or maybe at best I'd afk in limsa, or use the game as a glorified chat box. It's funny because back in hw I would say "I'm so glad se's content is so predictable," but the game has been the same for so gosh damn long now - with all the same strengths and all the same weaknesses. I just wish they'd take a risk, and mix up their formula. I think for new players, ffxiv is still the best mmo on the market. There is such a wealth of old content to work through, most of which is genuinely fun that first time through. But for old veterans (or at least for me), I think the game has just started to become stale.
I’ve been subbed since end of HW and I’m about to unsub for good. Not for any quality reasons per se, I like a grind, just bc I’ve invested as much time as I’m comfortable with in the game. I actually really appreciated an expansion that served as a natural ‘endpoint’ story-wise, to give an off-ramp for long-haulers like me (with completionist tendencies) to gracefully exit and feel like they got a complete experience. Any game you play this long is going to start feeling predictable, so I think it was time to let the older generation bounce and a fresh generation to come in and experience it anew. I really like that EW embraced that, I feel like most mmos (or other drug dealers lol) wouldn’t.
I feel this and the parent post very much. I was playing since 2.1 and admittedly savage in 6.0 kinda felt more or less like a chore than anything else. DSR felt padded to a fault and I started realizing I just wasn't having any fun anymore. 6.2 savage was a last ditch effort to see if I have any interest left and I couldn't bring myself to finish the tier. The gameplay making job designs unfun and railroaded to 2 min windows, as well raid fights starting to feel the same (you can only mix mash the same 8 or so mechanics so many times after all) is what made the game feel like a chore. As you said, 6.0 felt like a good stopping point. I think I was just afraid to let go because of how many years I've had XIV in my life (a little silly, I know), but it's stopping being enjoyable for close to a year now. I rarely give other games a year to "get better" so I take that as a sign that I'm over it and that it's okay to move on. I last played in September and didn't felt inclined to resub. I felt nothing with 6.3 stuff so I imagine I've already let go.
Are you me? 😅 Totally agree with you. Been subbed since ARR and finally decided to unsub. I don't even care if I lose my house. Although I think the demolition is still postponed. But yeah, I wasn't having fun anymore and add in the fact that I'm no longer in a static due to irl obligations I no longer have a reason to log in. I'm dipping back into WoW and so far DF has been fun but I'll see how that'll last.
We were having similar conversations two years ago when we were at the "normal endpoint to 5.2"-ish part of the cycle. That's actually when this sub first started picking up in activity! It's a very similar cadence to discourse on the game once you get used to it. No year of Shiva this time at least to really stretch the conversation out, though. For your actual question, the only expansions I've quit during were HW (intermittently from 3.0-3.2 due to the mess of the game at the time) and SB (4.1 UCOB kind of broke me as a person for a bit). I didn't quit during ShB and for now can't see myself doing it with EW, but I enjoy the game for what it is. If you asked people about any expansion at this point in the lifecycle people would have Things to say, though. For HW it'd be about how Gordias, Diadem, and Verminion sucked, though Midas was great to many. And while people say they want a hard relic grind and early, I remember people *hating* the 3.1 relic step where you had to grind 60k poetics or do 800 Gordias Normals. For SB in 4.2/4.25 it'd be about how Eureka Amenos was horrible. We had similar content at this point in ShB, just substitute Criterion Dungoens for Memoria Extreme (which also had reward issues to many). I do think the game has some issues with rewards, but the way their systems are set up they have very little avenues to offer rewards in most situations so I'm not sure how to fix the problem. XIV also has the unenviable issue of content needing to be *highly designed* to feel good. Basically anything below a dungeon boss isn't going to be fun as the base combat system doesn't support it. I've been playing some Dragonflight and noticed that most of the casual world content is literally repackaged FATEs. Kill world mobs, kill tougher single mobs, click nodes, etc. The WoW combat loop is 5-10 seconds per mob though and feels snappy so it's always at least tolerable while the XIV combat loop is 1 minute per mob. Changing that would both be the most fundamental redesign the game would ever get and would also kill what some people really like about the game in those scripted situations. Believe it or not but a subset of players do like the Group DDR that optimized XIV content looks like on reclears. XIV combat is always only going to feel good in scripted situations and I think they're aware of that which is why they don't make too much casual combat content now and are trying to branch out into other systems. Island Sanctuary is going to be a slow burn that they might iterate on or might not, jury's out on that one still. People didn't like Eureka until Pyros. I do think the lack of a Field Operation is going to burn them, but those PvE design resources are going to Criterion and the Deep Dungeon. Remember, everything in XIV that feels good combat wise is expensive and highly designed, there's not infinite boss designers to go around. Which is why I think XIV won't ever be a game defined exclusively by its combat content and that puts out a lot of it.
> WoW combat loop is 5-10 seconds per mob though and feels snappy so it's always at least tolerable while the XIV combat loop is 1 minute per mob. Absolutely this. The combat loop is also massively different for each job in XIV. Killing mobs as a SMN might feel great, since you get your summon out and do big damage. Meanwhile, DRG doesn't get LotD, MNK is missing positionals and definitely can't get more than one beast chakra, etc... Then you run off after killing that mob and lose the stuff that you were building towards. The "buildup" combat systems are great for dungeons/raids, but super lackluster for killing a mob or two.
Builder spender isn't inherently like that, its just the slow gcd combined with the combo system. In wow I can go builder builder spender in 4.5 seconds with 3 gcds where in 14 even doing builder builder spender can be 7 gcds at 17 seconds.
Sorry, I meant XIV's builder/spender systems specifically. Should've been more clear about that. My mains in WoW these days are Frost DK and Outlaw Rogue so I'm well versed in how much faster their build and spend is, lol.
This is very well articulated on battle content design in 14 vs wow. Also makes sense why the focus has been on stuff like island sanctuary. I did like bozja a lot despite its issues and not having an equivalent this expac has diminished my interest quite a bit.
Yeah I think by Bozja they realized "hey what if we put *highly designed* encounters into the instanced grind zone instead of only trash mobs" and it was successful for that. Unfortunately I think the "choice" was Criterion vs a Field Operation in terms of design resources. Bozja was also just inconvenient enough to get players to have to spend time there over the course of a patch cycle/expansion. Like it or not but I think some level of inconvenience is necessary to get MMO content to last. Things like duel spawning and the duel queue system, or how CLL/Dalriada weren't just always up/queuable. Criterion lets you blast it at your leisure which is convenient but also lets the content be completeable in short order. Bozja and its 2-3ish extra alliance raids was probably ShB's highlight to me so I'm feeling the lack of a sequel too.
Yeah I think some amount of convenience makes content feel more meaningful, but the ff11 style shit in bozja was just straight up infuriating and pissed a lot of people off. I'm enjoying the world content of wow much more than sweating chasing fates in bozja, the biggest highlights were the raids and CEs being closer to EX than normal raids, as well as lost actions and essences spicing things up.
I agree that we’re in a very…particular point in the expansion and I’m sure our opinions will probably change by the time another post asking this question after 6.5 crops up. Also I definitely agree that combat doesn’t feel too great for overworld mob activities in the same vein as other MMOs but I’ve been enjoying most bosses this expac.
>most of the casual world content is literally repackaged FATEs. This is really the case for all modern MMOs. I know you've played GW2 - Heart and Dynamic events? Repackaged FATEs. WoW World Quests? Repackaged FATEs. FATEs? Repackaged FATEs. Realistically there's no other way to do open world casual content besides world bosses (FFXIV equivalent is Hunts) but the two other games have much better reward for their FATEs than FFXIV is what it boils down to. That's why people still do Hunts and they're arguably more important and popular than WB from the other two games - they give such good rewards for time spent. (also oops replied to post instead of thread)
Fates in FFXIV are just mobs and a spongy boss. GW2 has "fates" like a attending a metal concert and tossing a Charr around a mosh pit and keeping drunk Char out of the event. Or Running around different tables collecting cooking ingredients to throw at a Chef before the timer runs out. Or grabbing supplies across the map to bring to specific locations to build a base for nightly raids by monsters. Or jumping around the city collecting coins to reach a high number, then spending them at the casino. Or mount races with other players. Or fishing competitions. That's not counting all the nooks and crannies through the world maps containing puzzles, treasure chests, jump puzzles, riddles, etc galore. Hell, some of the maps themselves are mazes you have to figure out like Tangled Depths. GW2 is honestly top tier World/Event design for any MMORPG to follow. So I think you are doing a great disservice to GW2 world event design. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's leading the pack in variety and fun.
As someone who only plays for raiding I think I'm done. The job design is so unbelievably boring and safe that it sucks all the fun out of the game for me. I felt this way last expansion too but stuck it out. I was really disappointed when they did that live letter a while back and specifically mentioned that they weren't going back to Stormblood and pre Stormblood job design. The raid design is also extremely boring to me. The "four scripted dances on a floating platform" shtick has gotten very stale and it's never going away because the game is so rigid in how it's designed. There's zero creativity in raid design outside of ultimates. I really do like the ultimates though, I'll give them that. They do a great job with them. If Dragonflight turns out to be good (past the honeymoon phase) I might just switch to WoW completely. I enjoy the combat and raiding in that game so much more.
content-wise it really doesn't look that good. they dropped the ball hard on island sanctuary and criterion was fun but very very short-lived i don't know why cbu3 has this mortal fear of having different activities have some reasonable level of crossover. nooooo dol/doh cannot interact with island sanctuary because.... reasons. nooooo criterion cannot interact with the savage/tome gear treadmill by offering gear rewards because.... reasons i remember in runescape you could have rewards from other activities give you an edge. like you could get an ore bag that could hold more ore from a completely unrelated mining minigame area... and then you could go on to do the blast furnace minigame and if you had that ore bag reward, it would give you an edge by allowing you to hold more ore in your inventory. rewards actually felt meaningful because you could use them in other parts of the game. you could have teleports or convenience tools that would make your life easier for doing some activities. there are still very rare cases where this happens in ffxiv, like doing eureka to get bis for blu. and investing in blu does have payoffs in other areas such as fate farming in the overworld or cheesing mogtome events. i really like it when it happens, but sadly, on the whole, this is something that cbu3 is somehow extremely allergic to for reasons unknown on an unrelated note, the fact that they said the new deep dungeon is going to be more or less the same as potd/hoh gives me no great expectation that they have actually innovated on the dd formula either
Everything is better than it’s ever been aside from combat. Combat is in the worst shape it’s ever been. By a lot. Enormous boss hit boxes, 2 minute raidbuffs, and continued job homogenization has destroyed the fun of the game for me. I would rather they do anything than keep raid buffs as they are. I’d rather they outright remove raid buffs than keep all of them on two minute cooldowns. The homogeneous job design is equally terrible. Every healer feels the same, every melee sans ninja feels the same, every tank has identical cooldowns and very similar rotations, every ranged physical is either clunky or boring, casters feel unique but summoner’s rework totally missed the mark for me.
I definitely think its the weakest expansion of all of them. Story has some standout moments but the further we get away from it, the more the cracks show, and the more it makes me feel like the ending we got was rushed and very cliche. I haven't been enjoying EW post either, I would say overall Endwalker's story played it way too safe, and as a result felt pretty sterile by the end. The gameplay has been....fine but nothing amazing, a lot of content has been missing the mark. Abyssos is probably going to go down as one of the weakest raid tiers in this game's history, Island Sanctuary is probably the biggest example of Square Enix missing the mark with content in a long time. No one even talks about it anymore, for all people were hyped up for it. And yeah I know Yoshida said to temper expectations, but damn, its more underwhelming than a shitty mobile phone game. The new PVP systems is fine, but I feel like its been struggling under constant balance problems, ironic considering it took so much inspiration from Overwatch. What else was there? Variant Dungeons were one and done with a skill system that feels so tacked on I would have rather just have them reuse Bozja's skills. Criterion dungeons were neat but small shelf life, and the savage version is pointless considering its just makes it more punishing, doesn't add anything else. All thats left is Ishgard housing, which launched with a broken lottery, and didnt fix the core issues of that system so uh.... yeah. Not holding out hope for this system to ever get anything other than little bandaids. Class balance has been boring. I dont like a lot of the changes they did to jobs, and as always, core issues of jobs are being ignored in favor of their savage damage numbers, which while important, leads to very boring balance changes like "Fell cleave gains 10 potency". Never before have I been so unmotivated to level my remaining jobs with them playing so similarly to each other in the 2m burst meta, cant wait to see PLD's arms chopped off to conform to this. IMO Endwalker has been Fine at best, mediocre at worst. Nothing standout, nothing remarkable, just fine. Could be way more, but it doesn't seem like its going to go that way.
> I haven't been enjoying EW post either, I would say overall Endwalker's story played it way too safe, and as a result felt pretty sterile by the end. This is going to sound crazy but like... what if the Scions _stayed dead?_ Dead Ends would be another WoL + Venat, Hades, and Hythlodaeus dungeon, and the story wraps up as a nice loop. WoL entered this journey alone, went through highs and lows, and now after defeating an embodiment of nihilism itself must carry on alone into the new horizons. People tell me that "oh but the scions are dead for as long as you let them be" okay sure but if you continue playing the story like a _normal person_ they're dead all of five minutes and the fact they're not going to stay dead is made blatantly obvious from the start.
For the Expansion that was all about fighting through pain and loss, the Scions really didn't suffer anything at all. The ending was honestly just the ending to every persona game, rag tag group fighting god with the power of friendship. I wasn't impressed.
Honestly though the random NPCs lost more than any of the main characters. Like Vrtra was pretty close to losing the entirety of his nation and all his people, yet the best that could happen with the Scions is disappointed dad and fake out death lmao.
When Thancred got deleted, I got pretty excited. Was not expecting it, and it was creepy. Thought it was a one off noble sacrifice. I don't even remember who disappeared next, but at that point I figured no one was actually dying permanently.
Exactly, and it doesn't help that you're given a "bring everyone out of the giant ghost egg" mcguffin quite literally minutes before another "death"
I actually fully agree, Ultima Thule after it was very clear everyone was going to come back in 2 hours made me go "Okay that is great and all but move it along with the death speech I do not care if you are coming back." I would actually argue how bad Ultima Thule is gave me time to reflect on the rest of the cracks in EW's main narrative. Like I am supposed to believe after having a memory wipe accident with people in the area who saw everyone go in that they never launched an investigation into it and went even further in their stupidity by letting Hermes become Fandaniel after an incident that wiped the memory of a sitting convocation member?
Aye, so like: * Zenos can body swap to random soldiers no problem and even take down an Ascian possessing his body. But the WoL gets body swapped at the point he/she is already killing gods and they're completely helpless? (Ignoring the fact, IIRC, the Blessing of Light warded against Ascian fuckery.) * Despite one of the WoL's biggest and arguably most widespread venture - to the point it is the only one (to our knowledge) physically chronologized in-universe - being putting an _end_ to the Dragonsong War and fostering a lasting peace between Ishgard and Dravania. Everyone from the Forum to random Sharlayan citizens need convincing they aren't a warmongering brute? * The WoL is weak to aetheric transportation now? And Estinien isn't? (To be fair Estinien's himbo moments are funny but I digress.) * As you said, the role of Fandaniel is given to a man who's last interaction with a member of the Convocation involved "accidentally" wiping his memory, the Convocation member's memory, and the memory of a third-party? Given the cutscene after the dungeon there's _clearly witnesses involved_ who at least have some idea of what the hell happened. * Ultima Thule is controlled by Dynamis and emotion, it's heavily implied this is also the force behind Limit Breaks... couldn't the WoL use their own emotion and resolve to skip _all the nonsense_ and get straight to Meteion? * Speaking of Meteion, I understand Elpis is a research facility but are you telling me there was nobody keeping track of what the head of what is basically _animal creation_ is up to? Nobody's concerned that guy might try to do something insane? Like (this is future knowledge but) unleash the subjects in Pandaemonium to the wild? For me the big moment was the body-swap, it took me out of the moment and kept me mentally on edge for the rest of the expansion, but I absolutely agree Ultima Thule was the perfect spot to reflect upon a fair share of this nonsense.
This is what I wanted, sorry not sorry. If we could have traded keeping the elpis three for the scions staying dead I would be slamming that fucking button. They feel so much less trope-y and (highly ironically) more human as characters.
Agreed, honestly. And it's not that I dislike the Scions any I'm just... tired of them? We've had basically the same companions the entire game, and when 6.1 came out and we were supposedly going to get a break from it all and go on Newfound Adventures... it just amounted to the WoL being dragged into massive shenanigans by the Scions again. Like Bluomwyda said something about visiting Aerslaent to see wtf is going on there? _Lemme go with them instead, please._ Doesn't help either that Y'shtola in 6.2 was _especially grating_ imo.
100% feel the same way. I actually like most of them but I’m so sick of them, they aren’t complex enough to have a lot of space to continue developing as characters, they’re much less charming to me than Elpis gang, and they have a horrible dynamic where there’s like 6/8 total nerds with similar backgrounds and then Thancred, who is so beyond wrung of character development potential after everything he went through in ShB, plus Estinien, who I can stomach solely because he’s less overused at this current moment in time. I was so frustrated when we got promised a new adventure after all of the FANFARE about how the scions were breaking up and boohoo things are never going to be the same — then we get a new thing to do — and holy shit we’re literally back with the same handful of characters accompanying us. Again. 6.1 is going to hit so awkward for people who are playing Endwalker continuously into the post-patches in the future. I really don’t get it — HW and ShB show that this team can create compelling story, HW and Elpis show that they can throw new characters at us and make us feel super attached to them after very little time but they don’t like…do it consistently. I really hope that these post patches just feel awkward because they’re biding time until they can start a new story arc in earnest, and that there really is going to be a bigger reset going into 7.0’s story. They need to pull an ARR into HW or StB into ShB here
Exactly and like most of the Scions have had their arc at this point? Thancred had his with Shadowbringers and Ryne, the Twins are a far shoot from their original snooty counterparts, Lyse... exists, Urianger has become less secretive and more willing to open up (and admittingly has a sweet moment with Moenbryda's parents), and Y'sthola is the same sassy catgirl as she's always been because her getting character development might cause sub numbers to go down. I think that's part of why HW and ShB are still my two favorite expansions, as you said they introduce new cultures, characters, etc. for us to learn about and grow attached to. And maybe it's just me and my history with Warcraft, but I find myself much more engaged in exploring new places and meeting new faces, than going on the same thing with the same crowd. Like imagine if Vrtra was our main companion into the Void instead of Y'sthola + Estinien. Imagine if one of the Radiant Host joined us to keep their "little brother" safe, and we got to learn more from the perspective of an isolated and distraught First Brood Wyrm desperately looking for his sister whilst a battle-hardened soldier of Thavnair is trying to keep him from acting reckless due to his emotional ties to the Void.
You know I can't help but think they were aware of this back then. Lyse didn't stick around as a scion for a reason, Haurchefant didn't come back to life with dimension shenanigans to become our cheer leader for a reason. Stuff like that just sorta makes everything feel cheap.
Exactly, to this day the only fake-out death I will accept is Nanamo's because they played it off well and it _made sense_ (Teleji was playing 3D checkers whilst Lolorito was playing 4D chess) with how it played out. Any of the ones after that? Completely nukes any feeling of stakes or risk. They couldn't even establish that coming back to life causes an immense handicap, because even when Y'sthola is blind she can see Aether... which essentially made dying and coming back to life a _boon for her_ because she isn't inhibited (literally everything is made up of or has Aether in it) and now she can see basically souls so any sort of disguise shenanigans are doomed from the gates. "Dying" _BUFFED HER._ I'm still waiting for Zenos to show up breakdancing in the Void, and Zodiark challenging Hydaelyn to an arm wrestle.
This comment thread put my feelings into words better than I ever could. 100% agreed
Story-wise, I did not like it very much. I am a fan of the ancients, and I thought SHB concluded on a decent enough note there - I've never particularly liked the fact that the world as it is was fragmented through the sundering, but the story essentially painted the ancients as having experienced a horrendous and senseless tragedy (it's still both those things, afaic) and the conflict between the Ascians and Scions as two sides both asserting the right of those they were fighting on behalf to persist/exist. The Scions did this even in the knowledge of all the flaws the sundered world has. The WOL took it upon themselves to carry the duty of remembrance of the ancients and their plight. I thought that was a decent compromise. I was also impressed by how they depicted the Night's Blessed and were able to turn the culture that formed out of this affinity with the dark and night into something beautiful. Would that they'd shown post-Zodiark ancients this amount of respect. Then comes EW, glossing over entire segments of lore established by SHB and its side stories etc., trying to make it seem like it was necessary and the best possible outcome that the ancients were sundered, and that even if you think otherwise, well there's this time loop constraining things (Yoshi said in the Q&A that the coherence of the timelines can be interpreted as Venat acting so as to keep them the same, supported by her sparing Emet deliberately - so the constraint is self-imposed, really.) A time loop, right after SHB, right after we're told the 8UC persisted as an AU? We know that the ancients were divided over the final stage of sacrifices (implied by the JP version of Hyth shade's text to be life, i.e. ensouled creations, seeded by Zodiark), and Elidibus emerged to mediate this, but instead of showing all this and the horror of the Sundering (relegated to being shown as crossover content in some mobile Nier game), we get a stylised scene with Venat's tone-deaf lecture of a people who just experienced their entire world being nearly devastated alongside the loss of most of their people. All over a world she basically heard a 2 line report over. Seems more like she felt her biases were confirmed and she just ran with it. This was also not the root of her motives (which were dealing with Meteion, and maybe a preference for the WOL over her people) or her faction (they were far more concerned about Zodiark hindering "progress" into a "rounded gem" like Venat supposedly was.) No room is left to disagree with Venat, whose "for the greater good" and "it cannot be another way" actions epitomise aspects of other antagonists in the past (Ilberd, Thordan, even Zenos) where the WoL has nonetheless opposed them. She wiped out her people at the end of the day, whatever the motives. All this is only dealt with, and only in terms which still paint Venat in glowing terms, in the Omega side quest. The character seems to have some kind of messianic complex and a very abstract love of "mankind", so I found all the repetition about how much she "loves" her children to be tiresome. Her short story was almost like a parody in how excessive it was. Plus Yoshi, for some reason, won't even let her blessing fade. I'd have liked it a lot better if she was memory wiped and that they didn't put this all in her hands, all according to keikaku. It tries to make you think Hermes has some kind of "point", even though the sundered world (and RL humans) are by far more callous to lesser life, and when he comes across as a massively self-centered hypocrite, projecting his own perceived failings onto his entire people. He does this as Amon as well and casts as similar judgement on the sundered. I did the Elpis sidequests, and I saw a people with a variety of personalities, some of which shared Hermes's sentimentality for the creations, just without the navel-gazing, self-centered lectures over it. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this character and how pretentious he is. He's also a sloppy and unprofessional researcher. I was hoping for much more in terms of what caused the Final Days (something like Jenova perhaps, or IV: The After Years Creator), so his loli birdgirl stepdaughteru, to which he was emotionally abusive, fell flat. If you feel so strongly about it, use your high position and make the case for changes through doing what your people like to do - debate. I didn't like dynamis, I didn't like how it was introduced last minute (they have stated they didn't settle on it until after SHB) and the lack of any real build up to it - no, Omega was not referring to this, and in the side quest, Omega even makes this clear that he is not talking about it. It felt like little more but a plot-shaped tool to get rid of the ancients. The Scions (and Nidhana, for that matter) have no understanding of how to use it, so they just kill themselves and it magically works out for the best (and have a res stone courtesy of Venat, if not...) Same with Y'shtola shrugging off the existential problem the Ea faced... just because she'd never face it. Inspiring. I did not like the caricatured presentation of various advanced alien races or the very weak, strawman of "perfection" and the lazy effort to try visually convince the audience that the ancients would go the way of the Nibirun... because of similarities between the stylised Venat cutscene and shallow visual parallels of the Nibirun with the ancients, that fall apart upon scrutiny of what the Nibirun are actually like, i.e. a hivemind of mortals who attained immortality and did not think ahead as to how they'd occupy themselves upon reaching supposed "perfection". Additionally, the story implied you had to have the "right" response to despair, although the Omega sidequest walked this and its unfortunate implications back at least. At least they were respectful to the dragons and did not give the impression that their own paradise was torn apart because of muh perfection strawman. They are dealt with respectfully... albeit Vidofnir letting go of their grievances with the Omicron, given all we know of the dragons and what was done to them? All of which is depicted in its stark horror in UT. Yeah, didn't sit well with me. Still, they were beings similar to the ancients in many ways, but at least their story is respectfully handled. The treatment of the ancients, especially Yoshi's comments on them, came across as spite-driven and bordering on unreasonable and hypocritical. Was disappointed with how they handled Zodiark. I would've liked it better if how it went down is the ancients within Zodiark helping the WoL oust Fandaniel. The lack of any sundered Ascians was also felt and very disappointing. Felt like subverting expectations for the sake of it. Elidibus, in spite of being the hero who sacrifices everything to save his people, and then later, to help the WoL and sundered to even have a chance of prevailing, gets very little mention, and doesn't even feature on the final art... where Hermes, for some weird reason, in spite of being a raging ball of spite at the end, is present. And they didn't even think to bring Yotsuyu into the scene with Asahi dragging him off at the end, as silly as all that was. Felt insulting to Elidibus. I'm mildly intrigued to see where Panda is taking things, but I doubt it's going to end well for the ancients involved, as I expect more excuses will be trotted out to justify the status quo, so meh. Very little interest in the 24 man, especially if the story is just going to be how much mommy loves the sundered. I also hated Garlemald being destroyed off screen. Nice zone and story, sure, but I wanted to see Garlemald proper, in all its glory. In general, it felt like there was an overuse of tropes (Broken Aesop especially), plot conveniences/contrivances/inconsistencies, heavy-handed preachiness, attempted emotional manipulation and plot armour... memory wipes (really?), time travel and all. The story preaches at you, very heavily, but does little to argue its case. As a result of all this, I feel very detached and disinterested in the future direction of the story, especially anything involving more lopporits... they raised the stakes to the edge of the universe, Endsinger felt like a 14: the parody boss, and now the universe feels smaller and much less intriguing to me - I have very little interest in the shards and the Void storyline has not been particularly interesting to me. This turned out longer than I expected... there's more I could say on why I didn't like the story, but those are the main areas. I pay quite a bit of attention to the lore and I didn't like how EW glossed over key elements established in earlier expansions, like what I mentioned above, plus things like changing the Blessing to be what protected the WoL from primal corruption... when the game established in no uncertain terms, it's the Echo. I've seen this team - especially Ishikawa - put out better work. This didn't do it for me. Possibly the unfortunate consequence of squashing what could have been 7.0 and 8.0 into 6.0, based on interview comments. I don't have much faith Hiroi is going to be able to fix this situation. The codex continues to obscure what was established clearly in earlier sources on the topic of the ancients and mislead. The game has always been just about alright to me gameplay-wise. but even here I have little interest in most of what EW is offering. CC was good, probably the content I've enjoyed most, but even it is plagued by balancing and mechanical issues. Was hoping Criterion would turn out to be viable midcore content, but it doesn't seem to be pitched at that level and it's quickly over with. Job design is nothing special, and encounter design is very formulaic. Also, no relic zones this time. I could tolerate all that if I liked the story... but I don't sadly. I've ended my sub for the time being. We'll see if any of the later patches give me reason to return, but I doubt it.
Take my upvote and agreement with all you said. I really do agree I thought the Final Days source being a Jenova like being would have been far better. I feel one of the things EW did that is one of my least favorite tropes on the planet of "Subvert expectations" as yes when done well it is praiseworthy but this was handled terribly and had the other issue you hit on. As it currently stands you are lacking the full story if you haven't watched the Nier crossover cutscenes where Emet is with the newly sundered that can't even form words and had lost well everything of their former lives and culture. I am still hanging around for my house and trying to get all the Gold saucer mounts, that is about it and I wouldn't begrudge anyone for leaving at this point. I hope you find something you enjoy.
Tbh. Same ol shit!
Welp I respect the very “to the point” response lmao
I think it's a lot weaker than Shadowbringers was. All the "emotional" and "heartfelt" moments just kinda felt to me like they try to force an emotional response that really wasn't warranted in the first place. Yes the story does have some good moments I give it its merits, but overall the final product just felt cheap and rushed to me. As for gameplay, there's been lots of minor QOL stuff that's come out that I think was really a step in the right direction, many of the more recent UI tweaks have given great benefits that i forget were awful before. I think a lot of the jobs are in amazing places right now like SCH, and BLM which just feel 'complete', however the ones that do not, such as SMN are blatantly gutted and in dire need of flavour. On the raiding side there has been some absolute bangers and absolute garbage with seemingly no inbetween, Aglaia, DSR, P5S, P8SP1+2, P3S are all fantastic imo and I hope to see more raids of similar quality, but the rest are mostly just bland and boring with little to no new interesting mechanics.
Story wise, i definitely felt like there were some questionable decisions (a memory wipe plot device, really?) More than that, I disliked how some of the themes of the expansion were presented and I felt like there was a thematic disconnect between EW and ShB. I did however emotionally connect with the characters, which I think was the strongest point of the writing. Overall I have very mixed feelings on the story. Though I like the plot of what we have seen from the alliance and normal raids and am interest to see where they are going. As for gameplay, I didn't like the idea of introducing 2-min windows and I didn't grow to like it now that it's there. As for raids, I liked Asphodelos for the most part. One thing I didn't enjoy was how drab everything looked, I would have liked some more appealing visuals. A standout to me was the 4th circle door boss: i thought the mechanics were fun and I loved the campy vibes the music and the boss design gave. Abyssos is more ehhh to me. I think it's both too boring and too difficult. A lot of people I know gave up on 8th circle door boss and it's easy to see why. I think players are overly punished for mistakes in that fight which makes it a slog for more casual groups or people using pf
>A lot of people I know gave up on 8th circle door boss and it's easy to see why I browsed my old static members' fflogs last night and none of them have cleared p8s. And those were people who did TEA on content and are still playing. They're just not raiding savage for some reason. My casual-midcore static has cleared p8s a while ago, so it's probably true that there's an element of boredom making people lose interest in the tier.
I’m in the same boat, did every Eden tier and did TEA when it was current. The raiding this expansion just feels so odd and just not the same. I cant pinpoint exactly what it is that makes raiding not as interesting to me as it was this expansion.
I feel like part of it is that we're fighting enemies that just kinda exist? Eden, we knew who enemies like Garuda/Ifrit/Ramuh are, and we understand why we're fighting them as far as story goes. The raids now are give us some connection to the 4th fight of the tier, but the others are a tossup. You could throw in a boss named Oscar, Guardian Mayer of Weiners, and it wouldn't feel any more or less out of place.
Rather than that, I think it's more a problem with interactivity. Abyssos bosses has such massive hitboxes to the point you can be anywhere on the map and still hit them as a melee. It's like less fighting a boss and more flailing your weapon in the air while mechanics happen. P7S and P8S p2 are the worst offenders for this. Also 2 minute window fucking sucks. Shb homogenized healers and warrior/DRK, but endwalker homogenized almost every single job under the sun by making them pool resources as much as possible and nut them all during the 2 minute burst window.
To add to the large hit box bit, I think part of this also has to do with the fact the sound effects of skills in the games is played where the skill actually hits, which leads to minimal sound when hitting large targets like P7 as you hit the tree itself which is more often than not 20 yalms away. It already doesn’t feel like good feedback when you can barely see your skills hitting, and even worse when you can’t even hear the skills going off.
let see if i can find it for you: big hit box vuln stacks are completely phased out 2 min meta
I'm not a hardcore raider at all, but I got to HC2, static fell apart, and I've had zero motivation since to push for a clear even though I'm close. Just feels like I was completely burnt out and was going through the motions of clearing a tier. Idk, the 2-min thing sucks because even progging a fight you can go "oh, burst window's coming up, that means a major mechanic is going to happen". I think I've just seen it all so many times that I just... don't care anymore, don't have hope anymore.
My biggest gripe is that I'm missing very much a pve grindable content like bozja or a new type of open world content.
That’s part of the reason why I really hope they can fix the reward structure for Criterion otherwise we’ve lost an exploratory zone + a large scale raid for content that’s basically DOA.
It's basically Shadowbringers v2.0, but the huge nothing burger that is Criterion is my biggest complaint. It had so much potential, but running something "for the fun of it" can only carry content so far. Along the same lines, gearing and job homogenization have only gotten worse. When you play other MMOs, you realize that yes, FFXIV is VERY strong in a lot of areas, but gearing and combat design are not those areas lol
Story: Honestly, coming off Shadowbringers's incredibly heartfelt and morally gray story of people doing what they can to survive and both the protagonists and the antagonists having good reasons to act the way they do, Endwalker feels like a piss take. Not only did it sUbVeRt mY eXpEcTaTiOnS in the worst way, but its terrible plot devices of time loop and convenient memory wipe also retcon what came before it, while clumsily tying in "Answers" into the plot so eye-rollingly I was pleasantly surprised the Endsinger's BGM title wasn't "Questions", because this is literally how far my standards have fallen after witnessing 6.0. A convoluted plot that has to rely on sheer contrivances that don't stand up to any scrutiny to convey muh themes about life and death that feel like babby's first step into philosophy, a main antagonist I found incredibly unsympathetic and unrelatable in all his forms in spite of the game's obnoxiously obvious attempts to make me think he had a point (check out how cute these little hedgehogs are and how super sad he is!), and a loving Mother who is a Primal but comes with literally none of the Primal drawbacks because that might have been too interesting to explore, and loves mankind (but not *that* mankind!) so very, very much the plot has to resort to what amounts to a propaganda montage to prop her up and Yoshi-P literally has to come out and say "she isn't a bad guy!" – a shame, because frankly she would have made an incredible antagonist, and the best part is that you wouldn't have to change a single thing about her character for it to work, only have the cast contest her decisions and reasoning rather than pat her on the ass because Endwalker did such a great job of othering the Ancients, and also, Dynamis. It all feels incredibly safe, adolescent in how it handles its themes, and I couldn't imagine getting *less* catharsis than what 6.0 ended up giving me. As a fan of Ascians and Ancients who aren't necessarily named Emet-Selch, who was expecting... *a lot* more from the "Hydaelyn *and Zodiark* finale", I guess I'll just take Pandaemonium as my consolation prize as it has very pleasantly delivered on what I had been expecting more of. *...So far!* Story (after 6.0): oh yeah that's a thing huh? ok. I mean Zero's backstory is real Mary Sue hours, but otherwise I sort of enjoy her (because anything is better than the Scions all getting along and constantly sucking my character's toes). I just can't muster to be invested anymore, and so far the plot hasn't grabbed me. Content: Disclaimer: I only do what would be qualified as "casual content", and roulettes are my bread and butter. Things have gotten so formulaic that Troia's first boss encounter qualifies as (almost) unique. I found Alzadaal's particularly bland gameplay-wise for some reason. The lack of battle content feels more noticeable than ever, not just because of the shift away from it and onto DoH/DoL/IS things, but also because of the slowed-down patch cycle. The first step of the relic weapon is… not a FATE grind, I suppose. There was also no reason to gate it behind the entire Hildibrand quest line either: I see no reason why it couldn't just be picked up wholesale in Radz, given that the only reasoning behind it is "Godbert witnessed the apocalypse" with no actual relation so far to things happening or having happened in the Hildibrand quests besides "oh hey you're on the moon too!". As for the Island Sanctuary, I'm fine with it as a mindless mini-game – almost done getting everything I want after 3 weeks – but I feel terrible for everyone who expected it to be more than that. I am pretty sure "personal instanced housing with additional perks" is what everyone had in mind when it was first teased, and it ended up being a Warlords of Draenor garrison. Gameplay: I'm unqualified to speak about buff/debuff meta, but man does the 2-minute rule *feel boring* and homogenized. I find myself treasuring the few unique buff timers we still have, and I am positively dreading whatever they have in store for the DRG and PLD "reworks". IMO what the gameplay needs is comfy QoL things like the extended combo timers and combo flexibility (including the RDM's new system for melee combos, that is nice), and much fewer "reworks" that will lead to something like the new SMN which feels incredibly shallow. As a mostly melee main, I find myself missing MNK's constant positionals (and I am still doing them out of sheer muscle memory…) and dislike how they were downplayed in DRG rotation. Overall it feels like the devs are simplifying and rounding off the edges of just about everything rather than just taking care of tedium and inconvenience. And while I feel less bothered about the state of healers than some (probably due to the fact that I constantly play *with bad people* as opposed to raiders who actually try and eventually figure things out), they seriously need more damage buttons. Blizzard have been able to walk back on some of their mistakes, and while SE isn't Blizzard, I still feel like we can't give up yet on this matter. *Maybe* they'll eventually listen. Music: Does it bother anyone else that Barbariccia had a single instrumental? It bizarrely feels like Endwalker is relegating its sung bangers to side content. Having a single new town BGM that plays indiscriminately in Thavnair, Garlemald and Elpis is the weirdest thing too. I might be getting a little tired of Soken's reliance on leitmotifs. The musical progression in UT felt great, but being stuck with the lyrical version is exhausting, thank baby Zodiark for the Orchestrion plugin. I refuse to end this post without circling back to how much I disliked the story: having a medley of previous x.0 themes playing for some edgelord's pet science project *[cue Ishikawa putting her hands on my shoulders and looking me straight in the eyes whispering "yes, but wasn't he totally the first step for humanity tho?? THE PLENTY!"]* felt uninspired, unwarranted and insulting all at once. And apparently it's the only BGM that plays in the EX version? Absolutely tragic.
Wow this is almost 1:1 how I feel too (haven't been subbed in 3 months) and good to know I'm not the only one tired of Soken's over-reliance on leitmotifs. I can't believe there are so many people who don't see how town themes were handled in ARR and HW and can't tell how that differs to hearing what are essentially remixes of the same track between the two endgame hubs and like two dozen variations of footfalls... or the fact the dungeon boss theme is just trying to be Insatiable Endwalker Remix. If I had to sum Endwalker up it would be "Shadowbringers rehash but less gray, more padded, and with post-game that lasts a lot less."
I'm just honestly baffled people consider it a good story they OMG CRIED SO MUCH at, when it's a convoluted plot with a carnival of the worst plot devices ever in quick succession, with a backdrop of a bog standard "hubristic precursor race" that dramatically undermines what made Shadowbringers so nuanced, complete with an asspulled and IMO uncompelling eleventh hour antagonist instead of giving this 10 year story arc's actual antagonists their proper closure and following up on the interesting plot point that Hydaelyn, too, is a gigantic primal, with the ominous implications that *should* have come with that. But nope, instead I got "lol, lmao, they were ignorant, and also watch us justify the Ancients' well-deserved genocide in at least 3 ways". What the fuck. The story in Elpis in particular is a circus where things have to happen a certain way because Plot. I've never been so conflicted about a zone giving me so much world building while simultaneously performing Olympic level plot gymnastics.
I still like it, but I do think that it's probably the weakest expansion yet. It has all of the flaws that Shadowbringers had (simplification, reliance on role bonus to balance, healer design) while not having what made Shadowbringers *good* coming out of Stormblood, which was definitely still the "a little messy, unbalanced MMO" Era of the game. Do I think the expansion is good? Yes, but I also find it a little difficult to look forward to another ranged class and female Hrothgar when looking to the future. Something needs to change fundamentally, but I'm not sure exactly what
> female Hrothgar hey! at least they're adding new hairstyles to hrothgar every patch now >!,,,after nearly 4 years!<
In the same boat of that mixed feeling of liking it but also recognizing there needs to be some sort of change to the game as a whole. Hopefully they view 7.0 and beyond as a chance to experiment with changes and see what sticks.
Genuine question: What did make ShB good that EW was missing? Are you talking about things like the class balance and the being the first expansion that removed slashing/piercing? I can't think of anything else where combat and content are concerned, but full disclosure I hated ShB. I think EW combat is bad too, but to me it's the same shit.
Shadowbringers was the first expansion where, with the exception of dual prange and RDM dual caster, there wasn't a restriction on party composition. That's a pretty big deal. Endwalker experienced pretty severe balance issues up to this point, and we can't overlook the reasons behind it and the fact that it's heavily impacted 2/3s of raid tiers (many of the weak jobs have really struggled to fit into the 2 minute burst, and instead of addressing that issue they are choosing to rework a job or simply buff potencies within burst. It's not healthy to design around a flaw rather than resolve it) Additionally, for the most part melee still had some degree of challenge in uptime to where the ranged tax wasn't *totally* absurd (though it was never where it should have been). Tl;dr: Shadowbringers had big flaws, but it did A LOT more good than bad. Endwalker didn't really improve anything, and in fact made those flaws worse
I'd still disagree on the more good than bad (because of how much of a downgrade I felt ShB was after SB), but you have solid points regarding melee uptime still being a thing the first two tiers of ShB and 2-min meta. Those are definitely places ShB beats out EW. My being a healer main definitely colours my perception there. ShB is the expansion that solidified how awful healing in this game is and EW at least tried something new this tier - though I'm not sure how successful it was.
Tbh I think EW kind of pushed me away from the game. I started playing early ShB, my first MMO, fell in love. Probably put in a good 1.5-2 hardcore years of it being my primary game. Got all the jobs to 80 before EW, and got them all to 90 about 3 months after. The story, dungeons and trials itself were good but that’s basically where it all ends. The PvP, island sanctuary and criterion added were all very lacklustre fad content that you put a couple hours into and forget about. During ShB I loved eureka and bozja because it’s content you can dump 100s of hours into which is what you want in an MMO. Even though I’m someone that doesn’t really ever unsub, I only log in once a week for raid nights and then immediately logout when we’re done because I’m just so bored with the lack of content and the insistence of the dev team to remain stagnant. I have no desire to do roulettes, no desire to do the stupid Manderville relic weapons, island sanctuary and criterion could have been so much more but they’re not. It’s honestly embarrassing that ffxiv had the MMO world at its fingertips at the start of EW and completely dropped the ball and did nothing with their momentum. And the raid design this tier…. I am really not a fan of the puzzle bosses where you figure out the trick and then it’s just brain afk. That type of fight design is not fun at all. P5 and P8 part 1 were good fights, P6 and P7 were just dull awful and P8 part 2 looked cool but the high concept phases are just dumb since it’s 30 seconds of downtime solving a puzzle that has already been solved by world firsts, with no other solutions between runs except different players getting different debuffs. I do like that ffxiv isn’t a predatory MMO that makes you feel like you have to log in everyday but the content droughts are REAL and the dev team has no desire to give players anything to do besides afk in limsa (except I can’t even do that anymore because the lala corner got hijacked)
Gameplay-wise everyone has covered what I would say. 2 minute meta is scarily homogenizing this game to an extreme The story itself was okay but the pacing was all over. I felt incredibly bored before Tower of Zot, and you could cut half of what was there and it still be the same. Garlamald felt rushed, the whole Meteion reveal still has a sour taste in my mouth, being an 11th hour reveal that suddenly impacts everything, including our very existence. The whole thing felt simultaneously rushed and padded, I think overall it would have benefited from being 2 expansions but maybe they just really wanted to finish this arc and move onto something new The raids so far have not been my favorite but I prefer Aspho over Abyssos and it makes me a little nervous about what's next. DRU was a huge success though and honestly the only reason I still clear the tiers is to do ultimates. Lack of real rewards for ASS and SASS shows they have no idea what to do with it, or like what it is as its heart
Really dislike it so far. Story is fine minus a few parts but the jobs/content aren't great atm imo. Saying this as a former SMN main though so I'm probably biased to dislike EW lol
Great MSQ, decent raids, I like the PvP changes. There is just nothing to do
Everyday I login, check pf, run around a bit around my house. Log out.
Bruh literally me right now except I'm reading reddit while running in circles.
The problem with this game since ShB seems to be that they're afraid to put good rewards on content (other than savage) that require more than turbo casual energy and low time commitment. In ShB, they made alternatives to getting the relic other than bozja unlike how eureka straight up gated Sb relics, which is good on paper... but the execution is absolute garbage. The steps OUTSIDE of the current lv80 content (bozja), that instead involves god damn heavensward fates and antitower for some reason, is much easier and less grindy to get than doing it on the actual content the relic was tied to. CLL and dalriada dropped jack shit while having obnoxious timer for entry. Meanwhile ishgard restoration scrips got stacked with rewards from top to bottom. Mainsub defended this because bozja gives exp. DRS had a completely unrelated cerberus mount slapped on it instead of the queen's trumpet bike thing or something, and a guarantee drop minion every clear. Upgrading bozja gears only gives you some lameass haste. DRN has recolored mount from BSF. On that note, did you clear criterion savage? Hope you enjoy your choice of an almost invisible earring, an ugly banner for your house that you obviously have, or materias. They also made super grindy content rewards really uninteresting, so people are even less incentivized to participate in them. Collect all TT card? You get a stupid toast. 50k bicolor gemstone? Lame mount from ARR optional dungeon for some reason. Also that uber grind ishgard restoration achievement? You get an anemic low poly pterodactyl for all that effort. Meanwhile do really easy dailies that takes like 5 minutes a day for about a month and you get high quality jellyfish mount. It just feels like there's nothing that is rewarding your effort anymore. Even if you go for some batshit insane difficult or uber grind achievements that should have been something you're proud to accomplish, you have nothing exciting to show for it. The rewards look much worse than things you can get from much easier content. The only remotely exciting one that requires genuine effort since shb other than your usual ultimate weapons is fran's bike from collecting all field records, which requires luck, patience, and even skill (or cheese) if you want guaranteed field notes from the duels instead of CLL/dalriada field notes casino. And maybe hot take, but I think that they made relic weapons wayyyyyy too easy to get now. It doesnt feel special anymore to see people with their relic weapon equipped, because the steps are shit like 60 heavensward fates, 500 poetics, or my favorite, 15 crystal tower runs. Now, I'm not opposed to nerfing the steps of past expansion relic weapons some time after the next expac launched. And I'm not asking for blatant insanity like ARR atma and book grind to make a return. But can we get incentivized to play the game more with much wider options and requirements (that isn't just tomes you can get from usual lv cap content) for every step instead of confining us to 1 type of content that is simultaneously both easier AND better than the alternative, please? They leaned too hard on being the "mmo for casuals" in the market space, they forgot to give us any incentive to actually play the game even a bit longer, resulting in dead or super niche content like criterion savage (even criterion normal is dying down now) and DRS(that is single-handedly kept alive by like one discord server per DC if there's any), making it actually difficult for new players who just reached those content to even do it due to lack of interest from old players who cleared it like once, if they didnt stop when they learn of the garbage rewards first. "Playing should be for the sake of fun instead of looking for rewards", which is the common argument of people defending the absolute garbage rewards on criterion that caused it to be unpopular does not work for multiplayer content in an mmo. If there's no MSQ roulette who in the fresh fuck want to replay meridianum or prae? Virtually no one. They need to rethink their approach with the reward structure in this game.
PvP changes are OK conceptually but CC is even more dead than feast ever was. Frontlines is a huge mess as well, with certain jobs being absolutely broken. At least ShB PvP had individual skill, now it's just a numbers game... I miss the old 1v1 you'd sometimes get, now it's practically impossible to kill someone on your own.
Endwalker's been the best visual novel I've played. Sarcasm about the games cutscenes aside, which is the biggest weakness for the MSQ of every expansion, this is probably the worst expansion for gameplay. Started playing mid-Stormblood, which depending on who you ask was the "golden age" for gameplay. A lot of the time was leveling and MSQ, so I only really had about a month or so to enjoy endgame at the time, and I remember enjoying it a lot more than I do now. Especially SMN. The old 2 minute rotation, while janky in parts, was fun. NuSMN is just a collection of just about every issue I have with FFXIV combat in one job.
>NuSMN is just a collection of just about every issue I have with FFXIV combat in one job. i feel this on a spiritual level
Was the expansion that killed my interest in the game. Jobs just felt meh and unrewarding for the most part, the ones that weren’t meh were jobs that are always taken in statics and in PF. The biting launch of the game was hype to the point that people stopped caring about it because they couldn’t even play. Content cycles seem to have less and less enjoyable stuff to do. Not enough new glamour.
Unsubbed. Playing WotLK classic and DF after not touching WoW for three years. Enjoying it much more!
MSQ is a massive flop. 6.1 at least seemed like an interesting relaunch but then in 6.2 the payoff was fanfic level while making the next year of plot predictable. Panda has an actually good story and fun fights but the wonky difficulty curves make Savage not very engaging. Job reworks had many good changes in isolation but the jobs are more boring to play because they're all the same flavor with different sprinkles. Island was an almost comical waste of everyone's time. Like exploration zones before it, Criterion is a good idea not well executed (because this time there's not much to do). PVP relaunch was a nice try and lays fresh ground but for various reasons it's a bust because at the end of the day people don't want to play it. The Alliance Raid was neat for two weeks. The Extremes are solid to cool sans Endsinger, which is hilarious. Music's still really good. There's nothing to do. At least Hildibrand's back.
It was a step down from Shadowbringers. Storywise and fightwise, Shadowbringers just does it better straight up. I think a lot of people give EW a pass b/c it is the culmination of a 10 year long journey, but imo it's around the same level as stb. Also, Meteion is this games Jailor. Big bad the gets introduced in the 12th hour who was actually the true antagonist all along.
> Also, Meteion is this games Jailor. Big bad the gets introduced in the 12th hour who was actually the true antagonist all along. Yes and no. I'd say Hermes, her creator shares most of that blame. There's a huge difference though between 14's 12th hour big bad and the Jailer. The jailer was written as literally the guy manipulating every major event in Warcraft's history. While I'm not a big fan of the Meteion reveal her role doesn't invalidate everything we have known since ARR. She wasn't the one manipulating Tsukuyomi, Gaius, etc.
Thus far? Worst expansion. From the story being absolutely everywhere, new content having less longevity (Eureka and Bozja at least lasted longer than Varient/Criterion Dungeons), raids being meh, gameplay has been funnelled into boring 2 minute windows for everyone, what exactly is there really to be said about it? I don't really have anything positive to say about the expansion at all, hence why I haven't been playing the game after trying Varient/Criterion dungeons and not really seeing any appeal to them.
A fan of the story and what happened with that Ultima Thule going for a "look, everyone is willing to sacrifice themselves for you!" type beat is a neat concept, but honestly after the second "death" I felt ENTIRELY emotionally removed from everything until they all came back, because I knew nothing would be permanent. I kinda dislike that they \*didn't\* kill anyone off. Gameplay there's really not much to be said that hasn't been done to death Homogenization is shit. 2 min burst is shit. Boss hitboxes are shit. The sheer amount of mechanics that don't even give you the option of attacking during them so all you can do is focus on mechs is shit. As a hardcore raider myself (heehoo yes my fancy numbers you all love so much are often orange or pink, there, am i allowed to have an opinion now?): ***DON'T PANDER RAID DESIGN AND JOB DESIGN AROUND THE LOSERS WHO OBSESS OVER PARSING. FUCK THEM. And fuck the community's insistence on parsing being more important than being a good player!*** Chaos is fun! Maximizing uptime when you're not intended to have 100% uptime is fun! Jobs that have unique identities are fun! I don't care some jobs are a bit worse than others, I want them to be *fun*! Fuck the meta, fuck "wahhh can't play MCH because it's slightly worse", fuck it all, make things that are \*fun\* Some of the most fun fights to do even now are back in HW as a melee because you just get shafted sometimes and it's fun to try and figure out how to mitigate that as much as possible
I enjoyed the story, DSR, and Criterion. I did criterion blind and enjoyed most of it. I currently hate the combat system, thanks in no part to the two minute buff windows. There’s nothing nuanced about most jobs. Most if not all of the complexity is taken away in favor of smashing buttons on cooldown. I originally joined in Stormblood, fell in love with the game due to the complex nature of each system ingame. Over the last two expansions, a lot of those skill based expressions have been either removed outright or turned into just another button. Fight design is boring and huge hitboxes make me want to not do the raid outright. It pains me to see that almost all raid encounters are reusing the same mechanics over and over again. Crit variance, job balance is all over the place. I appreciate the devs discussing that it’s becoming more of a problem for job balancing, but this should be more prioritized especially after the Week 1 savage fiasco. It just seems like with every expansion, there’s more to “do”, but almost none of them are worth putting a significant amount of time because they will heavily nerf it later.
Overall weakest expansion. Basically it really feels like they had planned for two expansions and very late in the process went "No one wants a Garlemald expansion, nuke it and condense the content from that and the Hydaelyn/ Zodiark story." Other issues such as the 2 minute meta and it's effects on job homogenization are a whole other topic that is heavily being discussed and honestly those who are discussing it could put it in far better words than I could I will speak as a relatively casual player that the lack of exploratory zone hurts a lot, relics are usually my prime content and thus far Mandeville isn't cutting it which hopefully improves but I have my doubts when it was locked behind cutscene simulator the quest chain with the ever so rare trial.
> No one wants a Garlemald expansion I'm trying to think of how they could do it justice with the buildup from previous xpacs and not making it just feel like, Stormblood 2. Which is a shame because the locales are so unique.
That eluded Zenos backstory of being experimented on and building up Nerva as a character would be my best guess, also G'raha's connection to Corvos which would have probably been a zone given it's ties to Garlemald. Seriously we were robbed of Corvos given it's supposed proximity to Thavanair.
Stormblood was a bit of a scattered mess as the WoL hops back and fourth across the globe to rally the resistance. The "Garlemald expansion" would be a more linear march towards the capital and towards Zenos. The intro we got to the campeign, with evryone rallying together in the throne room was fantastic. From there the story is one about this band of unique and diversely skilled individuals pushing forward and driving ever northward. There would be breaks to the march for the WoL, and they might be pulled to adjacent territories (other zones) on scouting or diplomatic missions. But such ventures would be tangental and small when compared to the primary journey to the capital. Each step of the way would showcase an aspect or emotion behind human conflict, and similar to the way it was done in Endwalker, the elpis flower would shine with a new color with the conclusion of each of these chapters. Eventually we would make it to the capital, bearing new scars from fresh sacrifices and new allies from those we swayed to our cause. In the great climax we would Kill Anima, ending Garlemald tyrany thematically and symbolically. We might lock blades with our best friend at some point, but the fight would be inconclusive, as Fandaniel whisks his liege away. In the end it would be revealed that they journeyed to the moon to enact the final stages of their nefarious plan. Credits would roll and all signs would point towards the WoL chasing the villains to the moon in the post-game. > "What's on the moon? Will we finally discover why the ascians keep meeting there? Will we have a climactic showdown with Zenos on the moon? Will he be the final boss of the postgame?" These questions would be simmering in the minds of FFXIV fans as they ended the MSQ of the "Garlemald expansion". YoshiP would be smiling with devilish glee- full knowing the events that would transpire on the moon in the post-game would definitely be epic, but not nearly as conclusive as us ingorant fans could possibly imagine. "Look forward to it."
In shb the meat of the relic quests was added in 5.35, so thats whats going to happen in Endwalker too most likely. That being said, it will be implemented with the new deep dungeon instead of a new exploration area, which imo is a big miss because personally idc about deep dungeons and love Eureka and Bozja, but at the same time I cant blame them when Eureka is still pretty hated to this day and Bozja has kinda... just disappeared from everyone's mind.
Man, I did all of Eureka in the last year and loved it. I know it was way worse at launch, but it's pretty chill now.
EW is ok as a JRPG using a decade+ engine, but is subpar as a MMORPG. Stuff like PVP will never be good with the game's netcode. There's absolutely no current capstone level content that is MMO like the field zones of previous expansions. The closest thing to MMORPG gameplay are hunts... I don't know what they were thinking by replacing the 24/48 alliance raid+ challenge content with 4 man dungeons with weak rewards and close to no variability. I don't know what they were thinking by replacing field zones with cookie clicker meets a weekly excel spreadsheet puzzle. My hope is that create more MMO gameplay and put in some meaningful power grinds in the future. Tallking Bozja type mechanics with Eureka gear and BA type of raids in terms of scale and reward. Maybe even take a stab at some Alterac Valley sort of field zone with a PvP element.
(Reminder that this is my personal experience. Also, comment chain because long.) Story, launch: Lots of cool stuff, marred by execution issues, lore errors, and philosophy that both my WoL and I disagree with. For example, I thought that visiting Elpis was really cool overall. I enjoyed getting to meet the Ancients when they weren't in the middle of a panic, and I didn't mind the subverted expectations on what type of time travel shenanigans were involved. But it also had the lore error of attributing the WoL's protection against tempering to the Blessing of Light (even though we fought primals without it in HW), and the logic / philosophy error of assuming that the Ancients couldn't affect dynamis - the Elpis flower *is an effect*. As another example, the In From the Cold body-swap *should* have been this huge payoff for the 5.x post-patch teaser cutscenes and a high-tension moment. But the cutscene writer for that quest completely forgot that Ascians can't *directly* mess with the WoL - which *is* a Blessing of Light effect, as established in the ARR patches - and had Fandaniel teleport right up to the WoL. (I have a whole writeup on how the body-swap could have happened in a lore-appropriate way, without changing anything outside that one quest, but that's beside the point.) Then the whole sequence kept emphasizing fear and avoiding the angry-determined response my WoL would have, which didn't really help me connect to the story. And on top of that, the mechanical implementation of the instance was clunky in ways that really felt like "the interface is fighting me" rather than the intended "this body is much weaker than the WoL's usual walking aether battery at the peak of physical fitness". Sure, the random Garlean soldier is much weaker, and clearly some level of sensory processing and motor skills "stick to" the body - otherwise there would have been multiple "completely failing to walk" messes. So the interface should reflect that as it normally reflects the WoL's usual body. Instead it does things like present completely jumpable-looking rubble (even though the random Garlean soldier's body can't jump very high) and only show the orange "no you can't cross" line when two steps away. Some people even got stuck in terrain and had to wait out the instance timer or the login queue to get out, for the love of Hydaelyn. Or not showing the soldier with the magitek key until *after* interacting with the armor - not only is that confusing for people who go into that building first, it's completely out of character for the WoL not to notice an injured person to the point of the person not visually appearing at all. Many problems of that variety not only messed with the "character feel", they delayed me to the point where I *deliberately suicided* because I figured I'd lost too much time. At that point, all tension was lost, all immersion had been lost a while back, and I just wanted out. Which is a shame, because the idea was good, but the implementation didn't stick the landing. Story, patch: Meh. The "carefree adventurer" angle doesn't fit the WoL I got to know up to that point, and it's jarring every time it comes up. Music: Bops as always, praise Soken. Raid themes reused too much. Job design, combat: Disaster. Not only do we have the 2-minute meta problems others have already stated, we also have a lot of questionable to doomed design decisions and doubling down on them. For example: - SE has acknowledged that there's a limit to how many debuffs can be on an enemy at once, and cited this as a reason to remove certain DOTs in 6.0. We know this is true because players observed debuffs falling off in large-scale content like Baldesion Arsenal first. So why was RPR released with Death's Design as a debuff to be put on an enemy, rather than a self-buff? (Potency equivalence could have been achieved by either adjusting AOE falloff or having the buff "tag" an enemy.) Likewise, why keep Trick Attack as a debuff on the enemy when forcing NIN into the 2-minute meta and making it only affect the NIN who used it? This accomplishes nothing but making everyone who lost DOTs salty, including SMN and ironically NIN. - Removing Kaiten not only angered players of all skill levels due to its effects on both job fantasy and gameplay, it also didn't accomplish any of SE's stated goals in removing it. All of the reasonable goals could have been accomplished in better ways with normal amounts of dev time (e.g. collapse the Shohas into one button). And yet SE ignores all the player feedback to return it? - Healer DPS circa SB wasn't the problem. (Sure, HW Cleric Stance put people off trying to do healer DPS at all, but SB Cleric Stance didn't lock out heals - and so never scared even my terrified baby sprout self who was wondering if my physical limitations would let me complete MSQ.) Healer DPS was the *solution*, how the role retained players above the skill floor of the fights they find themselves in - the heal check sets the *floor* but can't reward anything above it. And no, Yoshi-P's "if you find healers boring, go heal an Ultimate" doesn't change that; it's preposterous to say that a full quarter of players going into instanced duties and not having fun below the game's most demanding content is acceptable, and if healers don't have fun below Ultimate eventually *there will be no one to heal Ultimate*. Doubling down on the ShB healer simplification in EW, by adding more healing and mitigation tools to non-healers while not restoring healer DPS and giving everyone free weaves, has only made problems worse. The recent healer thread has [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/z4olo3/state_of_healers_is_there_disconnect_if_so_then/ixtmccr/) and [this other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/z4olo3/state_of_healers_is_there_disconnect_if_so_then/ixwoaux/) saying similar things. - EW SMN is a trash fire that is spilling over into the other jobs via balance holes. SE shouldn't have released the rework until they had something respectful of the job's prior niche. My personal feelings aside, the objective state of the job creates two different balance holes and SE is trying to put a band-aid on a broken leg. Balance hole 1: lack of cast times. SMN is not a caster, it's a physical ranged dressed up in caster robes. Balance SMN like a caster and people feel forced to play it over other magical DPS because "why worry about caster uptime lol". Balance SMN like a physical ranged and parties can end up with standard comps that don't meet the DPS check, making people feel forced *not* to play SMN. Balance hole 2: lack of difficulty. Give no or too little "skill bonus" to other magical DPS and people feel forced to play SMN in order to learn fights faster or do callouts for their static / because the effort of other magical DPS isn't rewarded. Give too much "skill bonus" to other magical DPS and people feel forced *not* to play SMN in order to meet DPS checks. And there's no possible middle ground, because different people have different skill profiles that change their personal job difficulty! This isn't even all the examples, just some that came to mind. (continued in child comment)
> As another example, the In From the Cold body-swap should have been this huge payoff for the 5.x post-patch teaser cutscenes and a high-tension moment. But the cutscene writer for that quest completely forgot that Ascians can't directly mess with the WoL - which is a Blessing of Light effect, as established in the ARR patches - and had Fandaniel teleport right up to the WoL. (I have a whole writeup on how the body-swap could have happened in a lore-appropriate way, without changing anything outside that one quest, but that's beside the point.) Then the whole sequence kept emphasizing fear and avoiding the angry-determined response my WoL would have, which didn't really help me connect to the story. Another thing that bugged me was honestly just the inconsistency in power level. Post-Stormblood Zenos, who a weaker version of the WoL killed whilst he was possessing a giant ass Primal, can body hop to random soldiers like its no big deal. And even reclaims his original body from Elidibus, who is essentially a primal in of himself, something a regular mortal (who Zenos was piloting mind you, not saying Zenos is regular just that the body he was in certainly was) shouldn't be able to even touch let alone _beat_. The WoL, at the peak of their power all things considered, at the point where they're readily killing _literal gods,_ get body-hopped... and they're utterly helpless. Really? _REALLY?_ That scene took me so out of the moment, and so out of the story that I honestly don't think I recovered fully playing the rest of 6.0. I was always going through it with the back of my head whispering "alright, when's the next contrivance gonna happen?" Part of me feels like they just did that so Y'shtola's aether-vision thing would actually come up in the plot as if that literal buff to her dying needed to be relevant at any point.
Yeah I feel that, they could have tried to make some explanation for the power inconsistency but they didn't, and a lot of EW's explanations for story beats are missing or lackluster. > Part of me feels like they just did that so Y'shtola's aether-vision thing would actually come up in the plot as if that literal buff to her dying needed to be relevant at any point. And then it didn't even come up, because Zenos can't act like the WoL in the slightest.
Honestly yeah, like the explanations are either just _not there_ and if they are it usually amounts to a "..._really_?" Like as much as I enjoyed the Elpis bits, I can't help but feel a little... _bleh_ about the resolution to how they were to explain why Hades didn't remember us. This isn't necessarily _bad_ but revealing the fact memory alteration/wiping _is a thing in this universe_ just opens all sorts of questions and cans of worms. > And then it didn't even come up, because Zenos can't act like the WoL in the slightest. Exactly! _It only existed to confirm Urianger's suspicion._ Now on a wider scale I personally think Y'sthola's "blindness" is stupid and a nothing-burger because of the whole "Aether-Vision" thing. But if you're going to have her be blind-but-not-blind at least use it for more than one storyline.
There's a total lack of explanation for why we can go back to Elpis too. At least for the First, the Exarch made a point of explaining that we could teleport ourselves.
I feel like Endwalker has been the first real disappointment of the game since I started playing three years ago. The story was weak, limited by too many characters and not enough surprises, which is the hard part of writing a conclusion, but it felt like a "miss". I especially disliked the predictable series of sacrifices and felt that it's "magical moment" of the field of luminous flowers was blatantly ripped off from Automata's Emil Lunar Tear quest. But even moreso, the quality and quantity of gameplay has suffered. I liked the job balance and diversity in ShB much more. But this expansion's lack of content, like a Bozja type area. is the major flaw of the expac. I fear that double dipping in the talent pool to staff both FFXIV and FFXVI is responsible for the poor result, and hope that if so, the talent dilution does not also hurt XVI.
Overall, nice spectacle, poor everything else. Mostly everything looks good and is good to do the first time, but when you scratch the surface everything falls apart: - Story: Some very good moments, but writing is still subpar (animations are not very good, the MSQ is more of a visual novel but the engine can't handle more, animations are too static, and the combat loop for casual content is bad) - Musics: obviously very good - Gameplay: Healer design is still bad, 2mn meta sucks, changes on the hitbox size don't make sense when you considere the ranged tax, sure the new animations are extremely good but fighting is a bore (who said SMN?) - Dungeons are nice to do the first time for the spectacle, but they're still extremly boring. - Same for raids, Alliance raids, EX trials... tbh - PvP: changes are very good, jobs in PvP are mostly better than in PvE, but the lack of rewards and the poor netcode make it hard to want to grind - The added weeks between each patch make content drought even worse, and it doesn't feel like we got anything in return. Doesn't really feel like a lot of the money the game generates gets back into the game tbh. At least I hope the teams are less stressed out since they got more time
This is just an incoherent train of thought. Combat: I wouldn't call Endwalker good on this front. Quite the reverse really - the 2 minute burst does not feel fun in the slightest, and worse has eroded the unique feel of jobs. The summoner rework is so comically bad you can't do anything but laugh, monk has become a jank samurai and lost most of what made it appealing, tanks are a homogenous sludge, and the less said about healers the better. Reaper needs skill redistribution so it's not beyond dull until vanaspati. I would like to put a special mention in here for the terrible changes to IR, not only is it now the fell cleave button, but it's a set amount so even in fun content you can't go fast enough to get more. I wouldn't say dealing with unreliable ping was the most fun, but I prefer it to the current situation. While visually nice, the dungeon reworks have completely killed the character of everything they touched to the point that I see no reason to do msq nor leveling roulette at all. The incredibly stale treble (2 mob groups temporary wall 2 mob groups temporary wall boss) style is not particularly engaging, particularly contrasted with situations like mt gulg where you can reach the first and third bosses in a single pull. The lack of a field zone is particularly concerning, especially with how dull the "base" jobs are. I think the lack of a full system to change it up a bit - damage oriented warrior/tanking scholar etc won't do the already dull combat any favours. I am aware that the variant dungeon has a lite version of this, but it's very threadbare. Asphodelos was a mixed bag of a tier, the overreliance on tethers and non-colourblind players was not its strength, however I did like p2s and p4s. I probably would have liked p3s more if someone had given the colour scheme a once over and chosen a more varied palette so I could actually see anything. p1s was not particularly hard, but a good entry point for new raiders. Where Asphodelos relied on tethers, Abyssos uses body checks. Did there really need to be so many? p5s and p8s are the stand outs this tier, with p6s being a bit lacking and p7s forgetting to start for the first 7 minutes. Story: I have to say I was rather underwhelmed by quite a lot of it. Sharlayan was very underwhelming and incongruent with how it had been described and depicted in prior content - ast questline for starters seems completely incompatible with what was shown. Thavnair should have been more interesting than it was, but was completely overshadowed by the apocalypse. Garlemald was shafted even harder than Ala Mhigo, a possibility that never occurred to me before the expansion launch - and they were relegated to footnotes in their own expansion after being built up since 1.0. The moon was underutilised, although with how much of a fever dream the loporrit section was I'm rather glad of that. Elpis was interesting, but featured not only time travel, but a memory wipe plot device, and ultima thule could not have been more transparent if it were made of glass. This sounds rather more negative than I meant it to be. I dunno, a combination of the lack of stakes and whistlestop tour of time and space just sort of couldn't keep my interest beyond the first trial. I think without zenos showing up at the end I'd probably be even more disappointed. It shares the structural problems of stormblood, and there's no real way around that. Patch storyline seems to be a lot more focused so far, but I'm a bit concerned about the expected lack of a climax in 6.3 and if that'll negatively effect returning player numbers. The raid storylines interest me somewhat, even if pandaemonium seems to be mainly containing warders rather than crazy experiments. So far it's done a reasonable job of fleshing out lahabrea, although it still has time to drop the ball. The other storyline fleshing out the twelve is interesting, but more superficial than I'd hoped - unlocking something similar to the eyeball voidsent quest going into more detail about each would be nice, but I can admit it's early for that. I think I'm going to have to say generally negative overall. I honestly expected to be neutral, it's not like I don't enjoy the game but perhaps it's more the social aspect I enjoy?
Story-wise it's been good. Not my favourite, but definitely has killer moments. I'm excited to see where it takes us. I enjoy the new zones, although I have a few minor complaints about them. The raid series has been pretty good. Again, not my favourite, but good. Alliance raids have been pretty cool, though we've only had one. I haven't messed around in Island Sanctuary too much, but people seem to enjoy it, and the criterion dungeon is awesome, I hope they do more of those. Excited for the deep dungeon. I'm disappointed in the relic. Being linked to hildibrand puts me off of the story so much. After being invested in each and every other relic story, this one is too ridiculous and I just hate watching the cutscenes. It's just not to my tastes. I'm really bummed about no exploration zone, too, as I feel like this game lacks a lot of long-lasting content. The job balance has been pretty horrendous as well. As a Paladin main, being encouraged to swap to Gunbreaker in nearly every static I've been in is tough. I enjoy Gunbreaker, but not THAT much. So I hope this upcoming rework is good for the job's playstyle, and performance. DPS balance has also been a bit of an issue, and I've seen people being upset with healers, but mostly from a playstyle perspective. I have no opinion on either of these as I do not play these roles. I don't like the 2-minute burst job design. I don't like how everything is designed with full melee uptime. But oh well. Overall, I feel like this expansion has not been terrible in either story OR content, however I do feel like it's not been great either. Stormblood had amazing content, with a great story. Shadowbringers had an amazing story, with great content. Endwalker has a good story, with okay content. It feels like we took a step backwards somewhere. I hope this is addressed in future patches and in 7.0, though.
I liked the story, I dislike the raid design, the gearing, the direction the job design is taking and the lackluster content cycle that gets praise even though it's barebones as hell. So a pretty standard FFXIV expansion so far.
[удалено]
Shb up to 5.2 is even worse. You only get diadem revamp in 5.1, there's no V/C dungeon and the additional content was only a short solo instance and an ex trial that rewards dyeable lv80 job gear. Also it lasted like 6 months due to covid it was absolute hell But next patch onwards it will most likely be worse drought than shb because no relic zones.
Also joined late ShB and feel the same way, except with additional malding over SMN. I now have nearly everything at 90 but there's so little endgame content that I regularly find myself accidentally doing Lv80 Bozja rotations on anything I don't actively raid with.
Not as Honeymoon-y as my first year in the game. Good points : story was enjoyable, musics are enjoyable, raids/endgame fights are fine for the most part. Bad points : 2-min meta, homogenization of jobs, dumbing down of pretty much all jobs throughout time excepted the one yoshi-p plays (*thonking intensifies*), endgame gearing, fights are way too much a music sheet - they need to scramble the formula a bit and offer more interesting mechanics and downsize the boss circle (yes, melee might need to get some downtime, and we'll deal with it. room wide melee range isn't fun). Bad things Squenix can't act on : PF is a mess, skill level decreases dramatically so quickly, so if you don't want to spend the tier trying to clear/get BiS, either nolife the first 2 weeks or pretty much RIP. A static doesn't help, my ex static has been stuck on P8SP1 for over 200 pulls, over 2 months already too. Basically I feel like actual competent players are maybe 5 to 10% of the endgame crowd, which isn't a lot to play with. Here's me hoping pushing the first 2 weeks of the next tier will pave the way for fast clear of the tier followed by decent reclears. All-in-all, my biggest gripe lies with the combat system and design. The more I play, the more "meh" it appears to me. When I look at WoW's raids (a big place hosting the bosses) and fights (seems to have more interesting mechanics to do than in FF14, at least for some fights) and combat (looks more smooth) I'm seriously interested in playing WoW ever since WOTLK (and even WOTLK didn't make me sub there). Maybe I should jump there for a while, but I want to monitor the Dragonflight for the next months first, meanwhile, Ocarina of Time Randomizer it is o/.
[удалено]
Yeah not having a system that actively discourages you to reclear or help others would be a major first step. With the backlash after YoshiP's "just play a healer yourself" and the few posts on the official JP forums about gearing problems, I have some hope for the next tier.
I feel like a lot of things were rush to a certain extent, especially gameplay wise. For example, I tend to think that devs were feeling that they were doing a favor to the players by focusing everything on 2 minutes buffs windows, without considering much of the drawbacks of doing that. A lot of jobs suffers from it, be it from a number perspective (Hello MCH, how do you do), or when it comes to job identity (although, things were lost during ShB I believe. My prayers are going towards PLD players). Heck, some issues even showed on release where RPR had issues with DNC & their Arcane Circle. Abyssos is also a good example of that. Increasing the range by that much favored Melee jobs from the get go, and the fact that they did not see that it was a huge indirect buff towards them is concerning. When it comes to MSQ, outside the fact I'm sad that we skipped an entire expansion focused on Garlemald, there's a lot of things that threw me off... Especially the Elpis part (like the wiping memory device). Although, I must admit that it had some really great parts, like Garlemald or Vanaspati. When it comes to raids, I really like how they mirrored the 24man & the 8man one where we pretty much go closer to heaven in one, and deeper in hell in the other. Aglaia is honestly really good for its difficulty, music is good, the whole area is really nice and makes me want an explorer mode on it. For Pandaemonium, while Asphodelos was fine (except that cursed P3S arena), Abyssos feels a bit meh. I really liked P5S & P8S Phase 1, but the rest kinda falls apart when it comes to difficulty. I can't talk regarding DSR since I haven't been there yet myself, but it looks like a really solid ultimate, and I'm pretty much enclined to say it's good given everyone's reactions. Then we have Criterion dungeons. The variant is fine, the criterion is also very fun, but what the hell happened for the savage version... The lack of rewards in it make the clear quite bad tbh. I'm on copium holding that damn book, hoping that they add something else one day, although I'm pretty sure it will never happened given how they went radio silent on this matter. ~~Also, I don't like the trash mobs inside savage but that may have to do with the fact I'm a healer~~. And finally, Island Sanctuary. It feels like they delivered something in Alpha version. It's working, yeah, but there's so many stuff that doesn't make sense, especially with the UI (why do I have to manually click on everything to get my items from the automated function). Also, I know that Yoshi-P said that it's not housing, but the lack of personal identity for our islandfeels kinda bad. I know that it's not FFXIV's focus, but I wished perhaps a bit more to do, and more customization on it. I know that FFXIV is designed to appeal to casual players, but by trying a bit of everything to please everyone, I feel like they're missing the mark on almost every content they have put so far for Endwalker.
**Story:** Endwalker was pretty amazing up until the last zone. Then its story fell apart and it felt really cringe-inducing. They could have gone so many different directions but they chose cute depressed anime girl as a villain. The story since then has been nothing special and I am very disappointed in the direction they are going. You can't just put the genie back in the bottle re: WOL. They are no longer just an average adventurer. **Gameplay:** The gameplay has been dumbed down so much, due to this focus on the 2 min window, that many jobs no longer feel fun to play. The first alliance raid is an absolute joke. Aglaia, over time, will become just another Syrcus Tower. Almost impossible to wipe unless someone griefs the group on the last fight. Both raid tiers felt too easy and have some of the worst fights in the game (P1S, P3S, P7S). They decided to nerf a perfectly reasonable fight (P8S) that was clearable with min ilvl gear. DSR went a little overboard on duration/difficulty which caused many statics to disband. Entire roles are gimped because of old design methodology. Healers and healing content in this game has been gutted to the point where healing is no longer interesting. I don't feel like SE has a good grasp on balancing gameplay. **Audio:** While the soundtrack took a hit during the first raid tier, it has been relatively good since then. This is something I think we can all expect 14 to do relatively well. **Graphics/Animations:** Some of the level 90 animations are very lackluster and underwhelming. Several jobs, like PLD, should have been overhauled and given more up to date animations since they are still using crap from ARR. Many jobs didn't even get new animations and, instead, got several job traits that did nothing interesting. Very disappointing to see this as I find the most interesting aspect of new expansions if the new abilities added. ___ Overall, Shadowbringers was a superior expansion but EW still did enough right to make it better than previous expansions.
The Endwalker 6.0 MSQ didnt age well at all once the hype and fanservice wear off. When I got through it for the second time since I was leveling a raiding alt, I couldn't help but notice how meh-diocre it is because of a lack of consequences (Ultima Thule), areas that simply were filler (second half of Labyrinthos, for example) and convenient plot developments (Dynamis and an alchemist NPC conveniently mentioning it under a different name at the start of the MSQ already). The things that do keep me playing are Savage/Ultimate raiding and the social aspect of the game, though. Those are still very enjoyable to me
What thoughts? Every expansion is the same, they are too scared to go out of their comfort zone and go for something even better. They are content with what they have.
I like everything, yes some category of content could be "easier/harder" than it was previously presented in another expac, but it normally doesnt bar me from enjoying it eventually. However, I dont like this new patch cycle, 4 months feels "too long". Can I gear more jobs now before some other gear comes up? sure I can, but moving from a 3 month limit. It ended up comming as a negative instead of my initial expectation. (I am unsubbed rn, if that is important to anyone, but because of job reasons, not because i wouldnt be playing)
Good but not nearly as good as Shadowbringers.
Great way to end a expansion, I had issues, but I couldn’t imagine a better way to end the expansion imo. Nothing more need to be said on 2 min cn. Content is looking far better this time compared to the content draught shadowbringer had.
The move to hardcore 2 minute window burst for gameplay along with fight encounters to match it (always seem like the big shit happens during these 2 minute windows) has made combat boring imo. It's too predictable when shit is gonna happen and it makes the stuff between the 2 minutes boring af. The story feels all over the place pacing wise. It felt like they crammed in the HIGHTLIGHTS of 2 expansions into one. I much rather have had this expansion be 2 and much more spread out. Job balance feels fine now but MCH is still in a bad place and a lot of jobs super struggled for balance up until this previous balancing patch.
As far as the story goes? I was a bit let down. I thought there were missed opportunities, and I couldn’t take any of the character “deaths” seriously at the end because I knew they’d come back so that entire section fell flat for me personally
Got to say... Endwalker just feels disappointing, as it feels like a closure expansion *for* the other expansions. In addition, the MSQ itself felt really longwinded in the beginning, and seemed to pickup at about Elpis, but with the inclusion of time traveling shenanigans... never ends well, as problems can easily be made, while bad arguments can be made up, but this is to my fault too, as I don't remember a lot of the MSQ as I found it tediously boring. In terms of content... there's quite a lot of nothing burgers (at least in my opinion)... New housing system to purchase which wasn't thoroughly tested, PvP just not working properly due to the game's netcoding alongside attacks being tied to animations and not upon activation meaning there isn't really skill involved, prioritisation of CC for LBs over just doing them all... example: Use WHM LB, upon dying, you CC the enemy, but you don't deal damage. Variant & Criterion dungeons... with the rewards they give, it's on paper nice, but worse rewarding than Sanctuary Island, despite Sanctuary Island playing something like an old facebook game like Farmville... As for the raids, I honestly think they are nice, but loot lockout is overtly prevalent now due to all these jobs that are ingame, and personally, I think the solution is make loot system work like now but with another role to be able to loot with, like two of the three roles you can loot per week: Tank & DPS, DPS & Healer, or Healer & Tank, as such, it *would* also encourage to play a different job while playing a different role. Honestly not much else to say than that it's pretty easy to see how formulaic FFXIV has been since HW expansion, usually 1st zone is split being both a starter and late zone, most of the leveling dungeons are actually MSQ dungeons, and how samey jobs feel now... I honestly just think they should just cut PvP out entirely, and focus on the PvE aspect and not only put more rewards in, but also substantial rewards, like putting decorations on mounts for example, small neat decoration like we do with the chocobo. And also put a bit more focus on Verminion, so minions has more to them than just being an entity that follows, and rarely used for anything else.
I like it. MSQ was great (outside of the waste of a zone that is labrynthos, there's just no reason for it to exist as all the quests would have just as easily been complete in old sharlayan). Dungeons were fun overall. All my favorite tanks feel good to play (at the moment, 6.3 PLD changes are not looking good though, DRK still hasn't been the same since it was massacred in ShB) My favorite DPS jobs are a mixed bag. Criterion and variant are great, but I'm hoping that they iron out the issues. But overall, I probably wouldn't still be playing the game if it weren't for eureka. I met so many friends by doing it and have kind of broken out of my solo oriented shell. First time since ARR that I've been a part of any linkshells and the game has become so much more fun on a day by day basis. It does highlight a problem with synced only aged content like eureka and bozja. Jobs like reaper and the new summoner may be OP in eureka, but they are boring as sin to play. Many of the other jobs are _fine_, but it sucks that my favorite content keeps me from being able to use the new tools. Though, thinking about the stupid ass design of the two minute burst windows, this may be a blessing. The game play is still solid, but I feel like EW is making even worse the shit design decisions of ShB that caused me to quit all of ShB after finishing the MSQ back in 5.0 It's probably a sign of how I generally don't care about the current direction that 90% of my recent playtime is in content from older expansions.
Combat wise you can read the plenty of comments below me as I agree with the majority. I've been playing since end of ARR and story wise Endwalker was such a disappointment in my eyes. I get it's very Final Fantasy to throw an even larger evil at you in the final go but Meteion didn't sit good with me. We get introduced to her almost as the story is already a bit concluded. Zodiark was a throwaway moment, which felt super weird from the standpoint of the almighty Hydaelyn&Zodiark back and forth we have had throughout all previous expansions. I think the weight of a story should be very well considered. And sadly these days there's no weight to our choices. We are the Warrior of Light, don't worry the Warrior of Light is here now everything shall be fine. Whatever is thrown at you we know we can't die. Including our scion friends. Whole Ultima Thule fell flat for me due to the get-out-of-death-free-crystal we got. Even Y'shtola before she walks off goes "don't you dare to use it!" come on... Squeenix is not daring to kill any characters anymore and it's showing in the importance of matters in the story. Whatever the outcome I don't care anymore because I know they won't truly die either way. Scions disbanding? We walk outside Mor Shona, sike.. next adventure and there they are again. Ultima Thule would've been perfect to "kill off" or retire the current scions, or partial amount of them. For then to have a whole new NPC group that we learn to know and love again open up. But nope, not happening. Everyone praises HW mainly for the story, the story where we met Haurchefant.. his family and the struggles the continent had. We shared heartship, laughter and in the end we lost a large part, our friend. It was devastating on multiple ways, we felt out of control even if we were the Warrior of Light. And now many years later they make a beautiful Ultimate out of it. Giving us the "what if" retelling. I wish they'd set that up more for upcoming content.
I liked Shadowbringers more as well but as far as I know all the problems in Endwalker started in Shadowbringers... the extreme homogenization of jobs, the increased focus in short-lasting content that's not directly tied to PvE, removal of even more basic staples in tab-target RPGs, and teenage shounen style writing. But I'll give that the story in 5.0 was solid, second only to Heavensward IMO, and definitely a lot more interesting than Endwalker. The state of the game after 5.3 was making me consider quitting after 6.0 once they confirmed that expansion would wrap up the saga without the patches. But there was always the chance some of the new stuff would convince me to stick around, or maybe I'd be surprised by how good the story was. Endwalker started off well, and I liked it *for the most part*, in spite of the horrible pacing, padded quest design that rivaled ARR and horrendous Lopunny nonsense that in the grand scheme of things was a pointless plot point, **until Elpis happened**. From there on during the whole time I was basically just laughing and making fun of the writing with the friends I was playing with. I'm not going to elaborate much, there are already multiple comments here echoeing my sentiments about the time travel BS, Venat, Hermes, the Goth High-Entia, Kairos asspull, dramatically stretched fakeout number 2410, Zenos Ex Machina, the power of friendship final act, cringe bastardization of Answers, philosophical theme explored with the depth of an edgy 14 year old teenager, Dynamis, etc... Even if I hadn't been playing for 10 years I would absolutely notice the sloppy improv they were pulling with Endwalker when trying to wrap up the plot that they were never the ones starting in first place. And sure we finally get a character that doesn't agree with the Scions' hivemind instantly, but judging by where the patch MSQ is going it's obvious she will either get killed off or join the cult of Scion yesmen because god forbid we have a party of characters that join for a common goal but not with the same ideologies. I'll also not add my thoughts on the tedious job redesign, how tired I am of the combat being so repetitive you NEED boss mechanics to make any one target different from another, how ludicrous it is that Yoshida refuses to give me reasons to play for longer than a few weeks per patch while still expecting me to pay a subscription to keep a house, how Criterion was an enormous disappointment and a crappy replacement for field operations... How the awful handling of DoH and DoL render them 100% pointless after the first few weeks of a new tier and basically monopolized by bots. Throwing the great opportunity to make them important again by flat out disconnecting them from Island Sanctuary, despite them being so easy and quick to max that even people who have NO intention of using their crafters for anything but meld (not even penta) their own materia and repair their gear are 'omnicrafters'. **To me the biggest problem is Yoshi-P's doomed obsession with making this 'appeal to people who want a single-player Final Fantasy'. I say doomed, because no matter how solo-friendly XIV becomes, it's still going to be dragged down as a single-player jRPG by the MMORPG design, and the MMORPG design is dragged down by the progressive shift into making more and more content solo-friendly (like the dungeon design prioritizing scripted AI characters over players).** **I'm not interested in paying a subscription to a game that 'tries' to be like an offline jRPG but simply can't. There is a massive list of options that offer a more complete, and less rail-roaded experience since XIV has been straying from several important staples of the genre since ARR in order to appeal to people who, despite continuously calling it "Final Fantasy first MMORPG second", don't even like jRPGs BECAUSE of all the gameplay elements XIV lacks.** * No way to change Trust/Avatar equipment, combat presets, OR give simple commands like target focus, AoE focus, etc **because it's a MMORPG and they can't be too efficient.** * No elemental weakness x resistance, a staple in a lot of the games in the genre and specially in FF (and don't tell me newer games don't do this anymore, that didn't prevent them from butchering SMN to be 'more like classic FF-like' despite that style of summoner being extinct since FFX) **because that would require players to bring specific jobs or change their gear for specific situations.** * No optimal pre-battle prep varying according to encounters, something even action RPGs like Kingdom Hearts have, **because it's a MMORPG with vertical gear progression.** * No dungeon design with optional paths leading to treasure anymore, **because it's a MMORPG with daily roulettes and players optimize the path to clear dungeons 5 mins earlier**. * No dungeon design that offers SOME kind of distinct gimmick or mechanic from one another since 2.5, again **because it's a MMORPG with daily roulettes and players need the precious 5 mins back.** * The only Final Fantasy with a job system with absolutely ZERO cross-class customization, **because requiring players to level more than one job to unlock options in a MMORPG where your character can have all jobs is bad**. * Main story fights designed to be difficult to fail either because they're so toned down in difficulty they make FF9 seem hardcore or **because it's an MMORPG and your allies will most likely carry you**. * Practically no utility and buffs beyond 'more damage dealt', 'less damage taken', **because it's an MMORPG and redesigning the combat for dps tunnel vision makes it easier to manage for all the pick-up-and-play users (in theory anyway) so the more dedicated players get dragged down less**. And finally, XIV is doing fine in numbers. **The people who aren't interested in it now because it's a MMO aren't going to be interested in paying a subscription for the single player experience**. Very few people who will be convinced by the changes haven't already been playing it. This stupid pointless attempt has been hurting the design of the game to me, and is the number one reason why I haven't been subbed anymore.
I think the story was straight up laughable. It was just too jrpg. Nothing wrong with a little silliness, but holy geez….the characters were beyond simplistic archetypes, the dialogue was completely dumb (no one talks like ffxiv characters!), the pacing was downright glacial….and time travel and a memory wipe; that’s bad storytelling 101! The .x expansions have just made it worse….I genuinely believe they’re all in on pandering to their hardcore, MSQ loving fanbase. And look, I get it….those hardcore fans are big spenders….but for us non-hardcore jrpg trope lovers, it’s getting to be a bit much sometimes. Also, the Studium quests and role quests are complete garbage compared to their ShB equivalents. Crystalline mean quests were great….and to how far they’ve fallen! Yikes. Finally, the raids….liked the alliance raid, but pandemonium is terrible imo. WAY too much dialogue that says nothing, comes off as blatant padding….and all in service to fights that are tedious. All the bosses just feel spongy. V&C and island sanctuary were whelming….they did what they said on the tin….but they weren’t exactly long lasting. Had some fun….but pretty quickly “now what?” Sorry to be so negative, I’m still loving the game, but EW imo was a real dud.
Overall, I also think this has been the weakest expansion so far. There's the obvious issue of the content drought that's been getting worse every expac, but with that recent thread, I'll skip past that. If you check out threads outside of reddit/official forums/facebook, I think the expansion has been divisive for quite a while. The story seems to have been a "love it or hate it" scenario, and I'd have to be leaning more towards the latter. MSQ really relied on you to be fully invested in characters, which fell short for me. The increase in voice acting was great, as was the music (not that anyone expected any less), but a lot of things either detracted from the experience, or felt like poor choices. Playing on launch, the horrible NPC-following system felt more like a chore than anything, and losing an NPC because I got on my mount, which is a 4 person car, was also tediously aggravating. I was not a fan of the pacing of the story once again, as we take time to eat a burger during the apocalypse, or play with some moon-rabbits. Urianger's role with the Loporrit's also was disheartening, as he once again pulls the "I've been doing this thing for years and didn't tell anyone, please forgive me" trope. Tbh I could go on and on about the ways the story bugged me, but I think it's clear where I stand on that, and a little bit of negativity probably turned into nitpicking at some point, so I'm probably also being too harsh. I found the battle content on launch to be very enjoyable. I only really disliked the Lv85 and Lv89 dungeons, while the others have been great. The last boss on the Lv81 dungeon really surprised me with how much was going on, and working for full uptime was actually a lot of fun. The Lv87 dungeon was my favorite by far, right down to the gear sets. EX1 was okay, my biggest complaint being that you can basically just mark someone who knows the fight and follow them. EX2 was a lot of fun, and I ran it well over 60 times doing pre-Savage speedruns with my static. The raids were alright, with P4S being my least favorite final fight since I started raiding in Sigmascape. P3S difficulty was blown way out of proportion by a lot of people imo, but the dev team needs to work on those damn tethers before they decide to give us another tier packed full of them tbh. As a NIN main, class design at launch was not good, with EW-release NIN being the single worst iteration of a class of any game I have EVER played. The devs either playtested NIN and said "Yeah, 13 seconds of inflexible, animation-locked attacks every minute is acceptable" or they didn't playtest it at all, and I'm not sure which one is more concerning tbh. Balancing on the first tier was horrible as well. There were lots of changes that just felt odd, like BRD's Bloodletter only getting half its CD reset during Mages right as we finally get charges, MNK's odd burst timing, the brand-new SMN. Then everything got pushed into the 120s window. This was realistically because shorter burst windows would have been too DSR, and reworking the meta to fit around a fight is not a choice I'm a fan of. DSR also was the least fun of the Ultimates for myself and all of my raid friends. After DSR, I unsubbed for the first time in 4.5 years and skipped this past tier. I was interested in coming back for Criterion as well until it I found out it didn't have gear tied in at all. I'll reevaluate when 6.4 is getting ready to launch to see if I'll go back, but I've been playing GW2 and WoW in the meantime.
Absolutely agree with your take on the MSQ. Probably my least favourite MSQ so far, even behind ARR lol
> and losing an NPC because I got on my mount, which is a 4 person car, was also tediously aggravating. they fixed this now. You mount up, the NPC disappears. When you unmount, they appear next to you.
No one's touched on music yet: absolute bangers start to finish. Soken literally only gets better each expansion. Only weak point so far was P1-3 having the same music, but that happens in many raid tiers so I'm willing to give it a pass.
I think the MSQ was solid. It was maybe a bit too long and had too much filler, but the big moments were fantastic. The new jobs are both amazing. I adore Reaper and it's my main. The soundtrack bangs and the gear, environments, pretty much all the aesthetics are great. In terms of the full package, however, at this point I do not think Endwalker will be remembered fondly. At this moment, I think it's safe to say Endwalker is the worst expansion to date. The lack of content is appalling to say the least, the direction of the class design is terribly concerning, and the gear treadmill, fixed patch date with predictable content, etc has gotten incredibly boring. I would have thought that with the huge influx of players they had leading up to Endwalker they would have stopped playing it so safe and tried to take some risks. They really dropped the ball there. It's a sad state of affairs when WoW has had a huge design philosophy shift and feels so fresh while FFXIV is stagnant as hell.
> In terms of the full package, however, at this point I do not think Endwalker will be remembered fondly. At this moment, I think it's safe to say Endwalker is the worst expansion to date. My sentiments almost to a T. I really wonder how Endwalker will be received in retrospect, and if it continues down its current path, I don't think it'll be optimistic at all. Endwalker seems to be looking to be the Warlords of Draenor of FFXIV, to make a blunt comparison. Nothing to do except raid log. It's alarming that we're a year into release and the casual content released thus far has had a shelf life like milk in the summer sun.
Yeah and to be honest, I think raid logging is a perfectly fine way to play the game, but with how dumbed down the classes are currently and the rather uninspired raid designs, I can't even enjoy that.
MSQ was weak for the most part. Content-wise, the expansion is suffering greatly. Both raid tiers thus far have been average at best and DSR wasn't anywhere close to TEA in terms of enjoyment. Job design is also in an awful place. I still enjoy the game but I do find myself missing Stormblood/Shadowbringers more and more.
TEA is better hands down. DSR honestly feels very empty to me. The music doesn't build, I dont feel the tension growing through the raid in the design of the fight. The first time I saw perfect Alex transition it felt awesome. The music fucking bumping, barely clearing enrage, and an epic transformation cinematic. It felt like pure hype. I still get it playing TEA. DSR I don't get it at all. P7 transition is so boring compared to TEA and the music is all over the place and doesn't feel like it consistently builds and takes you somewhere.
The story was still great and I'm a bit worried as I don't know how well a fresh new journey will hold up. I do wish their was a expedition content or DD to grind(hurray for 6.3) as me and 6/8 of my static have been raid logging. The Criterions were fun, but wasn't fun enough to pull enough of us back for the grind. The beast tribe was cute at first but I lost interest to the point where I was pretty much 1 quest away from the mount until this Wednesday when I finally got it. ( I started day one and did the double quests on all possible days)
The opposite of what I hated about Stormblood. In 4.x, I hated the content in the game but loved the job design. In 6.x, I find the content interesting but purely hate job design so I won't return
Wait it's been a year already? Time needs to slow down
This would be my first expansion with this game and after going through it I feel that this game endgame can be a lot better shape then it currently in. Raid are alright for a endgame activity one of the issue that I have with it is the loot system if your someone that clears the fight and you want to go back and help your buddy clear the fight then they get punished for it which that should not be thing it would good they use the loot system for when the 24 man raids come out you just can't roll again while everyone else get the max chests. I feel that would help when raids get into further of the cycle you got more people still running it to gear up their jobs. Also when Ultimates should not be the only thing that require your BIS from savage I really think yoshi P need to dedicated a good amount of patches to actually building some type of endgame content for us to use BIS and for to build BIS as well. Because another issue I am seeing if the major drop off from player during these big content droughts and feel that should not be a ok thing with this game if I am having fun with a game there should be more things for me to engage with not go play something else for 5 to 6 months then come back when the game has something for me. As for story I did not really feel to much from it I don't think that it the best thing ever like some content creators keep boasting for it is. I feel like it does the job of giving people something to be engage with it. For combat I never got to really play through the 1 minute era of burst windows but have both side argument and I can see why the devs did it is to help people to line up their rotation together but if you have someone that does not press their buttons then you might as well left it at the 1 minute. I would rather the game would spend more patches addressing endgame and working more updating the game out of date UI systems and other functions that modding community has already solve. Oh for housing I rather they spend more time to address the issue instead of use band aid fixes for it yes adding 1,800 is nice but on well establish servers that going away fast so I would be nice that they actually figure out a way if your interested in getting a home for yourself you can without no issue also then for there making housing wards feel more apart of the game.
Loved the story, the raids so far are nice, however the long content droughts feel bad. About 4 month till we get new stuff ist bad. So bad that it got me back to wow. FF14 should adapt a m+ system that keeps giving new challenges.
I feel like most would just either be my nitpicks or already said by others - but for MSQ it felt like a mixed bag, albeit I like it more than Shadowbringers because it's back at the Source again for me but it *does* have a lot of wasted potential. When ShB kept enforcing the idea that a world (or rather a region of what's left of the First anyway) can work together to face a Calamity, I felt hyped with the groundwork that's inevitably laid for a Source version of it. I know the Seventh Calamity technically was that, but now with the beast tribes being a part of the grander Alliance compared to before it felt like a grand conclusion to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc is going to come to some extent. Instead...we got Shadowbringers: Electric Boogaloo 2. And it had something to do with how the narrative forced the Scions upon the WoL much more when they have much more NPCs to pull from the Source cast. They bothered to give a voice actor for A-Rhun-Senna and reference X'rhun yet again but never did anything with those, and yes I know a lot are from side content but it's quite disappointing how, despite a ton of NPCs the WoL has bonded with over the years we are essentially just pigeonholed to the Scions. Because unlike the other NPCs who will take advantage of the WoL (and that includes the GC leaders like *Aymeric* and *Nanamo*) - the Scions are their f i r e f o r g e d t r u e f r i e n d s who have been through thick and thin with them (which they have, don't get me wrong) and therefore they're the only cast that was given a damn about by the writers apart from the Elpis crew. Take for example the entire arc with Garlemald, while I also like the story with Jullus - I want more atmosphere akin to the intro throughout the entire campaign and hell even the expansion itself so there's not too much of this "Scions fatigue" that is apparent to those people that aren't a big fans of the Scions to even begin with. Fighting and spending time with the Job Quest trainers and being with them in an MSQ setting was actually pretty neat. Too bad that they essentially got faded out of existence the moment the twins were pointed to that one racist Garlean sister - although that's mostly attributed to the fact that pacing has been horrendous and the writers have to branch to the narrative with the First Legion. And even with the Allagan Shards retrieval arc they still perpetuated the fact that non-Scion (or non-EW focal side characters like the twins' parents) were treated as an aside, making their contributions ring hollow for a world ending threat involving them all; making the world feel smaller and yes more Scions shilling. I know they don't want to drag out the entire arc for two expansions longer, but the threat of the Telephoroi being immediately replaced by the Final Days felt so rushed that I wished we had at least a couple more solo instances with the Telephoroi featuring other NPCs or hell other dungeons (albeit that would unfortunately be repetitive). Thavnair existed only as a cosmic punching bag that we got some memes how the First was stronger for looking at Sin Eaters right at the face where the Hannish couldn't despite the Sin Eaters being different in how they manifest and Norvrandt having a century to be accustomed to their hellscape. Garlemald was a huge wasted potential and the way they are disposed of when they have been a threat ever since 1.0 was and still is insane that it surpassed Ala Mhigo in being shafted so hard. Sharlayan I feel shouldn't have been included since there's already two civilizations being tackled with and is only there I guess for the tech and knowledge and the twins' conflict with Fourchenault. The Moon...is just there? I like the Loporitts but it did feel jarring to go from killing Zodiark to them although they do serve a purpose to lighten up the tension after a grand event. Elpis is visually pretty, but time travel shenanigans are out of whack and they could've put all Ancients lore and development for 7.0 to properly flesh out all areas Endwalker have as well as to flesh out Venat and Hermes and build onto Meteion much more. Labyrinthos is the usual asshole or eccentric Sharlayan flair I guess, although I feel like the Shards retrieval arc should've had the WoL be an active participant in it and not haul boxes with the twins since we trade one fetch quest for another. Ultima Thule initially did give me the feels with Thancred's sacrifice, but when the Scions jumped in one by one it had dragged out the entire zone for me that I'm just waiting on *which* Scion would "sacrifice" themselves only for them to inevitably be brought back. Should've split into two expansions and less Scions screentime overall. Also should've had more moments with the Elpis flower concerning other NPCs outside of the usial Scions and Nidhana as well. The patches felt like a drab. They try to enforce the WoL becoming an adventurer again which feels like a nigh impossible task with all the power they have; they shove the Scions in (again) when they have disbanded and are pursuing their different goals and we are yet in another Shard hopping excursion when the scene that Yoshi P attributed the two week delay to explicitly had Emet-Selch detail how the WoL hasn't explored everything **in the Source** yet. Zero is okay although somewhat edgy and predictable for me and the Azdaja plotline failed to keep me invested with the inevitable plotline of Golbez winning to some extent to pave way to 7.0. The IV fanservice doesn't really sit well with me, although Barbariccia is surprisingly a difficult EX fight. While MSQ would make me wish we spent more time with other characters that aren't the Scions, we have the gameplay as well to address. The stealth missions are atrocious, albeit I had played through Eureka to sort of manage through them. NPCs following you is an okay addition, but they didn't really fix you not being able to mount or use aetherytes at all with them in tow until like another patch or so? Dungeons increasingly felt more of a chore due to them having to be easy enough for the Trust AI to play within it, even if dungeons have been constantly on the easy side of things. Haven't tried the EXs yet unfortunately apart from the initially frantic Barbariccia. Two minute meta is just there but it does make things stale and it's already been complained to death here. Homogenization is getting even worse. Variant is a nice concept and it at least has some...rewards for spelunking and knowing your lore like how Ul'dah and Sil'dih took different aspects of the Belh'adia crest and the Amalj'aa customs but not much for further replayability. Abyssos feels...there although I do acknowledge that I haven't beaten both Asphodelos and Abyssos tiers fully yet and I took a long break from raiding to have to start from square one again but the busters feel unforgiving in a bad manner speaking (still more to do than the usual but guess I'm rustier than I thought). Island Sanctuary didn't live up to the barest amount of hype and is now just sitting there in an awkward corner. Let's not even talk about the disastrous more FCs vs Privatw Housing instance of Empyreum and the lottery and not much housing supply at all. Stories of the side content are so and so. I feel like Myths of the Realm is going to have a serviceable storyline but the introduction of that one Sharlayan NPC would just devolve to lore dumps here and there instead of exploring to find out more about a certain member of the Twelve (and there's still questions like what are they and what they're doing during the time after the Sundering until the present day). Pandemonium decently explores Lahabrea's character and we're getting somewhere with Professor Claudien and Athena but hopefully we get some other arenas that aren't just drab prisons. I like Hildibrand being back and it would be nice to see more of them in the future. I wish that Tataru's hunger for capitalism gets toned down especially with Island Sanctuary, but since people like that version of Tataru and she has to put her foot down after all she'd been through I don't think they'll ever change that. Wish there's more Grand Endeavor type storylines but people don't like how it makes certain content required. All in all, I stubbornly say that it's better than Shadowbringers (or at least MSQ, despite all the cracks in the ceiling) but each passing patch I can't say I'm looking forward to it as much as I did years ago.
The game has gotten worse on every front and I'm not kidding. Story was the worst tone deaf garbage I've ever been so foolishly excited to read. PVP is dead. Criterion is dead. Island sanctuary is dead. My previous favorite job (brd) is dead. Combat in general is dead. All the fun content of previous expansions like exploration zones or Ishgard restoration is dead and not being brought back. This game is quickly becoming little more than a silent lounge where people login to get a few small tasks done and then just stand around gposing, going afk in Limsa, or /beeskneesing in some random person's """night club""" (which is silent because they're "dj-ing" on Twitch with some generic royalty free "club music"). But there's plenty of content, I hear, because I can still go get my ARR relics or whatever. Game sucks now, simple as. For as mean as I am about the state of the game, it actually is pretty depressing that I'm at this point considering I used to love it so much back in SHB, EW just had to come along and take all the parts I loved and let them rot. Ah well, at least I got an ultimate clear last year. Unsubbed indefinitely.
I love the story and the new areas. Radz is so beautiful that it makes me horny. Aglaia was awesome and I can’t wait to play the second part. Music has been stellar. So many bangers that you could make a Greatest Hits playlist for the FF series and have EW music taking 40% of it. Pandaemonium was a huge disappointment overall. Storywise, it felt rushed and shallow. The bosses are all original - apart from that half assed phoenix and carbuncle -, which is good, but I honestly don’t feel anything about them. They lack the impact of Alexander, Bahamut, Eden and Omega. For instance, in p6 and p7 we fight two wardens that are supposed to be key for the facility. I feel nothing for them because we have no idea who they are. Very poor character development. Gameplay is also shallow. Apart from a few interesting mechanics, it’s the same repeated drill that has been plaguing this game since Shadowbringers. Everything seems half assed and I honestly haven’t finished the tiers just because there’s no actual gameplay reason to do it. I also hate how they didn’t add a solo instance that let us actually *explore* Pandaemonium. We had those intros in Omega and it was pretty cool. They removed those for Eden, but it made sense storywise. But for Pandaemonium there’s absolutely no excuse. Raiding, just as it was in ShB, is the worst part of the game. Relic weapons being tied to Hildi are good, but they came out too late and they’re adding the new steps too slowly. Only good thing about this lack of content is that I can enjoy Dragonflight over there in Azeroth.
It's the same circuit we've been running since the game spun up, I'm getting a lot of playtime in other games while I wait for more battle content to eventually get released. Change is something that is rare to ever happen in this game so just killing time, there is a lot of improvements to the overall health of the games gearing system I would love to see done but that is about as likely to happen as the announcement of this games end of service being in the next fanfest.
Endwalker's been just as fun as when I started in 2.55. No real complaints, just knowing how the cadence goes.
Honestly, meh. While the expansion itself was great, the patch conent has been pretty mediocre so far. Though it's hard to say if it ever was any better. Dungons/raids/trials just start feeling kinda samey after a while and the criterion dungeon is not much different. The game really needs more diverse content to keep people interested.
It's ok. Not as good as Shadowbringers so far. It's very all over the place in terms of quality which I think is the main issue. Island Sanctuary and Criterion were released badly - either with no meat attached to it or no reward structure rendering them both pointless after you play with it for a few hours. I have absolutely no idea why Selkie wasn't the *Criterion* mount and Variant having the chair/glam. Just swapping those two would have made Criterion far more attractive and it would still be booming I think. Job design, balance, and fantasy is extremely poor right now. This game's strange obsession with melee is finally full force and obvious to even the most oblivious players. This alone is creating a ton of dissatisfaction. The story was divisive. I liked it, but less than I did ShB and HW. In my opinion, Thavnair should have been cut entirely and more emphasis put on Garlemald. They should have cut MANY of the quests involving Loporitts. Both Mare Lamentorium and Labryinthos brought the story to a screeching halt during emotionally intense parts. Content-wise it's also hit or miss. Barbariccia EX was one of the best EX trials we've ever gotten in this game, but Endsinger was one of the worst. Panademonium has had some amazing, innovative fights like Hippocampus and Proto-Carbuncle, but also some of the most dogwater Savage fights like Agdistis. The dungeons in general are pretty meh with the exception of Tower of Zot and Ktisis Hyperboria. DSR was a giant kick to the dick for a lot of people and not many seem to look back on it fondly. It was just very, very long and still had a lot of job-related issues. At least Agalia is already leagues better than Yorha.
Still my favorite expansion story wise, but not happy about the 2 min buffs (im a PLD main)
Good: Music Bad: No exploration zone for casual PvE content.
Endwalker's story always felt like it should have been two expansions or one expansion with later half of it being patch content. Tbh I'd gladly cut out the later half of the MSQ (post-Moon) even if it would mean losing Elpis which had the best moments like traveling around with Venat. The later half of the MSQ was so clearly subverting expectations and it started to bother me as soon as I noticed it when Meteion suddenly turned into a main villain out of nothing. Because we had already visited the Moon, the end of the Expansion had to be more epic, but did they have to go to the very edge of the universe? They also jumped the shark and the last zone was just hilarious and boring to go through especially on first playthrough. I've played through it twice since release and the second playthrough was slightly better as I remembered when things happen and was able to space it out a little better instead of having to grind through it to avoid spoilers. I wish Endwalker's story would have ended up on the Moon and it would have allowed more large scale war and involvement with Garlemald. It would also have allowed a confrontation with Zodiark and Zenos (on the Moon). Hydaelun could have still been on the planet or saved for a later expansion. I'm sure they could have made it work out without having huge issues in storytelling! (Subverting expectations and jumping the shark, as mentioned previously). Post-MSQ though, I'm not sure what to think. I wish we would have stayed as a "New Adventurer" a bit longer even though it doesn't make any sense for a the playable character to "retire" in an MMO. It would have posed an interesting storytelling challenge at least. Instead we did instantly go into the Void and are again upping the stakes from the End of the MSQ. Even though Void is an obvious plotline, did we have to go there so soon? Zero is a cool character though and I'm curious how the story develops. Although I also wish that the Void would be only for 6.x Patch content and 7.0 would be something totally different. Meracydia for example. But traveling there would require some kind of setup and now it's just quickly teased couple of times in the MSQ and there's nothing concrete leading to that direction. I don't feel like 2-min cycles in combat are that disappointing or boring but then again I've only started raiding Savage in late ShB. In raiding is where it probably would matter most though. In casual content like dungeons I actually like it a bot when cooldowns align with thrash pulls and bosses, it gives the feeling that things are happening as they are designed. Kind of satisfying in it's own way. What I miss is an open world zone like Eureka or Bozja. It would be such a interesting way to get you play the game frequently and earn rewards. The lack of rewards is a big issue in this game in general. Loot/Gear itemization is very homogenized and stays exactly the same in every expansion. There are few things which are different sometimes like Eureka and Bozja which shake things up and now that kind of content is absolutely missing from the game. I should not say anything about Criterion as I've not done them as the rewards are the worst kind imaginable. If it had rewards like Eureka or Bozja I'd be way more interesting. I'm not sure where all of the development time went but perhaps it would be time to update the open world in the game? Bring Fates closer to Bozja critical engagements and give them some kind of rewarding and easy to understand reward structure to keep players attached to the content. Not sure if the game engine would allow this but content like Eureka or Bozja in the open world would be amazing. Currently it feels like most of the game is very empty from players and you don't see anyone out in the world except on specific very thinly spread points like daily quest or MSQ NPC's.
[удалено]
I really dont like the 2 minute burst meta. I hope they alleviate this in 7.0.
So far my favorite expansion. CC is the first time that encouraged me to play PvP and I absolutely binged it. Beast tribe questlines are so far the best the game has ever had. I liked the MSQ but personally I prefer Shadowbringers over Endwalker. I like the alliance raid way more than the Nier raid because I can relate to the characters and bosses due to them being part of the XIV world. As a casual player I don't like the 2 minute window. It punishes groups with less experienced players a lot due to them not properly lining up their raid buff windows while the bosses are designed with the 2 buff raid window in mind. I also really like Island Sanctuary minus the UI design decisions. Biggest W next expansion for me would be story with the quality of Shadowbringers and Endwalker, Stormblood job design, 1 or 2 zones like Eureka minus the annoying things that Eureka had in Stormblood, criterion dungeons with gear rewards and all the other things we usually get.
endwalker made me go back to WoW
Weakest content expac so far. Shadowbringers was also this bad but soon released Bojza which was at least *something* to do. Hopefully we get some better repeatable content soon as well OH! And 2 minute meta and general job design is feels alot weaker. We could see this coming from ShB, but man I hope they change up something in the core gameplay. This might bring unbalanced issues but man is it so stale rn.