I believe I finally understood why some people have issues with Dawntrail

[Raven2014]

Zenos was a mistake. Too much moving away from the political stone of the story. Characters are great and all, but it's always been only one part of what makes ffxiv story good.

No he was not, he was one of the most based and single minded villain in FF14. And while in some context that maybe called "shallow" and "one dimensional", in FF14 he's a unique - one of a kind.

I'm actually tired of how the writing always always ALWAYS try to humanize the villains at the end. 95% of the people we go after always gonna turn out symapthetic at the end, to the point it starts feeling pathetic. Like ... in Dawn Trail there is literally zero bad guy because everyone has a reason. I feel if you ask FF14 do an adaption of World War 2, they probably gonna try to make Hitler "isn't actually that bad".


Zenos was 101% selfish and un-apologetically evil, we need more such villain in FF14.

[Kashou]

The fetch quests are about 1% of the problems with Dawntrails story.

[Reimmi]

To sum it up, it's probably the way the team does fetch quests.
I think YoshiP almost always goes for a safe route in order to not compromise the release date and the overall quality of the product, but that means there are corners to be cut for something to be released in proper time.

For example, mini-games are usually the same 2 or 3 like spotting waldo or playing hide and seek.

Now, let's us imagine an ideal scenario where the team has infinite resources and time:
- I never liked the story of FF7 (original or otherwise) but I enjoyed how they implemented a lot of mini-games for every small quest on 7 rebirth.
This might not be feasible on FFXIV if you have to re-use content since it's an MMO and there are some limitations to it, but man... It would have been great if every fetch quest had a mini-game associated with it feeling more like you are playing a small fun game instead of simply reading a text and moving from A to B.
For example, if gathering is required, maybe re-using mini-games from the golden saucer like "Out on a Limb" to cut down trees could be possible, or maybe things like simple (not so complex) jumping puzzle games like in GATEs, chocobo racing, etc~
Or even steal some ideas from Nintendo games? xD

There could or could not be harder options, but essentially enjoying the journey could potentially ease some of the worries of people who think the story is slow because you tend to focus on a smaller goal at a time.

Alas, I personally do not dislike slow burns and I understand this is too resource heavy for a team that is already trying to deal with a graphical update.
So I thought that this was probably the main reason some people had issues not only with the way some quests are done in FFXIV but also in FFXVI.

I think what would help is just having fetch quests include some combat (gameplay) in between
not talking like kill 20 bears or anything crazy. just kill a couple waves of enemies to defend alphinaud or something, done

[KageTokage]

No he was not, he was one of the most based and single minded villain in FF14. And while in some context that maybe called "shallow" and "one dimensional", in FF14 he's a unique - one of a kind.

I'm actually tired of how the writing always always ALWAYS try to humanize the villains at the end. 95% of the people we go after always gonna turn out symapthetic at the end, to the point it starts feeling pathetic. Like ... in Dawn Trail there is literally zero bad guy because everyone has a reason. I feel if you ask FF14 do an adaption of World War 2, they probably gonna try to make Hitler "isn't actually that bad".


Zenos was 101% selfish and un-apologetically evil, we need more such villain in FF14.

I found him infinitely preferable to Zoraal Ja to whom they gave the shallowest frame of a motivation that did not even remotely begin to justify all the nonsense he gets up to.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Zenos was 101% selfish and un-apologetically evil, we need more such villain in FF14.

The more I'm in the forums the more I realize that y'all don't know literally anything about Zenos. Are we even playing the same game?

[Rolder50]

The more I'm in the forums the more I realize that y'all don't know literally anything about Zenos. Are we even playing the same game?

Zenos was perfectly okay with destroying his own country and killing civilians by the score just to try and goad the WoL into a fight. Doesn't even have a particularly good reason other then wanting to fight.

[koko-on-da-forumz]

Zenos was perfectly okay with destroying his own country and killing civilians by the score just to try and goad the WoL into a fight. Doesn't even have a particularly good reason other then wanting to fight.

That's not evil, it's selfish. He also saved his country and the world (twice) for the same reason. When civilians challenge him to a fight as representative of his colonial nation, he dissuades them. Girls just want to have fun, and if that requires putting on a theatrical villain persona for the WoL, he will.

[TKOtheKDR]

Because that way if you skip the god awful story at least there works be an actual game. OP is just using minigames as an example.

You can skip the horrid plot and still have to deal with hours of walking without anything interesting happening in between. Skipping the cutscenes you still have 2 to 3 hours of what amounts to nothing before the first dungeon.

Those are the words of a de facto Wuk apologist.

Yes, let's skip the main reason we've all just paid ~$60...

/s

[GrizzlyTank]

Please for the love of God let's not use the wacky GW2 base game MSQ system. I play GW2 since it's release back in 2012 and the change they made in the base game MSQ to be every 10 levels is one of the most hurtful things they did to new players, even anet admitted it wasn't a good choice. That is one of the biggest reasons why most ppl quit before lvl 80 in GW2.

Yeah, the 2nd expansion and it's following patches story was fun, albeit a bit rushed some places.

First half of icebrood was great too... but then the quality tanked for some reason.

[SillyCrow]

My guess is that they tried to jam everything in the regular schedule while doing sweeping changes and they just ran out of time.

Hopefully they'll have a workflow optimized for the new process to have more time to make 8.0 far better and fun.