I’m late to this discussion, but I’ve been watching a few videos about this from content creators and I find this argument impossible to defend.
Taking ARR out (it’s not really an expansion), you can’t actually think EW is worse than HW. HW had much worse and less content and while the story, including the patches, was better, that era didn’t have what people are complaining about now. Maybe less job homogenization, but also absolute dumpster tier jobs that people didn’t play.
So yeah, things are a bit rough (specially now that a lot of new players are caught up), but the worst one? I can’t agree with that.
On the flip side, excluding Garlemald because I think that genuinely was a missed opportunity,
I think it’s really cool how they structured the expansion.
All the teasers and such hyping up the stuff with zodi, only for that to be the level 83 trial, felt like it built a lot of hype mid story. We (my group) went into that feeling a lot of mixed emotions, like what would happen next? We all expected that to be the finale, but things were just getting started.
I think it’s cool what they did with Elpis. Like a more complete version of the Amaurot idea. At this point on the source, everything was going to complete shit with the Final Days (again, just like Amaurot) and everything was just feeling hectic and out of control. So stepping into Elpis was just…magical. Literal breath of fresh air. Seeing everything unfold and having the ancients further humanized was good.
I can see what you’re saying with the character Meteion not being fleshed out really, but she also wasn’t precisely a character. She was in essence a grotesque experiment, like an Elpis Flower given a mind. I think in the end, that’s what broke Hermes so much. He believed so badly that he was different from his peers, that he was unique in understanding the suffering of their creations. But in his ignorance he subjected Meteion to an even more acute suffering, the kind reserved only for sentient beings. Despair.
And in confronting this atrocity forged of his own hand, we see the man snap, and set into motion the foundational events of game’s entire lore. While Meteion the character was new, I really think of her as just being the mechanism through which the Final Days occurs, and Hermes is the real centerpiece of the story. In fighting her we are really just cleaning up his mess.
That being said, your experience is valid, just offering one other perspective. The story definitely had some sloppy points throughout and some pacing and clarity issues as well, but I enjoyed it overall.
I had actually never made the connection that Hermes was the weirdo Ascian that hung out in Garlemald with Zenos in the Shadoebringers cutscenes, and that now makes more sense to me.
I really liked Elpis as a zone, but I think the game explicitly saying that Hermes wasn’t Fandaniel yet during that zone made me mostly disregard it as a possibility for the future, so I was mostly just following around a guy and a bird lady I’d never met before. I honestly couldn’t even tell you if he took the job after we kicked his teeth in, I was so done with that guy.
I appreciate you mentioning this, though, and I wish that I could see the zone for the first time again with that understanding. =/