Was Endwalker a FAILURE? - Expansion Retrospective

[Music] and TI calling swiftly baiting light sming softly biing time watching forward Left Behind fire Shadows Clash forgotten for Falls anding F PA for ouros begin to [Music] F let us all drink in how Monumental a task end walk it is for Creative business unit 3 I doubt that many people watching this right now were there that day that Yoshi P launched his nuke at the game eradicating it to bring from those ashes A Realm Reborn 11 years ago August 2013 is when this fresh Journey begun and now it must come to an end and I imagine that most of you watching this who joined later were told over and over again when your friends or colleagues were trying to entice you in story story story this story is so beloved so cared for that you have to enjoy it it's going to be amazing I rated Heavens Ward and shadowbringers as two of the top five RPG and I'm not talking just MMO RPG stories ever told in video games and now 11 years later they have the task of bringing it all to an end adverti loud and clear for all to know end Walker is going to bring it all to a conclusion and move the game in a New Direction this is exciting and terrifying the story they're concluding is responsible for so many tears laughs memories theories and NeverEnding discussions forming one of the most loyal fan bases of all time ff14 is known for its incredibly welcoming heartwarming community and friendly atmosphere however disrespecting the main story Quest the msq or not loving one of the Scions one of the main characters and that super friendly welcoming fan base is likely to burst into your home at Christmas and set the whole thing on Fire end Walker this one's tricky because end Walker is essentially two two parts you've got the beginning with which is your msq and then you've got your second half post msq the new Journey the New Path as such whether you like this side or this side opinions are going to vary wildly some people like both some people like this bit and some people don't like this bit and that's going to lead to a lot of frustration and disappointment with parts of the game and we'll get to that bit shortly let's get into the low poly grapes and male Vieira the expansion launched with it would be hard to find many who actively dislike the msq or disliked this one which in of itself is phenomenal media in general is renowned for not satisfying its audience with their conclusions it's a problem spanning multiple genres and the whole array of Storytelling mediums from TV to video games from Game of Thrones to lost and from Lost to Seinfeld the end of an era is often not what audiences expected or desired or dreamt of and can leave them with that lingering frustrations of how they would have ended it end Walker surpassed these expectations with most conversations arguing as to whether it was better than shadowbringers was it one of the best stories ever told or not even deeper than that did the end Walker msq simply make shadowbringers even better we've discussed it in detail but meton for me never quite matched EMT C despite her and Hermes having clear sympathetic values just as EMT did she's so blatantly going to be the antagonist from her very first interaction that didn't have me waiting for her overall character development just her turn to the eventual dark side alpus was a surprise no one could have expected the relationship explored of EMT venar and hodus is a highlight for everybody Gamal for me is utterly outstanding in its simple yet Soul crushing portrayal of a once Great Society reduced to a shell of them former selves defeating zodiac the long renowned big bad so early completely threw people's fan theories into shambles they had plenty of time to roll along with the actual ending without constantly waiting for their fan theories to come true remarkably clever story writing and pacing almost perfectly designed for such an invested audience especially those who have written the end of his tail in their heads months if not years ago leritz gave every everything a much needed levity while mixing in the resolution of story threads that had been hot Community topics aran's resolution with M Brea's parents no doubt brought many people into despair of me on herself as The Whispers played on the warrior of light's final footsteps of the msq and the ending of this decade long journey was in sight it would be difficult for anyone to argue that CBU 3 overd delivered on expectations if this review ended there then end Walker would deserve an S rank for its story alone but as with all MMO Journeys it doesn't end there it shouldn't be discounted the additions of Reaper and Sage super well received people really liked it and they made good choices with this changing alphano to a sage immediately brought him in more maturity and made the one super nerd who was painting naked pictures of yisha a little bit cooler right and also it helps out zenos Reaper is a bad last job it simply is and zenos is a character with a mixed reception I'm a zenos lover he could be combat sexual with me all day every day but not everybody feels the same way right and the reaper gave him a new lease on life and a new flare but here my friends here here here is where that Journey takes a fork because now we are unfortunately all suffering ladies included from post nut Clarity the hyelin Zodiac storyline has come to an end and the shininess is wearing off everybody will always tell you when a new MMO is coming out is it's generally always a good thing to jump in even for the price of buying a new game you're probably going to get two or three months out because new jobs new quest lines new side quests new this new that everything's shiny new raids new things to explore and all that fun but then depending on the player couple of months down the line sometimes it's longer you start to see the details and that's when things change so let's get a post msq out of the way now before we get down to the nuts and bolts the call back to ff4 was great it's my favorite it had so much potential twists and turns with goldbear zero Cecilia and cb3 did plenty to push that speculation as to what was really going on its downfall was that it didn't and could never ever carry the weight of the previous msq editions because the Grim darkness of zodiac and hyelin was finished filler is a word that gets tossed around plenty in regards to the post msq of end Walker just something to tide people over until dawn Trail and having no bearing on the big picture personally I find this ridiculous we don't know what the big picture is yet and to suspect the story writers of ff14 of all people don't know what they're doing is really dismissive zero and GZ fall into the same box as the Warriors of Darkness all those years ago at the time they too seem somewhat throwaway and pointless but we all know how that turned out I doubt anyone here thinks for doler and Aron bald aren't going to make their presence known again in the future but as their Arc takes place amongst the old story arc it's not considered filler by anyone the post msq was used in my opinion to get the story and development of what will be important characters done now so that later it's not needed in the middle of the main story in Zero's case we now have a character that has been completely altered by witnessing the positive actions of the Scions on the general populace no doubt when the Scions doubt themselves they will rely on the ones closed off and distant zero to remind them of what they've done and their true path I don't believe that any story told in ff14 is wasted and as of now and at least since Around Reborn I have no reason to believe that that's the case this time that's not to say that I don't understand why people didn't feel as strongly about it as they had in the past after all the emotional weight of end Walker it took a decade to achieve a fresh tale needs time to find its legs however however beyond all those things the biggest criticism we've seen of end Walker certainly now is that it lacks that daily grip that reason to log in just to play and we've seen this from content creators and a lot of the community being outspoken that there's just not much to do compared to what I used to do in other expansions now a lot of people have said there's a lack of content so let's take a closer look at that welcome back to school let's consider expansion content and what's in there the raids they're all there in fact pandemonium had a good a story as we expect from mea Alexander Eden it doesn't matter but all the Raiders then started to encounter another problem you see Final Fantasy 14 as I'm sure many of you know works on a very homogeneous job style yeah they have slightly different resources and different abilities but overall the big picture they all kind of work the same and that allows CBU 3 to make some very simple decisions they can balance things way way easier they don't have to worry about multiple Talent setups crazy gear setups or anything like that however players do like having some nice differences between their jobs when it came to the raiding the biggest feedback I got from all the Raiders was the horror of the twom minute window now if you're not a Raider this might not make sense to you so we have zero 4 minutes and right in the middle two so what's the two-minute window it's actually pretty simple cooldowns big DPS cooldowns or tanking cool Downs or whatever you have on your character are designed to be used sparingly right you use them whenever they're available and they give you a big boost to your character's performance the problem was in N Walker and became even more obvious with the ultimates so we had Omega and DSR is that these cooldowns do tremendous amounts of damage and in an MMO when you put them all together so let's say you have this window where your cooldowns will be up somewhere in there in here if you do things like my character does more crit I another character has a thing where the boss takes more damage more damn and then somebody else has a cool down that gives you haste all these things stack up together on top of each other so you then multiply that by like eight characters and what you see is a DPS graph that suddenly goes like this if you don't fit into this area then in fact you're just becoming a detriment to the team and that's the simple fact if your DPS cooldowns are here then it goes or if your DPS cooldowns are here you go and this one gets shorter and so what happened was any jobs that didn't fit inside here got abandoned and so cb3 was presented with the problem because this is a real problem when you have massive DPS checks on Boss encounters and you can cut entire phases out of fights simple as that and so they made the decision we'll just make everybody 2 minutes now why is that a problem because it also makes every single fight the same it's all about 2 minutes 2 minutes 2 minutes and now every single Raider will tell you that most of the planning goes into when do we use our 2 minutes and it's tedious and it's tiresome and that homogenity that exists in ff14 may only get worse of course we got pctto maner and Viper coming in Dawn Trail and they're not very happy however if we look at some other content the Beast tribes for example when compared to the frustrations people have the pets the mounts all the Cosmetics were up to an S-Class tier so let's take a close look let's go somewhere a bit special and really find out about this lack of content welcome to all the things that make up an expansion in a typical Final Fantasy 14 setting here we can really compare old expansions new expansions and all the features that make them up let's start with one of the obvious ones people complain about with end Walker and that is the lack of a raid trial series these would be your whets your four Lords and of course you're Waring Triad now this didn't exist in end Walker or did it well yes it did but they decided to make a change they decided to split it in two on the one hand we had the bosses and these were sent off to the msq and you might wonder why they were perfectly fine the way they were they were unique interesting stories all leading to bosses well the likely reason is after dealing with a lot of Mo companies just not enough people were doing them to justify the expense of creating them a lot of people join ff14 and just play the msq and then log out they don't even know in some cases that the raid series and extra stories exist but what about the actual story element itself then where did that go Mike well actually this time around it was moved over to tataru her adventures and our adventures of visiting a lot of old faces across atheris and seeing what they were up to and giving you that extra story line to go along with so the story and the raid series and the bosses do exist but change in an MMO is very dangerous people like what they like a lot of old elements came back to life hilderbrand who hadn't been seen for a while brought back into the game itself and of course alongside that much to the love of the community the blue Mage brought back as well even more content but above that new sparks were created Criterion dungeons CBU 3's answer to a lot of the West joining ff14 and demanding what they had seen in other games low group counts really hard challenging content and they delivered the Criterion dungeons did provide that as well as still being suitable for casual players however no reason whatsoever to farm them and then we had another new idea Island Adventures So Exciting in the ff14 world we're getting the stardew Valley Animal Crossing style simulator and people were so excited in fact Island Adventures were one of the things I was so excited for I'd never tried those kind of games but to do it in 14 sure and I played the life out of it this was the first time in 14 I act ly farmed something but unfortunately it very quickly turned into a spreadsheet simulator that none of us wanted and it died just as my love of it died the one thing about Final Fantasy 14 and CBU 3 is they're going to iterate and keep growing on it more criterian dungeons are coming still no real reason to farm it and we know that we're going to be traveling the stars in Dawn trail with the next iteration of what Island Adventures will be and end Walker didn't stop there ishgardian housing that joined us we also got data sensor travel that joined us as well and we got a brand new deep dungeon to go along with it and the crystallin conflict join us as well end Walker brought with it as you can see tons and tons of content and features several of them brand new so when players as saying there's just not enough content what exactly are they talking about well we discussed the change of the norm in some cases this is always going to be upsetting but the big one people bring up is The Relic grind especially when compared to Eureka and my personal favorite bosia at this point we should talk about the elephant in the room Final Fantasy 16 many have decried the team's involvement on 16 as the reason for a big whole existing in 14's end Walker Yoshi P already has a very busy schedule so adding 16 to his plate is definitely going to affect something more clearly Yoshi P made it very very loud and clear he actively wanted people to be able to complete their favorite activities in 14 in a nice timely manner in order to free people up to play 16 you might remember the live letter of him discussing reducing the gearing process for raiding for this exact reason no doubt The Relic grind was under similar scrutiny in the past it was common that your first Relic would be relatively easily obtainable but then collecting them all for all the jobs would be a long-term Endeavor end Walker has literally no long-term goals and that is poison for the people who just want to play their favorite game while it's easy to say hey just go play other games including the game director himself the reality is there are many people who just don't want to and a monthly paid MMO should also be catering to those people the end Walker Relic hunt was reduced to Simply farming tomestones not that many of them either and just getting the relics given to you now this has a twofold effect firstly obtaining them is not only easy but also boring as you aren't doing some Niche separate piece of content with its own pros and cons like bosia but instead you're just doing dungeons and journals as you would aily do and hunting across the plains secondly it makes the relics mundane nothing is special if everybody has it Relic collections were previously a badge of honor for the day-to-day players seeing their jobs with the harder to grind relics felt so rewarding and you knew that not many players could have achieved what you had done yet now it means nothing back in world of warcraft's Legion expansion a weapon known as ashbringer a legendary sword that had its own fanfiction crackpot theories was suddenly just equipped by anyone who happened to play a paladin all spectacle and mystery of the weapon was suddenly lost to the ether for many this was a gap in the game that nothing could fill and while we could entirely shift the blame to ff16 it should be considered there are now so many jobs in the game that having huge long grinds for completionists is somewhat becoming untenable there are two more jobs coming in Dawn tril the next version of this Relic content which we know is coming well it may never be what you hope it would be as we move away from end Walker and as someone who wasn't looking to play every single day I have to say I had a blast it's an a rank for me but it had its problems Criterion dungeons were great and so they weren't Island Adventures were amazing until they weren't but I'm still so happy to see that they kept trying new things while maintaining a lot of the old school things but now now we turn to Dawn Trail and which path will they take I don't think anything will ever beat shadow Bringers for me the post msq had mixed reaction so whatever they do to launch Dawn trail with it has to be an absolute banger but I have the utmost faith in their storytelling I know for one that when it launches I'll be getting my brush out and pick to mancing immediately and then I'll do the msq a little later after you guys have had you fill but wherever we go we're going to have a good time I choose this way [Music] forun and what you see is a DPS graph that suddenly goes like this and what you don't see it was too tempting and the thing was three two one and the thing is if you didn't fit into it is at the top three two t three two one if you didn't fit into I need to get out of this all all right three we're very serious professional three a that is what happens I'm not lying and so what happened was

Channel: Preach Gaming

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Keywords: Preach, preachgaming, preach gaming, ffxiv, ff14, ff 14, ff xiv, ffxiv dungeon, mmo, mmo gameplay, final fantasy 14, final fantasy xiv, rp, ff14 expansion, ffxiv expansion, heavensward, ffxiv heavensward, ff14 heavensward, preach ffxiv, preach ff14, story, ffxiv story, msq, shadowbringers, ff14 shadowbringers, ffxiv endgame, shb, yshtola, emet selch, rpg, endwalker, hythlodeus, ff14 endwalker, zero, zeromus, cecil, post msq, 6.0, dawntrail, 7.0, golbez

Id: Z8xkJo7Z554

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024