7.3 MSQ Was Absolutely Terrific

I have to say did nothing for me at all....the whole of DT was not great and after playing for so long and seeing some of the amazing MSQ that has gone before made me bored. It did pick up in this patch but all the modern crap and all the neon left a bad taste in my mouth.

The voice acting omg I had to skip it and wish I had remembered to put it back to Japanese as all the cheesy cartoon voices just made me skip and that is something I never thought I would do. I preferred the voice acting in older expacs and felt this was really bad. There is a town you go too in DT that was full of cheesy voiced characters and it ruined it for me. I liked Shale and Sphene but not enough to care.

I knew when I saw the first trailer for DT it was not going to be great as the music the singing mostly made me think wtf lol it was like a load of people singing badly and then we got it again.

I used to love the MSQ it was what I played for and waited each patch but now I am a bit concerned the MSQ has peaked and gone. EW and SHB where amazing all of it up to then was great but this MSQ was a big let down sadly.

It was aggressively OK for me. Nothing to write home about. Unfortunately, Dawntrail as a whole has completely failed to get me to be interested in any of the characters. Shale is OK, I guess. I straight up don't like Sphene and her cutesy uwu shtick. I didn't care enough about Geode for the story to have any impact. I did like the puzzle elements, though.

"Cutesy uwu schtick" and "Sphene" in the same sentence.

I think this patch was a very positive sign. I liked the puzzle section and definitely appreciate the effort put into the cutscenes this time around, it really shows. They were very well put together. I am particularly impressed with the fact that they animated separate WOL attacks for every job. :D

The best patch we've gotten since 5.5 or 6.0 depending on whatever your opinions of 6.0 might be in my opinion. Hopefully they can keep this momentum up.

When it comes to the Ascians I'm glad they're addressing the remaining overlords, since they're still around. Whether or not it pays off depends on what direction the writers take the story, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad sign for the future of the story. By necessity, their goals have to be different considering Zodiark and the Paragons are dead and with it any hope of reviving the ancient civilization. Personally I'm hoping they're now a part of some bigger organization with different goals, which wouldn't really make them ascians anymore.

I often get the feeling that I played a different game than some of you. I thought 7.3 was a meandering slog, padded with unnecessary exposition and awkward, long-winded dialog. Any tension that could have been built by being a race against time was killed by standing around yapping, strolling through hallways, puzzle sections, and eulogizing a character that barely existed (Geode got a longer funeral than Papalymo). Calyx was a cartoonish villain that I never felt was all that threatening, and I am sorely disappointed that he still exists in some capacity.

I appreciate the attempt at puzzles and trying something new, but they just weren't "puzzling" enough. Unfortunately, I don't think they could have made them too challenging without people complaining about it; after all, they had to nerf In from the Cold because it was too hard. I also didn't feel like there was a need for the puzzles to occur when they did. Would it not be better if there was some sort of puzzle to shut down the Meso Terminal, instead of using those resources to power a door or brute-force someone's computer password?

Some of the stuff they did with cutscenes was nice, but they are still limited, which often kills the particular mood they are trying to convey. When Wawakeke (or whatever, I can't remember names) learns of Geode's death, she collapses to her knees in grief... in complete silence. I thought that maybe it wasn't a voiced CS, but it was, and she even had voiced lines. Why can't they keep the actress in the studio long enough to give a cry of despair? I'm fine with not every CS being voiced, but those that are should be fully voiced.

I'd like to give a more detailed review of 7.3, but I just don't have the time to write a novella. Maybe I'll get to it sometime. I figure I'm here through 7.5 because it's hard to look away from this trainwreck full of naked people, but there is no guarantee I will buy 8.0. SE is going to have to work hard to earn my continued loyalty. I'm not going to pay for another Dawntrail.

I liked it UNTIL the cliffhanger. Absolutely LAME! It felt like a "WELL WE ARE OUT OF IDEAS, SO HERE IS THIS"

I thought DT was the start of a "new" story, but here we are going back to ascians and rejoining. It's VERY stale.

I really liked 7.3. It felt like a return to form. The realization he was summoning a Primal!? I felt more emotions in that one scene than I did for most of DT put together.

Some people may turn their noses at Primals and Ascians. But I LIKE the Primals and Ascians! They are what got me into the game. I was a bit downhearted when they said they were going away from Primals.

Plus, I don't even think we are going to pursue the Rejoining plot anymore. The only Ascians left are Sundered Ascians. They don't NEED to follow the orders of their Unsundered counterparts anymore. They can motovations we haven't even conceived of yet.

TLDR, I'm very excited for what is coming next!

tbf a rejoining needs quite a bit of time to prepare... so other shards may very well be in the middle of going downward.
so even if the sundered ascians (who may or may not have their memories) arent the main enemy its still a likely scenario and of course an easy one for the writers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Luluna

I used to love the MSQ it was what I played for and waited each patch but now I am a bit concerned the MSQ has peaked and gone. EW and SHB where amazing all of it up to then was great but this MSQ was a big let down sadly.

---

My take is that I have bad news for you - the MSQ likely has peaked and gone, at least for the foreseeable future. EW and ShB were amazing...but they were able to *be* amazing precisely because they had ARR/HW/SB as a solid foundation. DT is the start of a "new" direction in the story, which means it has doesn't really have anything to build on. It's functionally a new ARR. That's not to say there won't be another expansion in the future that likewise knocks it out of the park for many people, but it'll likely be a few installments down the line. The only real question at that point will be whether people are willing to acknowledge that said great-expansion-to-come was able to be that great because other "mediocre" expansions came first and set the foundation.

There's also the very real possibility that FFXIV indeed peaked with EW and will never reach that "level" again. In long-running games like this, that tends to happen once the "main" storyline has been completed, which for us happened with EW. It's happening right now with Destiny 2 - they wrapped up their main story with their last expansion, and the newest one (first to release after said culmination of the story) is a thud. Or look at WoW - the culmination of its story was WotLK, when they had an active playerbase of ~12 MILLION players. The following expansion (Cataclysm) was likewise a thud in terms of population, and fast-forward to today, WoW needed to put out what are viewed as two "solid" expansions in a row just to reach a playerbase of ~2 million (meaning even two good installments in a row, they've still lost over 80% of their one-time playerbase). The same may well be true with FFXIV now. Personally, I just set my expectations accordingly, and I continue having a blast. In my mind, on a scale of 1-10, the most I envisioned DT hitting was a 7 or an 8 for me (compared to 10 for both EW and ShB), and since it did indeed turn out to be about a 7 or an 8, I was happy and felt it turned out the best that could reasonably be expected.

Quote:

---

I often get the feeling that I played a different game than some of you.

---

I feel that way around here all the time, given that I've thoroughly enjoyed my FFXIV experience throughout the whole time I've been here, while this place is almost entirely an echo chamber of negativity. Realistically, it's just the reality that no matter what a dev team does, there will be some people who love the result and some who hate it. It's just the reality of human nature.

More Primals.
More Ascians.
The tried-and-true gameplay works much better than what we've had in Dawntrail.

Looking forward to the next MSQ patch. Let's see where it goes!