Dawntrail's MSQ story is a disaster and waste of potential. [full spoilers]

[HighlanderClone]

The biggest issue with Dawntrail's story is that it's overall boring. This is the first expansion story where I lost interest half way through and abandoned the story to go level up alt jobs rather than have a desire to see what happens next. The problem is 1. there is little tension and 2. there is a lot of padding both on the micro and macro level.

The lack of stakes is definitely the worst it has ever been in Dawntrail. To be honest I think it was already pretty bad in ShB and EW, where you just know that none of the Scions will ever die ever again. They're just gonna pull out a random NPC to kill off instead in ShB and EW. Now DT doesn't even have those...

The moralizing has also become really grating. It's 4-year-old level of moralizing. Stuff that you read to your kid in bed. Not to adults. I don't understand how people still find "power of friendship" compelling as a functioning adult human.

[ThorneDynasty]

The lack of stakes is definitely the worst it has ever been in Dawntrail. To be honest I think it was already pretty bad in ShB and EW, where you just know that none of the Scions will ever die ever again. They're just gonna pull out a random NPC to kill off instead in ShB and EW. Now DT doesn't even have those...

It wasn't even that they aren't allowed to die, they aren't allowed to even fail significantly. Remember G'raha's offscreen Mega-Float that somehow saved hundreds upon hundreds of people stuck in those giant tower columns when the entire structure disintegrated - represented by a couple Thavnairian's lying on a beach afterwards?

I don't want to overuse the phrase, but what are you going to call that if not writing for children?

[Taliriah]

I thought the msq was ok. It had the difficult task to lay out the basis for a new story arc almost "from scratch". They couldn't rely too much on the legacy of the previous arc (imagine the groans if it as all about the ascians once again)

Now in the past they did something that I always thought really helped tie the story together: they would lay the foundations of an extensions msq in the post patch of two extensions before.

Post ARR prepared StB with the woman's refugees storyline, Yda/Papalymo working for the Ala mhigo resistance, and of course Ilbert's BS.

Post heavensward prepared ShB with the warriors of darkness/oracle of light story.

Post StB prepared endwalker with Zenos survival and the resulting regicide and garland empire implosion.

Now the problem is that post ShB focused entirely on setting up endwalker, probably because they hadn't decided yet what the new arc would be. So in DT they had to lay everything out from scratch which is why it feels like two stories in one (the succession story and then the invasion form another shard story).

Note that since post EW cooked some stuff with the 13th we can safely assume the 13th will be a major part of 8.0's story.

[Darkrai4014]

The lack of stakes is definitely the worst it has ever been in Dawntrail. To be honest I think it was already pretty bad in ShB and EW, where you just know that none of the Scions will ever die ever again. They're just gonna pull out a random NPC to kill off instead in ShB and EW. Now DT doesn't even have those...

The moralizing has also become really grating. It's 4-year-old level of moralizing. Stuff that you read to your kid in bed. Not to adults. I don't understand how people still find "power of friendship" compelling as a functioning adult human.

I really want to know why you believe the "power of friendship" thing isn't compelling to people, or at least why you don't understand it. I feel like there is a value in the joy and co-operation of others, since we as humans must work together to survive (and in a sense, is reflected in the game itself since raid content is done together in a group).