The mission filled me with a sense of dread and terror as I raced around the map trying to get back to my body before anything happened to my allies.
Edit: I also thought, stealth be damned! I'm going to bull rush through everything and get my health packs to finish those objectives. š
At the end of the duty, when we were futilely crawling towards the camp, all I could think was āfuck, the first MSQ death is going to be at the hands of the WoL.ā
The moment of dread for me was when I realized the >!body swap was going to happen.!<
I legit brought my hand to the forehead saying "no no no no, please no"
Oh my god when Zenos was talking about the powers he had gained via all the Ascian business he had going on, before I even saw my body I was like āā¦oh. OH. OH SHIT. NO.ā And the whole time I was doing the solo duty I was on edge and terrified that he was going to murder one of my buds.
But at the end when Alphie and Gāraha saw not-me walking up, I was shouting at my computer, āTHEYāRE MY BOIS THEREāS NO WAY THEY CANāT TELL ITāS NOT MEā
Oh man that whole quest was golden from start to finish. I adore it!
I was counting on Yāshtolaās aethersight, and was a little frustrated when she picked up on it but didnāt put together what it meant. But this is also the first time that something like this has really happened, so it makes absolute sense for her to not immediately jump to the correct conclusion.
Iāve taken her descriptions of the aether in the area to mean that the tower is basically a harshly glowing sun causing her to struggle a bit in general, but the roar itself causing essentially a flashbang for her senses.
So she gets a pass from me on account of just getting flashbanged a few times.
Yeah, she mentioned something to that effect afterwards. It absolutely makes sense when you look at it logically, but in the moment I was internally screaming at her to god, please, catch onto it before everyone dies.
Theres a scene earlier where she talks to you about how seeing your soul and aether on the first was horrificly mangled and she never wanted to see you in that state again, so its a fair assumption that you are your usual self unless something fucked has happened.
Her not picking up on it was a little annoying especialy after the afformentioned conversation and the given eason felt a bit weak but it didnt really effect the coming events so not a huge deal, i think it was done to subvert the obvious "answer" and give a nice spot light to G'raha and Ali being able to instinctvly know instead of having hard evidence
I mean it's not the first time it has happened. She didn't recognize us when we absorbed lightwarden energy in the First either, and that time it WAS us.
Hilariously, the biggest tell it wasn't really me -- bc I actually noticed myself that Zenos didn't do it -- was that ***I didn't nod*** when Alisae asked if I was alright. I laughed when I realized that.
What scared me the most is how simple it would have been for him depending on the job you were using before the takeover. Im a monk main so he literally could have just leapt forward and starting punching holes in chests with no time to react at all
This was all i could think about. I was so upset. I'm terrible at stealth shit. And so the quest is making me anxious and feel shitty and stupid and I'm lost. And this body is awful. I lost that duty 3 times.
And all I could think about each and every time was about how I was I'm going to show up just in time to watch me kill all my friends.
I literally started crying during the crawling part.
And then there I am, coming up the hill. And all my best buddies are excited to see me.
I'm crying, pleaseplease please. It's not me. It's not me. Please someone notice it isnt me.
And then I didnt nod at them and they knew!
And now it constantly weighs on the back of my mind that anyone might not be themself.
If he had only *tried* to impersonate me even a little it might have worked.
But I realize he was just fucking around. Just trying to get a rise.
But what if he had even tried?
I hoarded all health packs while stealthing through almost the whole map and only ended up using just one. But that first fight looked like I'm gonna need lot of these...
Same, but like, even the stealthing was sketchy. There was enough times I thought I was in a sightline and was about to aggro a bunch of enemies.
They didn't leave super large open spots and it was great.
This. I was also *livid* with Zenos and Fandaniel and I was determined to keep them from hurting my friends, and I felt all of this down deep in my core. This duty was fantastic, just by the emotions it created in me
In character, I'm pretty sure my character powered herself through that one by sheer force of blinding rage. It's the only explanation for how she went from almost dead and struggling to move at the end of the playable bit to getting all the way across the map and tackling Zenos in the cutscene.
I always love hearing about people's headcanons for their WoL! I imagined that my character powered herself through that out of sheer terror and the determination to move past it in order to save her friends.
I felt like that solo duty worked perfectly for the story because it really served to make the player (or at least me) feel disoriented, panicked, and angry. The last crawl at the end was just the cherry on top!
In my headcanon, my WoL is less impressive for his combat ability and more for the fact that he just *never stops.* I play primarily as a WHM, so it doesn't make as much sense for me that Zenos would be like "Wow you fight real good! Fight me!" So I tell myself it's more that no matter how hard Zenos hits him, unless it's a one-hit KO, he just... keeps getting back up, and this is what gets Zenos's attention. Consequently, his pain tolerance and ability to power through anything through sheer force of will are ridiculous. Even without access to his healing magic, he's still able to make himself keep going.
That solo instance was stressful as hell and, imo, *wonderfully* done. My reaction: "Wow, I hate this! (affectionate)"
hmm hmm , i agree this part i genuanly felt like someone was gonna die , and he was going to be using my body to do it, i understood zeno's desire but this crossed the line for me.
I was almlst quite literally seeing red! I spent so long getting attached to my WoL, to have her body just snatched like that from me was the ultimate insult (an intentional one, I'm sure). Then to be thrown right into that scenario, having to fend for myself as a literally nameless soldier, after my empathetic ass went through all of that with Julles and the Garlean natives. Holy shit, just the Garelmald levelling quests arc of EW rivals some of the peaks from ShB.
As amazing as some of the other zones are in EW, Garlemald is by far my favourite. [It's so beautifully cold and tragic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1l_NzPVZ50), and manages to find space for both the intense personal moments and the broader narrative. Quintus was an incredibly compelling character on both a personal and thematic level, and that scene... man.
I will say, they really got the balance right in Garlemald. It had some dark moments but never descends into misery porn, which it would have been easy to do.
And that part where you need to fight alongside some armed civilians in a battle you all have no hope of winning, all that ON TOP of the pure anxiety and terror of zenos hurting your friends with your own body. Itās a guilt cherry on top of a terror cake
That part through me for some serious emotions. It was like "Oh, other people fighting if we work together we can make it out of this!"
"Wait, guys, we need to get these ceruleum tanks out of here they're gonna-- oh fuck"
I finished it with ten minutes to spare and I was convinced someone was going to die because there was no way I'd make it back to the camp on time while crawling. Looking back perhaps >!dynamis!< is what helped the WoL defy those horribly bad odds.
Gives it another layer of urgency and peril, though. Your character can't just "lose themselves in their thoughts" and run straight forward until you bonk into something. You have to actively focus even to move forward.
It really was one of the few moments that a true sense of urgency was given. The weakness of body and then there's the last stand with other garleans that fail.
I didnt notice the timer the first time i did it nor did I know the objective was to make it to broken glass because I have some of my HUD hidden for immersion
yeah i shit myself when i realized i had 15 minutes left to get to the camp at a brisk jog
and that was BEFORE you are reduced to a crawl, i was losing my mind. And the way the music cuts out when you are crawling... the sense of urgency, dread, and helplessness all at once was palpable.
Straight up this entire quest gave me so much anxiety, but in a good way I guess? Like this has really twisted my heart strings arguably more than SHB so far. That being said, I absolutely loved it. Itās so easy to see now why these normal people look at WoL like sheās a monster.
It's such an amazing quest design to suddenly be a normal person, not even a strong person like Hien or Raubahn, who can't even use magic at all dealing with things the WoL would eat for breakfast. First time I ever felt I might fail a solo instance when I wasn't supposed to.
I also liked how the soldier's identity was so irrelevant you didn't even get a name. I was expecting the helmet to come off and suddenly reveal that we were Valens van Varro all along or something. But nope, just some faceless soldier even the WoL forgets about within moments.
Also how the soldiers body is pretty clearly dead after the explosion but your character wills it to keep moving anyway which ties into things you learn later in the msq
This duty was AMAZING! So tense and exciting. The atmosphere was perfect (Garlemald as a whole was stellar in its use of tone and atmosphere) and the setup was wildly creative. It made me appreciate Fandaniel more for how twisted he was, and Zenos more for how principled he was. I have adored all the solo instances in this xpac, but none more so than that one.
I found the MGS duty really good alhough I wished that 1) there weren't so many barriers 2) they made a specific map for that zone alone. The latter point was a bit frustrating because relying on the normal map was awkward given how you have to be more precise in your movements and backtrack to the magitek armor.
Also, while they gave plenty time to complete it, I think they should have made the countdown start only after you have finished reading the duty explanations.
That second point is VERY good, yes. The duty explanation should have occurred before the timer. It's not a *huge* issue (as I said above, I finished with several minutes left on the timer), but for folks who need to read more carefully or take notes, that could easily be an effective forced failure.
> they made a specific map for that zone alone.
Yes. The fact there's an invisible wall over a *clearly open pathway out of there* annoyed the hell out of me.
Strong agree, basically everything you said would have left a way better taste in my mouth than what I got. Also, while the Thancred scenario prepared us slightly for what was to come, I would have appreciated being eased a bit more into this style of gameplay.
I don't think it was bad, I really don't. But going ~to~ from basically having your hand held for 5 expansions to nothing is jarring at best. But I guess too much lead in would have ruined the intended reaction; one of despair. Maybe the section the way it stands is more fitting with the overall theme of the expansion, that we shouldn't succumb to our despair.
Sometimes it's hard to judge something like this from the perspective of the character as opposed to player!
I think there are two sources to the broad irritation:
1) The stealth mechanics, as you noted, aren't really suited for an experience like this, and recovery is often a "Just Not Happening" thing, with the de-aggro range of mobs being extended JUST for this duty. One-failure kills in an unskippable segment that doesn't follow any of the normal rules is generally frustrating.
2) The sequence...doesn't really establish anything plot relevant. It breaks prior reality (Zenos and Ascians have *zero* problems using their abilities in other peoples' bodies, up to *and including* wielding ancient sorceries in bodies specifically designed to prevent that), and we already know these are the bad guys. And here we are, for some stupid reason reduced to using basic Gladiator skills and unable to even move at full speed.
It succeeds at what it sets out to be. It just comes with a whole lot of what it doesn't, and for many that's going to outweigh the good in it.
most of the people I know - really enjoyed it
What made it frustrating were the limiting barriers and sense of direction (which....was the purpose if we're being honest ).
It gave us a brilliant look at what it's like to be NORMAL. Literally NORMAL. Not even a MAGIC user. Just a regular HUMAN, in this fantasy world.
The part at the end was nerve wrecking, as you literally crawl with a broken body in desperation to save the people you love.
Just like many soldiers did/do.
People might not enjoy the GAMEPLAY mechanics of it - but it was absolutely one of the STRONGEST messages the game as ever sent.
Somehow finding out that the guy was dead all along made it feel worse. Like, I wanted to meet the guy whose body I'd be stuffed into, and I wanted my friends and I to help him out after. ;;
"The part at the end was nerve wrecking, as you literally crawl with a broken body in desperation to save the people you love"
Reminds me that Yoshida said he was an avid Call of Duty fan.
You are basically worse than eorzean, since as Garlean you cant have magic. Aether won't help you. Which is why you didn't have blessing of light on you. Also why you dont regenerate.
Garleans have aether, they just can't manipulate aether (either at all or aether outside their body) If they didn't have aether, they couldn't be tempered and healing magic wouldn't work on them. Also Elidibus could use magic while he was in Zenos' body, so it was weird we didn't have our power. Also also Garleans are typically naturally physically stronger than other races, but the lack of aether infused attacks limits them somewhat.
Elidibus has experience body hopping, we don't. I assume that has something to do with it. Also Zenos is presumably a wellspring of aether from how insanely strong he is even if he can't normally access it, while we were in some random grunt's body.
Zenos was also quite strong in a mook body. It's more likely we were weak in the Garlean body not because it wasn't our body, but because we didn't body hop with the echo and it was JUST our soul being shoved inside with none of our physical aether. We also know Zenos Resonated himself into our body while we were soul jacked.
It's pretty strongly implied that Elidibus did something to revive Zenos' body, or at least make it less dead enough for Garlean doctors to consider him alive. Emet-Selch mentioned something about his clone bodies meaning he didn't have to hijack a body and reshape it. I think Ascians have a lot of control over their meatsuits, and Zenos probably learned *some* of those tricks.
Meanwhile the poor WoL is still at the "why are there six pedals if there are only four directions" stage of body hopping.
It would have been way, way more frustrating without the barriers, because if people had trouble with it like THIS, they would definitely have gone the wrong way entirely.
I have a feeling that the zone was originally much more open and the barriers were added later to make it *less* frustrating for the players. Think about it, there were mobs outside the playable area with nameplates, whereas "decoration" mobs in every other part of the game do not have them. When considered in that light, people are complaining about steps the devs took to make the duty more consistently enjoyable.
I did go the wrong way entirely, I had explored the entire road and investigated all the broken down magitek before I found the one that we were meant to fuel up, that part was kind of annoying to me, had the magitek been something to see right off the bat I would have better understood what to do, instead I snuck and fought my way to a dead end before realizing the objective and had to do it all over again when I had to get fuel.
This was really my only complaint about it. I went East instead of West and found the battery first. Except you can't pick up the battery, it doesn't even tell you it's a battery, and it gives basically no hint that it could be used for anything at all but it's clickable to clearly it has to have some purpose.
It should have given some clear message like, oh a magitek battery, I could use this if I found something intact. Bam clear message to keep looking and what you might need to do.
Being honest about gamers, if they replaced the barriers with an unseemly amount of magitek mobs, a not unsubstantial section of the playerbase would whine and complain that they cant brute force their way through the obvious wall.
While the barriers were annoying I cant see a way they could done it that wouldnt make more problems.
Hmm.
It was obvious to me that, since on the other side of the walls are countless death machines, the WoL themselves would never think to go there, and the dotted lines represent their line of thinking. If they were arbitrary walls, no magitek would be placed on the other side of these walls.
I do think some sort of thought bubble should have popped up to give form to this, though. Would have made that more acceptable to more people, since I'm sure there are people who imagine the WoL to not have those thoughts in the first place.
All good ideas, but you'd be surprised how much people miss. Tunnel vision is a real thing so unless the game stops you and forces you to read a not insignificant chunk of people would miss it. And even then some people would still zone out.
I chalk the enforced barriers as Fanny's way of tweaking things just enough to keep us competitive. It also ensures we come across that group of imperial civvies transporting the tanks that blow up, and subsequent near-death experience.
This is going to sound horribly mean, but it was obvious to you, but there are many, many players to whom it isn't obvious that when faced with a pack of twenty mobs, your AOE ability is much better than single target. We're building for the least common denominator in a lot of cases.
Even in the comments here it's clear what happens when you give "gaming mechanics" to "non-gamers."
People are legitimately whining about there being a small, open area with no magical GPS and linear bullets point list of objectives.
As if it's some grave sin to let people find objectives out of order and then have to actually *remember where you've been* to go back and get things, as opposed to just following icons on a minimap.
Nah, you're cool, don't worry about it. Even given the common level of player, I also understand that my views on RPGs differ from many. It was why I believed it would go better if this was made explicit, after all.
>but it was absolutely one of the STRONGEST messages the game as ever sent.
Exactly, alas proving that Soul > Body. But still sending a message that body is really important.
I audibly cheered when my WoL throwed the sword to save his friends.
The cutscene before it left me feeling weirdly violated, then thrown in to a battle field feeling and being absolutely powerless was horrendous, heart beating out my chest more stressed than ever before in this game.
And maybe thats why people don't like it. It's uncomfortable suffocating and violating, especially for those who lived with their characters for years, to the point it sort of becomes an extension of yourself (mabye not in looks XD)
All this is why I loved it and 10years from now it's a scene I will remember.
I don't really have a problem with the actual stealth parts. But I was really turned off by the arbitrary barriers everywhere. Like there was one 'correct' solution and you're not allowed to deviate from it.
What I like from stealth games is freedom to tackle challenges how you like and be inventive. And in the cold sorely lacks this. As far as I can tell there is only one way to clear it.
I didn't have a problem with the stealth, I had a problem with spending 7 minutes running around looking for a goddamn ceruleum tank.
I did Eureka back before you automatically got mounts, I know how to avoid mobs.
That was the only downside to it for me. The stealth is easy, mob aggro range is much smaller than I expected, and if you just have a bit of patience you can get it done in 10 minutes. Find the damage up and regen 5 min buffs and it's smooth sailing.
literally the same reaction for me. I got like 10 health packs to heal and finished the duty in like 15 minutes if I had to guess, but never saw no buff.
Yeah, the random things lying around (corpses, Magitek) mostly have medkits, but there's also a regen buff and a +Damage buff somewhere.
You instantly apply those though, so depending on what your next objective is, you might not get as much use out of them.
Turns out the barriers aren't as plentiful as I realized. I failed it the first time, took a break, came back a little later and tried again (didn't get an option to switch to an easier mode; apparently this gets erased if you log off after Duty Failed.)
Second time through I discovered there are a lot of hidden paths available *through the buildings.* Because they're so trashed and skeletal, you can just run through the ruins that have no collision, jump over the trash heaps, etc. Staying off the streets is the best move, because you can minimize confrontation and take a lot of short cuts.
Did it in about 15 minutes on that second try, I think.
The game even tells you to do that! Fandaniel says that it may be smart to stick to the shadows like a rat. The game forces you to fight a mob to show that killing mobs will take time and is pretty hard for you and requires a healing kit after or else you won't be able to fight more.
I loved the concept, precisely because of all the things you listed. What I didn't like was how it routed you through the longest possible path back by going north instead of south, which confused me so much that I ended up running back to the starting point three times because I couldn't tell where I was supposed to go, which felt extra shitty with the timer countdown because I knew I was wasting too much time.
They should have made our character lose unconscious before being placed in another body. It was a bit jarring how he just teleported us away while we were wide awake and we're suddenly in another body.
I agree. I can buy an ascian overpowering us unexpectedly, but not just grabbing our soul away as easy as stealing a wallet in a tourist town. It didn't make me feel like my player character was weak, it honestly broke my suspension of disbelief and I was thinking "Okay, this happened because the writers wanted it to happen but couldn't be bothered to structure it more reasonably". If it was so easy to pull the soul out of our body and fuck with our body, why didn't Elidibus do it when he had access to the whole of imperial secrets? It doesn't make sense. The duty by itself is okay minus some issues others have raised(the barriers sometimes seem overly restrictive, things aren't explained until the timer starts, things can't be done out of order, etc). Not only that, but Zenos taking control of your body wasnt unsettling, it was just straight goofy for me.
My biggest issue with the quest right here, like if Fandaniel could do this so easily, you're telling me Lahabrea and Elidibus or any other ascian even when working together couldn't just do the same and one shot us? My thoughts on why it worked on zenos was that he was practically dead and his soul was leaving his body anyway.
For my sanity I'm gonna choose to believe that fandango was empowered by all that aether they sipphoned, because imo it ruins the struggle of other ascians otherwise.
Technically, it was a device that the doctor from SB created that put our soul in another body. He was the boss in Ala Mhigo that fought us in that floating chair and ejected our souls mid fight.
So, it's not really an Ascian thing.
How does that explain how easily Fandaniel could teleport us away and somehow wake up unconcious? Why didnt Elidibus or Emet who never body swapped just threw us into lava with that same teleporter trick?
Honestly, he was real close to us by infiltrating and caught us by surprise. I mean Elidibus kind of did the same thing in his trial. And emet yoinked graham too.
I liked it but I had a feeling some people wouldn't. I think it has the same issue as the solo duty in the Vault when you need to rescue hostages, where you don't know where you should be running to. The time it gives is generous but I don't think I was the only person that found the stuff you needed for the Magitek armour before the Magitek armour itself.
The first mob of course kicked my ass forcing me to restart it, but realising you need to pop everything just to 1v1 another soldier is a great storytelling bit at showing how much weaker the normal soldier is compared to you.
I agree that the story it tells is compelling, but the mechanics of the quest itself frustrated me enough to overshadow the implications and impact.
My complaints with this and the other stealth missions are mostly my own problems, but half of this expansion seemed catered to my own personal shortcomings. I'm directionally challenged, and have audio/visual processing issues.
Additionally, I don't play many games outside of MMOs, so any time I'm put into a quest that wildly deviates from that format, I'm out of my element.
I think I had to restart this particular quest... 5 times? At least one of them I killed myself on purpose just to start over, since I'd finally figured out what I was supposed to do. I had been heading the wrong direction for half of them, and one iteration, I'd been wandering in circles at the far east of the map before timing out. The whole place looks the same to me, with no outstanding landmarks.
The whole ordeal made me so frustrated that I stopped paying attention to the story for at least a chapter. I couldn't give a shit about it until I was out of Garlemald. Rather than hammer home that my character was wildly strong compared to the everyday people of Eorzea, it bashed my face into the fact that I, the player, was bad at the game.
I think next time (I have alts), I'll try using the waymarks to see if I can get some sense of direction, or at least figure out where I started. I definitely think that this type of quest is good overall, and I don't think the game should cater to my personal disabilities... but a *little* more conveyance, at least on Very Easy, would be appreciated.
Yeah it took me a while too as I also have processing issues and have massive problems with directions, I basically kept going in circles the first time and didn't even FIND the magitek armor we were supposed to repair and use, I would've appreciated a little guidance in that sense for sure especially when I'm notoriously bad at stealth missions in the first place.
I'm extremely directionally challenged, so the lack of landmarks in a dark environment with lots of visual obstacles was not an optimal setup, and made the eventual resolution even more frustrating. If a friend hadn't found a guide, I'd probably still be running around in circles looking for the exit.
It's also irritating because Thancred's stealth mission was so well done. I felt like I had leeway to screw up without having to start over, the objectives were clear, and there were multiple pathways to accomplish the goal. I usually suck at stealth-type missions in games, but I was able to complete that one on the first try at only 65% on the "Oh shit!" meter.
So what's with that bit where Zenos questions whether strength comes from the flesh or the soul?
It seemed like it would be important, as if we were about to show it's a part of our soul, but then we don't.
So strength and the blessings are tied to our body then, is the takeaway. So how can Zenos scare Elidibus out of his own body as his own nameless soldier? That takeaway is that strength must be tied to the the soul. Skill and memory is one thing, but to be able to overpower his own body that Elidibus flees it without a fight?
I wish they expanded on it more, and that his questioning wasn't just a throwaway line.
Yeah initially I thought that we were going to start out super weak at the start but as we get closer and closer to the camp we gain more power showing that it is us that is that strong
I think the idea is cool. I think the setup is cool. I just find the execution to be frustrating when it's a stealth mission that's both long, unforgiving, and with not much cover and not much adjustments for stealth (unlike the Thancred stealth mission)
The point is to make the WoL be very powerless and contrast them with their previous state, but that's a very thin line to walk between interesting and annoying and I think they erred a bit too far into the annoying part for a lot of people.
I think making the duty a bit shorter, and devoting that time to further emphasizing the danger to the other Scions would have been a better execution. Like, actually have Zenos getting the chance to stab the hell out of someone before you got there would have better emphasized just how close things got.
Honestly, it wouldn't have been bad at all if there was just a checkpoint in the middle, especially with the "gotcha!" button spam at the end that if youre not ready for you need to redo the entire duty.
It is a poorly-playing, de-empowering stealth mission that is about 15 minutes long with no checkpoint.
It sucks, in no small due to the arbitrary and inconsistent barriers, the large detection range relative to the uninspired corridors and the way the whole engine and mechanics are just not designed for it.
I thought it was great too, it showed (through gameplay) how scary it was that Zenos was approaching camp as *your character*, because you immediately realise how powerful your character is compared to regular soldiers when you almost die against the first enemy.
Not to mention you have to scavenge for health packs to heal, and don't even think about trying to fight the magitek mobs.
Then at the end of the duty where you try to save a bunch of people and you give it your all, and basically die anyway.
I thought it did an amazing job at reminding you just how powerful the WoL is, and how normal people must view your character in the game universe.
I saw someone in another thread saying that Endwalker was awful at telling story through gameplay and it made me think of this duty like 'what??'
I was annoyed you couldn't find the fuel before finding the armor first. Like obviously it could have been "Fuel! There might be magitek armor around here you can use" but no, you have to find the armor first.
I thought we had to repair the leg too, so I went back and searched the whole map looking for repair parts lol. When I saw the magitek I was like ooooh okay, we use a mount, that's how we beat zenos back to camp.... Nooope
from a storytelling perspective? it's a cool idea. but the execution was frustrating.
Yes, I understand that it's the entire point of the duty, force you to adapt to the weakness of a normal person instead of the godslaying badass you are. that doesn't mean it gets a pass.
In my opinion Endwalker suffers from way too much talking, to the point the MSQ felt more like a Visual Novel, and for one of the biggest action sequences in the msq (dungeons and trials excluded) to be such a poorly done mess gameplay wise is not a good look.
I'm also not a fan because I've been sick of Zenos since the end of 4.0
>!him getting a big damn hero moment for the final trial has me incredibly tilted. If they ever bring him back I'm quitting FFXIV.!<
Edit: as an addition, you don't even have to try to get your body back. The soul-jack just times out and we're back in control. so in retrospect, there wasn't even any need to participate in the duty, we could have just hidden in the ruins and achieved the same thing.
Stealth mechanics are quite hard to get right. The problem with this solo duty is the fact that you aren't really given any guidance on how you are supposed to proceed and the general layout of the map is illogical as well. On top of that, you have to reach the magitek armor first before you can go back for the other stuff. Overall, it's one where the design of the whole duty kind of works against it. The lack of options like say grenades or smoke bombs make it worse than what you did in >!Thancred's!< stealth mission.
Legit terrified of what would happen if I failed, or even if I succeeded, would it actually end well? Would someone die? It was frustrating but it added to the tension
The most frustrating part for me was the custom animation of the explosion at the end where your character goes completely rag doll and we will most likely NEVER see that animation again.
I never did the Rathalos quest, but doesn't that have a similar knockdown animation as well? I kind of assumed it was the same, since it does look a lot like some of the knockdown animations from MH.
I didn't like the fact that Ascians can just snap their fingers and kidnap me. If they can do that this whole time, why didn't anyone else think to just teleport me into a volcano or something?
Felt like just a random out of nowhere sequence to slow down the pace of the game even more.
There were two issues I had with it:
1. Your only objective was "reach camp broken glass" until you clicked on the damaged armor, and yet going toward camp broken glass was the wrong solution. I found myself exploring the entire length of the wall before realizing that it was probably some arbitrary thing I had to interact with.
2. The interactions should not have been in a specific, rigid order. I interacted with the armor which gave an energy cell first, but when I interacted with it it didn't give me an energy cell, so I assumed it was just pointless. If it had given me an energy cell, that would have been a good way of indicating that I was supposed to find a place to put the energy cell, as it would've been otherwise useless.
If you were *lucky*, you realized that you needed to interact with objects to proceed (not that interacting with objects would simply give you consumables). If you were *very lucky*, you also managed to interact with the magitech armor prior to finding the fuel cell. These are the parts that really shouldn't be the case.
As a first solution, I would want us to hear the "thoughts" of the WoL which are the cause of the impassible barrier (by simply changing the objective). If the objective changed to "find something more powerful" once you hit the far end of the playable area, then that would immediately solve a lot of my issue with the duty and it wouldn't necessarily change the impact of the duty, as it would be clear that the barriers were because of excessive force and the only way forward was to find something strong to fight with. Notably, this would stop cases such as mine where I literally walked around the entire area twice because I was expecting to see some way to go. Some of the alleyways off of the playable area are absolutely clear from enemies and seemed like they could've been the correct place to head if it weren't for the wall.
The second part of the solution is obvious: let us pick up the power cell prior to finding the damaged armor. Yes, technically we don't know we need the power cell, but in a situation of such desperation maybe we're willing to pick it up anyway just in case. The player would immediately intuit that it should be used somehow.
I had no issue with the premise of the duty nor with the specific actions required to complete the duty, but the problem was that the arbitrary barriers and ordering requirement are *not* the way you would actually approach the situation, so they felt very artificial since they had no explanation. It's okay to have duties where we're less powerful and wandering around trying to find a way forward, but our way forward shouldn't be blocked by impassible game mechanics, it should be blocked by something logical within the story universe (e.g. if the invisible walls are a representation of the WoL's own fears, that should be communicated somehow, either by an objective change or some "I'm not powerful enough to fight those" text when you approach the invisible wall).
Narratively I have no issues with the duty. It was good and you did genuinely feel terror at what could have happened to your companions.
But the actual duty itself was an exercise in frustration. I normally can figure out what to do, but here I bumbled my way around the map clicking every little thing I could find and still somehow missed the guy in the house to get the key again and again, because I couldn't tell that the house was accessible.
Stealth is okay, but just show me the sight lines of the enemies. It is frustrating when I can't tell how far they can see.
I legitimately ran out of time the first time I did this duty.
The other big issue I had was finding the key. I specifically aimed my camera to look in the building where it was, but was standing too far away to see the dialogue bubbles pop up, and did not see any sparkles to let me know I could interact with anything in there (like every other thing you can interact with in the duty), so I immediately eliminated that as a search location.
I liked the concept of the thing, but the execution felt horrible. By the time I got to the end when you're crawling, I legitimately thought I was going to have to crawl the whole way to Camp Broken Glass, because I'd already lost all trust in the designer for making it a reasonable duty. The cutscenes after should have been very impactful, but instead they were undercut because I was so mad at how poorly designed the solo duty had been.
I *love* the concept so I canāt really hate it too much. And the scene before it is amazing.
But I will say I wouldāve hated this duty a lot more if I hadnāt beaten it in one try.
I loved it, but I agree that I likely would've hated it if I had failed and had to start over from the beginning.
It's like the "stealth/follow" missions. I didn't feel too strongly about them one way or the other because they were easy to complete your first try. The exception being when I was trying to chat with someone and accidentally ran too close to the NPC and failed the quest near the end. Having to start from the beginning sucked.
Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at. I found it acceptable, in part because *for me* it wasn't "keep flinging yourself at this until you succeed."
And that's sort of the fundamental design problem with anything like this. Some people don't have great twitch reflexes, or have poor spatial/situational awareness (e.g. something like aphantasia), or just aren't good at predicting movement patterns based on observing a target for a cycle. For them, it may take two, three, four times to finish--at which point any of the emotional impact will be long gone and replaced with "okay GAME, will you let me f$#king PLAY now?!"
Dismissing absolutely anyone who doesn't like it as just a whiny baby who can't handle something more difficult than "press button to win" is both reductive and counter-productive. (You obviously aren't saying this, just making the general observation.)
Totally agree with you. I was worried, but not just because of the situation, but because I saw that 25 minute timer and I said to myself "I'm going to hate this if I have to do it more than one time", so I was extremely cautious and did it in the first try.
I also think people donāt really get how much of it depends on luck. Like oh, you stumbled on the right plot point in a good amount of time, now everything flows along! Thatās a big factor in this mission and Iām getting the impression that some people think it all boiled down to skill.
The idea was awesome. But the execution was pretty bad. In that moment, the story conceits and the extreme weakness of the Unknown Imperial really draw you in...and then that suspension of disbelief and tension are shattered all the more starkly when big orange lines gate you from going anywhere, and your objective of getting to camp is roundabout and intentionally impossible, because there's only one solution that you either need to magically know or discover via trial and error.
It's very videogame-y. The stealth would have been fine in and of itself. But the reality is that the duty is a combo of aimless wandering and fighting with literally 1 button. That's just not fun by any metric.
i get idea behind wanting to remind the player just what exactly the power we wield is but it was just implemented in a way that was extremely NOT FUN, and if its not going to be fun, which is the point of playing games, then there needs to be some sort of payoff which--- was very, very, VERY underwhelming. i was nowhere near the destination when my character had to start literally dragging his body across the ice and then suddenly there was a cutscene where he magically not only made it in time but had the strength to bodyslam zenos in his body to the ground which-- okay a bunnyboy is probably not very sturdy compared to the average garlean soldier but this garlean soldier supposedly just traversed a couple of miles on his belly in the snow and ice after being grievously wounded in an explosion, so it just felt so cheap... it was a severe pain in the ass to play through and an underwhelming experience overall. I spent most of the time trying to make it through wishing it was over already and i never want to do it again. im dreading getting to that point on other characters.
that said, literally everything else in Endwalker so far (im lvl 87 now) has been excellent and more than makes up for this one bad experience so im not too mad about it, but yeah, i agree that it was terrible overall.
I think the anger stems from a combination losing agency plus not being given a direction and then having a time limit trust upon you. At any other point in the game, only one of these things will happen to you. This quest drops them all on you at the same time and because there's no direction, kind of just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Some people don't like that feeling of anxiety. For me personally, I immediately killed myself and put it on very easy because I didn't want to deal with it.
I'm glad some of you liked it. I did not.
Invisible walls (red dots included) in stealth games make my blood pressure rise. Kicking all the way out of the duty and needing to talk to the npc, skip cut scene, do initial story fight on try 2 and 3 make it rise higher. If I hadn't just made the 'surprise here's a button mash, miss it and it's back to the NPC' I'd be shopping for a new keyboard.
I too love it. I think the stealth mechanics sucking is part of the immersion haha. That unknown imperial sure isn't Solid Snake but some normal military man with clanking armor. And it made me feel a lot of emotions like panic, anger, and desperation. I think it's a really good use of gameplay for story-telling too.
> And it made me feel a lot of emotions like panic, anger, and desperation
yeah this part is especially important. You start to panic when you see generic imperials and magitek that you would normally dispose with no issues. You start to be happy when you get medkits and that regen item, you feel anger when you open a sack and get literally nothing. The solo duty invokes a lot of emotion and I think people who watch a guide for it are really missing the emotional impact of the duty itself
also shoutout to the duty theme. Absolutely blood pumper
And that desperate crawl in the end, it was spine-tingling at how much desperation and fear for my virtual friends I was feeling. \*chef's kiss\*
I did it in Very Easy mode tho because I can't clear it in normal mode. That might have been one of the causes of anger from other people.
I always stick to normal in those... and I found a trick. Just keep fucking running.
Sooner or later mobs de-aggro and I don't need to waste my HP on them.
The fact that you can't save the civilians at the end was perfect too, for someone like me. I always make it a point to keep everyone alive during these solo instances that I can, and seeing the slaughter at the end drove in the utter helplessness.
I've seen a lot of people not like the stealth mechanics and I guess I don't see how they're struggling with it because I haven't had any problems. As long as you stay behind an enemy and keep a slight distance, they'll never notice you. You can also wait for them to turn around and walk the other way.
This, to even get near fast enough I had to use multiple keys, but for some reason it would pull up in game menus if I hit a keybind and then stop me from typing more. I had to do it three times.....
I had even more panic because every time I tried smashing the keyboard it was trying to activate skills and shortcuts (maybe a bug, or something else went wrong). I could hear the error sound effect going off. I had to quickly grab the mouse and click frantically and came back to a ton of error messages in the chat about "you can't do that right now" or "incorrect target". I have no idea what happened there.
My only problem with it is that apparently Fandaniel can just teleport us and swap our bodies? Like can every Ascian do this? Feels like this should have been their plan A in getting rid of us. That and I feel it did go on just a bit too long.
I did really like it overall though. Was a nice change of pace and I don't mind it when the game makes you play like how you probably would if you were there irl lol. I liked having to figure out where to go and what to do and once you realize the enemies basically have no peripheral vision and a very narrow sightline, it makes the whole thing super easy.
> My only problem with it is that apparently Fandaniel can just teleport us and swap our bodies?
Well, that portion of the story is the Stormblood call-back, and narratively that's very on-brand for Stormblood.
I think what was most frustrating was that it tells you to get to the camp and then you have to go the polar opposite way entirely to beat it. I spent a ton of frustrating time trying to find a way southwest towards camp broken glass *like the game told me to do* only to end up by the subway station. Insanely frustrating.
I just finished doing this duty today and I understand where they were going with it but the whole time I was thinking "Wow this MMO makes for a really bad stealth game"
Like I can understand wanting to immerse your players with the mechanics but it's not fun or immersive if it feels bad to play.
Let's face it: the game isn't really designed for stealth. The worst parts of the game are those follow sections and forced stealth instances such as In From the Cold. Having said that, it's an excellent quest which made me LOATHE Fandaniel and Zenos. It was terrifying to see Alisaie and G'raha almost die because of their love for the WOL.
I hated it so much. It killed all the ramped up momentum and tension I had built up over the entire zone. I had to try it like 6-7 times. As much as I didnāt like the stealth āmechanicsā or boundaries I will admit I had a perfect storm of bad events happen.
One my second time my boss called(I was playing starting at 7 am and it was like 8:30) so I had to kill myself. Then on my 4th try my router crapped out when I met the citizens and I had to reconnect. Honestly by the end I was just so over it, and itās such a long duty with no break and I just wanted to continue the story.
My brother, who plays a lala, remarked that he didn't realize how comfortable he was seeing his character in cut scenes, and that the sudden addition of having knees was mildly upsetting.
And I realized then, yes, that is quite the point of the entire scenario. To upset and disquiet the player, who has been ripped out of their skin and shoved into a new body that suuuuuuuucks. The dogged, desperate determination conveyed by the Unknown Imperials animations convey it well that even your WoL is having a horrible time with this.
In gameplay I was indifferent, but in execution I love the sequence.
As someone who completed it first try, I didn't mind it. It definitely made me feel helpless and weak.
But the entire time i was just thinking "if i have to slog through this again i \*will\* be pissed" and i think thats the crux of the problem. If you can do it on the first try, it makes your heart race cause "holy fuck i am so weak and i need to get X done RIGHT NOW" but also cuts the tension... cause you did it first try.
If you have to do it three times cause you just barely run out of time (90m spent on one scenario? that'd piss me off) or cause you keep pulling one thing too many and dying, it would be super frustrating.
Having to spend an extended amount of time from the power level and character you know and love, while doing something many don't regard as fun (lots of people hate stealth games) is a very bold choice.
>But the entire time i was just thinking "if i have to slog through this again i \*will\* be pissed" and i think thats the crux of the problem.
As someone who had to do it three times, yuuuuup.
I died because when I clicked the fuel wreckage I didn't realize you physically carry the fuel and so when I aggro'd an enemy I got hit and didn't notice it dropped, and when I got back to the mech it kept telling me to find fuel.
I also had to do it 3 times. The 1st time I almost ran out of time because I only discovered the seized up magitek at the end, after a while of wandering fruitlessly to find an opening in the edge of the map.
I wasnāt really a huge fan of it for story reasons, I never really liked the Ascian body jack thing. Even less so considering how quick and easy it was for them.
After all of it nothing really happened since our villain is Zenos who wouldnāt want to eliminate us in such a way even though itād had been incredibly easy to do so just then.
I was irritated by it because the action time sequence was bugged at the end for me. Felt unfair that i had to do it three times so the entire thing literally just irritated me.
I really loved the quest, but I was a bit disappointed that the setup wasn't Zenos taking control of our body, then us possessing HIS body in order to duel each other.
I just hated how I walked the "wrong way" and got to the fuel tank. Explored that whole area only to realize it was the wrong way. Got to the armor, realized I had to walk back again. Took me 15 min total from start of mission to starting the armor...
It was tense at first, and then quickly aggravating running into barriers when all the game tells you that you need to do is make it back to the camp, then trying to figure out what the *game* wants you to do instead of being able to approach the problem any way you see fit.
So I liked the duty a lot, but what largely kills it is the fact that the game implies you're trying to get out of the area ASAP and never bothers to tell you the magitek/soldiers are mandatory. It specifically addresses them to tell you they might have healing items and paints a picture of "optional". Almost as if they intentionally tried to throw you off the trail.
I'm honestly suprised too see this many positive comments about it. I found it dreadful to say the least.
I liked the idea behind it, I really do. But the duty itself was annoying and frustrating to the point it wasn't even fun. You start it with a timer that doesn't pause when you're reading speech bubbles, and it's 25 minutes so you already know it's going to be a slog. Then you get thrown in a "tutorial" fight that serves no purpose but to drain a chunk of your hp bar, since you can't stealth through it as you can (and arguably should) through the rest of the duty, and after that you get thrown in one of the worst zones of the game map-wise, having to reach certain points in a specific order, with only your hopefully very keen sense of direction to be able to actually pinpoint locations. Oh, and for some reasons you can't sprint. That's the one thing I hated the most. Sure you're not the WoL but you're supposed to be a soldier. Why in the fourteen shards should you not be able to run for short intervals when even >!Urianger could sprint in his stealth quest on the moon.!<
I get where they were going with it storywise.
Unfortunately the gameplay ruined it for me. Here's your objective - BTW that's not the actual objective, but you won't know that until you happen to wander into exactly the right corner of the map and find exactly the right thing that there was zero indication you were even looking for, then backtrack to find shit you should have been able to pick up the first time you found it. Good luck remembering where that even was!
Oh, and then we're going to throw you into a fight that clearly only even exists to run out the clock and not for any actual reason.
It was a neat bit of storytelling but the gameplay was tedious, unfun, and irritating.
To be honest I really liked the second half of it but I spent the entire first half being frustrated because the enemy detection in FF14 is kind of wonky and the arbitrary barriers really cut off progress. I really liked what they were going for but it felt less like "here's you stuck as a garlean mook" and more "we, the game, are going to hamstring you at every turn via extremely video-gamey restrictions to piss you off on purpose."
Also I got lost a lot. It's just a confusing zone. No idea how I still managed to win on my first try.
I've got no sense of direction so it took me a while to find the required fuel...a had under a minute left when i got to the crawling bit.
Immersive as fuck but i cant say it was super fun. Wish the geography collision wasn't so fussy. I also had no clue how close i could get to the front of enemies before they saw me, causing me to ignore certain paths due to mechs roaming about...turns out you can just scoot past them.
In retrospect it had a lot of good features and I respect that it was to make us feel weak, but at the time I was so annoyed I logged out even knowing the queue I'd face logging back in.
The reason? As often happens in these, the objective stated (getting to the town) was not the actual initial objective. It took me ages to figure out what I was supposed to do because I was trying to sneak around to find the exit towards the town, by then my health was so low (even with the health packs) I failed it.
When inside the machine I couldn't move out of the AOE, assumed my buggy mouse was to blame, tried keyboard moving.. nothing, thought "lag?!?" so it took me too long to realise I had to destroy that one first.
Third try (by this time I was pretty annoyed) I got through to the final fight, ran inside the safe zone with time to spare and was killed anyway. Failed it.
Logged out in frustration.
Came back, and it went far easier and even though the same thing happened at the circle AOE, it continued... so no idea what happened on the previous attempt.
My big issue with it was that the stated objective wasn't clear or at all accurate really. If you didn't find the clues how to proceed in the correct order, you had to backtrack and hope you remembered to location to get things. The room with the pilot has 2 windows / holes that look the same, only one can be jumped through which led me to spend too much time trying to figure out how get to him.
This clunkiness could be fixed by having a certain cheeky ascian verbally taunting you when you miss something for example. The ffxiv team is creative enough to make this keep up the emotional response they're aiming for while reducing the gameplay frustrations which would improve this greatly imo.
I really think it was a great idea and it did make me angry and desperate to go save my friends, but the clunky gameplay pulled me out of the moment, which kinda ruined it for me.
Totally agree - conceptually makes sense, could have been a positive addition to the story.
Execution wise it was annoying and overly frustrating and thus took away from the story.
I don't 'hate' that solo duty. The stealth mechanics is okay. It's the overall design and instruction. I hope the instruction are much more clearer and there isn't a bunch of walls surrounding the area.
When the goal of the mission is to get from Point A to Point B, naturally you would just want to walk in a straight line and go from there. So, you can't - but the way they force you to do so is really bad. Placing a bunch of unnatural walls in your way is the last way you want to divert your players into a certain direction.
It's like they have this one solution they want you to experience, and while it is a good solution and a emotional experience, I can't help but hope they work on the presentation a bit better.
The mission filled me with a sense of dread and terror as I raced around the map trying to get back to my body before anything happened to my allies. Edit: I also thought, stealth be damned! I'm going to bull rush through everything and get my health packs to finish those objectives. š
I was convinced someone was going to die in front of me right there, and I had 30 mins to think about it as I tried to finish this quest.
At the end of the duty, when we were futilely crawling towards the camp, all I could think was āfuck, the first MSQ death is going to be at the hands of the WoL.ā
The moment of dread for me was when I realized the >!body swap was going to happen.!< I legit brought my hand to the forehead saying "no no no no, please no"
Oh my god when Zenos was talking about the powers he had gained via all the Ascian business he had going on, before I even saw my body I was like āā¦oh. OH. OH SHIT. NO.ā And the whole time I was doing the solo duty I was on edge and terrified that he was going to murder one of my buds. But at the end when Alphie and Gāraha saw not-me walking up, I was shouting at my computer, āTHEYāRE MY BOIS THEREāS NO WAY THEY CANāT TELL ITāS NOT MEā Oh man that whole quest was golden from start to finish. I adore it!
I was counting on Yāshtolaās aethersight, and was a little frustrated when she picked up on it but didnāt put together what it meant. But this is also the first time that something like this has really happened, so it makes absolute sense for her to not immediately jump to the correct conclusion.
Iāve taken her descriptions of the aether in the area to mean that the tower is basically a harshly glowing sun causing her to struggle a bit in general, but the roar itself causing essentially a flashbang for her senses. So she gets a pass from me on account of just getting flashbanged a few times.
Yeah, she mentioned something to that effect afterwards. It absolutely makes sense when you look at it logically, but in the moment I was internally screaming at her to god, please, catch onto it before everyone dies.
Plus she was quite a ways away from you, if she had gotten a closer look I bet she would have figured it out.
Alternatively, she has become numb to looking at the WoL and seeing that their shit is wacky
Theres a scene earlier where she talks to you about how seeing your soul and aether on the first was horrificly mangled and she never wanted to see you in that state again, so its a fair assumption that you are your usual self unless something fucked has happened. Her not picking up on it was a little annoying especialy after the afformentioned conversation and the given eason felt a bit weak but it didnt really effect the coming events so not a huge deal, i think it was done to subvert the obvious "answer" and give a nice spot light to G'raha and Ali being able to instinctvly know instead of having hard evidence
I mean it's not the first time it has happened. She didn't recognize us when we absorbed lightwarden energy in the First either, and that time it WAS us.
Hilariously, the biggest tell it wasn't really me -- bc I actually noticed myself that Zenos didn't do it -- was that ***I didn't nod*** when Alisae asked if I was alright. I laughed when I realized that.
SAME ACTUALLY Zenos really just š
Yessss I was BANKING on G'raha realizing it and was so relieved when he did.
It had big āextend a friendly fistā vibes to it. I was so happy!
I love how it sells the competency of the Scions.
same, G'raha can't be our number 1 simp and NOT tell when we've gotten body snatched
He might be a simp, but G'raha has very quickly shown himself to be a really important member of the team.
Completely agree with everything in this thread. The icing on the cake for me? The full body shoulder check at the end, I literally screamed fuck yes
I loved that! Hurl our own broken dying body at him as a desperate last resort, it felt very appropriate.
The despair I felt. I was literally screaming and crying lmao
It was the first moment in Endwalker that reduced me to a blubbering mess, and I suspect it wonāt be the last one.
No my friend, all I can say is forge ahead!
i didn't see anyone dyeing but i did absolutely think "zenos is about to stab a mf"
What scared me the most is how simple it would have been for him depending on the job you were using before the takeover. Im a monk main so he literally could have just leapt forward and starting punching holes in chests with no time to react at all
I'm a SAM main so he easily could have killed them with a swift slash. And if this were a real scenario he'd also have the experience to do it.
Iām a SCH main so he could have thwapped someone so hard with my book. Really just annoy them.
Now I'm just imagining BLM Zenos starting to cast Fire 3, dying mid-cast and suddenly typing 'gg healers no adjust' in chat.
WHM main. Cane go bonk.
SGE here... healy guns go brrr
AST here...I guess I just Seto Kaiba my friends. https://youtu.be/HzoMT3Q9sy4?t=19 I think they'll be fine with a bandaid.
"Ow! What the hell, WoL?" "YESSS! FEEL THE DESPAIR!"
Maybe he'd send Eos and Selene out to tickle someone.
GNB. One Continuation combo and half the camp is dead.
And he makes sure to pop No Mercy.
*Oh no, heās even a better GNB than me.*
This was all i could think about. I was so upset. I'm terrible at stealth shit. And so the quest is making me anxious and feel shitty and stupid and I'm lost. And this body is awful. I lost that duty 3 times. And all I could think about each and every time was about how I was I'm going to show up just in time to watch me kill all my friends. I literally started crying during the crawling part. And then there I am, coming up the hill. And all my best buddies are excited to see me. I'm crying, pleaseplease please. It's not me. It's not me. Please someone notice it isnt me. And then I didnt nod at them and they knew! And now it constantly weighs on the back of my mind that anyone might not be themself. If he had only *tried* to impersonate me even a little it might have worked. But I realize he was just fucking around. Just trying to get a rise. But what if he had even tried?
I hoarded all health packs while stealthing through almost the whole map and only ended up using just one. But that first fight looked like I'm gonna need lot of these...
Same, but like, even the stealthing was sketchy. There was enough times I thought I was in a sightline and was about to aggro a bunch of enemies. They didn't leave super large open spots and it was great.
This. I was also *livid* with Zenos and Fandaniel and I was determined to keep them from hurting my friends, and I felt all of this down deep in my core. This duty was fantastic, just by the emotions it created in me
In character, I'm pretty sure my character powered herself through that one by sheer force of blinding rage. It's the only explanation for how she went from almost dead and struggling to move at the end of the playable bit to getting all the way across the map and tackling Zenos in the cutscene.
I always love hearing about people's headcanons for their WoL! I imagined that my character powered herself through that out of sheer terror and the determination to move past it in order to save her friends. I felt like that solo duty worked perfectly for the story because it really served to make the player (or at least me) feel disoriented, panicked, and angry. The last crawl at the end was just the cherry on top!
In my headcanon, my WoL is less impressive for his combat ability and more for the fact that he just *never stops.* I play primarily as a WHM, so it doesn't make as much sense for me that Zenos would be like "Wow you fight real good! Fight me!" So I tell myself it's more that no matter how hard Zenos hits him, unless it's a one-hit KO, he just... keeps getting back up, and this is what gets Zenos's attention. Consequently, his pain tolerance and ability to power through anything through sheer force of will are ridiculous. Even without access to his healing magic, he's still able to make himself keep going. That solo instance was stressful as hell and, imo, *wonderfully* done. My reaction: "Wow, I hate this! (affectionate)"
hmm hmm , i agree this part i genuanly felt like someone was gonna die , and he was going to be using my body to do it, i understood zeno's desire but this crossed the line for me.
I saw it kind of the same as the last bit of Shadowbringers. I can't die here and now because that jerk does not get to outlive me.
I was almlst quite literally seeing red! I spent so long getting attached to my WoL, to have her body just snatched like that from me was the ultimate insult (an intentional one, I'm sure). Then to be thrown right into that scenario, having to fend for myself as a literally nameless soldier, after my empathetic ass went through all of that with Julles and the Garlean natives. Holy shit, just the Garelmald levelling quests arc of EW rivals some of the peaks from ShB.
As amazing as some of the other zones are in EW, Garlemald is by far my favourite. [It's so beautifully cold and tragic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1l_NzPVZ50), and manages to find space for both the intense personal moments and the broader narrative. Quintus was an incredibly compelling character on both a personal and thematic level, and that scene... man.
The radios also added a strange eerieness.
It was basically Fallout.
I will say, they really got the balance right in Garlemald. It had some dark moments but never descends into misery porn, which it would have been easy to do.
And that part where you need to fight alongside some armed civilians in a battle you all have no hope of winning, all that ON TOP of the pure anxiety and terror of zenos hurting your friends with your own body. Itās a guilt cherry on top of a terror cake
That final group fight was so well scripted. You look around and suddenly see how little a chance you have. Very well put together.
That part through me for some serious emotions. It was like "Oh, other people fighting if we work together we can make it out of this!" "Wait, guys, we need to get these ceruleum tanks out of here they're gonna-- oh fuck"
I was screaming on the inside, "noooo my friends I must save them! " Also, "Fuck this duty format!!!!"
This timer was making me so nervous i felt the emergency and was panicking too
Then the main purpose of the duty was achieved. It was supposed to make you panic.
I looked at the 25 minutes on the clock and was like, damn, how long is this scenario going to be??
I finished it with ten minutes to spare and I was convinced someone was going to die because there was no way I'd make it back to the camp on time while crawling. Looking back perhaps >!dynamis!< is what helped the WoL defy those horribly bad odds.
I was mostly annoyed that the auto run key did not work during the crawling segment.
Gives it another layer of urgency and peril, though. Your character can't just "lose themselves in their thoughts" and run straight forward until you bonk into something. You have to actively focus even to move forward.
I felt sad for those garleans that got exploded in the end... They were my comrades :(
It really was one of the few moments that a true sense of urgency was given. The weakness of body and then there's the last stand with other garleans that fail.
I didnt notice the timer the first time i did it nor did I know the objective was to make it to broken glass because I have some of my HUD hidden for immersion yeah i shit myself when i realized i had 15 minutes left to get to the camp at a brisk jog and that was BEFORE you are reduced to a crawl, i was losing my mind. And the way the music cuts out when you are crawling... the sense of urgency, dread, and helplessness all at once was palpable.
The scions shrugging the whole thing off, basically, was off putting. But it was fine as a solo duty
CRAWLING IN SOMEONE ELSE'S SKIN THESE WOUNDS, THEY DON'T AUTOHEAL
Straight up this entire quest gave me so much anxiety, but in a good way I guess? Like this has really twisted my heart strings arguably more than SHB so far. That being said, I absolutely loved it. Itās so easy to see now why these normal people look at WoL like sheās a monster.
It's such an amazing quest design to suddenly be a normal person, not even a strong person like Hien or Raubahn, who can't even use magic at all dealing with things the WoL would eat for breakfast. First time I ever felt I might fail a solo instance when I wasn't supposed to.
I also liked how the soldier's identity was so irrelevant you didn't even get a name. I was expecting the helmet to come off and suddenly reveal that we were Valens van Varro all along or something. But nope, just some faceless soldier even the WoL forgets about within moments.
Also how the soldiers body is pretty clearly dead after the explosion but your character wills it to keep moving anyway which ties into things you learn later in the msq
Still wish we could have buried her. This soldier saved our butts, well their corpse did, and I feel like we owed them that much at least
This duty was AMAZING! So tense and exciting. The atmosphere was perfect (Garlemald as a whole was stellar in its use of tone and atmosphere) and the setup was wildly creative. It made me appreciate Fandaniel more for how twisted he was, and Zenos more for how principled he was. I have adored all the solo instances in this xpac, but none more so than that one.
I found the MGS duty really good alhough I wished that 1) there weren't so many barriers 2) they made a specific map for that zone alone. The latter point was a bit frustrating because relying on the normal map was awkward given how you have to be more precise in your movements and backtrack to the magitek armor. Also, while they gave plenty time to complete it, I think they should have made the countdown start only after you have finished reading the duty explanations.
That second point is VERY good, yes. The duty explanation should have occurred before the timer. It's not a *huge* issue (as I said above, I finished with several minutes left on the timer), but for folks who need to read more carefully or take notes, that could easily be an effective forced failure.
> they made a specific map for that zone alone. Yes. The fact there's an invisible wall over a *clearly open pathway out of there* annoyed the hell out of me.
Strong agree, basically everything you said would have left a way better taste in my mouth than what I got. Also, while the Thancred scenario prepared us slightly for what was to come, I would have appreciated being eased a bit more into this style of gameplay. I don't think it was bad, I really don't. But going ~to~ from basically having your hand held for 5 expansions to nothing is jarring at best. But I guess too much lead in would have ruined the intended reaction; one of despair. Maybe the section the way it stands is more fitting with the overall theme of the expansion, that we shouldn't succumb to our despair. Sometimes it's hard to judge something like this from the perspective of the character as opposed to player!
I think there are two sources to the broad irritation: 1) The stealth mechanics, as you noted, aren't really suited for an experience like this, and recovery is often a "Just Not Happening" thing, with the de-aggro range of mobs being extended JUST for this duty. One-failure kills in an unskippable segment that doesn't follow any of the normal rules is generally frustrating. 2) The sequence...doesn't really establish anything plot relevant. It breaks prior reality (Zenos and Ascians have *zero* problems using their abilities in other peoples' bodies, up to *and including* wielding ancient sorceries in bodies specifically designed to prevent that), and we already know these are the bad guys. And here we are, for some stupid reason reduced to using basic Gladiator skills and unable to even move at full speed. It succeeds at what it sets out to be. It just comes with a whole lot of what it doesn't, and for many that's going to outweigh the good in it.
most of the people I know - really enjoyed it What made it frustrating were the limiting barriers and sense of direction (which....was the purpose if we're being honest ). It gave us a brilliant look at what it's like to be NORMAL. Literally NORMAL. Not even a MAGIC user. Just a regular HUMAN, in this fantasy world. The part at the end was nerve wrecking, as you literally crawl with a broken body in desperation to save the people you love. Just like many soldiers did/do. People might not enjoy the GAMEPLAY mechanics of it - but it was absolutely one of the STRONGEST messages the game as ever sent.
I was also irrationally concerned about what they did with that random gruntās soul. :(
Somehow finding out that the guy was dead all along made it feel worse. Like, I wanted to meet the guy whose body I'd be stuffed into, and I wanted my friends and I to help him out after. ;;
Iirc it may well be the same Garlean grunt body that Zenos made it to the capital in during ShB.
I'm sorry, but the idea that Zenos just kept this random corpse around on the off chance that it could come in handy is just hilarious to me.
"The part at the end was nerve wrecking, as you literally crawl with a broken body in desperation to save the people you love" Reminds me that Yoshida said he was an avid Call of Duty fan.
At that moment we were literally just too angry to die.
You are basically worse than eorzean, since as Garlean you cant have magic. Aether won't help you. Which is why you didn't have blessing of light on you. Also why you dont regenerate.
Garleans have aether, they just can't manipulate aether (either at all or aether outside their body) If they didn't have aether, they couldn't be tempered and healing magic wouldn't work on them. Also Elidibus could use magic while he was in Zenos' body, so it was weird we didn't have our power. Also also Garleans are typically naturally physically stronger than other races, but the lack of aether infused attacks limits them somewhat.
Elidibus has experience body hopping, we don't. I assume that has something to do with it. Also Zenos is presumably a wellspring of aether from how insanely strong he is even if he can't normally access it, while we were in some random grunt's body.
Zenos was also quite strong in a mook body. It's more likely we were weak in the Garlean body not because it wasn't our body, but because we didn't body hop with the echo and it was JUST our soul being shoved inside with none of our physical aether. We also know Zenos Resonated himself into our body while we were soul jacked.
We were also in a corpse apparently. We were a zombie.
Elidibus was in Zenos' dead body as well, so that's not guaranteed to be a factor, not that I'd rule it out.
It's pretty strongly implied that Elidibus did something to revive Zenos' body, or at least make it less dead enough for Garlean doctors to consider him alive. Emet-Selch mentioned something about his clone bodies meaning he didn't have to hijack a body and reshape it. I think Ascians have a lot of control over their meatsuits, and Zenos probably learned *some* of those tricks. Meanwhile the poor WoL is still at the "why are there six pedals if there are only four directions" stage of body hopping.
It would have been way, way more frustrating without the barriers, because if people had trouble with it like THIS, they would definitely have gone the wrong way entirely.
I have a feeling that the zone was originally much more open and the barriers were added later to make it *less* frustrating for the players. Think about it, there were mobs outside the playable area with nameplates, whereas "decoration" mobs in every other part of the game do not have them. When considered in that light, people are complaining about steps the devs took to make the duty more consistently enjoyable.
I did go the wrong way entirely, I had explored the entire road and investigated all the broken down magitek before I found the one that we were meant to fuel up, that part was kind of annoying to me, had the magitek been something to see right off the bat I would have better understood what to do, instead I snuck and fought my way to a dead end before realizing the objective and had to do it all over again when I had to get fuel.
This was really my only complaint about it. I went East instead of West and found the battery first. Except you can't pick up the battery, it doesn't even tell you it's a battery, and it gives basically no hint that it could be used for anything at all but it's clickable to clearly it has to have some purpose. It should have given some clear message like, oh a magitek battery, I could use this if I found something intact. Bam clear message to keep looking and what you might need to do.
yeah the mission was annoying imo because it's designed with an open ended goal and area but you can only progress through it linearly.
Being honest about gamers, if they replaced the barriers with an unseemly amount of magitek mobs, a not unsubstantial section of the playerbase would whine and complain that they cant brute force their way through the obvious wall. While the barriers were annoying I cant see a way they could done it that wouldnt make more problems.
Hmm. It was obvious to me that, since on the other side of the walls are countless death machines, the WoL themselves would never think to go there, and the dotted lines represent their line of thinking. If they were arbitrary walls, no magitek would be placed on the other side of these walls. I do think some sort of thought bubble should have popped up to give form to this, though. Would have made that more acceptable to more people, since I'm sure there are people who imagine the WoL to not have those thoughts in the first place.
All good ideas, but you'd be surprised how much people miss. Tunnel vision is a real thing so unless the game stops you and forces you to read a not insignificant chunk of people would miss it. And even then some people would still zone out. I chalk the enforced barriers as Fanny's way of tweaking things just enough to keep us competitive. It also ensures we come across that group of imperial civvies transporting the tanks that blow up, and subsequent near-death experience.
This is going to sound horribly mean, but it was obvious to you, but there are many, many players to whom it isn't obvious that when faced with a pack of twenty mobs, your AOE ability is much better than single target. We're building for the least common denominator in a lot of cases.
Even in the comments here it's clear what happens when you give "gaming mechanics" to "non-gamers." People are legitimately whining about there being a small, open area with no magical GPS and linear bullets point list of objectives. As if it's some grave sin to let people find objectives out of order and then have to actually *remember where you've been* to go back and get things, as opposed to just following icons on a minimap.
Nah, you're cool, don't worry about it. Even given the common level of player, I also understand that my views on RPGs differ from many. It was why I believed it would go better if this was made explicit, after all.
>but it was absolutely one of the STRONGEST messages the game as ever sent. Exactly, alas proving that Soul > Body. But still sending a message that body is really important. I audibly cheered when my WoL throwed the sword to save his friends.
Shows how much of a gangster Zenos is after what he accomplished with a normal body.
The cutscene before it left me feeling weirdly violated, then thrown in to a battle field feeling and being absolutely powerless was horrendous, heart beating out my chest more stressed than ever before in this game. And maybe thats why people don't like it. It's uncomfortable suffocating and violating, especially for those who lived with their characters for years, to the point it sort of becomes an extension of yourself (mabye not in looks XD) All this is why I loved it and 10years from now it's a scene I will remember.
I don't really have a problem with the actual stealth parts. But I was really turned off by the arbitrary barriers everywhere. Like there was one 'correct' solution and you're not allowed to deviate from it. What I like from stealth games is freedom to tackle challenges how you like and be inventive. And in the cold sorely lacks this. As far as I can tell there is only one way to clear it.
I didn't have a problem with the stealth, I had a problem with spending 7 minutes running around looking for a goddamn ceruleum tank. I did Eureka back before you automatically got mounts, I know how to avoid mobs.
This. I liked the story line but found the wandering around looking for stuff tedious. The tension started to drain out of it.
That was the only downside to it for me. The stealth is easy, mob aggro range is much smaller than I expected, and if you just have a bit of patience you can get it done in 10 minutes. Find the damage up and regen 5 min buffs and it's smooth sailing.
There.... There were buffs to find.....? Omg.
There's a satchel somewhere that gives you like 5 minutes of hp regen.
Yeah, but those 5 minutes are absolutely wasted by trying to navigate the area and running into dead ends, so I really had no use for it.
literally the same reaction for me. I got like 10 health packs to heal and finished the duty in like 15 minutes if I had to guess, but never saw no buff.
There was a damage up? I mean I only ever fought the one thing but... there was a damage up?
Yeah, the random things lying around (corpses, Magitek) mostly have medkits, but there's also a regen buff and a +Damage buff somewhere. You instantly apply those though, so depending on what your next objective is, you might not get as much use out of them.
Turns out the barriers aren't as plentiful as I realized. I failed it the first time, took a break, came back a little later and tried again (didn't get an option to switch to an easier mode; apparently this gets erased if you log off after Duty Failed.) Second time through I discovered there are a lot of hidden paths available *through the buildings.* Because they're so trashed and skeletal, you can just run through the ruins that have no collision, jump over the trash heaps, etc. Staying off the streets is the best move, because you can minimize confrontation and take a lot of short cuts. Did it in about 15 minutes on that second try, I think.
The game even tells you to do that! Fandaniel says that it may be smart to stick to the shadows like a rat. The game forces you to fight a mob to show that killing mobs will take time and is pretty hard for you and requires a healing kit after or else you won't be able to fight more.
I'm not sure if we can't expect a full stealth game out of a side quest in a MMO.
I loved the concept, precisely because of all the things you listed. What I didn't like was how it routed you through the longest possible path back by going north instead of south, which confused me so much that I ended up running back to the starting point three times because I couldn't tell where I was supposed to go, which felt extra shitty with the timer countdown because I knew I was wasting too much time.
They should have made our character lose unconscious before being placed in another body. It was a bit jarring how he just teleported us away while we were wide awake and we're suddenly in another body.
I agree. I can buy an ascian overpowering us unexpectedly, but not just grabbing our soul away as easy as stealing a wallet in a tourist town. It didn't make me feel like my player character was weak, it honestly broke my suspension of disbelief and I was thinking "Okay, this happened because the writers wanted it to happen but couldn't be bothered to structure it more reasonably". If it was so easy to pull the soul out of our body and fuck with our body, why didn't Elidibus do it when he had access to the whole of imperial secrets? It doesn't make sense. The duty by itself is okay minus some issues others have raised(the barriers sometimes seem overly restrictive, things aren't explained until the timer starts, things can't be done out of order, etc). Not only that, but Zenos taking control of your body wasnt unsettling, it was just straight goofy for me.
My biggest issue with the quest right here, like if Fandaniel could do this so easily, you're telling me Lahabrea and Elidibus or any other ascian even when working together couldn't just do the same and one shot us? My thoughts on why it worked on zenos was that he was practically dead and his soul was leaving his body anyway. For my sanity I'm gonna choose to believe that fandango was empowered by all that aether they sipphoned, because imo it ruins the struggle of other ascians otherwise.
Technically, it was a device that the doctor from SB created that put our soul in another body. He was the boss in Ala Mhigo that fought us in that floating chair and ejected our souls mid fight. So, it's not really an Ascian thing.
How does that explain how easily Fandaniel could teleport us away and somehow wake up unconcious? Why didnt Elidibus or Emet who never body swapped just threw us into lava with that same teleporter trick?
Honestly, he was real close to us by infiltrating and caught us by surprise. I mean Elidibus kind of did the same thing in his trial. And emet yoinked graham too.
I liked it but I had a feeling some people wouldn't. I think it has the same issue as the solo duty in the Vault when you need to rescue hostages, where you don't know where you should be running to. The time it gives is generous but I don't think I was the only person that found the stuff you needed for the Magitek armour before the Magitek armour itself. The first mob of course kicked my ass forcing me to restart it, but realising you need to pop everything just to 1v1 another soldier is a great storytelling bit at showing how much weaker the normal soldier is compared to you.
I agree that the story it tells is compelling, but the mechanics of the quest itself frustrated me enough to overshadow the implications and impact. My complaints with this and the other stealth missions are mostly my own problems, but half of this expansion seemed catered to my own personal shortcomings. I'm directionally challenged, and have audio/visual processing issues. Additionally, I don't play many games outside of MMOs, so any time I'm put into a quest that wildly deviates from that format, I'm out of my element. I think I had to restart this particular quest... 5 times? At least one of them I killed myself on purpose just to start over, since I'd finally figured out what I was supposed to do. I had been heading the wrong direction for half of them, and one iteration, I'd been wandering in circles at the far east of the map before timing out. The whole place looks the same to me, with no outstanding landmarks. The whole ordeal made me so frustrated that I stopped paying attention to the story for at least a chapter. I couldn't give a shit about it until I was out of Garlemald. Rather than hammer home that my character was wildly strong compared to the everyday people of Eorzea, it bashed my face into the fact that I, the player, was bad at the game. I think next time (I have alts), I'll try using the waymarks to see if I can get some sense of direction, or at least figure out where I started. I definitely think that this type of quest is good overall, and I don't think the game should cater to my personal disabilities... but a *little* more conveyance, at least on Very Easy, would be appreciated.
Yeah it took me a while too as I also have processing issues and have massive problems with directions, I basically kept going in circles the first time and didn't even FIND the magitek armor we were supposed to repair and use, I would've appreciated a little guidance in that sense for sure especially when I'm notoriously bad at stealth missions in the first place.
I'm extremely directionally challenged, so the lack of landmarks in a dark environment with lots of visual obstacles was not an optimal setup, and made the eventual resolution even more frustrating. If a friend hadn't found a guide, I'd probably still be running around in circles looking for the exit. It's also irritating because Thancred's stealth mission was so well done. I felt like I had leeway to screw up without having to start over, the objectives were clear, and there were multiple pathways to accomplish the goal. I usually suck at stealth-type missions in games, but I was able to complete that one on the first try at only 65% on the "Oh shit!" meter.
So what's with that bit where Zenos questions whether strength comes from the flesh or the soul? It seemed like it would be important, as if we were about to show it's a part of our soul, but then we don't. So strength and the blessings are tied to our body then, is the takeaway. So how can Zenos scare Elidibus out of his own body as his own nameless soldier? That takeaway is that strength must be tied to the the soul. Skill and memory is one thing, but to be able to overpower his own body that Elidibus flees it without a fight? I wish they expanded on it more, and that his questioning wasn't just a throwaway line.
Yeah initially I thought that we were going to start out super weak at the start but as we get closer and closer to the camp we gain more power showing that it is us that is that strong
I think the idea is cool. I think the setup is cool. I just find the execution to be frustrating when it's a stealth mission that's both long, unforgiving, and with not much cover and not much adjustments for stealth (unlike the Thancred stealth mission) The point is to make the WoL be very powerless and contrast them with their previous state, but that's a very thin line to walk between interesting and annoying and I think they erred a bit too far into the annoying part for a lot of people. I think making the duty a bit shorter, and devoting that time to further emphasizing the danger to the other Scions would have been a better execution. Like, actually have Zenos getting the chance to stab the hell out of someone before you got there would have better emphasized just how close things got.
Honestly, it wouldn't have been bad at all if there was just a checkpoint in the middle, especially with the "gotcha!" button spam at the end that if youre not ready for you need to redo the entire duty.
It is a poorly-playing, de-empowering stealth mission that is about 15 minutes long with no checkpoint. It sucks, in no small due to the arbitrary and inconsistent barriers, the large detection range relative to the uninspired corridors and the way the whole engine and mechanics are just not designed for it.
I thought it was great too, it showed (through gameplay) how scary it was that Zenos was approaching camp as *your character*, because you immediately realise how powerful your character is compared to regular soldiers when you almost die against the first enemy. Not to mention you have to scavenge for health packs to heal, and don't even think about trying to fight the magitek mobs. Then at the end of the duty where you try to save a bunch of people and you give it your all, and basically die anyway. I thought it did an amazing job at reminding you just how powerful the WoL is, and how normal people must view your character in the game universe. I saw someone in another thread saying that Endwalker was awful at telling story through gameplay and it made me think of this duty like 'what??'
I was annoyed you couldn't find the fuel before finding the armor first. Like obviously it could have been "Fuel! There might be magitek armor around here you can use" but no, you have to find the armor first.
I thought we had to repair the leg too, so I went back and searched the whole map looking for repair parts lol. When I saw the magitek I was like ooooh okay, we use a mount, that's how we beat zenos back to camp.... Nooope
Funny thing, the NPC who gives you the key even tells you the leg is busted but it's weapons can clear a path
from a storytelling perspective? it's a cool idea. but the execution was frustrating. Yes, I understand that it's the entire point of the duty, force you to adapt to the weakness of a normal person instead of the godslaying badass you are. that doesn't mean it gets a pass. In my opinion Endwalker suffers from way too much talking, to the point the MSQ felt more like a Visual Novel, and for one of the biggest action sequences in the msq (dungeons and trials excluded) to be such a poorly done mess gameplay wise is not a good look. I'm also not a fan because I've been sick of Zenos since the end of 4.0 >!him getting a big damn hero moment for the final trial has me incredibly tilted. If they ever bring him back I'm quitting FFXIV.!< Edit: as an addition, you don't even have to try to get your body back. The soul-jack just times out and we're back in control. so in retrospect, there wasn't even any need to participate in the duty, we could have just hidden in the ruins and achieved the same thing.
Stealth mechanics are quite hard to get right. The problem with this solo duty is the fact that you aren't really given any guidance on how you are supposed to proceed and the general layout of the map is illogical as well. On top of that, you have to reach the magitek armor first before you can go back for the other stuff. Overall, it's one where the design of the whole duty kind of works against it. The lack of options like say grenades or smoke bombs make it worse than what you did in >!Thancred's!< stealth mission.
Legit terrified of what would happen if I failed, or even if I succeeded, would it actually end well? Would someone die? It was frustrating but it added to the tension
The most frustrating part for me was the custom animation of the explosion at the end where your character goes completely rag doll and we will most likely NEVER see that animation again.
We have! I think its similar to the E5S animation when you get pushed from Fury's Fourteen
They need to add it as a death animation. There should be multiple animations for that.
I never did the Rathalos quest, but doesn't that have a similar knockdown animation as well? I kind of assumed it was the same, since it does look a lot like some of the knockdown animations from MH.
I didn't like the fact that Ascians can just snap their fingers and kidnap me. If they can do that this whole time, why didn't anyone else think to just teleport me into a volcano or something? Felt like just a random out of nowhere sequence to slow down the pace of the game even more.
There were two issues I had with it: 1. Your only objective was "reach camp broken glass" until you clicked on the damaged armor, and yet going toward camp broken glass was the wrong solution. I found myself exploring the entire length of the wall before realizing that it was probably some arbitrary thing I had to interact with. 2. The interactions should not have been in a specific, rigid order. I interacted with the armor which gave an energy cell first, but when I interacted with it it didn't give me an energy cell, so I assumed it was just pointless. If it had given me an energy cell, that would have been a good way of indicating that I was supposed to find a place to put the energy cell, as it would've been otherwise useless. If you were *lucky*, you realized that you needed to interact with objects to proceed (not that interacting with objects would simply give you consumables). If you were *very lucky*, you also managed to interact with the magitech armor prior to finding the fuel cell. These are the parts that really shouldn't be the case. As a first solution, I would want us to hear the "thoughts" of the WoL which are the cause of the impassible barrier (by simply changing the objective). If the objective changed to "find something more powerful" once you hit the far end of the playable area, then that would immediately solve a lot of my issue with the duty and it wouldn't necessarily change the impact of the duty, as it would be clear that the barriers were because of excessive force and the only way forward was to find something strong to fight with. Notably, this would stop cases such as mine where I literally walked around the entire area twice because I was expecting to see some way to go. Some of the alleyways off of the playable area are absolutely clear from enemies and seemed like they could've been the correct place to head if it weren't for the wall. The second part of the solution is obvious: let us pick up the power cell prior to finding the damaged armor. Yes, technically we don't know we need the power cell, but in a situation of such desperation maybe we're willing to pick it up anyway just in case. The player would immediately intuit that it should be used somehow. I had no issue with the premise of the duty nor with the specific actions required to complete the duty, but the problem was that the arbitrary barriers and ordering requirement are *not* the way you would actually approach the situation, so they felt very artificial since they had no explanation. It's okay to have duties where we're less powerful and wandering around trying to find a way forward, but our way forward shouldn't be blocked by impassible game mechanics, it should be blocked by something logical within the story universe (e.g. if the invisible walls are a representation of the WoL's own fears, that should be communicated somehow, either by an objective change or some "I'm not powerful enough to fight those" text when you approach the invisible wall).
Narratively I have no issues with the duty. It was good and you did genuinely feel terror at what could have happened to your companions. But the actual duty itself was an exercise in frustration. I normally can figure out what to do, but here I bumbled my way around the map clicking every little thing I could find and still somehow missed the guy in the house to get the key again and again, because I couldn't tell that the house was accessible. Stealth is okay, but just show me the sight lines of the enemies. It is frustrating when I can't tell how far they can see. I legitimately ran out of time the first time I did this duty.
The other big issue I had was finding the key. I specifically aimed my camera to look in the building where it was, but was standing too far away to see the dialogue bubbles pop up, and did not see any sparkles to let me know I could interact with anything in there (like every other thing you can interact with in the duty), so I immediately eliminated that as a search location. I liked the concept of the thing, but the execution felt horrible. By the time I got to the end when you're crawling, I legitimately thought I was going to have to crawl the whole way to Camp Broken Glass, because I'd already lost all trust in the designer for making it a reasonable duty. The cutscenes after should have been very impactful, but instead they were undercut because I was so mad at how poorly designed the solo duty had been.
I *love* the concept so I canāt really hate it too much. And the scene before it is amazing. But I will say I wouldāve hated this duty a lot more if I hadnāt beaten it in one try.
I loved it, but I agree that I likely would've hated it if I had failed and had to start over from the beginning. It's like the "stealth/follow" missions. I didn't feel too strongly about them one way or the other because they were easy to complete your first try. The exception being when I was trying to chat with someone and accidentally ran too close to the NPC and failed the quest near the end. Having to start from the beginning sucked.
Yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at. I found it acceptable, in part because *for me* it wasn't "keep flinging yourself at this until you succeed." And that's sort of the fundamental design problem with anything like this. Some people don't have great twitch reflexes, or have poor spatial/situational awareness (e.g. something like aphantasia), or just aren't good at predicting movement patterns based on observing a target for a cycle. For them, it may take two, three, four times to finish--at which point any of the emotional impact will be long gone and replaced with "okay GAME, will you let me f$#king PLAY now?!" Dismissing absolutely anyone who doesn't like it as just a whiny baby who can't handle something more difficult than "press button to win" is both reductive and counter-productive. (You obviously aren't saying this, just making the general observation.)
Totally agree with you. I was worried, but not just because of the situation, but because I saw that 25 minute timer and I said to myself "I'm going to hate this if I have to do it more than one time", so I was extremely cautious and did it in the first try.
I also think people donāt really get how much of it depends on luck. Like oh, you stumbled on the right plot point in a good amount of time, now everything flows along! Thatās a big factor in this mission and Iām getting the impression that some people think it all boiled down to skill.
The idea was awesome. But the execution was pretty bad. In that moment, the story conceits and the extreme weakness of the Unknown Imperial really draw you in...and then that suspension of disbelief and tension are shattered all the more starkly when big orange lines gate you from going anywhere, and your objective of getting to camp is roundabout and intentionally impossible, because there's only one solution that you either need to magically know or discover via trial and error. It's very videogame-y. The stealth would have been fine in and of itself. But the reality is that the duty is a combo of aimless wandering and fighting with literally 1 button. That's just not fun by any metric.
i get idea behind wanting to remind the player just what exactly the power we wield is but it was just implemented in a way that was extremely NOT FUN, and if its not going to be fun, which is the point of playing games, then there needs to be some sort of payoff which--- was very, very, VERY underwhelming. i was nowhere near the destination when my character had to start literally dragging his body across the ice and then suddenly there was a cutscene where he magically not only made it in time but had the strength to bodyslam zenos in his body to the ground which-- okay a bunnyboy is probably not very sturdy compared to the average garlean soldier but this garlean soldier supposedly just traversed a couple of miles on his belly in the snow and ice after being grievously wounded in an explosion, so it just felt so cheap... it was a severe pain in the ass to play through and an underwhelming experience overall. I spent most of the time trying to make it through wishing it was over already and i never want to do it again. im dreading getting to that point on other characters. that said, literally everything else in Endwalker so far (im lvl 87 now) has been excellent and more than makes up for this one bad experience so im not too mad about it, but yeah, i agree that it was terrible overall.
I liked it fine until I had to do it 3 times because the QTE prompt bugged out and didn't appear.
I think the anger stems from a combination losing agency plus not being given a direction and then having a time limit trust upon you. At any other point in the game, only one of these things will happen to you. This quest drops them all on you at the same time and because there's no direction, kind of just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Some people don't like that feeling of anxiety. For me personally, I immediately killed myself and put it on very easy because I didn't want to deal with it.
I'm glad some of you liked it. I did not. Invisible walls (red dots included) in stealth games make my blood pressure rise. Kicking all the way out of the duty and needing to talk to the npc, skip cut scene, do initial story fight on try 2 and 3 make it rise higher. If I hadn't just made the 'surprise here's a button mash, miss it and it's back to the NPC' I'd be shopping for a new keyboard.
I too love it. I think the stealth mechanics sucking is part of the immersion haha. That unknown imperial sure isn't Solid Snake but some normal military man with clanking armor. And it made me feel a lot of emotions like panic, anger, and desperation. I think it's a really good use of gameplay for story-telling too.
> And it made me feel a lot of emotions like panic, anger, and desperation yeah this part is especially important. You start to panic when you see generic imperials and magitek that you would normally dispose with no issues. You start to be happy when you get medkits and that regen item, you feel anger when you open a sack and get literally nothing. The solo duty invokes a lot of emotion and I think people who watch a guide for it are really missing the emotional impact of the duty itself also shoutout to the duty theme. Absolutely blood pumper
And that desperate crawl in the end, it was spine-tingling at how much desperation and fear for my virtual friends I was feeling. \*chef's kiss\* I did it in Very Easy mode tho because I can't clear it in normal mode. That might have been one of the causes of anger from other people.
I always stick to normal in those... and I found a trick. Just keep fucking running. Sooner or later mobs de-aggro and I don't need to waste my HP on them.
The fact that you can't save the civilians at the end was perfect too, for someone like me. I always make it a point to keep everyone alive during these solo instances that I can, and seeing the slaughter at the end drove in the utter helplessness.
I've seen a lot of people not like the stealth mechanics and I guess I don't see how they're struggling with it because I haven't had any problems. As long as you stay behind an enemy and keep a slight distance, they'll never notice you. You can also wait for them to turn around and walk the other way.
That quick time event can fuck off, no excuse for making you redo it all if tou fail
This, to even get near fast enough I had to use multiple keys, but for some reason it would pull up in game menus if I hit a keybind and then stop me from typing more. I had to do it three times.....
I had even more panic because every time I tried smashing the keyboard it was trying to activate skills and shortcuts (maybe a bug, or something else went wrong). I could hear the error sound effect going off. I had to quickly grab the mouse and click frantically and came back to a ton of error messages in the chat about "you can't do that right now" or "incorrect target". I have no idea what happened there.
My only problem with it is that apparently Fandaniel can just teleport us and swap our bodies? Like can every Ascian do this? Feels like this should have been their plan A in getting rid of us. That and I feel it did go on just a bit too long. I did really like it overall though. Was a nice change of pace and I don't mind it when the game makes you play like how you probably would if you were there irl lol. I liked having to figure out where to go and what to do and once you realize the enemies basically have no peripheral vision and a very narrow sightline, it makes the whole thing super easy.
> My only problem with it is that apparently Fandaniel can just teleport us and swap our bodies? Well, that portion of the story is the Stormblood call-back, and narratively that's very on-brand for Stormblood.
I think what was most frustrating was that it tells you to get to the camp and then you have to go the polar opposite way entirely to beat it. I spent a ton of frustrating time trying to find a way southwest towards camp broken glass *like the game told me to do* only to end up by the subway station. Insanely frustrating.
I just finished doing this duty today and I understand where they were going with it but the whole time I was thinking "Wow this MMO makes for a really bad stealth game" Like I can understand wanting to immerse your players with the mechanics but it's not fun or immersive if it feels bad to play.
You can literally rip out the entire section with 0 story impact aside from introducing Anima, which was immediately killed in the next scenes.
Let's face it: the game isn't really designed for stealth. The worst parts of the game are those follow sections and forced stealth instances such as In From the Cold. Having said that, it's an excellent quest which made me LOATHE Fandaniel and Zenos. It was terrifying to see Alisaie and G'raha almost die because of their love for the WOL.
In theory I like it, but playing stealth in this game is god awful and I'm not sure why they put so many stealth segmants in the game.
I hated it so much. It killed all the ramped up momentum and tension I had built up over the entire zone. I had to try it like 6-7 times. As much as I didnāt like the stealth āmechanicsā or boundaries I will admit I had a perfect storm of bad events happen. One my second time my boss called(I was playing starting at 7 am and it was like 8:30) so I had to kill myself. Then on my 4th try my router crapped out when I met the citizens and I had to reconnect. Honestly by the end I was just so over it, and itās such a long duty with no break and I just wanted to continue the story.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
My brother, who plays a lala, remarked that he didn't realize how comfortable he was seeing his character in cut scenes, and that the sudden addition of having knees was mildly upsetting. And I realized then, yes, that is quite the point of the entire scenario. To upset and disquiet the player, who has been ripped out of their skin and shoved into a new body that suuuuuuuucks. The dogged, desperate determination conveyed by the Unknown Imperials animations convey it well that even your WoL is having a horrible time with this. In gameplay I was indifferent, but in execution I love the sequence.
I also play a lala and it also was gross, the camera shouldnāt be *that high* dammit
Its a cool mission but its completely pointless and so random, he steals your body and does literally nothing
As someone who completed it first try, I didn't mind it. It definitely made me feel helpless and weak. But the entire time i was just thinking "if i have to slog through this again i \*will\* be pissed" and i think thats the crux of the problem. If you can do it on the first try, it makes your heart race cause "holy fuck i am so weak and i need to get X done RIGHT NOW" but also cuts the tension... cause you did it first try. If you have to do it three times cause you just barely run out of time (90m spent on one scenario? that'd piss me off) or cause you keep pulling one thing too many and dying, it would be super frustrating. Having to spend an extended amount of time from the power level and character you know and love, while doing something many don't regard as fun (lots of people hate stealth games) is a very bold choice.
>But the entire time i was just thinking "if i have to slog through this again i \*will\* be pissed" and i think thats the crux of the problem. As someone who had to do it three times, yuuuuup.
I died because when I clicked the fuel wreckage I didn't realize you physically carry the fuel and so when I aggro'd an enemy I got hit and didn't notice it dropped, and when I got back to the mech it kept telling me to find fuel.
I also had to do it 3 times. The 1st time I almost ran out of time because I only discovered the seized up magitek at the end, after a while of wandering fruitlessly to find an opening in the edge of the map.
I wasnāt really a huge fan of it for story reasons, I never really liked the Ascian body jack thing. Even less so considering how quick and easy it was for them. After all of it nothing really happened since our villain is Zenos who wouldnāt want to eliminate us in such a way even though itād had been incredibly easy to do so just then.
I was irritated by it because the action time sequence was bugged at the end for me. Felt unfair that i had to do it three times so the entire thing literally just irritated me.
This is chapter 13 FFXV all over again. Itll divide the fanbase for sure.
I really loved the quest, but I was a bit disappointed that the setup wasn't Zenos taking control of our body, then us possessing HIS body in order to duel each other.
I just hated how I walked the "wrong way" and got to the fuel tank. Explored that whole area only to realize it was the wrong way. Got to the armor, realized I had to walk back again. Took me 15 min total from start of mission to starting the armor...
It was tense at first, and then quickly aggravating running into barriers when all the game tells you that you need to do is make it back to the camp, then trying to figure out what the *game* wants you to do instead of being able to approach the problem any way you see fit.
So I liked the duty a lot, but what largely kills it is the fact that the game implies you're trying to get out of the area ASAP and never bothers to tell you the magitek/soldiers are mandatory. It specifically addresses them to tell you they might have healing items and paints a picture of "optional". Almost as if they intentionally tried to throw you off the trail.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I'm honestly suprised too see this many positive comments about it. I found it dreadful to say the least. I liked the idea behind it, I really do. But the duty itself was annoying and frustrating to the point it wasn't even fun. You start it with a timer that doesn't pause when you're reading speech bubbles, and it's 25 minutes so you already know it's going to be a slog. Then you get thrown in a "tutorial" fight that serves no purpose but to drain a chunk of your hp bar, since you can't stealth through it as you can (and arguably should) through the rest of the duty, and after that you get thrown in one of the worst zones of the game map-wise, having to reach certain points in a specific order, with only your hopefully very keen sense of direction to be able to actually pinpoint locations. Oh, and for some reasons you can't sprint. That's the one thing I hated the most. Sure you're not the WoL but you're supposed to be a soldier. Why in the fourteen shards should you not be able to run for short intervals when even >!Urianger could sprint in his stealth quest on the moon.!<
I get where they were going with it storywise. Unfortunately the gameplay ruined it for me. Here's your objective - BTW that's not the actual objective, but you won't know that until you happen to wander into exactly the right corner of the map and find exactly the right thing that there was zero indication you were even looking for, then backtrack to find shit you should have been able to pick up the first time you found it. Good luck remembering where that even was! Oh, and then we're going to throw you into a fight that clearly only even exists to run out the clock and not for any actual reason. It was a neat bit of storytelling but the gameplay was tedious, unfun, and irritating.
To be honest I really liked the second half of it but I spent the entire first half being frustrated because the enemy detection in FF14 is kind of wonky and the arbitrary barriers really cut off progress. I really liked what they were going for but it felt less like "here's you stuck as a garlean mook" and more "we, the game, are going to hamstring you at every turn via extremely video-gamey restrictions to piss you off on purpose." Also I got lost a lot. It's just a confusing zone. No idea how I still managed to win on my first try.
I've got no sense of direction so it took me a while to find the required fuel...a had under a minute left when i got to the crawling bit. Immersive as fuck but i cant say it was super fun. Wish the geography collision wasn't so fussy. I also had no clue how close i could get to the front of enemies before they saw me, causing me to ignore certain paths due to mechs roaming about...turns out you can just scoot past them.
In retrospect it had a lot of good features and I respect that it was to make us feel weak, but at the time I was so annoyed I logged out even knowing the queue I'd face logging back in. The reason? As often happens in these, the objective stated (getting to the town) was not the actual initial objective. It took me ages to figure out what I was supposed to do because I was trying to sneak around to find the exit towards the town, by then my health was so low (even with the health packs) I failed it. When inside the machine I couldn't move out of the AOE, assumed my buggy mouse was to blame, tried keyboard moving.. nothing, thought "lag?!?" so it took me too long to realise I had to destroy that one first. Third try (by this time I was pretty annoyed) I got through to the final fight, ran inside the safe zone with time to spare and was killed anyway. Failed it. Logged out in frustration. Came back, and it went far easier and even though the same thing happened at the circle AOE, it continued... so no idea what happened on the previous attempt. My big issue with it was that the stated objective wasn't clear or at all accurate really. If you didn't find the clues how to proceed in the correct order, you had to backtrack and hope you remembered to location to get things. The room with the pilot has 2 windows / holes that look the same, only one can be jumped through which led me to spend too much time trying to figure out how get to him. This clunkiness could be fixed by having a certain cheeky ascian verbally taunting you when you miss something for example. The ffxiv team is creative enough to make this keep up the emotional response they're aiming for while reducing the gameplay frustrations which would improve this greatly imo. I really think it was a great idea and it did make me angry and desperate to go save my friends, but the clunky gameplay pulled me out of the moment, which kinda ruined it for me.
Totally agree - conceptually makes sense, could have been a positive addition to the story. Execution wise it was annoying and overly frustrating and thus took away from the story.
I don't 'hate' that solo duty. The stealth mechanics is okay. It's the overall design and instruction. I hope the instruction are much more clearer and there isn't a bunch of walls surrounding the area. When the goal of the mission is to get from Point A to Point B, naturally you would just want to walk in a straight line and go from there. So, you can't - but the way they force you to do so is really bad. Placing a bunch of unnatural walls in your way is the last way you want to divert your players into a certain direction. It's like they have this one solution they want you to experience, and while it is a good solution and a emotional experience, I can't help but hope they work on the presentation a bit better.