I'd give the at-launch main body of Endwalker a near perfect score. It's a huge emotional climax to the story told throughout the previous expansions that manages to take you to new, surprising places while still feeling like a satisfying conclusion. The boss fights are fantastic, the characters are great, the soundtrack delivers hit after hit. There are a couple of minor annoyances - some elements feel rushed or incomplete, like Garlemald, the longtime antagonistic nation, here reduced to a speedbump on the way to bigger conflicts. As with Stormblood, since the zones are all spread out and discobobulated the sense of place and connection is weaker, and why large chunks of the story take place in Thavnair I'm still not really sure. These come out in the wash though. The whole of the MSQ is stronger than the sum of its parts.
The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said for the patch content. Shadowbringers delivered, in my opinion, some of the greatest hits in the entire game with Ishgard Restoration & Bozja. These were meaty, community oriented projects that would allow players to sink hundreds of hours into them, or much less and still have fun. There's no comparable content in Endwalker. Island Sanctuary is an absolute bust, a single player idle game that consists of alternatively right clicking rocks or showing up once a week to collect rent. Variant & Criterion dungeons are hits, and I do like having a hard-as-nails 4 player content, but they don't fill the void left by the bigger group activities. Manderville Weapons are deeply underwhelming.
Most disappointing is the post-game story. We knew going into Endwalker that the typical format established in Heavensward wouldn't apply here - Endwalker's story climaxed in 6.0, not 6.3. What we didn't know was that the next expansion storyline wouldn't start until 6.55, meaning the entirety of the 6.X MSQ is an overblown filler arc. I was so disappointed when I realised the standout new character Zero was disappearing like a movie-only anime character when the story came to a close (and worse still, trading in her cool Scythe for a boring Sword!) Maybe it'll all come to bear in a future Bozja-style Void content, one can only hope.
I am sympathetic to the developers, who pushed hard to get the base game out, and struggled on working through the pandemic. I hope that the content drought in the post game is the after effects of the pandemic finally appearing out of the pipeline, and that Dawntrail will be a return to form. Fingers crossed.
The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said for the patch content. Shadowbringers delivered, in my opinion, some of the greatest hits in the entire game with Ishgard Restoration & Bozja. These were meaty, community oriented projects that would allow players to sink hundreds of hours into them, or much less and still have fun. There's no comparable content in Endwalker. Island Sanctuary is an absolute bust, a single player idle game that consists of alternatively right clicking rocks or showing up once a week to collect rent. Variant & Criterion dungeons are hits, and I do like having a hard-as-nails 4 player content, but they don't fill the void left by the bigger group activities. Manderville Weapons are deeply underwhelming.
Most disappointing is the post-game story. We knew going into Endwalker that the typical format established in Heavensward wouldn't apply here - Endwalker's story climaxed in 6.0, not 6.3. What we didn't know was that the next expansion storyline wouldn't start until 6.55, meaning the entirety of the 6.X MSQ is an overblown filler arc. I was so disappointed when I realised the standout new character Zero was disappearing like a movie-only anime character when the story came to a close (and worse still, trading in her cool Scythe for a boring Sword!) Maybe it'll all come to bear in a future Bozja-style Void content, one can only hope.
I am sympathetic to the developers, who pushed hard to get the base game out, and struggled on working through the pandemic. I hope that the content drought in the post game is the after effects of the pandemic finally appearing out of the pipeline, and that Dawntrail will be a return to form. Fingers crossed.