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

[duckorz]

My point is mainly that DT didn't necessarily needed to be her level to be good. It already falls short of being on the level of the entirety of 2.X~4.55 and that's a problem. Even Stormblood's most dull moments were far more grounded in reality compared to Dawntrail's best moments.
Ishikawa is the best writer XIV had, but the game's story was praised since 2015.

For sure, I agree with that. I'll take literally anyone over the person currently writing the MSQ. Hire some random fan or someone off the street. Anyone. It literally cannot get worse than this.

I didn't express this in the body of the post originally, but I have to make my feelings clear - this level of writing could legitimately kill the game. It is not just *that* bad, it's that this game IS its narrative. This games main selling point, it's main point of reputation, how its marketed, how its reviewed so well, how its transmitted through word of mouth, its main point of consumer investment, is the quality of the world, its characters, and the narrative. What on earth do SE expect to happen if all of a sudden, all people can talk about is how horrible the narrative in FFXIV is? With WoW steadily improving, it might, somehow, have a better narrative in its new expansion than Dawntrail. That is catastrophic. CBU3 has been tirelessly fighting tooth and nail for this reputation for a decade. For that one crucial point of comparison to its main competitor in the market that lead to the WoW exodus in 2020. That cannot go away. This is SE's financial anchor. If people start unsubbing and buying cash shop stuff (which they will if they feel less emotionally and personally invested in the world and the story), it's a serious, serious issue for SE. FFXIV needs to be actually treated like the utmost #1 priority it is for the company. The writing in this expansion (thats not even to say anything about the nonexistent VA direction, some of the issues with the graphics update, and any of the gameplay problems the game still has, even if the encounter design is getting better) is worse than my worst nightmare. I never thought it could ever get this bad.

[CosmoBabylonia]

Luke Skywalker is arguably the same trope as Wuk being an naive protagonist that had to learn the hard way. They could have copied someone's homework.

People shit on Lyse and Stormblood, but at least the writers had the gull to made us fail. That made the story more awesome.

[Icycrits]

This is masterfully put. I went into this expansion with a lot of hope and tried my best not to criticize anything until I had the full story, from start to credit roll. And yes, there were nuggets of concepts that I really enjoyed. But for every bit of enjoyment, there was a very bitter pill to swallow along with it:

I liked the idea of the rite of succession as a trial, but not only did they condense these 'trials' into the most mundane acts of fetch quest nonsense, but they also stretched everything way too thin by making them require SEVEN keystones. It should have been one per zone, maximum. To call the first half of this expansion a meandering slog is putting it lightly. It will be fun watching streamers as they start to stream the MSQ and their live reactions to the merciless drudgery this expansion puts you through.
I really liked Bakool Ja Ja as a character, but like others have mentioned in these forums, his motivations and acts during the trial did not align in any way.
I wanted to enjoy Wuk Lamat's growth as a character, but there were never any moments of growth. She just skated by on luck, relying on the WoL, or deciding that she was good enough as is.
The most unforgiveable aspect of it all is the utter disrespect for the Scions as characters this expansion. I would've much preferred to see them all left behind in the old world rather than see them so pathetically underutilized as bland servants to Wuk Lamat/Koana.

I think what makes me sad about it all is that there was a lot of potential here but it was just completely mishandled. And now, despite how good the writing may be in the future, there is now a second unavoidable "Stormblood" for people to try to slog through in an attempt to get their friends to join them in the 500 hour MSQ journey to future expansions. Except this one dwarfs any other expansion in size.

[Tethan]

I'm genuinely curious or rather unsure if the story can even be salvaged at this point, it's something I wanted to make a thread about, but I'm not sure how to put it. It's just..

This is like a curse the game will have to carry for the rest of its life. EVERY new player will have to slog their way through this, a dark stain in an otherwise shining legacy, not very different from 1.0 FFXIV being a stain on Final Fantasy as a franchise and how did they fix that? By blowing up the world.

The MSQ is already like this jenga tower that is build up, every expansion makes it taller and taller, but it ALWAYS has to stand on what came before. If one section isn't stable, nothing that comes after it will be stable. And again, every new player has to climb this tower at least once (or skip I guess, but then why play FFXIV?). How can this be sustainable going forward?

[SirShady]

Luke Skywalker is arguably the same trope as Wuk being an naive protagonist that had to learn the hard way. They could have copied someone's homework.

People shit on Lyse and Stormblood, but at least the writers had the gull to made us fail. That made the story more awesome.

I hope Dawntrail makes people realize that as unearned as Lyse's rise to political power was, she was actually a well written flawed character who actually had nuance and drive. She wasn't a character we had to sit down and talk about how crying about sea sickness to your friends is ok. No, she had a goal and was willing to diplomatically punch her way through entire countries to accomplish it.

I didn't like Lyse my first time playing Stormblood, then I replayed the story and realized, she's actually a really fun character if you get past her flaws. The story rightfully points them out multiple times, and she does grow over the course of the journey, even if placing her as the leader of Ala Mhigo felt rushed. At the very least, she's interesting.

Wuk Lamat on the other hand is an idealized Mary Sue who is never challenged and everyone else fawns over, and probably has triple the amount of screentime Lyse did with only a bunch of cardboard cutout Scion cheerleaders to bounce off of. It's agonizing.

[Zaniel]

I think that's a solid write-up that gives a good summary of the core problem with the writing. I do think there are other almost-as serious problems with the narrative based on pure logical plotholes (which either weren't a thing previous to Dawntrail or were cleverly covered up by quick thinking writing), the utter non-connection to existing FF14 lore (we've had 4 expansions about Primals and the dangerous power of belief and all of a sudden we're back to religion and faith again, plus no Final Days in Tural apparently). Also the unbelievably slow pacing (worse than ARR) and constant missteps in narrative design (Erinville is about to tell us something interesting and before he can finish his sentence someone is interrupting us to praise Wuk Lamat again and we neever heear the lore). Not to mention the almost complete lack of gameplay in the first 30 hours, just a bombardment of visual novel (that's a game design thing, not really writing but it makes the writing feel even worse).

The writing problems are not just confined to characters (although that is the core), they are numerous, all encompassing and omnipresent to the point it wears at your soul.

[duckorz]

This is masterfully put. I went into this expansion with a lot of hope and tried my best not to criticize anything until I had the full story, from start to credit roll. And yes, there were nuggets of concepts that I really enjoyed. But for every bit of enjoyment, there was a very bitter pill to swallow along with it:

I liked the idea of the rite of succession as a trial, but not only did they condense these 'trials' into the most mundane acts of fetch quest nonsense, but they also stretched everything way too thin by making them require SEVEN keystones. It should have been one per zone, maximum. To call the first half of this expansion a meandering slog is putting it lightly. It will be fun watching streamers as they start to stream the MSQ and their live reactions to the merciless drudgery this expansion puts you through.
I really liked Bakool Ja Ja as a character, but like others have mentioned in these forums, his motivations and acts during the trial did not align in any way.
I wanted to enjoy Wuk Lamat's growth as a character, but there were never any moments of growth. She just skated by on luck, relying on the WoL, or deciding that she was good enough as is.
The most unforgiveable aspect of it all is the utter disrespect for the Scions as characters this expansion. I would've much preferred to see them all left behind in the old world rather than see them so pathetically underutilized as bland servants to Wuk Lamat/Koana.

I think what makes me sad about it all is that there was a lot of potential here but it was just completely mishandled. And now, despite how good the writing may be in the future, there is now a second unavoidable "Stormblood" for people to try to slog through in an attempt to get their friends to join them in the 500 hour MSQ journey to future expansions. Except this one dwarfs any other expansion in size.

One of the biggest red flags for me was when I totally expected the stuff with Solution 9 and its invasion to interrupt the succession plot before we got all 7 keystones, which then just... didnt happen...? It's so obvious, so straightforwardly more compelling, that it was the prediction I was by far the most certain about. There was just going to be no way that we just did all 7 trials in a straightforward fashion with no complication along the way (No, Valigarmanda really doesn't count, here, because there are LITERALLY ZERO CONSEQUENCES FOR IT BEING RELEASED). And then it happened. Wuk Lamat just became Dawnservant, I got the Dawntrail orchestrion roll, and that was it. Everyone's happy, plot over, let's go to Texas to find a bracelet. Shadowbringers recognized this potential issue with its Lightwardens and introduced regular, significant twists and breaks in structure to keep the pacing tight and the narrative intriguing. I mean, they succeeded in expectations by making it completely straightforward and instead shoving all of Solution 9 and its nonsensical plot into the very end of the MSQ, but I don't really think it was a good subversion.

I still struggle to understand why Zoraal Ja was even involved with Solution 9 as an antagonist at all. Yeah, yeah, because he wanted power and Solution 9 had power. I get that's what the story tells me and wants me to just go along with. But structurally its just nonsensical and totally ineffective. Why did Sphene just give him total authority over everything? Why not just take the key from him if thats what she needed? Why did Zoraal Ja even feel this was necessary to prove his point? Did he do all of this *just* to prove a point? Why am I watching this fisher price Arbiter transforming into a completely different character all of a sudden with an even more utterly incomprehensible motivation than he had before he went into the portal? What on earth is happening?

[Kaecilius]

"Well actually, the bird people weren't REALLY starving because they couldn't remember the ritual they do to harvest their crops every year. They just were pretending for the sake of the feat. It was all a funny ruse!" "Ohhhh, okay!"

This one is particularly egregious because you can *see* the writers deciding to forgo all logic to give us a morality lesson of why there is value to respecting the traditions of cultures, especially since it's mirrored by Koana fixing the issue with a Sharlayan alchemical innovation.

This wasn't about traditions; this was as if I suddenly forgot I had to go to work in order to feed myself.

[OliverQ]

I hope Dawntrail makes people realize that as unearned as Lyse's rise to political power was, she was actually a well written flawed character who actually had nuance and drive. She wasn't a character we had to sit down and talk about how crying about sea sickness to your friends is ok. No, she had a goal and was willing to diplomatically punch her way through entire countries to accomplish it.

I didn't like Lyse my first time playing Stormblood, then I replayed the story and realized, she's actually a really fun character if you get past her flaws. The story rightfully points them out multiple times, and she does grow over the course of the journey, even if placing her as the leader of Ala Mhigo felt rushed. At the very least, she's interesting.

Wuk Lamat on the other hand is an idealized Mary Sue who is never challenged and everyone else fawns over, and probably has triple the amount of screentime Lyse did with only a bunch of cardboard cutout Scion cheerleaders to bounce off of. It's agonizing.

I personally don't get the hate for Lyse. I didn't play Stormblood on release, and I get she's rather naive. But I still feel like she has some depth and there are actual consequences for her actions. She gets thrown into leadership because her mentor and commander dies, and then she struggles to try and live up to being the commander.

I think she's much better written than Wuk Lamat, who is royalty and never actually faces any real consequences nor does she grow. She remains as naive at the end as at the beginning.

[Malthir]

For sure, I agree with that. I'll take literally anyone over the person currently writing the MSQ. Hire some random fan or someone off the street. Anyone. It literally cannot get worse than this.

Other than wuk being incredibly annoying for some people, I think the mistake the writers made is going for an Epic story for the MSQ as well as their constant resolving of very newly created plot threats. The plotlines are resolved so quickly the audience doesn't have time to sit in the emotions, which then removes any kind of emotional payoff at the end. I think if they make things like Wuk in future, her entire arc needs to be 1 or 2 zones, and don't resolve her trying to become the leader in 1 expac story it's far too short, doesn't give the character enough time to grow or develop so them gaining the position doesn't feel earned to the players.

Also stop for the love of god, over using cutscenes. It was a trend that really started in shadowbringer but was far subtler. In Endwalker was were they really started to heavy handedly use cutscenes instead of solo duties and gameplay to push the narrative. Endwalker kind of got a pass imo because it was trying to resolve so much story which the player was already invested in. However with DT you don't have that, you have no real attachment to anything in the story, so heavy use of cutscenes just makes the audience bored, especially when you have a divisive character, and if you are going to keep resolving things almost instantly as I mentioned before.

Basically they need to give the story time to breath, stop over using cutscenes and honestly don't be afraid to make the MSQ shorter, I don't think any of us were really expecting or even wanting a 30hour msq which was functionally just a 30 hour movie telling us to like Wuk. A series of smaller stories which end unresolved allowing for future development in post patch and future expac is the better way, that's my opinion anyway.