The link should take you to the specific part, but if it's not working it should be 3h 23m 37s
In itself I think the sentiment is not bad. Giving a new generation of game designers a chance to mature into their roles is in itself great but if you do that then really tightknit supervision is even more important. You need to guide them and make sure to catch their (rookie) mistakes, of which there are likely to be more, as fast as possible. It almost looks like they gave their inexperienced staff free reign and didn't conduct any regular quality checks whatsoever. (No idea if it really happened like that of course.)
This. I understand training them with maybe sidequests, and slowly giving them more to do. I already felt a drop in writing quality in the Alliance raids, and the EW patches MSQ - but I still believed that for the actual expansion, things would get better, that more experienced people would be mostly responsible. It seems like there was no supervision at all! They said Ishikawa was in a supervision role, but honestly I don't know if I believe that, or maybe I just have a different idea of what a "supervision" role actually is. It's bizarre to think they would let things be this bad in the final product.
It kinda feels like they promoted some of their sidequest/allied society writing team to MSQ, because a lot of the writing was perfectly fine for optional content. We just expect a lot more out of MSQ.
And I definitely agree with your point that better supervision would have improved a ton of things, catch some of the obvious problems everyone has mentioned, and cut back on the repetition.
I'm doing the the 95 MSQ in the fourth zone - the voice acting and voice mixing is absolutely abysmal. It literally feels like they're not even in the cutscene they're speaking in.
I don't know how it's so overt when I've never yet thought this once in 10 years of content and voice acting.
I feel this is only going to get worse and the reviews will not be kind.
If that is true then they did everything wrong they could.
It's fine to get new people and young workers but you have to work them in.
If thats the case then honestly, this all is not the fault of the writers but of the supervisors. This all screams too much freedom for unexprienced people.
FF14 already had the theory of just being the money printing machine of SE and being not very loved itself (it getting no budget, almost no merchandise and no real recognition in the series itself). Now it really seems like "it sells anyway, do what you want".
The part with the youngr audience is just hilarious. Explains the whole disney theme. An expansion without the more mature stuff like HW is fine in itself but they didn't even do that. Instead we got a story mix of cringe silly shonen and world ending mad AI with a top of "what measure is a nonhuman".
Looks like a cocktail of ideas thrown at the wall and sticking them together with glue while sniffing it.
The awkward voice acting seems like a direction issue to me. Characters using a normal speaking voice when they should be yelling, for example, is 100% not the VA's fault
The thing is the story has all the shonen tropes, but as far as games go, is too slow to capture the younger audience. I think it was nearly 2-3 hours of play before my first quest to kill something in this expansion. That isn't going to capture the younger audience that often lack attention spans.