Dawntrail's Final Zone - What a dissapointment *spoilers*

I've always looked forward to the final zones for the the MSQ and I really enjoyed ShB and EW. They are zones I enjoy going back to and hanging out or just to gather, etc.

However, Living Memory? That entire zone had me like WTF?

First off, I didn't hate DT MSQ as much as folks did, but the final zone and final seven quests (which felt like 70) were an absolute slog. What should have felt like a build-up to the final showdown, was just repetitive drivel.

Go to new area. Meet the people. Delete the people. Zone turns butt ugly.

While I understand the zone changed for story purposes, we are now left with one of the most depressing and ugly zones that I have zero desire to ever return to. I get that you can bring it back to pre-change by going into NG+ but I have no desire to do that really.

It's just such a strange zone from the MSQ perspective (this was not the time for the story to slow down to crawl). Even worse, Sphene doesn't even have a recreation to you deleting everyone. Like she didn't sense that at all?

Anyway. Long story short. Final zone was unfortunate. It's now an ugly relic.

At that point, I was already checked out and apathetic. But it seemed like we were getting geared up for the end after the second trial and......nope, enjoy hours and hours of filler. Don't forget a quiz to make sure you're really reading!

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Originally Posted by DynnDiablos

First off, I didn't hate DT MSQ as much as folks did, but the final zone and final seven quests (which felt like 70) were an absolute slog. What should have felt like a build-up to the final showdown, was just repetitive drivel.

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This has been a problem with FF14 for a long time now, in that they tend to use the final zone as an exposition dump and often just kill off any momentum the story has for the shake of ... feeling. I haven't played WoW for 12 years but the final zone is what WoW always get done right. For example in Wotlk's final zone, it's all about prepping the armies, building outpost, gathering supply, scouting the oppositions .etc. all in preparation for the final assault at the citadel. It's funny because FF14 used to do that too in ARR, i.e most of the side quests/fate at The celureum processing plant and Mordana zone were about pushing toward the 2 castrums. But than it make sense because back then FF14 was still trying to copy WoW, and frankly that one aspect of WoW I wish they kept. But these day whenever we get to the last zone, the story always take a pause so it can gives dump a bunch of exposition on us and then we go into the final fight as a one man army.

The last 2 expansion weren't any different.

- EW: I felt that sense of urgency and togetherness in Shalayan should have been made into its own final zone. Instead we get Ultima Thule which were just a massive apathetic exposition dump. (And frankly, all that crap about the Scion's scarify was probably the lowest point of EW for me).

- ShB: again, that sense of urgency when we rally everyone to build the golem to attack Vaultry's fortress should have been the ramp into the final confrontation of the story. But instead we got Tempest, which was just a slow slog across a massive map.


Now don't get me wrong, Amuroh is cool, the Endless zone is not that bad but at the very least I think their position in the story sequence is misplaced. Those exposition would be perfect as a x.10 post story contents instead of being a momentum killer. And frankly, even if they were done right it has become so formulaic at this point that I'm fully expect they gonna kill the story momentum before it happens. Even as the writing obviously was hyping zone 6 as a dangerous incursion into enemy territory - including that tear jerking (NOT) send off at the gate, I already fully expect it ain't gonna be like that. Maybe the writers thought they manage to subvert my expectation when they had that tour guide dude greet me at the entrance, but I just rolled my eye because it's exactly what I knew would happen. And so it began (again), on one hand we're on a doomday time limit, on the other hand let spend time to take in the scenery, smelling flowers and entertaining the kids because exposition, Exposition, EXPOSITION, EXPOSITIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

Feels like the first part of the story should have ended earlier after 2 zones. Leaving 3 zones for alexandria instead of just 2.

Everkeep feels otherwise oversized and underutilized.

My issue with the final zone was the squandered potential of what could have been.
The concept of memory replicas being people should have been interesting to me, having watched the inverse when a loved one fades to dementia until the person I knew and loved was gone but the shell of their body remained.
Yet we're told in the first two minutes of entering the zone that all these entities are doomed, no ifs or buts about it but hey waste your time trying to learn about them before inevitably shutting them off anyway. At that point I just stopped caring about them, the game made it clear we were going to shut them off so why bother learning about them.
For me that zone would have been so much better if we learned about the Endless there, tried and failed to brainstorm/find alternatives to keep them going and then decided to shut them down for a lack of alternatives instead of that being a foregone conclusion from the start.

Alexandria, Everkeep, and Living Memory only serve as examples as to why DT's writing is very noticably sub-par.

Reflection shenanigans? Y'shtola should have something to say about this... or she's just here for fan service.
An entire city seemingly destroyed? Certainly there should be many people affected by this... or it's just Schmuck Lamat and her foster mother. And Erenville. But don't look at him until later! Wuk Lamat wants to talk to Speeeeen!
People literally eating souls? This has some interesting parallels to the voidsent we just spent several patches interacting with... mentioned once and never again brought up.
People who seem to be alive but aren't by our standards? Didn't we just finish a 10 year arc about thiLOOK A BOAT RIDE WITH G'RAHA!

I had no emotional connection to any of them in that zone. I just wanted the story to end already. It was a slog getting through each zone. No depth in the writing. The final boss fight was cool, but then you know who showed up and I forgot she existed for a moment and it was awkward with the forced emotions. They probably thought players would be emotionally connected. I was except I wanted everyone to die, including you know who.

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Originally Posted by koko-on-da-forumz

nope, enjoy hours and hours of filler. Don't forget a quiz to make sure you're really reading!

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I purged that memory out from my head and completely forgot about it. That quiz was dreadful especially since I didn’t care and skipped the history lesson and most dialogues .It was bad enough slogging through that zone. Then they give you a quiz as I was already falling asleep from the endless cutscene soap bar and sock beating.

The zone worked well for me. It was slower paced yes but that's not neccesarily a bad thing. I enjoyed learning more about the place before we started shutting it down. Seeing Otis as he was backin the day. Having Wuk Lamat, Krile and Erenville getting to talk to lost loved ones, the bitter sweet moments of bonding knowing what was inevitably coming, and then saying goodbye. Letting go, the thing our villain could not bring herself to do and drove her said villainy in the first place. Seeing the lights fade and feeling the silence after. Helping wayward 'spirits' move on in a sense. Was it perfect? No, but all around I really enjoyed it.

The whole zone had me thinking how stupid the Alexandrians were - the way they overengineered that place is a great tragedy.
They carved everything out of solid electrope and projected texture/color onto them instead of doing something sensible like using paint.
Hence why Sphene felt the need to invade The Source - the sheer incompetence of Alexandria's engineers created something brutally inefficient and requiring far too much power to be sustainabl and the fact that it could never be shut down for even a second because they stored all of their data in RAM meant that it was always on, 24/7. They programmed Sphene to be wholly unreasonable and not open to the idea of, say, working with Cid and Nero to find a better power source. It was always doomed to failure.
You call it bad writing, I call it tragedy.

Not sure what the dev team was thinking by making a zone so ugly that you never want to return. I was on a hunt train last night and all I could think for the last zone was "this has to be the ugliest thing they've ever put in this game, I can't wait to finish this train so I can leave this awful zone." I have no idea why shutting down the terminals needed to wipe all of the textures off the map and replace them with ugly gray blocks. Yeah yeah, it's supposed to be "thematic," but FFXIV has had plenty of thematic zones that don't make being in them utterly miserable. I had already checked out of the story by the time we got to Living Memory and all I could think as a silver lining to keep going was "well, it's almost over now and at least I can gpose here later." NOPE lol can't even do that.

I know you can start a NG+ file to restore it, but I'd really rather not have to do that and have a NG+ quest tracker stuck to the top left corner of my screen just to make a single zone less disgusting to look at. Hell, I rather like that the old lighting disappears and you get a proper skybox, I just don't see why it was necessary to paint nasty textures all over the zone to do it.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

People who seem to be alive but aren't by our standards? Didn't we just finish a 10 year arc about thiLOOK A BOAT RIDE WITH G'RAHA!

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What was the one line in ShB? "The ephemeral lives you wield are ghastly mockeries of the true world, utterly devoid of meaning"? Sure would be appropriate to have a callback to that to at least try to add some kind of moral quandary to such a clear-cut them or us situation, but I guess that's asking too much.