#since se is pretty much done with garlemald: my city now

[sealrock]

me: hector is part of a small percentage of garleans that have psionic powers to compensate for their inability to manipulate aether, but it weakens greatly with age and causes immense mental strain

also me: *falls into a deep rabbit hole of paranormal pseudoscience and marvel/dc comic power scaling wackiness in an attempt to explain why and how that is in the ffxiv universe, but suspension of disbelief is thrown out the window*

#cid.txt #rambling thoughts incoming #since se is pretty much done with garlemald: my city now #i can't do things halfway. i have to explain my work or else my brain will grow mold #is it biological? esoteric? environmental? who knows #leave it to me to make things more complicated than it needs to be :p #but there has to be more to their third eye beyond having better spatial awareness for weaponry #there has to be an advantage that others who can use aether do not have #i'm most likely not the first person to think of this concept but i enjoy tinkering with it #and as a sidenote i kinda wanna make yves a pisonic too because the more i remold him the more i move away from his mhach/supernatural root #his new outfit greatly inspired my current situation #he's already tall like a garlean and his full name is latin so he'll fit right in #and since he and hector are similar people i wanna revisit their early concepts of where they were friends—kirke included #i can't not see these 3 as the terror trio no matter how hard i tried to separate them through each rewrite #i'll have to make a meta writeup soon #signalis mgs and outlast have been templates for this concept #so let's see what I can cook up

[the-wardens-torch]

So, FFXIVwrite2023, huh?

About that... I said I'd be happy with 10 entries, so I just stopped there. Quite possibly because I started Baldur's Gate 3, but that's just a small piece of the problem. The main piece is that... I'm not enjoying FFXIV all that much anymore.

I decided to put this under a cut after I finished because it... mostly just turned into me complaining.

I have to be fully honest here. Endwalker really disappointed me from almost every angle. I love some of the characters and character growth moments (Alisaie's speech to Zenos, Jullus and the Garlemald arc come to mind,) and the environments and music are perfect and gorgeous as always. However, there are several buts, and they are stinky and hairy and flatulent buts indeed.

First of all, (and you probably saw this coming) my main class of 8 fucking years got gutted, and I can't seem to find another that I can both enjoy AND be good at. I play DNC now just because its easy and I can do it without burdening my party or unduly stressing myself out. Secondly, the story really lost me - the time travel, the continuing uwu-ification of the ancients/the world unsundered, the "just trust us!" style retcons, the fact that a single conversation could have solved everything on numerous occasions, whatever the fuck dynamis is... etc.

I digress a bit here though. The point is that I have played some absolutely phenomenal games since starting FFXIV (Baldur's Gate 3, Spiritfarer, Disco Elysium, Hades, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Forgotten City,) and they keep reminding me that I'm supposed to be having fun... all the time. And yes, I am aware that comparing a detective procedural to a platformer to a Roguelite to an MMO doesn't make any sense, but joy and engagement with a game are just that, no matter what genre.

I feel like I should add the caveat that I still have a lot of fun raiding/partying with my friends, but schedules and other obligations and timezones and whatnot (aka through no fault of my dear friends) mean I'm solo/pugging a good 85% of the time and not having fun so much as filling quotas. I'm not quitting as of now or anything, (at the very least since I walked right into SE's subscription trap by getting a house) but I think I'm gonna be pretty light on logging in for at least a little while.

...

Holy shit, I was supposed to be talking about FFXIVwrite but that all just poured out of me.

About that FFXIVwrite though - I met a modest goal, and this was probably my last FFXIVwrite unless Dawntrail really blows my mind. I do want to continue my project of getting all 100+ pieces of Fal writing strung into a single story on my Ao3 . (Actually, the main reason I haven't done anything with it lately is because I was expecting to get more done with FFXIVwrite2023 to fill in some blanks before I posted everything else.) As for why I want to continue... I just really love my FFXIV son.

#personal #MMORPG burnout