The Negative Impact of Poor Character Writing on the Quality of Dawntrail's MSQ

[Colt47]

The weakness they have is they want to say everything instead of show everything, and because they want to say everything they overlook the nuances that they unintentionally put into the world lore that would heavily impact several of the events in the game. The fact our character remains silent on several key points in the story of dawntrail despite having experiences relating to an immediate situation is definitely felt through the entire thing.

The other problem is that they focus so much on making a giant cutscene fiesta, the player has barely any interaction at all. If someone doesn't stop to do side quests, it literally turns into a string of cutscenes that have points where someone walks to another quest marker, then starts yet another cutscene. Many of them did not need to be there at all and could have been interactive segments, and there is one especially bad example of this that happens later in the story and EVERYONE who has done Dawntrail probably knows it, since it happens between the mid point and finale involving a train. We are so far past the limits of the PS2 era on needing movies for everything, and an MMO is not a great medium for lengthy story bits that people are going to rush through and then spoil anyway as short as two days after release.

[duckorz]

The weakness they have is they want to say everything instead of show everything, and because they want to say everything they overlook the nuances that they unintentionally put into the world lore that would heavily impact several of the events in the game. The fact our character remains silent on several key points in the story of dawntrail despite having experiences relating to an immediate situation is definitely felt through the entire thing.

This is a massive, massive problem that imposes an exponential entropy of narrative incoherence as things go along. This is why I say that sensible, empathy-driven (that is, being able to think through what a character would do/say) character writing is the biggest issue, and the core matter at hand that every other problem stems from. Characters not asking the right questions breaks the plot and the worldbuilding, characters not having sensible reactions to the situations and contexts they're placed in ruins the themes and the nuance they could have, characters suggesting that we do inane things to go from point A to point B ruins the pacing (I would take just one blue/yellow quests from the zones that are written way better than MSQ is than talk to/reassure 3 random citizens again). This was tolerable in 6.x because the narrative outline and premise were less complicated, posed less questions, and we had less time for the poor character writing to negatively affect the narrative. Even the first 2-3 levels of DT, while still having all the problems of the later MSQ, were still more enjoyable because we didn't have as many stacks of this "horrible writing" debuff. It just gets worse and worse and worse and I'm mortified at the thought of the patch quests trying to deal with stuff like the inexplicable unexplained baby of Zoraal Ja being the king of Solution 9 and actually trying to address the insane implications of that.