/r/ffxivdiscussion: Data analysis of Dawntrail negative reviews (Steam)

I thought I'd share this thread as it has some interesting statistics and analysis about DT's negative reviews on Steam. The data surrounding DT's reviews doesn't surprise me one bit. There's also good info in the thread's comments as well, so feel free to take a look at the reddit thread itself.

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Original Post:

I did a little bit of data analysis of Dawntrail negative reviews in Python using Steam API.

Dawntrail was released on the 2nd of July, 2024. Early access started a little bit earlier but I took only reviews from July 2.

Only those who bought the game on Steam were taken into account.

At the time of writing there are 1626 negative reviews to Dawntrail on Steam (given the criteria above). And since you can leave only one review for a game on Steam this is the number of players who did that.

I could fetch stats for only 40.6% (660 people) of those who left negative reviews. Usually it means that the others have private profiles. It already makes it hard to make any conclusions. There may have been an organized campaign by people with closed profiles. But you need to remember that every vote here costs 45€. I simply don't believe someone would do it at such cost even if we imagine a massive review-bomb-refund campaign.

Your playtime in FFXIV is counted only for the base game, not the expansion, so I had to go to every single user profile and fetch their playtime for FFXIV Online.

And here is the graph of playtime [URL on reddit page] (in hours) of 41% of those who left a negative review for Dawntrail in Steam since July 2nd.
81% of those have 1000+ hours in the game! [URL on reddit page] That's 534 of 660 players.

TLDR; At least 33% of those tho left a negative review to Dawntrail are veterans with 1000+ hours in the game. This is indisputable. If we assume the same distribution among those who have closed Steam profile it becomes 81%.

P.S. The code (Jupyter Notebook) is here [URL on reddit page] for anyone to use.

UPD: I used this method [URL on reddit page] to acquire playtime. It's called GetOwnedGames. The name suggests that it doesn't return those that were refunded. If that is true then we can say that all of negative reviews are genuine players who still (several months) after release own the expansion and the whole idea of review-bomb-refund campaign is busted.

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Notable Comments:

"I can't imagine anyone actually played Dawntrail and thinks a negative review is product of a "review bombing." Most of the time, people are just dissatisfied. And that's okay."

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"For those who mainly play the game for the story, something as bad as DT may just poison every other content, everything may feel souless and without purpose. I myself have 6k hours in the game and am considering canceling my sub if 7.1 does not give me some hope for the msq."

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"I don't think people being veterans matter, MSQ tourists are a big source of income for SE and if they're not happy then I expect 8.0 preorders and sales will reflect that. Dawntrail has the benefit of riding the coattails of Endwalker, I worry about whats ahead."

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"This is the first expansion where I went "Who the **** wrote this ****? Why is the story/lore so bad?" and I liked EW patch msq."

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"The problem with DT is that it tries to be every expansion at once while being terrible at all of them.

.It wants the "ANOTHER SHARD" plot line of Shb,but without any of the emotional weight or writing of It

.It attempts SB's "uniting the nation to save it" aspect,but the place was already saved and everyone gets along perfectly as is so that's moot.

.It desperately tried to make Tuliuloyal have Ishgards society schisms with the blessed siblings,as well as the other tribes,but that got solved in 5 minutes while Ishgards is still fighting it to this day(and makes Gulool look like a negligent dick).

Hell it even tried its hand at EW by making all these culminate together,but because the buildup was non-existent it comes off as half assed.It should've been a more simple ARR like story."

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"The story is legitimately poorly executed. People saying the reviews are faked or are made by some angry fringe group aren't paying attention. The ideas had potential, but they dropped the ball in pretty much every way.

Boring characters with no personality other than cringey tropes. Sudden changes of heart with 0 consequences. Plot lines that either resolve far too quickly or drag on for eternity. Erenville having like 0 reaction to learning his mom is dead?? Wuk Lamat was a really awkward caricature of the sheltered princess trope, but that's not how she was portrayed b4 the xpac launched. It's like they decided halfway through that they should make her really stupid.

The entire last zone was a lame excuse to give the villain a quick power boost so he was actually a threat. It's 2024, the hyperbolic time chamber s**t is overdone and tired. I felt 0 connection to Sphene or her people, despite them shoving it down your throat for several quest chains that shutting it down should be sad. It wasn't. At all.

People say ARR is boring, but its setup was way better than this. You could tell it was building to something interesting. All this is building to is me wondering how much more of Wuk's company I'm going to have to suffer through."

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Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1fz8yev/data_analysis_of_dawntrail_negative_reviews/

Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves below. Cheers.

I'm one of the private profiles that left a negative review.

Well that what you get when you sell it as story first and MMO second. If they story is not great you get what you get tbh.

1000 hours in the game isn't necessarily a veteran player. That's about 2 months of playing all day (16 hours a day). Could easily be done during a holiday, summer break or while seeking employment.

I don't think it's necessarily review bombing on Steam, but you're more likely to leave a review for a negative experience than a positive one. It's got to be extraordinarily positive (to the point of changing your view on life or something like that) to motivate you to leave a positive one usually, which to be fair, much of the story does motivate people to want to go out of their way to praise it for that, which probably explains why there are positive reviews at all.

The story in Dawntrail may not be for everyone but it's just one expansion. I don't get the people acting like it's the end of the world because one expansion didn't hit for them.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

1000 hours in the game isn't necessarily a veteran player. That's about 2 months of playing all day (16 hours a day). Could easily be done during a holiday, summer break or while seeking employment.

I don't think it's necessarily review bombing on Steam, but you're more likely to leave a review for a negative experience than a positive one. It's got to be extraordinarily positive (to the point of changing your view on life or something like that) to motivate you to leave a positive one usually, which to be fair, much of the story does motivate people to want to go out of their way to praise it for that, which probably explains why there are positive reviews at all.

The story in Dawntrail may not be for everyone but it's just one expansion. I don't get the people acting like it's the end of the world because one expansion didn't hit for them.

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1000 hours is more than three completionist runs of Tears of the Kingdom. Get real.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

1000 hours in the game isn't necessarily a veteran player. That's about 2 months of playing all day (16 hours a day). Could easily be done during a holiday, summer break or while seeking employment.

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Other games take somewhere between 6-40 hours. The MSQ of this game can be beaten in about 250-400 hours, depending on how willing you are to skip cutscenes. I'd argue that people that have played 1000 hours have seen a lot of the content in this game, and while one could argue if that makes them veterans or not, it at least shows some level of dedication to this game.

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I don't think it's necessarily review bombing on Steam, but you're more likely to leave a review for a negative experience than a positive one. It's got to be extraordinarily positive (to the point of changing your view on life or something like that) to motivate you to leave a positive one usually, which to be fair, much of the story does motivate people to want to go out of their way to praise it for that, which probably explains why there are positive reviews at all.

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Considering the reviews of the other expansions, which were much more favorable, I'm gonna say "Of all the takes you did, this is one of them."

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The story in Dawntrail may not be for everyone but it's just one expansion. I don't get the people acting like it's the end of the world because one expansion didn't hit for them.

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I don't get why you say this is people acting like the end of the world? This is just an analysis of the general opinion of the game based on public feedback. Dawntrail has its issues, especially when comparing it to the other expansions.

People have paid for a product and are entitled to an opinion. There are people that act like people disliking the current state of the game are a minority, and this post can just be taken as partial proof that the negative voices are not just naysayers, reviewbombers, Wuk Lamat haters, and "a loud but vocal minority".

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Originally Posted by ovIm

I don't get why you say this is people acting like the end of the world?

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I say that because I've seen people act like Dawntrail's MSQ being poorly regarded could be the end of the game or something (not necessarily on these forums, but generally). Of course not everyone is saying that, but my point with it is that there will be an 8.0 and a 9.0 etc. for those thinking otherwise.

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Dawntrail has its issues, especially when comparing it to the other expansions.

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Sure and I think people have pointed them out all over the internet.

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There are people that act like people disliking the current state of the game are a minority, and this post can just be taken as partial proof that the negative voices are not just naysayers, reviewbombers, Wuk Lamat haters, and "a loud but vocal minority".

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I'm not actually trying to say that the dislike of Dawntrail is a minority. It does seem like a lot of people actually. Whether it's actually a majority or not I'm just gonna leave to analysis' like this, but I do know that there are people I've talked to in the game that are alright with it. However, the dislike has been enough for Yoshi-P to acknowledge it as a general sentiment which I don't think he did for Endwalker despite certain pages-long posts in this forum.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I say that because I've seen people act like Dawntrail's MSQ being poorly regarded could be the end of the game or something (not necessarily on these forums, but generally). Of course not everyone is saying that, but my point with it is that there will be an 8.0 and a 9.0 etc. for those thinking otherwise.

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Yes but this is in regards to this post here, which is not all that? We've seen opinions on all directions, this reddit user here has done an interesting bit of analysis of the negative reviews to put things more into perspective as to where the feedback comes from.

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I'm not actually trying to say that the dislike of Dawntrail is a minority. It does seem like a lot of people actually. Whether it's actually a majority or not I'm just gonna leave to analysis' like this, but I do know that there are people I've talked to in the game that are alright with it. However, the dislike has been enough for Yoshi-P to acknowledge it as a general sentiment which I don't think he did for Endwalker despite certain pages-long posts in this forum.

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You may not, but there are people that do, and an analysis like that helps to create a more objective baseline for a discussion about the criticism the game receives.

Still though, Yoshi-P's reasoning behind his "I expected people to dislike Dawntrail" (which was, in that one interview at least, that he considers the review to be based upon the ending of the old story arc, and Wuk Lamats lack of self confidence, which are both disproven) shows an inherent misunderstanding as to why people disliked DT.
Hopefully, with time having passed between that interview and now, he and his team had a better chance of analyzing the feedback provided.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

shows an inherent misunderstanding as to why people disliked DT

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It does show a lack of understanding, but I think this is because everyone has different criticism, so from a zoomed out perspective the criticism looks all over the place. Due to that, he was probably just trying to guess the root of the criticism.

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Hopefully, with time having passed between that interview and now, he and his team had a better chance of analyzing the feedback provided.

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I hope so as well. If not, hopefully it'll eventually get through, especially given all the events he's been going to, because places like Gamescom, PAX, and so on give an opportunity to meet people in person and then he can't avoid being directly confronted with concerns like this. And even if he doesn't get the feedback directly, any of his team that go with him to these events may talk to people as well.

I think that was one of the big problems from mid-Shadowbringers and throughout Endwalker. They had to cancel meeting people in person, leaving their only source of feedback as the internet where it's easy to create an echo chamber of what you want to hear. But when going to events in person it's unavoidable to hear the most deep and heartfelt concerns people have, sometimes from journalists as well, where you sometimes see questions catch him off-guard if asked by a journalist that's in touch with community sentiment (obviously not all of them are :D).

https://i.ibb.co/51mgpXP/jarjar.webp