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

[NovalisCrystalis]

That kidnapping scene was so hilariously badly done that I just have to laugh at it. WE COULD SEE THE TOWN FROM WHERE WE WERE STANDING. We knew there were bandits in the area and no one went with her? At that point Wuk had fought much , much worse than bandits, hadn't we literally already polished off Skyruin there?

This is entry level writing at best and that might be a stretch. Maybe don't give the reins of your story heavy RPG to a novice fanfiction writer, yea?

God i love this thread, everyone's response to this is exactly how I felt, Like REALLY? my Wol wouldve dashed for her knowing something was up! I hated the wait two times thing. Like ahhh D: it was frustrating.

[Mostly_Raxus]

i swear, the excessive use of the phrase "Hear, Feel, Think" just shoehorned in to every conversation is getting really annoying, its like babies first pass at sudo-clever writing, its got the same weight as will smith saying "is this some kind of suic*** Squad?"

stop trying to remind me of the storys that had weight and heart, especially in so cheap a fashion., do we really want to waste Venat's words telling the kid we're babysitting to have fun on her day trip?

[Icycrits]

This one storyline could have at least been paced better but they were all just too fast, which is crazy because the story felt way too long, lots of issues with the story team I guess, but pacing was terrible this expansion.

It's because they keep doing this thing where they mash together multiple expansions worth of development into a singular expansion. It throws the pacing off completely. The entire expansion really should have been about adventure with the scions (properly written scions with some good subtext about the events unfolding) intermingled with the rite of succession and slowly building up all of the new characters. It would have been so fun to have all of the scions picking different claimants and have actual ideological differences explored. Then they could have used to patch content to have the solution 9 dome appear and build up intrigue.

Instead we got this mess.

EDIT: Thinking about it further, it would have been even more interesting if they spent this expansion somehow allowing you to make meaningful choices like picking to side with your claimant of choice. I know it would have been difficult, and there would only be one canon ending despite who you side with, but imagine how much more interesting this expansion could've been if you weren't forced to pick what the game told you is the right choice? (which is part of the reason I was so taken out of it, Wuk Lamat is NOT fit to rule and she still isn't)

[Lannybaby]

I've only reached as far as getting 2 keystones, but I felt like I've been forcing myself just to get through the MSQ. I didn't read any patch notes leading up to this, or anything FFXIV-related in social media, so I went into the MSQ with only the knowledge of the end of the 6.x MSQ. Immediately, I noticed a shift in writing. I couldn't put a finger on it at first, but it felt like the writing quality had toned down a lot from ShB and EW. In fact, I knew it was going downhill post ShB, but EW was still pretty good. Now, DT is just... how do I put this... comically pointless? Maybe I got too used to WoL being at the thick of the action, and now we're taking a backseat to someone else's reckless driving. We've done that a few times, so no biggie, but it also seems like everything we've learned and experienced leading up to the end of EW just poofed - gone into the wind. Did WoL take too many tank busters without using any mits? Is brain damage the likely suspect? I understand that DT is supposed to be the start of a new adventure, but that doesn't mean throwing out everything we've gone through. WoL has fought emotionless psychopaths, world-ending threats, got caught in the middle of a dragon-pissing contest, vanquished god-like beings, and grinded our axe on the faces of actual gods. We've been isekai'd to another world to deal with their problems, defeated cloaked wizards who have lived for thousands of years, decimated the physical manifestation of despair with the power of friendship, got rid of our psychotic stalker, took down a maniac who tried to conquer our world after screwing up his own... and our new foe is a two-headed thug with more muscles than he has brains? Why is this something we'd even consider a threat? It shouldn't be. We've gone into dungeons with mobs - not even bosses - that looked more threatening. Compared to all of them, BJJ may as well be a fly on our windshield.

I really hope Ishikawa writes the rest of DT. She probably won't, but it's nice to dream sometimes.

[IvoryHawk]

It's because they keep doing this thing where they mash together multiple expansions worth of development into a singular expansion. It throws the pacing off completely. The entire expansion really should have been about adventure with the scions (properly written scions with some good subtext about the events unfolding) intermingled with the rite of succession and slowly building up all of the new characters. It would have been so fun to have all of the scions picking different claimants and have actual ideological differences explored. Then they could have used to patch content to have the solution 9 dome appear and build up intrigue.

Instead we got this mess.

EDIT: Thinking about it further, it would have been even more interesting if they spent this expansion somehow allowing you to make meaningful choices like picking to side with your claimant of choice. I know it would have been difficult, and there would only be one canon ending despite who you side with, but imagine how much more interesting this expansion could've been if you weren't forced to pick what the game told you is the right choice? (which is part of the reason I was so taken out of it, Wuk Lamat is NOT fit to rule and she still isn't)

100% Sucks that it was just a cheap attempt at obtaining pokemon gym badges as fast as possible, it felt like nobody learned anything but they were written in a way that they did without any on screen growth, I ended the expansion not feeling any connection to the new cast, nothing hit as hard as Elidibus/Emet/Meteion's storylines and pain, It was just empty....

[Sephira91]

It boggles the mind that the writing team thought it was good enough to greenlight it. There are so many inconsistencies across the board, the writing lacks any sort of nuance and empathy. As someone said above, it felt as though the writing was made to "educate" the player instead of "entertaining" them. Ever since 6.1 the writing had become increasingly preachy and moralistic and this trend continued into DT. It felt as though the MSQ was targeted towards a younger audience overall. They absolutely need to correct their tajectory now and find someone who can write with confidence and with enough knowledge of FFXIV's worldbuilding and characters. Did Yoshida think that this was good enough as the start of a new "arc"?

I'm honestly not quite sure what went wrong, and it's all speculation at the end of the day. It could be that the dev team had too much on their plate between the graphical update, the server expansion(s), the gameplay overhaul in dungeons/trials and potentially other stuff happening behind the scenes? While the game looks technically gorgeous, it felt as though we had pretty few voiced lines, and the quality of some of them seems questionable.

Also, while the introduction cutscene made an effort with cinematographic shots with the scions on the boat, the rest of the MSQ for the most part was using pretty standard camera angles. I had assumed, perhaps wrongly so, that there would be more creative liberties taken with cinematography to show off the flashy graphics.

All of these issues lead me to believe that the developpers were short on time and/or funding for different parts of the project...

[Turtledeluxe]

It's challenging to write a compelling and comprehensive narrative about beast tribes. That's been true the entire length of the game. We aren't beasts and we are inherently more interested in human stories. This is something I don't often see discussed, but it's just true. It's not impossible to get the audience to care about DT as much as say, SHB or EW, but the expertise just isn't present for it on this team imo.

Part of it is, as the OP states, there is a fundamental lack of imagination when it comes to the character portrayal. The writers can't get into the head of the Scions, and characters like Koana don't even stand a chance when the main cast is so underutilized. A lot of secondary characters, including the beast tribes are written in very one dimensional and plot serving ways the majority of the time. It's hard to empathize them when the plot calls for it.

[Vonson]

I never post on these forums and I logged in just to say you're absolutely right.

The writing in general in this story is extremely weak and that feedback should be given.

Something I frequently thought when I was doing the first half of the MSQ was "they weren't mean enough to this character". The writers treat her like she is what her father is afraid she is-- a spoiled royal who's never seen the outside of the throne room.

She effortlessly saves or redeems everyone she interacts with, and in so doing requires the person she redeems or befriends to seem extremely feeble-minded.
Every conflict or tension in this story treats itself like it comes out of a program targeted at a much younger demographic than previous arcs in this game.

The farmers forgot how their own farming worked, to the point that it became the objective of a royal crowning ceremony.
Wuk Lamat befriends xenophobic, power-obsessed, depressed zealots by suggesting that they could learn to love the land they've killed their own children to escape, and they universally agree.
Cowboys in the bleak old west settle their disputes with rubber bullets (safety first).
Zoraal Ja's motivation is extremely unclear, to the point that he seems to be present merely for the sake of providing a powerful antagonist that we'll be forced to fight.
At least 3 hours of questions are waved away as "I can't tell you that now, you'll just have to trust me".
Krile's parents returning to the world in which they are clearly doomed makes no sense.



As numerous people have said, Wuk's idealism isn't a problem because it's naive. It's a problem because it is never treated in the same sobering way that Alphinaud's was.

[Kiet]

Hi, excellent write up to start, I was pointed to you by a mutual friend of ours. I wanted to share something that personally bugged me. It has nothing to do with Wuk Lamat.

Towards the latter half of the Solution 9 arc, Erenville begins to realize that his mom is dead, and you can very clearly notice his behavior changing from that point up until the very last part of the last bit of Living Memory. If you talk to him between quests, he literally just sits there pacing back and fourth, only saying "..." because he knows he's going to have to come to terms with it. And that's where my problem is. Why did no one comfort him? He got like one offhand comment thrown his way, but where's the actual consolation? I lost a parent recently, so this part probably personally bugs me more than it should, but I felt so bad that I took a gpose of my character hugging him in some strange attempt to convince myself the WOL actually notices that their friend is grieving about their dead parent and that they actually care about him. It just felt so wrong and bizarre at the same time, and was easily the most infuriating thing about the entire expansion to me that made me feel downright awful, not just "this is boring".

This! My mother died quite recently so this hit me on a personal level. I felt like the WOL (and everyone else too, for that matter) was a complete failure as a friend for not trying to comfort him. It felt awful to not be able to do that.

[KylePearlsand]

Cowboys in the bleak old west settle their disputes with rubber bullets (safety first).

You know, this is a question I've had for awhile. Is the rubber bullets a localization thing or was it close to the Japanese? Because it's so strange to have a lawless western setting and settle disputes with rubber bullets.