What is DT story missing the most?

actual useful feedback thread? :yesyes:

So for me it feels like the most important things missing from the story are the following :

> No inner conflict
this 1 really sucks since it as actually part of DT advertisement. The scions never fight or disagree about anything. no clashes or conflicts and that removes character development

> No Villain/Rival
gonna be real zarool ja and sphene just aint it. im sure ill get hate here but i LIKED zenos. ' though he provided a perfect mirror reflection to the wols good and just heart. The lack of a good villain in DT meant that the humour characters like zenos, emet, fandanial all provided is lacking. zarool ja doesn't entertain me and neither does sphene.

> No sense of adventure
Kinda funny they lured your wol into this MSQ with the promise of adventure but the whole game feels like a stormblood CTRL+V. Aren't we in the Brazilian rainforest? why aren't we discovering hidden ruins or endemic life instead of playing chaperone to Wukky

> Low to No stakes
when something goes wrong in Dt, it just kinda fixes itself, nothing ever has lasting consequences, nobody dies or gets killed, nobody is really alive and nobody matters.

> No likeable companions
Wuk is horrible because she's overbearing, loud, annoying and delusional. and errenvil is a bland as unpainted walls, the story with them feels fake and i don't care about either of em /shrug

> WOL mentally afk
This 1 bothers me the most, but i swear the WOL has stopped paying attention to the msq, he has no emotion, conviction or even care.. he never speaks up for himself, never defies anybody and never does anything on his own. Guy is afk in his own game (the 7.16 role quests really just hammers this problem in even more)

• Voice Acting.
• Inner conflict between allies (and no, Thancred and Urianger weren't really fighting us. Our current allies know us too well and wouldn't dare, so we need new ones).
• Duties and gameplay. The train scene sticks out because they have the sniper gun technology we saw since (I think) Shadowbringers.

"I'm sure I'll get hate here I liked Zenos"
yeah, so did a majority of the fanbase

My main issue was the lack of tension. It is a very long story punctuated by some ocassional neat moments, but I was overall bored and found myself spending more time alt+tabbed out to browse the internet than engaged and sitting on the edge of my seat wanting to find out what happens next.

Right off the bat, it does not feel like there is an urgency or stakes to the contest. Bajool Ja Ja is just a bully and then keeps failing so no reason to fear him. Zoraal Ja never came across as threatening. So I go to Urqopacha and Kozam and spend a lot of time meandering around and doing chores and Wuk gets two keystones, and then eventually the only thing that happens is that Wuk Lamat gets kidnapped, and then we get her back and she hasn't lost any keystones. The turning point for me was when the doom bird was unleashed and nothing happened. I was expecting it was going to be like FF9 or FF10 and villages would have to be evacuated, settlements wiped off the face of the earth, the army mobilized and divisions wiped out, etc. But we just teleport onto a rock with 8 guys and kill it just like that with no casualties. That greatly diminished my interest in the story, and then the cooking contest had the two agreeable good guys paired with each other vs the two antagonists, and at that point it is clear there is no risk of failure or anything bad happening, and I abandoned the MSQ to go level up alt jobs instead.

It didn't feel like there were any real emotional gut-punches. And I was quite surprised at this, to be honest.

I mean - Endwalker gave us, for example, 'You're Not Alone' and that walk with 'Close in the Distance' playing. Shadowbringers gave us the whole "This world is not yours to end. This is our future. Our Story" sequence.
I could obviously cite more, but my point is that Dawntrail didn't really have anything like this. I will say that it seemed to attempt it at least twice -
- Vrtra being called on
- Cahciua's 'deletion'

In the case of Vrtra, whilst it WAS one of 7.0's better (if not best) moments, the fact that they used 'Footfalls' with it felt like a play on Endwalker nostalgia.
In the case of Cahciua - the fact that she was a facsimile was the sad element of this but it was difficult to overlook the fact that the real Cahciua spent the remainder of her life trapped inside the dome and never got to reconcile with her son.

Whether or not we'll get something more impactful in the patches remains to be seen.

Honestly? There is a single thing that is entirely absence in DT in all aspects.

Substance/Depth.

Be it the story, the stakes or the characters.
If anything it was stripped from the characters we know already.

Everything feels 2-dimensional, it has no depth to it. The story feels paperthin, the characters are merely cutouts and painfully 2D.
They used to have different viewpoints on things, that was stripped in DT. Heck even Thancred and Urianger lack that. They basically support Koana just cause he asked and have no qualms in him throwing it all away for an objectively worse candidate.

Everything just falls into place as if the story tries to rush itself without any friction to the finish line.
It is such an on-rails experience that does not dare to introduce anything that would cause interest thast may detract from the writers goal.

It's especially felt in the last zone where we know these memories act like real people and such but are hammered over the head with "gotta delete this all, lol". No conflict arises, neither by the Scions, the Memory-people nor the WoL and it SHOULD.
As it was said so many times before:

- We as WoL are knowledgeable in civilizations, magic and Magiteck that would most likely be able to solve the situation and make Sphenes plan obsolete
- We as WoL and the Scions should have doubts and hesitations acting like the Ascians all of a sudden
- We have a long track record of preservation but this time we chose annihilation for a vague reason

It truly does not feel like an expansion but a hamfisted story using existing elements and discarding anything else cause someone wanted to tell their story in FFXIV and not a story about FFXIV, the Scions and WoL.

Everything about the WoL.

No agency, no adventure (like promised), no vacation (once again), no use.

• No agency
  The only way to have agency in this story is only if you care for Wuk Lamat from the very beginning and sincerely want her to become the Dawnservant, and I think that's a miss for many people (even the WoL recognize that she isn't ready at the beginning).
  
• No adventure
  It's a guided tour of an already pacified land, there's not the slightest taste of "adventure". And when things go off the rails with Alexandria, we return to the usual “We have to save the world” which is not the kind of adventure promised (Indiana Jones styled).
  
• No vacation
  I don't know about you, but guided tour while having to babysit someone in a quest to determinate who will be the next leader of a country is s the furthest thing from what I consider a vacation.
  
• No use
  Let's be honest, the WoL and their skills / perticularities are useless in this story. Either for the foes we encounters or a a supposed role of mentor for Wuk Lamat.
  Every foes could have been defeated without the WoL having to be involved, any high skilled adventurer (we are stealing job from Hoary Boulder) would have been enough, maybe excluding the last fight but even then, Wuk Lamat is the one who mattered at the end.
  And the WoL is never shown to train Wuk Lamat in any way possible nor never used their past experiences to inspire her. The only think she lacked always have been confidence, which she gain by herself.

I have never felt so disconnected from my WoL ever (and it has nothing to do with not being the main character, even in story where the WoL take the backseat, like Hildibrand, some Raid storylines or even 6.x patches with Zero taking the main seat, the WoL never felt to shallow and empty as a character).

The only reason we are here is to recover the Key that's is the McGuffin that will allow us to go to other shards and that's it.

The whole story doesn't feel like the "beginning" of something but a big filler, and I'm not someone who like fillers that much.

Honestly it feels like Wuk Lamat is having more of an adventure than we are.

The biggest thing IMO is character development and establishing a new cast.

This was the expansion for Krile and a great opportunity for them to introduce new characters and build on them. Instead they picked 1 character and beat us to death with them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Derio

Honestly it feels like Wuk Lamat is having more of an adventure than we are.

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Not just her. Estinien left me feeling he was having a better adventure than we were, and he was in just three scenes in the whole of 7.0 and 7.1 combined!

The setting, which I guess means the writing in general. I still cannot buy that Dawntrail happens in the same universe as the rest of FF14, or why we're here. It's a country with a king and everyone is happy, and now help them crown their next ruler. We're not given any true information of how these people live, how they've come together, why they've come together, how they're governed, etc. Gulool Ja Ja went on his own WoL-level journey 80 something years ago(?) and everything's been groovy since then. Except when it hasn't, but we'll just gloss over those moments for shock value when needed and go back to happy-go-lucky asap. We're not here for adventure, we're here to play kingmaker on an guided tour challenge who's own organizer tells us has no plan to honour it if need be. Everyone but the bad people are good, and even those are actually good, we just need to teach them a lesson.

I know Endwalker gets some flak, and even if it's deserved, it ultimately still felt like FF14's world, just with both it's strength and weaknesses dialed up to 11. Dawntrail looked at a setting of different countries learning to trust, accept and work with one another and the often difficult path to get there, all propped up by shadowy organizations and antagonists that play into that and said "What if we just did a shonen story instead? Take a kid who wants to become X and give them dumb simple villains to beat up along the way".

I'm just gonna be blunt.

What it's missing the most is direction and purpose. Like the list of issues and what it is missing or what it needs is really too long that it's difficult for me to say anything else outside of direction and purpose.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CVXIV

"I'm sure I'll get hate here I liked Zenos"
yeah, so did a majority of the fanbase

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Hated that prick. I'm glad he's dead. Wasn't a fan of his build a bear either.

I didn't hate the msq it just wasn't memorable.

But to be fair, I thought pretty much the same for Endwalker. You take out all the "hey member," and the story kinda sucks.

Where something like Shadowbringers stands on it own. It has some issues, sure, but the highs are as high as they can go while the lows are still better than what we've gotten since.