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

[duckorz]

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.

Yeah, totally. The fun thing about approaching DT critically is that you can write literally 500,000 words about how fundamentally broken it is in every single way. I think if I made a 10 hour video essay about it I don't think it would be exhaustive. I felt that the character writing was the most fundamental issue, and a core problem that causes a lot of what you're outlining in terms of lack of narrative coherence, plot structure, pacing, etc; so I had to limit my write-up to just that for an "introduction" of sorts to what's so horribly wrong with Dawntrail. I may end up writing like, 5 more posts this long, though, about how every single plot element, zone, and premise is completely annihilated by how bad the writing is. I just graduated with my English degree and I've never been so compelled by how transcendentally, auteristically bad something is. This is "The Room" of FFXIV expansions.

[SirShady]

Why did Sphene just give him total authority over everything? Why not just take the key from him if thats what she needed? 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?

And why is it that as soon as he dies she decides she can rewrite her own personality and start killing people? Did she have to delete her own code in order to do that? Why can't she accomplish her plan without deleting her personality? If her armies were defeated during the second assault on Tural (they lost to Estinien and a small group of cowboys!), what makes her think she'll have better success in other shards? Why does she have authority to delete her personality in the first place? Wouldn't the people who created her put checks on her power? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

If we're forced to continue hanging out with Wuk Lamat I want the patches to at least address the consequences of her actions.

From the Alexandrians' point of view, we killed their king and queen, destroyed their "heaven", pushed a child as the new ruler and then Wuk Lamat, a foreign ruler, proclaimed herself her guardian, essentially making Alexandria part of the Tuliyollal alliance whether they like it or not.

And then mentioned they weren't happy with it when these people have been happy with everything up til now including their own deletion. We FINALLY do something to upset someone in this expansion and taking over their government was it? We've murdered your monarchs and ended your afterlife, erased all your loved ones, but THIS was the final straw? This one?

[duckorz]

And why is it that as soon as he dies she decides she can rewrite her own personality and start killing people? Did she have to delete her own code in order to do that? Why can't she accomplish her plan without deleting her personality? If her armies were defeated during the second assault on Tural (they lost to Estinien and a small group of cowboys!), what makes her think she'll have better success in other shards? Why does she have authority to delete her personality in the first place? Wouldn't the people who created her put checks on her power? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

I think I'll make you go even more insane if I bring up a plot hole that's so insane that I can't believe I didn't notice it when first playing:

Why doesn't Sphene bodyswap while Otis is protecting her? Otis, the one almost good character in this expansion, dies for literally no reason. She bodyswaps away immediately after he dies. She could have done this at any time. Why did he need to defend her. She was never in danger. Why did this happen. This is one of the few almost emotionally resonant moments in the expansion, and it is ruined by a gigantic obvious horrifying plot hole. In a comedy of errors, this obscene unforced error has undermined literally any attempt this narrative has made at approaching being good.

[SirShady]

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.

It's actually so insulting. I see that Square Enix tried to get their representation right in regards to the real-life counterparts of a couple of these zones, but I have a hard time saying "the really nailed the cultural diversity" when they also pull crap like this.

"The stupid natives can't remember their yearly traditions that allow them to live. Don't worry savages, the white (catwo)man is here to remind you all how to feed yourselves!"

Big yikes.

Not to mention, referencing other cultures in FFXIV is cool, but that's not what I play the game for. I'm not going to overlook crap writing just because the name of an area translates to something in another language. Was I supposed to drop all criticism when the native Americans were all hunky-dory cat people perfectly fine with having their land ravaged by the cowboys? That didn't seem entirely accurate either.

[Malthir]

It's actually so insulting. I see that Square Enix tried to get their representation right in regards to the real-life counterparts of a couple of these zones, but I have a hard time saying "the really nailed the cultural diversity" when they also pull crap like this.

"The stupid natives can't remember their yearly traditions that allow them to live. Don't worry savages, the white (catwo)man is here to remind you all how to feed yourselves!"

Big yikes.

Not to mention, referencing other cultures in FFXIV is cool, but that's not what I play the game for. I'm not going to overlook crap writing just because the name of an area translates to something in another language. Was I supposed to drop all criticism when the native Americans were all hunky-dory cat people perfectly fine with having their land ravaged by the cowboys? That didn't seem entirely accurate either.

Apart from the one member of the tribe that knew and just didn't tell everyone, watching you kids starve for the bants I gues????

[Vyrerus]

let's go to Texas to find a bracelet.

Let's go to Texas to visit Erenville's mom, but be redirected and FORCED to find a bracelet* ftfy

Lmao, Fisher Price Arbiter xD

It's sort of half-heartedly explained. The key only responds kinda sorta sometimes to fervent desires. Apparently, Zoraal Ja had the fervent desire strong enough to activate it to open the portal, and Sphene in desperation to get more souls for Alexandria gave into his demands.

The real kicker comes, "Ok, but why didn't she just double cross him immediately after Interdimensional Fusion were declared?" "Why wait 30 years and let him clone himself (absent a mom, who the hell is Gulool's mom? Has to be a clone... damn it!)?

[SirShady]

Apart from the one member of the tribe that knew and just didn't tell everyone, watching you kids starve for the bants I gues????

Anything for the bit. Everyone loves a good gag.

[Icycrits]

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?

I am extremely concerned about this as well as I mentioned in my initial post. We are going to get another 10 years of story, with very dubious quality; each story bigger, longer, and more bombastic than the last... how is anyone supposed to genuinely ever get to the endgame? I understand full well as a story-enjoyer that the journey trumps the endgame in XIV, but is 1000 hours of cutscenes really viable? Especially when the quality takes a projected nosedive after the first big arc is resolved?

Dawntrail, narrratively, to me just feels like an expansion that has zero confidence in itself. I feel like Square Enix was very worried about people leaving the game in droves after Endwalker resolved all of the threads that people cared about since their relaunch in ARR. So instead of giving us a relaxed adventure in the new world that would slowly build up into a multi-expansion climax with Sphene that could properly be resolved, they made the same mistake that Endwalker made and rushed through a lot of story to get to the end (Yoshi-P himself has admitted that Endwalker was actually heavily considered as two separate expansions before it was combined into the final product we know today).

However, unlike Endwalker, Dawntrail doesn't have a legacy to fall back on, and instead uses the previous expansions' callbacks as a crutch to keep players interested. Hell, even the reveal of Solution 9 in the marketing material reeks of panic. Imagine if they just showed us Amaurot before Shadowbringers even launched. It completely robbed the player of any sense of surprise because in the back of all of our minds, we were just trudging along, wondering "when does it get to the good parts?" which made an unbearable start that much more painful.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I am extremely concerned about this as well as I mentioned in my initial post. We are going to get another 10 years of story, with very dubious quality; each story bigger, longer, and more bombastic than the last... how is anyone supposed to genuinely ever get to the endgame? I understand full well as a story-enjoyer that the journey trumps the endgame in XIV, but is 1000 hours of cutscenes really viable? Especially when the quality takes a projected nosedive after the first big arc is resolved?

Dawntrail, narrratively, to me just feels like an expansion that has zero confidence in itself. I feel like Square Enix was very worried about people leaving the game in droves after Endwalker resolved all of the threads that people cared about since their relaunch in ARR. So instead of giving us a relaxed adventure in the new world that would slowly build up into a multi-expansion climax with Sphene that could properly be resolved, they made the same mistake that Endwalker made and rushed through a lot of story to get to the end (Yoshi-P himself has admitted that Endwalker was actually heavily considered as two separate expansions before it was combined into the final product we know today).

However, unlike Endwalker, Dawntrail doesn't have a legacy to fall back on, and instead uses the previous expansions' callbacks as a crutch to keep players interested. Hell, even the reveal of Solution 9 in the marketing material reeks of panic. Imagine if they just showed us Amaurot before Shadowbringers even launched. It completely robbed the player of any sense of surprise because in the back of all of our minds, we were just trudging along, wondering "when does it get to the good parts?" which made an unbearable start that much more painful.

Thanks to a friend I know you can finish Dawntrail in a day if you don't read anything and skip all the scenes. So that's how, it'll become another MMO where no one knows or cares what the story is. But I feel they are gonna have to up quality in other areas if they are gonna go that route.