The hell were they thinking when doing "Newfound adventure" back on 6.1???

[Kisshu]

With now Dawntrail on the horizon and seeing more in retrospective, why, just why pull out all the newfound adventure thing so soon when it would've been the literal PERFECT setup for Dawntrail?

The premise was simple, you've saved the world and now you're free to do whatever you want, go to whatever place you wish and so on we go to New World on a well deserved vacations... but after said talk Tataru gives us we're thrown onto the Golbez/void arc

Put anything, literally anything as an excuse for us to meet Estinien with his map and remove this, and instead move this literal moment to the end of this expansion, because everything just indicates it was made as a great epilogue to DT
Tataru's talk, a new glam indicating traveling without a defined job, on the patch image all previous jobs Derplander has had with a big smile just looking foward and being free on this time HIS next adventure

Please tell me i'm not the only one who thinks this because i just think it's a shame such perfect and ideal setup was wasted this back on 6.1

Plus the overall storybeats of 6.1 dungeon is just 4.1 all over again with a repeat of Skalla. (Go on an adventure with a friend to find a lost stash of treasure, only to end up using the treasure for others).

I think alot were expecting us to finally be going back to beng adventurers again, just for the second half of the patch to rail-road us onto another world saving quest.

[Lunaxia]

To me, this whole post-patch EW story has just been very much a who cares? Non of it feels like it matters. We just saved the whole universe, to then go: oh, by the way, some dude in the void wants to destroy the world or whatever. It just feels very much like they were stuck with an idea of what to do and decided, hey lets go with a world ending threat.... again!

Scatterbrained thoughts are I feel like we should have been dealing more with the ramifications and loss and fear and rebuilding. There should have been lingering effects, from the stopping the Final Day, with the underlying idea of what was said, about how little we knew about and had explored of the world. That would be the set up to go visit the other places.

This whole Golbez thing could have been made into an expansion, later, to explore and recover the Thirteenth shard, somehow, instead of being shoehorned into post-patch and treated like oh no! the lady of wind! oh, she dead... whose next?

It's very weird, to the point I'm confused why it isn't talked about more - even criticism regarding 6.1 onwards is mainly to do with the quality of the void quests. If they want to rid themselves of the entire arc they've worked on for a decade that brought them immense popularity with a perplexing sense of speed and dismissal, fine, but I don't understand not even devoting some of post-6.0 to looking at any after-effects of what was a world-altering affair. Every expansion that came before made a clear point of doing so, and under much less impactful circumstances. And in exchange for... this. Some strange, lacklustre IV rip-off they couldn't even dredge some original lore or the Mhach raids for.

Really, really weird. I feel like any other company would have wanted to take advantage of the explosion of interest for as long as they could, but it's like they couldn't wait for it to be over.

[undull1]

6.1 and 6.2 atleast kinda made sense with where they were going, they seamlessly directed you into the alliance raids/trials which has been an issue in previous expansions.
Say what you want about crystal tower but it would be less common if Void ark/Ivalice were better signposted for new players.

But then near the end of 6.2 they veered off by keeping zero as the focus, stretching the very simple trial storyline over the duration of MSQ.

This time from 6.3-6.5 could have been used to introduce new characters, places and ideas to lead into the Dawntrail plot.
As it stands now everything both said and implied about Dawntrails plot seems counter to what most players want and if their willing to throw the patch MSQ under the bus by handing it off to junior writers who says they won't half-ass the expansion too?

[Mostly_Raxus]

lets be real, the newfound adventurer arc was where we left off the MSQ..
its just the trial series and its self contained arc were for some reason added as the MSQ plot while the devs mysteriously worked on ff16 instead.. *weird*

[Shikiseki]

I just have the impression that whole Archfiend arc was supposed to be the self contained trial questline like the four lords, warring triad, the weapons etc. but they decided to cut corners (yet again) and relegated it to MSQ. I can't really think of another explanation.

Still, since we got the DT trailer, we know that our "new" adventure is just the same recycled style they've been doing lately: same old characters, same old beast tribes, same old fetch quests and content formula.

Maybe I've just been playing this game for too long now but it really hurts to see this game in such a poor, stale, bare-bones maintenance-mode state

[Iscah]

I just have the impression that whole Archfiend arc was supposed to be the self contained trial questline like the four lords, warring triad, the weapons etc. but they decided to cut corners (yet again) and relegated it to MSQ. I can't really think of another explanation.

If they changed it, they changed it very early on, because the story as it stands relies on the dungeons and all five trials to pull it all together.

It's possible that they did it to cut corners, but it's also possible that they started out conceiving of it as a trial questline before deciding they couldn't do it justice in that "three trials, one solo duty" format or even the Four Lords approach of adding in a dungeon or two but keeping the same trial structure. If that happened and they had no other solid plans for what to do with MSQ between the end of one major story arc and the beginning of the new one, then it does make sense to make use of the MSQ story channel with its more generous amount of duties.

[Hyperia]

This arc was a test to see how the community reacts to small, self contained arcs and not a grand arc similar to what we finished. From what I have seen, most want a large multi-expansion story with smaller arcs within.

[SieyaM]

This arc was a test to see how the community reacts to small, self contained arcs and not a grand arc similar to what we finished. From what I have seen, most want a large multi-expansion story with smaller arcs within.

I'm not sure that is the case, since a lot of this MSQ relies on things we have learned in previous arcs, and has us visiting characters from previous arcs. It was not all that self contained.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

Bold of you to assume they actually knew what they were going to do for Dawntrail back in 6.1.

[Nebelheim]

This arc was a test to see how the community reacts to small, self contained arcs and not a grand arc similar to what we finished. From what I have seen, most want a large multi-expansion story with smaller arcs within.

I wouldn't mind if they did self contained stories for each future expansion similar to ff11 instead of another multi expansion arc.