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ImpAtom posted:The entire point of that sequence is that they know they will be back if you succeed. They are gambling on you succeeding and throwing themselves into the unknown of despair. There is a reason Alisae's so upset about having to leave you alone, versus being scared of dying. She has faith in you but she hates that you're walking into the face of utmost despair alone and without support. Like the literal premise of the entire sequence is that your friends are decorporating themselves to support you by altering the world around you and the final walk is literally "You Are Not Alone." Thank you! I get so annoyed that people constantly misunderstand the point of this sequence and think it means that because we know the Scions can be brought back there are no real stakes.
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May 7, 2024 17:47
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Endorph posted:solo duty boss fights can be interesting but they can also be a massive pain in the rear end if you die to them and there's a clear design space issue where healers/tanks take longer to kill them than dps jobs, and on the flipside DPS jobs with no self-healing cant survive more than a couple failed mechanics while healers or warriors can just facetank through and barely engage with the design outside of instant loss mechanics not that it makes tanks any less braindead but there is a buff they have in most solo duties that makes it so tanks and healers do more damage, tanks and dps gain health over time, and healers and dps take less damage. with most solo duties having a hard ilvl sync it should take roughly the same amount of time for most classes
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May 7, 2024 17:56
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ImpAtom posted:The entire point of that sequence is that they know they will be back if you succeed. They are gambling on you succeeding and throwing themselves into the unknown of despair. There is a reason Alisae's so upset about having to leave you alone, versus being scared of dying. She has faith in you but she hates that you're walking into the face of utmost despair alone and without support. Like the literal premise of the entire sequence is that your friends are decorporating themselves to support you by altering the world around you and the final walk is literally "You Are Not Alone." Yeah I got that, and it was boring. I didn't miss the point, I didn't find the point compelling. Your friends gambling on you to succeed does not make a compelling plot point when the writers have laid all the groundwork ahead of time for you to know that you're going to succeed. Even setting aside the inherent nature of mmo protagonists being unasailable, everything the scions said in game on ultima thule made it obvious that resurrection was on the table. And it doesn't help that the number of important plot people that die and miraculously come back to life over the course of this 10 year story is higher than the number of those people that actually stay dead. Contrast this with SHB. Yes, it's obvious that you are not going to transform into a lightwarden and it's obvious you're going to kill Emet-Selch and it's obvious that everything is going to be fine. But all the scions and hangers-on around you are deeply concerned for your well-being. The instances of coughing up light are disturbing, regardless of you knowing you're going to survive it no matter where the plot goes. You are strolling into Emet's lobby not entirely certain how things are going to play out. There were several potential options for dealing with the light that would leave you alive but things going poorly for others or the world. They put in the writing time to make the stakes feel believable and laid down enough uncertainty to make the last few hours of SHB tense and exciting. This was not done in EW. And I really want to emphasize how much of a failure this is because I shut my brain off and just jump in for the ride with all sorts of media. Hell I can say I've done that for large chunks of this game pre and post EW. But EW dropped the ball hard enough that even me, a person who was a Mark back when I watched wrestling, couldn't just roll with it. EW's ending sequence lower stakes than attitude era wrestling plot lines. Or more topically, you can contrast it with in from the cold where there are very real stakes to you personally: the threat of having to do a 20 minute duty a 2nd time.
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May 7, 2024 18:01
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For me, In From The Cold was something I didn't like when I did it, because I still hated Endwalker at that point. Now, looking back, it's good, but I don't think it's as good as a lot of people say it is. By the time i got to <<< Ultima Thule >>>, on the other hand, I had changed my mind, and was fully invested in Endwalker, so I found it to be a very tense thing. I'd found speculation that the devs were gonna leave the Scions behind, and replace them with a new group. Since I wasn't sure if we could get them back, I thought it was an excellent way to send them off. I was really hoping the speculation was wrong, but I was prepared for The End. Of course, I know now that those speculations have been flying around for forever, but at that time?
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May 7, 2024 18:04
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Failboattootoot posted:Yeah I got that, and it was boring. I didn't miss the point, I didn't find the point compelling. Your friends gambling on you to succeed does not make a compelling plot point when the writers have laid all the groundwork ahead of time for you to know that you're going to succeed. Even setting aside the inherent nature of mmo protagonists being unasailable, everything the scions said in game on ultima thule made it obvious that resurrection was on the table. And it doesn't help that the number of important plot people that die and miraculously come back to life over the course of this 10 year story is higher than the number of those people that actually stay dead. I mean you say you didn't miss the point but then you said it is bad writing because they laid the groundwork beforehand and that it was obvious resurrection was on the table, which is missing the point. Resurrection was on the table if you succeeded at an impossible task against an unbelievably overwhelming force that toppled gods. You had to march into the heart of despair and summon the soul of a god to bring stability to a broken ruin of a world to have the chance. It isn't about if they will come back or not, that was never what it was about. Like the fact you keep focusing on "Well, I knew the scions were coming back" is missing the point. The Scions didn't suicide themselves without hope. They explicitly set themselves up in a position where their literal hope for you overcomes a great despair and provides you with a new path forward. That's the actual stated plot.
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May 7, 2024 18:09
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i fully believed that not all of the scions might've made it back, especially since endwalker was supposed to be the capstone of the story arc.
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May 7, 2024 18:12
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The last zone of EW isn't a tale of loss (or fire). It's a tale of faith. That's the focus. If that doesn't land for you, sorry to hear it.
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May 7, 2024 18:14
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especially in genre pieces that necessarily tread very well-worn ideas and themes, it's the procedure - the path from point A to a clearly defined point B - that provides the interest. you know columbo is going to solve the case, and you know saitama is going to punch something once to kill it, but how they get to that inevitable conclusion is what keeps you hooked and provides emotional resonance
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May 7, 2024 18:16
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Vermain posted:especially in genre pieces that necessarily tread very well-worn ideas and themes, it's the procedure - the path from point A to a clearly defined point B - that provides the interest. you know columbo is going to solve the case, and you know saitama is going to punch something once to kill it, but how they get to that inevitable conclusion is what keeps you hooked and provides emotional resonance Correct, and what I am saying is that none of that journey landed for me in UT. Most of it also didn't land for me for me in Elpis either. Most of the 6.0 msq experience didn't really land for me if I am being honest. It is entirely possible that by the time I got to UT I had just been nickle and dimed enough along the way that I was unwilling to engage with it anymore. But regardless of how or why, my general feeling during UT was that the events of the main plot had lost most of my interest compared to the side-goings on of the zone itself such as sad dragons, nihilist gasses, and confused robots.
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May 7, 2024 18:27
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Failboattootoot posted:The onus is on the writers to establish credible stakes even under these circumstances. For example (end of shb and ew spoilers): Ultima Thule is a victory lap imo.
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May 7, 2024 18:28
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Noper Q posted:When I did In From The Cold, I got lost for awhile and finally found where I was supposed to be only to just barely lose. So not only was I frustrated by my first, over-long attempt, I then had to deal with the slow, boring, frustrating gameplay a second time, which completely destroyed any enjoyment I could have gotten out of the following cutscenes. Local goon DESTROYS the very concept of narrative Quoted "Yeah I'm too smart to be tricked into investing emotion into a story"
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May 7, 2024 18:30
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I hated that zone so much. It just felt so repetitive to me that anything else that was going on was swept away by a tide of 'we're doing this again, seriously?'
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May 7, 2024 18:31
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What on earth.
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May 7, 2024 18:32
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Opinions on EW's final zone have always been mixed in my experience.
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May 7, 2024 18:33
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Regardless of the stakes involved, the big thing for me was the overarching theme of overcoming despair through trust, faith, and friendship against seemingly impossible odds. That really sold EW's ending for me.
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May 7, 2024 18:34
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I don’t even remember my feelings about ‘Into the Cold’ because the forced crawling section at the end was such a meme that it turned me off of the whole thing. I vastly preferred the Thancred sneaking mission, though I genuinely love Thancred.
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May 7, 2024 18:38
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To me, Endwalker's final zone reminds me of all the times in the story when you're fighting an overwhelming amount of enemies and your allies say "You go on ahead, we'll hold them back." Because they have faith in you to succeed. Do people get upset by these segments too? It's essentially the same thing in Ultima Thule "You go on ahead, we'll forge the path." Because we have faith in you to succeed.
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May 7, 2024 18:38
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