This story is really underwhelming - it's opened to mixed reviews.

[ShadowyZero]

I, for one, think this is the worst expansion MSQ they've ever released and I've played since ARR launch. So my answer would be to carry over none of what's happened in DT going forward and try and go back to what made the MSQ great in the past. That's not to say repeat the same story beats again, that's to say look at how we as a player interacted with the world and those around us and what worked and build off of that.

nah no going back we're done with that now, and the scions need to go away too there was no reason for them to be here in Dawntrail where they essentially contribute nothing and are just there as decoration or comic relief this should've just been a story with krile, erenville, g'raha and maybe estinien.

writing may have felt weak or not interesting this time around but it is still something new and i'd rather they keep trying new things then to keep bringing back a festering boil (primals,eikons, ascians, allagans etc.)

let all the past stuff remain as it is if you liked that stuff so much make an alt or just do new game plus let everyone else have a brand new adventure and new story.
and to be precise i dont care if they re-use some points of contension or put in things that were highlights from a different time we did something or met someone but those shouldn't be the main things but just passing mentions to remind us what we fight for etc

[KurenXIV]

nah no going back we're done with that now, and the scions need to go away too there was no reason for them to be here in Dawntrail where they essentially contribute nothing and are just there as decoration or comic relief this should've just been a story with krile, erenville, g'raha and maybe estinien.

writing may have felt weak or not interesting this time around but it is still something new and i'd rather they keep trying new things then to keep bringing back a festering boil (primals,eikons, ascians, allagans etc.)

let all the past stuff remain as it is if you liked that stuff so much make an alt or just do new game plus let everyone else have a brand new adventure and new story.
and to be precise i dont care if they re-use some points of contension or put in things that were highlights from a different time we did something or met someone but those shouldn't be the main things but just passing mentions to remind us what we fight for etc

I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying we need the Scions back. I agree they should have been gone this expansion.

Allow me to elaborate; what I mean by how we interact with the world is reflected upon the starting of ARR, how we got to know the Scions, how we became a part of the larger story and such.

As an example, imagine if we started DT by just going to the new world with Erenville. Heck keep the same plot point of looking for the City of Gold, a perfectly good adventure to plot the story around. Perhaps something happens and we get knocked off course and land somewhere unintended. Both of us are now out of our element to some degree and we have no connections to help us. We go through and begin to encounter towns and cities belonging to the people of that region and we learn about them and their troubles. We slowly grow to understand the neighboring areas and the connections they have with the lands we've discovered and gone through. You can imagine how this opens up the ability to introduce the politics of the region (similar to ARR with Gridania, Ul'dah and Limsa) and we can learn about the greater conflicts that impact the land. And the best part . . . is none of those have to be addressed yet! They'd be like seeds that can be planted and grown for later story harvesting. Instead as we learn and progress we can eventually get back to finding the city of gold and that can be the later part of the MSQ. Thus you now have a nice self contained story but also all the elements to build upon a larger world story and future stories.

This is me just spit ballin' but you get the idea.

[Rannie]

I just realized that we couldn't even get a decent echo vision in the game. The two or so we DID get was just made up as a flash back and wasn't even like any of the echo visions which we had in the past. IE if two characters are talking we literally see the dialogue between the two characters in the echo vision. Not a narration of what is happening with the two characters mouthing nothing.

[VictorSpoils]

As the most powerful White Mage on the planet, I watched and couldn't be bothered to muster a single heal.

StB Krile: YOU'RE A HEALER, AREN'T YOU? HELP US, DAMNIT!
DT Krile: zZz

[Cynric]

I've played the game for over 11 years and had up and down feelings about MSQ's over the years. But this one was just really bad and actually my worst experience in an RPG in like... a long time in general, too much wuk lamat, too much bad writing.

If they had like not finished the story the way they did which really was the icing on the cake for me, and I didn't have to have to wuk around for 99% of the game, and instead maybe only 50% I think it might've been passable. Alas, I was a side character to a main character that wasn't fun to be around in the slightest.

I wish when she asked me if I wanted to help her become ruler I could've said no.

The gameplay was good though, dungeons are awesome, viper is awesome.

[Kiarin]

Okay, so what the heck is this writing. 92-94 MSQ spoilers.

First Bakool releases the scary bird and totally gets away with that. We are told in length how harmful this serpent is. In real life his crime is comparable to sabotaging a major nuclear plant. Not only should he have been disqualified immediately as a claimant, he should be detained and imprisoned as Tural citizen. We don't recall the king giving claimants indulgence to perform any crime they wish during the rite. But nothing of it happens, and when we meet him again, he admits his deed nonchalantly, Wuk Lamat scolds him briefly, and that's it. After that the bird is never mentioned and completely forgot. Everyone is okay. No one seems to go tell the king that his kingdom barely evaded a huge disaster due to obviously dangerous and evil deed of one of the claimants.

Second, Bakool kindaps one of the electors, drags him somewhere, threatens him harm, issues a kill order on him, and actually inflicts at least minor physical harm to him, as in the cutscene we see how his goons throw the elector onto his knees. Wasn't it explicitly told that attempting to harm electors results in disqualification? But once again, no one ever tells anything to Bakool or to the king. While a bit later first Promise is disqualified exactly for this, and I presume for much even less than Bakool did.

We may assume that Bakool was acting dumb and desperate, not thinking of consequences of his actions. So be it. But why everyone around acted the same? Why no one calmly told him that what he does will simply grant him disqualification, if not criminal trial on top of that, instead of whatever he wanted to achieve? Why no one informed the king about all that, isn't that electors' direct job?

[Voidmage]

Okay, so what the heck is this writing. 92-94 MSQ spoilers.

First Bakool releases the scary bird and totally gets away with that. We are told in length how harmful this serpent is. In real life his crime is comparable to sabotaging a major nuclear plant. Not only should he have been disqualified immediately as a claimant, he should be detained and imprisoned as Tural citizen. We don't recall the king giving claimants indulgence to perform any crime they wish during the rite. But nothing of it happens, and when we meet him again, he admits his deed nonchalantly, Wuk Lamat scolds him briefly, and that's it. After that the bird is never mentioned and completely forgot. Everyone is okay. No one seems to go tell the king that his kingdom barely evaded a huge disaster due to obviously dangerous and evil deed of one of the claimants.

Second, Bakool kindaps one of the electors, drags him somewhere, threatens him harm, issues a kill order on him, and actually inflicts at least minor physical harm to him, as in the cutscene we see how his goons throw the elector onto his knees. Wasn't it explicitly told that attempting to harm electors results in disqualification? But once again, no one ever tells anything to Bakool or to the king. While a bit later first Promise is disqualified exactly for this, and I presume for much even less than Bakool did.

We may assume that Bakool was acting dumb and desperate, not thinking of consequences of his actions. So be it. But why everyone around acted the same? Why no one calmly told him that what he does will simply grant him disqualification, if not criminal trial on top of that, instead of whatever he wanted to achieve? Why no one informed the king about all that, isn't that electors' direct job?

As someone who liked Bakool JaJa I agree.
The problem was not his behaviour (it is great to have someone like this from time to time) nor his heel-face turn (even though it was to quick). It was the world and reactions around him.

The giant that was supposed to be guarding that thing just stood there.
No one really called Bakool out on anything but treat him like a lowly school bully when he clearly overstepped the boundarys.

I get that he was really desperate and all and that is actually the ground for a real interesting plot right there with him slowly coming to terms and changing for the better with all the failures and a disqualification but even that falls flat because all the problems he wanted to resolve? We do that in a matter of a few quests because the Mamool Ja apparently were to "stupid" to just plant other things despite having some people there that were to Eorzea and back.

Zoral Ja also. He could have had such a deep story with the whole expansion exploring the darker and deeper sites of charakters. Him descenting into darkness and Bakool rising out from it, maybe stand with us against him in the end but nothing.

In the end, Wuk Lamat was always the favoured child of the father and was always meant to be the victor. He talked to us to help her and said that none of the other candidates had anyone giving them a push. Hello? I guess Thancred and Urianger are not even important enough for that despite them doing more mentoring then we are.

Thats my biggest pet peave. Wuk Lamat not only stole spotlight from us but from the other candidates as well. She was just so perfect. Even when another candidate resolved a trial better or different then her (Zoral Ja defeating the giant before us, the Miqo boy finding a craftsman with no problems because he had the approval of them before or resolving the harvest of the birds quickly) Wuk Lamat always got an extra pat on the back.

[Rynn21]

What really bothered me was the amount of repetitiveness from the writing. I read/heard the same lines said in slightly different ways a zillion times. If you took a drink every time the word "peace" was said, you'd die from alcohol poisoning.

[Colt47]

The one who did the writing didn't review anything that was going on with Shadowbringers and Endwalker MSQ from what I can tell. We had actual bargaining chips that could have been laid out on the table and discussed at multiple points that would have definitely forced Sphene to stop the aggression. I think ultimately what happened later with the brother likely would have led to the same conclusion, but at the very least it would have felt more like there really was no other way. Heck I'm not even convinced after that final event there wasn't a way to at least give pause or force Sphene into redirecting her attention elsewhere for fuel.

[Ritsugamesh]

Gotta agree with the general consensus here. It was a tough job for CBU3 to take on, but it's a mess of their own making at the end of the day.

Throughout all the expansions we raised and raised the stakes, but I don't look at the trials in Heavensward and think 'that's such small fry' compared to ShB. It had weight, there were threats, lives were lost, and sacrifices made. Endwalker kind of went crazy shooting us to the moon, travelling back in time to be at the origin of the whole problem's making, and murdering the very gods that established the universe we live in. And it also did so without us actually really sacrificing anything for it. We dismantled Garlemald, stopped the final days, destroyed the very last link the Ascians and killed Zenos too. After that... What could really matter?

The 6.x story was already pretty mid and lacked any of the nuance we've enjoyed during ShB-EW era writing, but Dawntrail is just on another level. We are a literal fragment, the possible last remnant, of a powerful precursor race, and very likely the most powerful being left alive on Eorzea AND the other shards - so the logical thing is to trapse around the jungle and avoid treading on sacred flowers or whatever that zone's custom is. It's just so dull. Nobody is under threat, nothing really matters, and the impact here doesn't really mean anything. Even if it does, the world is kind of 'solved' at this point. We did it. We saved everything.

It's made worse that they TRY and make things feel threatening, but it just isn't. We had a similar concept in ShB - a new world, new traditions, unfamiliar environs - but the whole thing was underpinned by moving pieces and the machinations of greater plots. We just don't have anything here.

The only way they could have salvaged the plot they've gone with - at least the first half - is to let you choose your promise. But that'd be too wild for them to consider.

EDIT: One other important thought. With ShB - we went to a new land and nobody knew who we were. So everything felt normal. It seems in DT our reputation precedes us and most people are well aware who we are and what we've achieved. Would you really mess with someone you know saved the entire planet? Yet they still want to throw hands at the first sign of tension.

I honestly feel that people will look on Dawntrail unfavourably, but come to realise that much of the blame does lie with Endwalker. It was just a bit too crazy compared to what came before. Now we're back with our feet on the ground and the grass is not greener for it.