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A community for fans of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which has a free trial that includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn, the award-winning Heavensward and Stormblood expansion up to level 70 with no restrictions on playtime. FFXIV's newest expansion, Dawntrail, is out now.

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Is Endwalker really the worst expansion this game has ever had? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by lorty@lemmy.ml to c/finalfantasyxiv@lemmy.world

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I'm late to this discussion, but I've been watching a few videos about this from content creators and I find this argument impossible to defend.

Taking ARR out (it's not really an expansion), you can't actually think EW is worse than HW. HW had much worse and less content and while the story, including the patches, was better, that era didn't have what people are complaining about now. Maybe less job homogenization, but also absolute dumpster tier jobs that people didn't play.

So yeah, things are a bit rough (specially now that a lot of new players are caught up), but the worst one? I can't agree with that.

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[–] Stovetop@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Story-wise, I think it's fantastic.

Content-wise, I can understand the argument. To put it in perspective, think of what we used to have compared to what we have now.

In Stormblood, we had multiple new dungeons coming out per patch. Today it's just one per. I will concede, though, that we have Variant/Criterion Dungeons coming out to make up for the loss (can't even say that about Shadowbringers), but they're already dead content after the first few weeks of being out. And the rewards of Criterion do not justify the difficulty.
Stormblood and Endwalker both had comparable content with Alliance Raids, Normal Raids, a Deep Dungeon, and two Ultimates, but (aside from maybe the Ultimates) I can't help but feel like there was more effort put into the Stormblood content. Ivalice and Omega were very memorable.
Stormblood had a distinct Trial series, Endwalker just merged it into the MSQ. Not to say it's not good, but it doesn't feel like bonus content now that it's not optional.
Stormblood had Eureka to progress the relic weapon, and the Baldesion Arsenal was an amazing climax to it. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but there was a LOT of content. In Endwalker, instead of having a Eureka or Bozja to do, we've shoved the relic grind into Hildibrand, which is something we just used to do for fun. Yay?
Endwalker has an Island Sanctuary, which is nice. Stormblood didn't have that.
Perhaps more importantly, content droughts have never been this bad. We're in the final patch cycle of the expansion. So there's nothing else big coming between now and Dawntrail. When does Dawntrail come out again? Summer 2024, so that's at least...8 months from now? So the wait begins.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Stormblood had Eureka to progress the relic weapon, and the Baldesion Arsenal was an amazing climax to it. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but there was a LOT of content. In Endwalker, instead of having a Eureka or Bozja to do, we’ve shoved the relic grind into Hildibrand, which is something we just used to do for fun. Yay?

I mean, Hildibrand is just the unlock. What you actually do for the relic is... whatever. It's just tomestones.

This makes me wonder something though: We did get a new "grind place", it's not a Bozja or Eureka, but it's a PotD/HoH. It gives tomestones. You can perfectly state that you can grind that to grind your relics. It'll give you the relics eventually. Or you could even go to lvl80 Bozja to grind them. Or do dungeons. Or savage raids. Or whatnot.

The fact that now without the reward forcing you to go into a grind place, very few players do, makes me wonder why people remember these places fondly. They clearly don't want to do them, or they would as their preferred way of obtaining their rewards now that they have multiple ways of getting them. But yet even though people went in there out of necessity not desire, they have fond memories of it. Shared hardships of utterly boring grind content, maybe?