Feedback: Dawntrail MSQ thoughts

[NanaWiloh]

There's nothing wrong with Lamaty'i as a character, but it's not at all surprising that the decision to utilize a proxy main character didn't go down well with players. GW2's writers discovered this about 10 years ago with Trahearne.

I'm not surprised that they did it, in order to avoid creating too much of a colonialist subtext. But using a proxy main character disconnects the player from the story. Part of the strength of Shadowbringers comes from the fact that our showdown with Emet feels deeply personal. Imagine the same climax, except with Raha holding the corrupted light aether and facing down Emet as the hero while we cheer him on from the sidelines. It's still an interesting story, but it just doesn't have the same storytelling impact. There's also this added feeling of 'we can easily defeat them if we wanted to, but we're just standing by as backup', which greatly diminishes the menace of the villains in this expansion.

I also think that in writing this story in the 'third person', Daichi Hiroi ignored a lot of opportunities to engage the player through dialogue options, and in the few cases that he did, they seemed to be added in just for the sake of it.

Either way, I think this is more of an story execution issue than a character/personality issue.

Problem is players are Main Character drunk and use to the Main character being the center of attention. It was a nice change to not have the WOL hording the spot light at every turn for once, nothing wrong with letting another character take the wheel for a while.

[honest_psycho]

Problem is players are Main Character drunk and use to the Main character being the center of attention.

I really don't understand the point of this argument. Why is it a bad thing?

A video-game is not real life.
I payed money to play an RPG, where the player character is usually the central piece, or at least an important part of it.
Why is a little self-indulgence in a fictional videogame something bad?
With this logic, playing an ego-shooter and feeling awesome and powerful makes one some kind of narcissist.

This is not real life, where I actually prefer NOT to be the center of attention (I'm actually very introverted).

And I'm not debating irl geo-politics here. I'm debating the writing in a videogame and our role in it.
But I get treated like I insulted someones religion, because I disagree with a fictional character.

[Lyth]

Problem is players are Main Character drunk and use to the Main character being the center of attention.

The 'main character' is by definition central to the narrative of the story. This is a tautology.

You've missed the broader point. A stand alone story about Lamaty'i would be perfectly fine in itself. That's not the story we have in Dawntrail. Instead, we have a story about the Warrior of Light, shard of the seat of Azem, kingmaker, slayer of gods, defender of grapes, and savior of the known multiverse, where we powerlevel Lamaty'i so that she can defeat her Mamool Ja rival and his minions. There is no dramatic tension in this whatsoever, because the narrative still acknowledges that we could step in and squash both sides at a moments' notice.

There's nothing wrong with taking on an apprentice and powerlevelling them so that they can fight their own battles, either. We've done this before (see: 'Return of the Holyfist', Lv. 30). It just needs the right narrative context. Perhaps comedy would have worked better than drama.

One essential point worth remembering about storywriting in FFXIV is that the audience have lived in their characters for the better part of ten years now. Part of Ishikawa's storytelling genius was that she simultaneously acknowledged the player's desire to be 'heard' and her own role in carving a narrative, which she meticulously balanced through the construct of Azem.

'We are the stories we tell ourselves. The brave hero, the tortured soul, the altruist, the pragmatist. They tell you who you see, but you and you alone know who you are. I speak only for myself. If my words give you comfort, they are yours for the taking, but that is your choice. Now and ever after, as it has always been.

Now comes your part,
To cloak yourself in the fiction,
To breathe life into the dead,
To give a voice to the voiceless...'

Her words tell you everything you need to know, really.

[Cilia]

Problem is players are Main Character drunk and use to the Main character being the center of attention. It was a nice change to not have the WOL hording the spot light at every turn for once, nothing wrong with letting another character take the wheel for a while.

By definition, the main character (usually the Player Character / Warrior of Light) should be the center of attention. We've had a significant role in every story so far, and the overall narrative is framed as being their story. The story they were least involved with was Heavensward; that was Alphinaud's story with Estinien as the deuteragonist, and even then it became personal after Haurchefant was killed.

Dawntrail, in comparison, feels like it was written and then a few dialogue options were pasted into the script to give us the illusion of narrative purpose. You could cut the Warrior of Light (and hell, the Scions in general) out of the script and it would work just fine with a few edits. Even in our bread and butter capacity of being an indomitable soldier capable of handling threats nobody else can, Wuk Lamat upstages us at the very end. It's fine as a story, but video games are an interactive medium; being reduced to a hanger-on for an NPC isn't exactly most peoples' idea of a fun time in that regard.

The Warrior of Light should be the main protagonist, or at least have a significant role in the story. In Dawntrail you could replace them with an NPC or cut them out entirely. Kind of an issue, in my opinion. It's not altogether uncommon in Daichi Hiroi storylines, so I kind of expected it, but I wasn't expecting more or less every other character to spend most of the story warming the bench for Wuk Lamat.

[Rannie]

snip snip.

right not even to mention during the second half we actually have the option to say basically that "it looks like a job for the Scions!" and they go into a full explanation of how we're secretly still together and not tell anyone, but that was all for not since... lo and behold Wuk Lamat just takes over... oh joy!