Are y'all expecting too much from Dawntrail's story?

[EusisLandale]

Let me put it to you this way. There is a tribe of merchants wearing giant nosed masks that want the warmonger in power so they can earn more money. You can not set your expectations low enough for this to not still be disappointed.

[DrForester]

I feel like it lived up to what we were told it would be. A fun adventure with overall smaller stakes than we saw in Endwalker. Endwalker was the end of a 10 year journey. Thought the expansion was a lot of fun. This was our beach episode.

I do think the story could have been trimmed a bit. Maybe cut down on the whole successor storyline to only 4 objectives instead of seven. Enjoyable as they were, I do think that much lore being dropped at once has led to the feeling by some that it's slow. Thought the back half MSQ story was excellent.

Enjoyed all the new characters. Though Wuk Lamat was great. Think there's been a lot of bad-faith criticism about her from the gamergate 2.0 crowd, but what can you expect from that type.

Only notable story criticism is that I think most the scions were very underutilized to the point I think the devs missed the chance to make this a new starting point for the game. Cut most them out (I would have kept Krile and Estinien), and make a modified MSQ for new players. Basically do for new players in 7.0 what 2.0 did for it's new players.

That aside, I really enjoyed it, and I think there's some excellent hooks for future storylines.

[Isala]

Enjoyed all the new characters. Though Wuk Lamat was great. Think there's been a lot of bad-faith criticism about her from the gamergate 2.0 crowd, but what can you expect from that type.

Bullcrap. I wouldn't have even known about their deal if I hadn't tried to look up if I was the only one who thought that voice acting was terrible.

[MikkoAkure]

My biggest problems are that the pacing in the beginning is really slow and the Scions are kind of just there and don't really do anything. They could have very well replaced the whole cast with new people or have them not present at all and absolutely nothing would have changed at all.

I don't think the plot wrecks the momentum as bad as SB's did when we completely halt our rebellion to go to the other side of the world to have fun Fantasy Japan times in Kugane before whatever the heck Ruby Tide was. I think so far it's a solid 6/7 out of 10. It'll maintain a 7 as long as it doesn't completely ruin its story by reviving half the dead cast at the very end like SB. The story is decent, but the way it tells it is a little cumbersome. The villains have much better motivations than ARR's Ascians who were just doing evil things for evil's sake or whatever Zenos' deal was.


I think a lot of the people here on the forums reviewing it are being extremely melodramatic. I've read A LOT of fiction and this is at least passable. There's way worse writing out there but this isn't the best FFXIV has put out there. I think at this point a lot of posters here have way too much exposure to social media and people are used to expressing their opinions in extremes and everyone who disagrees with them is the enemy and places where people have good opinions are "hugboxes". Internet brain rot is real.

All that said, outside of the forums and in my max-capacity FC of randomly collected people by an overzealous recruiter, I seem to have the most negative outlook to Dawntrail and my thoughts are that it's an OK run at best and aggressively mediocre at worst. I haven't seen anyone in-game say it's downright bad and there's a lot of people who seem easily pleased enough and absolutely love it.