Final Fantasy XIV: Wastin' Away in Moogleritaville

Polaritie

PMAvers wrote: »

Zone 4:

This is the ONE TIME I really wish I had leveled MCH first, since that's my normal main. Really was curious if there was some different lines.

Like, I just imagine if we could step into the duel, and instead of a rubber bullet just blast the guy's gun away with a Air Anchor.
"What in tarnation was THAT?"
"Oooooh, yeah, you guys use rubber bullets, don't you. Guess what mine is loaded with."

"So yeah, your gun shoots a bullet. Mine shoots spreads of magic homing bullets with every pull of the trigger."

I'd love to see their reactions to Queen.

Frozenzen

Polaritie wrote: »

PMAvers wrote: »

Zone 4:

This is the ONE TIME I really wish I had leveled MCH first, since that's my normal main. Really was curious if there was some different lines.

Like, I just imagine if we could step into the duel, and instead of a rubber bullet just blast the guy's gun away with a Air Anchor.
"What in tarnation was THAT?"
"Oooooh, yeah, you guys use rubber bullets, don't you. Guess what mine is loaded with."

"So yeah, your gun shoots a bullet. Mine shoots spreads of magic homing bullets with every pull of the trigger."

I'd love to see their reactions to Queen.

More zone 4 stuff

I just showed them why you don't bring a gun to a chakram fight.

I am however very jealous of them being able to world a gun without a lunchbox.

LD50

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

Specifically a response to your last bit:

There are a bunch of compounding factors here for me:

Right off the bat, the final zone shit shouldn't have even happened the way that it did. We shouldn't have let Sphene grab the MacGuffin after the fight with Zoral Ja. The party explicitly does not trust her. She suspiciously shows up after the big fight, walks past us, and picks up the dangerous artifact that we know is responsible for the dimensional fuckery going on. Every single person in our party would have intervened and stopped her from taking it if the writing were half decent. This moment disconnected me from a story I was previously engaged with, and nothing about the final zone reconnected me to the plot.

The biggest issue is that I just don't care about the endless. Are they alive? I don't care. They are people who lived their full lives. They don't get a second chance at life at the cost of the souls of future generations. Turning them off isn't a difficult choice for me. "Getting to know them" isn't something I want to spend time doing, especially when we have this big world ending threat we need to be actively countering. This might be different in a different setting where we don't know how souls work. We spent an entire expansion learning about how souls on Etherys work, about the aethereal sea and the cycle of rebirth. And this is hard information and not myth or speculation. We fully understand the cost of keeping the endless around.

I also hated Erenville's mom. She's such an awful parent and we didn't do anything other than subject Erenville to trauma for 80% of the zone. A real friend would have called that shit out from the get-go, but we are forced there to stand by passively while she blatantly ignores her son's suffering and makes fun of him for being 'fussy'. God she's such a shitbag.

I have some personal issues and speculation that pulled me out of the unlost world as well.

Firstly, the idea of being trapped in an unchanging theme park and cursed with eternal life sounds like a true hell. This is a personal preference thing but I do not and would not want to live forever and this specific instance of living forever sounds like actual torture.

On the speculation side of things, I get the impression that the endless cannot change or grow. Sphene herself cannot deviate from her existential directive to preserve the people of Alexandria. The children endless are still children in appearance and personality even though they have lived for an unknown number of years as kids. Every single 'employed' endless is still performing the exact job they performed in life. The most interesting endless character is the man with the fiancé, but I find it suspicious that they weren't able to successfully propose to their partner until outside involvement from a non-endless. If my suspicions are correct, the endless are distinctly lacking a 'human' component and preserving them in this way is not a pathway to truly sapient existence. This makes the cost of maintaining them even more of a bad deal.

Muzzmuzz

I hate, hate HATE the first boss on one of post msq dungeons.

I love, love LOVE the final boss of the other post MSQ dungeon. The realization with the last group of mobs of what it would be was amazing.

Javen

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

LD50

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

reVerse

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

Yeah, the Alexandrian system basically stops the soul from going to the XIV setting's proper and provably existing afterlife (the Lifestream/the Aetherial sea) and instead uses them as a consumable resource for the living to never die. The souls devoured by the resurrection machine cease to exist entirely, which is probably why Alexandria has population issues to begin with: there's just not enough souls left in their reflection's Lifestream for new people to be born.

Zomro

I've cleared up through the base Shadowbringers content, so now it's post expansion content and then on to Endwalker. Taking a little break from the "catch up" game to level some other jobs, to give myself some variety when I get caught up.

Currently have Paladin and Red Mage at 80, Warrior at 70, Dark Knight and Gunbreaker at 60 (just unlocked Gunbreaker), and am working on Dragoon (currently 56). I have White Mage at 50 so will probably level that as a healing option. The tanks I'm going to try and get leveled since I have a bunch of tank gear from Stormblood and Shadowbringers and it will be nice to catch them up and then just get rid of it all.

When I came back for a very short time three years ago, I unlocked Red Mage and just didn't understand it that well, but my buddy gave me a run down which made it make sense and I've been loving it. So Red Mage is currently my DPS of choice and I've been using it to clear MSQ, and then swapping to Paladin for dungeons (works very well to keep them on par levelwise)

Donnicton

LD50 wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

Specifically a response to your last bit:

There are a bunch of compounding factors here for me:

Right off the bat, the final zone shit shouldn't have even happened the way that it did. We shouldn't have let Sphene grab the MacGuffin after the fight with Zoral Ja. The party explicitly does not trust her. She suspiciously shows up after the big fight, walks past us, and picks up the dangerous artifact that we know is responsible for the dimensional fuckery going on. Every single person in our party would have intervened and stopped her from taking it if the writing were half decent. This moment disconnected me from a story I was previously engaged with, and nothing about the final zone reconnected me to the plot.

The biggest issue is that I just don't care about the endless. Are they alive? I don't care. They are people who lived their full lives. They don't get a second chance at life at the cost of the souls of future generations. Turning them off isn't a difficult choice for me. "Getting to know them" isn't something I want to spend time doing, especially when we have this big world ending threat we need to be actively countering. This might be different in a different setting where we don't know how souls work. We spent an entire expansion learning about how souls on Etherys work, about the aethereal sea and the cycle of rebirth. And this is hard information and not myth or speculation. We fully understand the cost of keeping the endless around.

I also hated Erenville's mom. She's such an awful parent and we didn't do anything other than subject Erenville to trauma for 80% of the zone. A real friend would have called that shit out from the get-go, but we are forced there to stand by passively while she blatantly ignores her son's suffering and makes fun of him for being 'fussy'. God she's such a shitbag.

I have some personal issues and speculation that pulled me out of the unlost world as well.

Firstly, the idea of being trapped in an unchanging theme park and cursed with eternal life sounds like a true hell. This is a personal preference thing but I do not and would not want to live forever and this specific instance of living forever sounds like actual torture.

On the speculation side of things, I get the impression that the endless cannot change or grow. Sphene herself cannot deviate from her existential directive to preserve the people of Alexandria. The children endless are still children in appearance and personality even though they have lived for an unknown number of years as kids. Every single 'employed' endless is still performing the exact job they performed in life. The most interesting endless character is the man with the fiancé, but I find it suspicious that they weren't able to successfully propose to their partner until outside involvement from a non-endless. If my suspicions are correct, the endless are distinctly lacking a 'human' component and preserving them in this way is not a pathway to truly sapient existence. This makes the cost of maintaining them even more of a bad deal.

"But how are we going to see the cool new boss model if we don't let the boss eat the macguffin?" - Warrior of Light's mentality throughout FF14, probably

But in all seriousness, Cahciua was really annoying for me as well because she spent the entire section of the game unsubtly dodging Erenville's obvious emotional conflict until the last possible moment and even when backed into where she couldn't avoid it, still didn't really address it in any way I'd call satisfying. But the game made it pretty clear she was an absentee parent to begin with (that is, above and beyond normal Shetona culture), so it wasn't entirely unexpected for me either.

Regarding your Unlost World comment, it gets worse the more you dig into it - consider not simply the fate of the Endless after death, but what happens to you well before then. You're hooked into a system where you just forget about loved ones and you can no longer trust your memories, because you're at the whim of a system that has total control over them - any time your memories are tampered with to that extent, are you without your memories still even you anymore at that point, any more than an Endless being memories without a soul is still that person? Not to mention the copy of Otis that existed independently of the real Otis which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

Your last paragraph is explored with the Omicron, which share elements (e.g. minds uploaded to computers). Since Endwalker appears to establish that the soul is what gives someone the "spark" to "imagine" or "change", without it both the Omicron and the Endless are only really capable of reacting to hard data and observed information, and are otherwise pretty strictly dictated by the personality/data/memories that are loaded.

reVerse wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

Yeah, the Alexandrian system basically stops the soul from going to the XIV setting's proper and provably existing afterlife (the Lifestream/the Aetherial sea) and instead uses them as a consumable resource for the living to never die. The souls devoured by the resurrection machine cease to exist entirely, which is probably why Alexandria has population issues to begin with: there's just not enough souls left in their reflection's Lifestream for new people to be born.

I believe that's also basically the gist of her off-handed line about how some of the populating were asserting that there was a declining birth rate as a consequence of the system. And since most of their reflection had been rejoined and they were basically... a shielded island floating in space or something? (they kind of gloss over the technicalities of this) it's very unclear how much of a life stream there would be left for their reflection to continue to pull from.

One streamer I watched likened it to the old clinging onto life and power at the cost of strangling out the younger generations and it's kind of a depressing parallel when put in that way. Not to mention the wealthy who had enough "credits" to weather being killed over and over again during Zoraal Ja's attack on S9, versus the poor who likely died their final deaths.

admanb

Zomro wrote: »

I've cleared up through the base Shadowbringers content, so now it's post expansion content and then on to Endwalker. Taking a little break from the "catch up" game to level some other jobs, to give myself some variety when I get caught up.

Currently have Paladin and Red Mage at 80, Warrior at 70, Dark Knight and Gunbreaker at 60 (just unlocked Gunbreaker), and am working on Dragoon (currently 56). I have White Mage at 50 so will probably level that as a healing option. The tanks I'm going to try and get leveled since I have a bunch of tank gear from Stormblood and Shadowbringers and it will be nice to catch them up and then just get rid of it all.

When I came back for a very short time three years ago, I unlocked Red Mage and just didn't understand it that well, but my buddy gave me a run down which made it make sense and I've been loving it. So Red Mage is currently my DPS of choice and I've been using it to clear MSQ, and then swapping to Paladin for dungeons (works very well to keep them on par levelwise)

I leveled everything to 90 in the lead up to DT and RDM was one of my favorite classes. I would’ve pushed to swap to caster for this raid tier but there was no shot with Picto coming out XD

Wrizzik

I wanted an opening cinematic like we had for EW and I didn't get it

BahamutZERO

Mugsley wrote: »

I wanted an opening cinematic like we had for EW and I didn't get it

what do you mean?

Javen

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

Donnicton

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

And then imagine you find out you received a Lalafell's soul. *vomit*

Alice Leywind

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

this is speculation but

It might be more along the lines of using the aether in the soul cell to like...jumpstart the person's soul back to life instead of letting the original one go.

Frozenzen

heenato wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

this is speculation but

It might be more along the lines of using the aether in the soul cell to like...jumpstart the person's soul back to life instead of letting the original one go.

More post msq stuff!

I really hope we get some kind of clarity as to what happens with the soul that is used for ressurection/enhancement. Does that soul get consumed, or does it just replace the old one?

If it just replaces the old one and the old soul goes to the lifestream they're not actually breaking the cycle of reincarnation, just delaying it. But if it gets consumed to remake or rebuild the old soul it gets more murky.

And if memory and soul are fully separate there is no practical difference after replacing the soul.

reVerse

Frozenzen wrote: »

heenato wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

this is speculation but

It might be more along the lines of using the aether in the soul cell to like...jumpstart the person's soul back to life instead of letting the original one go.

More post msq stuff!

I really hope we get some kind of clarity as to what happens with the soul that is used for ressurection/enhancement. Does that soul get consumed, or does it just replace the old one?

If it just replaces the old one and the old soul goes to the lifestream they're not actually breaking the cycle of reincarnation, just delaying it. But if it gets consumed to remake or rebuild the old soul it gets more murky.

And if memory and soul are fully separate there is no practical difference after replacing the soul.

The final boss of the Vanguard says "I'll make you pay for all the souls you've made me waste this day" when he does his soul thing.

All signs point to the souls being consumed.

admanb

reVerse wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

heenato wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

this is speculation but

It might be more along the lines of using the aether in the soul cell to like...jumpstart the person's soul back to life instead of letting the original one go.

More post msq stuff!

I really hope we get some kind of clarity as to what happens with the soul that is used for ressurection/enhancement. Does that soul get consumed, or does it just replace the old one?

If it just replaces the old one and the old soul goes to the lifestream they're not actually breaking the cycle of reincarnation, just delaying it. But if it gets consumed to remake or rebuild the old soul it gets more murky.

And if memory and soul are fully separate there is no practical difference after replacing the soul.

The final boss of the Vanguard says "I'll make you pay for all the souls you've made me waste this day" when he does his soul thing.

All signs point to the souls being consumed.

I don't really think that guy can be relied on to have any idea what happens to the souls beyond "they go away."

I do think they're probably consumed, but I don't think random jackass knows that.

Frozenzen

LD50 wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

Specifically a response to your last bit:

There are a bunch of compounding factors here for me:

Right off the bat, the final zone shit shouldn't have even happened the way that it did. We shouldn't have let Sphene grab the MacGuffin after the fight with Zoral Ja. The party explicitly does not trust her. She suspiciously shows up after the big fight, walks past us, and picks up the dangerous artifact that we know is responsible for the dimensional fuckery going on. Every single person in our party would have intervened and stopped her from taking it if the writing were half decent. This moment disconnected me from a story I was previously engaged with, and nothing about the final zone reconnected me to the plot.

The biggest issue is that I just don't care about the endless. Are they alive? I don't care. They are people who lived their full lives. They don't get a second chance at life at the cost of the souls of future generations. Turning them off isn't a difficult choice for me. "Getting to know them" isn't something I want to spend time doing, especially when we have this big world ending threat we need to be actively countering. This might be different in a different setting where we don't know how souls work. We spent an entire expansion learning about how souls on Etherys work, about the aethereal sea and the cycle of rebirth. And this is hard information and not myth or speculation. We fully understand the cost of keeping the endless around.

I also hated Erenville's mom. She's such an awful parent and we didn't do anything other than subject Erenville to trauma for 80% of the zone. A real friend would have called that shit out from the get-go, but we are forced there to stand by passively while she blatantly ignores her son's suffering and makes fun of him for being 'fussy'. God she's such a shitbag.

I have some personal issues and speculation that pulled me out of the unlost world as well.

Firstly, the idea of being trapped in an unchanging theme park and cursed with eternal life sounds like a true hell. This is a personal preference thing but I do not and would not want to live forever and this specific instance of living forever sounds like actual torture.

On the speculation side of things, I get the impression that the endless cannot change or grow. Sphene herself cannot deviate from her existential directive to preserve the people of Alexandria. The children endless are still children in appearance and personality even though they have lived for an unknown number of years as kids. Every single 'employed' endless is still performing the exact job they performed in life. The most interesting endless character is the man with the fiancé, but I find it suspicious that they weren't able to successfully propose to their partner until outside involvement from a non-endless. If my suspicions are correct, the endless are distinctly lacking a 'human' component and preserving them in this way is not a pathway to truly sapient existence. This makes the cost of maintaining them even more of a bad deal.

Post msq reactions.

After writing this I see it ended up really rambly, and I agree with most of your points. I just do very charitable readings and assumptions to fill in the blanks .

The way we passively let things happen feels like a combination of engine limitations and lazy writing, yes. I guess I've just accepted it as part of the game. That specific scene would imo have been easily fixed since Sphene didn't actually need to use her body to touch the remote. Just have us blocking her physical body from reaching ut, and then having it fly to the portal before anyone picks it up.

As for Erenvilles mom I can only agree. It was very weirdly handled, but it did feel like Erenville wasn't really surprised. It would have been nice if we as his friend could have told her to have some goddamn compassion for her son, but otoh it also felt like we lacked cultural context. Erenville referred to her as his mentor for the longest time, rather than his mother.

And it's interesting that I agree with you on the existence of the endless being a kind of torment. And considering quite a few of them wanted to be shut down it was clearly something some of them also thought. But overall the implications of the endless existence is rather horrifying. Namikkas change from young to old as the system arbitrarily decides when she is happiest has some pretty awful connotations.

As for the endless capacity for change it's very much open for interpretation. The sidequests in the zone suggest that some of the memories stick around due to unfulfilled desires, but at least one basically said "thanks for the help, now I can do something else until I fade" iirc which suggests they are capable . And the ones who realise what the cost of their existence is want to be shut down even if they can't actually do it which suggests some free will and agency. But there are no straight answers either way. I hope these things come up in the patches, since it all feels kind of half baked.

As for Sphene I don't agree with her being forced to do what she does by a directive or programming. She always had a strong sense of duty and wished to protect her people. She chose to actively delete her compassion to give herself the capability to do what she needed to do for them. Once we fight her all that's left is a directive, but she chose that path of her own free will.

Stabbity Style

heenato wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Javen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

It poses an interesting follow-up question to the confirmation in Endwalker that a 'soul' in FF14 is a tangible thing (a collection of aether that contains a persons personality and memories)

If a persons memories are extracted from the soul and put somewhere other than the lifestream, then the aether that composed the soul is used to revive someone else, what then is lost? If 'memories' can be quantifiably stored somewhere, but at the cost of not being remembered by anybody, is anything actually being preserved? Is that better or worse, or just different, than the inverse, which is the Lifestream, where your soul dissipates and you utterly lose your sense of self (excepting a few specific cases) but you are remembered by the people who knew you?

In the lifestream case, your soul is recycled, and the cycle of reincarnation begins again. Consuming the aether of the soul for something else has the implication that you are breaking that cycle and preventing future reincarnation. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it seems like what they are doing is actually very bad.

But if when you die, your aether is replaced by a ‘soul’ without changing your memories, what happened to the aether that you originally had? Either it goes back to the lifestream, or it goes into whatever apparatus spare souls are stored. So the recycling still happens, just within a smaller body. So instead of reincarnation, revivification.

this is speculation but

It might be more along the lines of using the aether in the soul cell to like...jumpstart the person's soul back to life instead of letting the original one go.

I thought the whole memory backup thing was because they were swapping the souls out. They had to separate the memory from the soul and when they slot in a new soul, they overwrite/imprint the memories back on to maintain continuity.

Axen

Frozenzen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

Specifically a response to your last bit:

There are a bunch of compounding factors here for me:

Right off the bat, the final zone shit shouldn't have even happened the way that it did. We shouldn't have let Sphene grab the MacGuffin after the fight with Zoral Ja. The party explicitly does not trust her. She suspiciously shows up after the big fight, walks past us, and picks up the dangerous artifact that we know is responsible for the dimensional fuckery going on. Every single person in our party would have intervened and stopped her from taking it if the writing were half decent. This moment disconnected me from a story I was previously engaged with, and nothing about the final zone reconnected me to the plot.

The biggest issue is that I just don't care about the endless. Are they alive? I don't care. They are people who lived their full lives. They don't get a second chance at life at the cost of the souls of future generations. Turning them off isn't a difficult choice for me. "Getting to know them" isn't something I want to spend time doing, especially when we have this big world ending threat we need to be actively countering. This might be different in a different setting where we don't know how souls work. We spent an entire expansion learning about how souls on Etherys work, about the aethereal sea and the cycle of rebirth. And this is hard information and not myth or speculation. We fully understand the cost of keeping the endless around.

I also hated Erenville's mom. She's such an awful parent and we didn't do anything other than subject Erenville to trauma for 80% of the zone. A real friend would have called that shit out from the get-go, but we are forced there to stand by passively while she blatantly ignores her son's suffering and makes fun of him for being 'fussy'. God she's such a shitbag.

I have some personal issues and speculation that pulled me out of the unlost world as well.

Firstly, the idea of being trapped in an unchanging theme park and cursed with eternal life sounds like a true hell. This is a personal preference thing but I do not and would not want to live forever and this specific instance of living forever sounds like actual torture.

On the speculation side of things, I get the impression that the endless cannot change or grow. Sphene herself cannot deviate from her existential directive to preserve the people of Alexandria. The children endless are still children in appearance and personality even though they have lived for an unknown number of years as kids. Every single 'employed' endless is still performing the exact job they performed in life. The most interesting endless character is the man with the fiancé, but I find it suspicious that they weren't able to successfully propose to their partner until outside involvement from a non-endless. If my suspicions are correct, the endless are distinctly lacking a 'human' component and preserving them in this way is not a pathway to truly sapient existence. This makes the cost of maintaining them even more of a bad deal.

Post msq reactions.

After writing this I see it ended up really rambly, and I agree with most of your points. I just do very charitable readings and assumptions to fill in the blanks .

The way we passively let things happen feels like a combination of engine limitations and lazy writing, yes. I guess I've just accepted it as part of the game. That specific scene would imo have been easily fixed since Sphene didn't actually need to use her body to touch the remote. Just have us blocking her physical body from reaching ut, and then having it fly to the portal before anyone picks it up.

As for Erenvilles mom I can only agree. It was very weirdly handled, but it did feel like Erenville wasn't really surprised. It would have been nice if we as his friend could have told her to have some goddamn compassion for her son, but otoh it also felt like we lacked cultural context. Erenville referred to her as his mentor for the longest time, rather than his mother.

And it's interesting that I agree with you on the existence of the endless being a kind of torment. And considering quite a few of them wanted to be shut down it was clearly something some of them also thought. But overall the implications of the endless existence is rather horrifying. Namikkas change from young to old as the system arbitrarily decides when she is happiest has some pretty awful connotations.

As for the endless capacity for change it's very much open for interpretation. The sidequests in the zone suggest that some of the memories stick around due to unfulfilled desires, but at least one basically said "thanks for the help, now I can do something else until I fade" iirc which suggests they are capable . And the ones who realise what the cost of their existence is want to be shut down even if they can't actually do it which suggests some free will and agency. But there are no straight answers either way. I hope these things come up in the patches, since it all feels kind of half baked.

As for Sphene I don't agree with her being forced to do what she does by a directive or programming. She always had a strong sense of duty and wished to protect her people. She chose to actively delete her compassion to give herself the capability to do what she needed to do for them. Once we fight her all that's left is a directive, but she chose that path of her own free will.

MSQ discusaroo

To your last point the game does, albeit not til damn near the end, explicitly state that Sphene is compelled.

When the scientists created her they made her prime directive to be to keep the people of Alexandria, including the Endless, safe and happy by any and all means necessary. The last part about the Endless is what really screws her over. If the Endless didn't exist she'd otherwise be pretty chill.

Javen

Axen wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

LD50 wrote: »

Frozenzen wrote: »

Apart from my vacationing spirit being a bit dampened by the final zones it really was excellent.

And combat design was superb, haven't had time to do the EX fights yet, but very much looking forward to them.

Full msq spoilers.

At some point in the third zone I was hooked and really enjoyed Wuk Lamats story. I liked that we didn't take over entirely for the second half either. The final parts did have some retreads, but I found it to be very effective for me at least. The people of Alexandria had made some bad choices due to extreme circumstances but had to be stopped.

Some points did feel like retreads of ShB, but it mostly had it's own spin that kept it fresh enough for me. I was a bit annoyed we didn't get to argue against the memory erasure part of solution 9, but hopefully the patches deal with that. We just had an entire expansion partly dedicated to the concept of acceptance of suffering as a core part of life and not talking about it felt weird. Sphene could have used a bit more time to breathe, but I thought they did a good job with her being Wuk Lamats mirror.

Overall thus expansion seems to be just as divisive as StB, depending on whether you liked Wuk Lamats journey or not. I actually get most of the criticism, I just didn't mind it.

I am however a bit perplexed about some reactions to the final zone. The memories are to me firmly established as being alive, as perfect copies of the person and still being capable of personal growth. The scenes between Krile and Erenville and their parents were to me really touching.

The lack of a soul does not seem to impact the endless more than the lack of a body. I do wonder if they will ever explore how the established cycle of reincarnation is affected by the separation of soul and memory.

Specifically a response to your last bit:

There are a bunch of compounding factors here for me:

Right off the bat, the final zone shit shouldn't have even happened the way that it did. We shouldn't have let Sphene grab the MacGuffin after the fight with Zoral Ja. The party explicitly does not trust her. She suspiciously shows up after the big fight, walks past us, and picks up the dangerous artifact that we know is responsible for the dimensional fuckery going on. Every single person in our party would have intervened and stopped her from taking it if the writing were half decent. This moment disconnected me from a story I was previously engaged with, and nothing about the final zone reconnected me to the plot.

The biggest issue is that I just don't care about the endless. Are they alive? I don't care. They are people who lived their full lives. They don't get a second chance at life at the cost of the souls of future generations. Turning them off isn't a difficult choice for me. "Getting to know them" isn't something I want to spend time doing, especially when we have this big world ending threat we need to be actively countering. This might be different in a different setting where we don't know how souls work. We spent an entire expansion learning about how souls on Etherys work, about the aethereal sea and the cycle of rebirth. And this is hard information and not myth or speculation. We fully understand the cost of keeping the endless around.

I also hated Erenville's mom. She's such an awful parent and we didn't do anything other than subject Erenville to trauma for 80% of the zone. A real friend would have called that shit out from the get-go, but we are forced there to stand by passively while she blatantly ignores her son's suffering and makes fun of him for being 'fussy'. God she's such a shitbag.

I have some personal issues and speculation that pulled me out of the unlost world as well.

Firstly, the idea of being trapped in an unchanging theme park and cursed with eternal life sounds like a true hell. This is a personal preference thing but I do not and would not want to live forever and this specific instance of living forever sounds like actual torture.

On the speculation side of things, I get the impression that the endless cannot change or grow. Sphene herself cannot deviate from her existential directive to preserve the people of Alexandria. The children endless are still children in appearance and personality even though they have lived for an unknown number of years as kids. Every single 'employed' endless is still performing the exact job they performed in life. The most interesting endless character is the man with the fiancé, but I find it suspicious that they weren't able to successfully propose to their partner until outside involvement from a non-endless. If my suspicions are correct, the endless are distinctly lacking a 'human' component and preserving them in this way is not a pathway to truly sapient existence. This makes the cost of maintaining them even more of a bad deal.

Post msq reactions.

After writing this I see it ended up really rambly, and I agree with most of your points. I just do very charitable readings and assumptions to fill in the blanks .

The way we passively let things happen feels like a combination of engine limitations and lazy writing, yes. I guess I've just accepted it as part of the game. That specific scene would imo have been easily fixed since Sphene didn't actually need to use her body to touch the remote. Just have us blocking her physical body from reaching ut, and then having it fly to the portal before anyone picks it up.

As for Erenvilles mom I can only agree. It was very weirdly handled, but it did feel like Erenville wasn't really surprised. It would have been nice if we as his friend could have told her to have some goddamn compassion for her son, but otoh it also felt like we lacked cultural context. Erenville referred to her as his mentor for the longest time, rather than his mother.

And it's interesting that I agree with you on the existence of the endless being a kind of torment. And considering quite a few of them wanted to be shut down it was clearly something some of them also thought. But overall the implications of the endless existence is rather horrifying. Namikkas change from young to old as the system arbitrarily decides when she is happiest has some pretty awful connotations.

As for the endless capacity for change it's very much open for interpretation. The sidequests in the zone suggest that some of the memories stick around due to unfulfilled desires, but at least one basically said "thanks for the help, now I can do something else until I fade" iirc which suggests they are capable . And the ones who realise what the cost of their existence is want to be shut down even if they can't actually do it which suggests some free will and agency. But there are no straight answers either way. I hope these things come up in the patches, since it all feels kind of half baked.

As for Sphene I don't agree with her being forced to do what she does by a directive or programming. She always had a strong sense of duty and wished to protect her people. She chose to actively delete her compassion to give herself the capability to do what she needed to do for them. Once we fight her all that's left is a directive, but she chose that path of her own free will.

MSQ discusaroo

To your last point the game does, albeit not til damn near the end, explicitly state that Sphene is compelled.

When the scientists created her they made her prime directive to be to keep the people of Alexandria, including the Endless, safe and happy by any and all means necessary. The last part about the Endless is what really screws her over. If the Endless didn't exist she'd otherwise be pretty chill.

I thought that bit was really cool actually; that they attempted to preserve the personality/memories of Sphene, but also with specific parameters programmed in. And, upon meeting us, the two started to conflict, to the point where the intelligence executing the programmed parameters deemed the personality part detrimental to their primary directive, so they attempted to actively purge it. That's where the Eternal Queen came from

The Dude With Herpes

My mostly appropriately geared 100 retainers are getting single crystal rewards from quick explorations, at least half the time and it's really annoying.

I know that venture is always a gamble, but the consistency that they're coming back with what amounts to nothing feels unintentional.

I guess since they basically can never come back with current level dungeon gear means their pool of stuff is fairly limited, so maybe there's a check for "current dungeon" then with nothing in return they just default to a crystal. All the other retainers that aren't 100 are still bringing in constant normal rewards.

Lord_Asmodeus

Trying to decide between sticking with Viera or going with a FemHroth has been tough, I like the FemHroth and want to give them a try, but I don't know if I can abandon my Viera. I might just have to make an alt sometime even though it's so much less efficient, I dunno. I'd feel like I wasted the Fantasia if I switch back but also like, I gotta go with my heart.

Polaritie

I've been torn on grabbing the new freebie and just doing some minor tweaks to my character. But also like... I'm pretty happy with the current look too, so.... hmm.

BahamutZERO

note that there is supposed to be a 1 hour (I think?) grace period where you can undo your fantasia and not use it up now, if you want to see how it looks a little

Polaritie

BahamutZERO wrote: »

note that there is supposed to be a 1 hour (I think?) grace period where you can undo your fantasia and not use it up now, if you want to see how it looks a little

I thought that was just a period you could go back and edit more.

Alice Leywind

I mean yeah but you can edit back to the original.

Dhalphir

yeah its not a grace period it's just how fanta's work now - instead of getting one edit, you now get 1hr of ingame-logged in time that you can freely edit as many times as you want. basically allows you to make an edit then see how it looks ingame before committing to it.

Lucid_Seraph

I made Xibruq Pibil today. It actually took two days of work. It was. Fucking. Amazing.

Lord_Asmodeus

Yeah I ended up switching back to Viera, though it wasn't a total waste I did make some changes, appearance wise, and I changed voice after some consideration. One thing that really annoys me is how shit the lighting in the character creator is.

Anyway here is my current look after some changes with a before and after. Will have to sleep on it while I decide if I like them or not. It is ironic that I was looking forward to the Femhroth so much only to immediately switch back to my Viera and just use the opportunity to tinker with her looks a bit.

Before

After

BahamutZERO

oh so you don't get the fantasia back if you don't change anything? ok that's lamer than how I thought it worked

and re: the character creator lighting: it's at least better now, they fixed it up even if it's still not exactly reflective of any real in game environment lighting

Kana

I like my picto's look

Dhalphir

BahamutZERO wrote: »

oh so you don't get the fantasia back if you don't change anything? ok that's lamer than how I thought it worked

and re: the character creator lighting: it's at least better now, they fixed it up even if it's still not exactly reflective of any real in game environment lighting

I'm not sure if the 1hr timer starts when you make your first changes or if it starts when you drink the fantasia. But it's definitely a 1hr logged-in timer now.

Dhalphir

Mods are slowly starting to come back and with a lot of Photoshop effort & behind the scenes Blender/Textools conversion work I managed to get all of my core appearance mods back working again; upscaled face markings, hair, fluffy ears, makeup, and higher detail skin. Plus, it turns out that Dawntrail's changes were actually pretty easy to adjust for with old clothing mods, so the whole old wardrobe of clothing mods will still work with some minor efforts.

BahamutZERO

Finished MSQ finally! Was good, I liked this expansion. Hit for me a little better than Endwalker I think.

Dac

Honestly, I wish monk had a little more complexity to their AoE. I enjoy the ST gameplay, but every time I have to do AoE for an extended period I just find myself actually falling asleep in my chair.

NFyt

First endgame raids dropped today, I'm at the halfway point, some fun vibes on the fights.

Frozenzen

The first raid fight was pretty boring.

Luckily 2-4 were all really fun! Loved that they all had their own music.

PMAvers

I just had a thought about a possible Manderville quest for Dawntrail.

With how much FF9 theming this expansion has…

…it’s time for Gigi to reawaken isn’t it?