How FFXIV state change from ShB to DT?

[Tunda]

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

I think it is not your business go about yourself and stop saying dumb thinga

[KvotheCadera]

Its really awful. Its not just the story thats bad though. Its the gameplay as well *questing wise*
its like were on a whole new adventure in a new realm, but instead of actual exploration, were baby sitting a potato with less than 10 iq points and just running errands for the first 10 hours

I unsubbed around lvl 97 msq. I play healer too and im still just spamming the same old button over and over and over again. Like. At least give us ONE good aspect. Instead its all shit. Story, Gameplay, Job design.

[Voidmage]

I am just viewing it as a transition period. established people leave and its a rebuilding period.

hopefully they find their footing before the building collapses around them.

We really shouldn‘t have to expect a drop in quality just because of a transition period. This is a product overall.
Slower yes but not worse.

There are supervisors and higher positions this stuff has to go through.
This wasn‘t just the fault of the writer. They WANTED the story to be like this.

I really hope they take the feedback to heart and get an grip like you wrote.
Otherwise the building can collapse and burn down for all I care and I will never again buy a SE game.

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

It’s called feedback.
This is a new expansion not even a month old. Of course people will post feedback it’s the same even outside the forum.

Every normal company should and would be happy for so much feedback. If it’s mostly negative that’s on them.
They got their praise singing in ShB and EW. Now they got the opposite.

[kinslayer-]

It's even weird when you realize they were responsible for the Pandemonium quests, which i consider more mature and serious than Ew (yes yes i know Athena is saturday morning villain but Alabhrea, Ericthonios and Elidibus were great).

[BigCheez]

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

If everyone took this stance, you would still be playing 1.0. Or more likely, no one would be playing the game any more.

[Striker44]

But that's the easiest way for SQE to notice that the playerbase isn't happy.

Except we don't speak for "the playerbase" which had over 1 million players even before DT launched. As long as we acknowledge that we only speak for our own individual selves, and that the forum only represents a tiny grain of sand on the beach that is the playerbase, we're probably good. It's when people start believing the few of us here actually matter for major decision-making that we end up just frustrating ourselves. (Fifty people on the forum agreed with me - why didn't they change this? Oh, right, because SE has data showing that tens of thousands of people disagreed through their in-game choices.)

[Striker44]

How can story writer so perfectly in Shadowbringers to be as disappointment as we see in Dawntrail?

For me, I'd say the biggest reason is simply that this is a new story, so there is very little to build off. I compare it to WotLK from WoW. WotLK was far and away the most popular expansion and the "peak" of that game's playerbase. And it owes a great deal of that success to Arthas, who will probably go down as one of the "best" villains in gaming history. Yes, the dev team still had to execute the opportunity they had really well, which they did. But that opportunity existed in the first place precisely because of the groundwork laid by Vanilla WoW and BC, coupled with Arthas - a character that wasn't even introduced in WoW itself but goes all the way back to their previous game (Warcraft III). Point being - WotLK would not have been as massively successful as it was without the buildup leading to it.

I see the same applying here. ShB had the opportunity to be as good as it was because of what came before it. We needed to have the longstanding antagonists in the Ascians, the knowledge of other reflections, etc. for ShB to have the impact it had. Again, the dev team still needed to execute, which they did. But the opportunity for a 10/10 expansion was there precisely because of the other expansions that came before which weren't 10/10. That 10/10 doesn't occur in a vacuum. Or look at EW. Surveys of the playerbase consistently rank ShB as the #1 favorite expansion of players, with EW consistently ranking #2. And again, much of EW's success was due to it being the culmination of all the other expansions. Even more pointedly, one of the main criticisms of EW (and a key reason it's #2 instead of #1) is how Meteion came out of left field while people were expecting Zodiark to be the main villain - notice how the complaint is about a character we just met that expansion and how the "desire" leaned to the one that had already been established.

Personally, I'm very much enjoying the story writing in DT. I've loved seeing the various characters mature, whether that be having skills but lacking self-confidence, or having confidence but not realizing there's skills they lack, and making those discoveries about themselves and growing. I've loved the ambiance of the different zones, the background music has resonated with me, and most of the classes are still very familiar (one of my personal dislikes is when games fundamentally re-work classes with each new expansion and effectively make you have to relearn them - I like keeping the familiar and focusing on the new content). I've also really liked the ways they still managed to sprinkle in various tie-ins from the past (which I'll detail in another thread with a spoiler note at some point). So, yeah, I take into consideration that DT is the start of something new, and as such I can't realistically expect it to be as good as ShB. Doing so would just set me up for disappointment. I'm just looking for it to be solid in its own right, and for me, it's done that.

That puts DT in a position that ARR, HW, and SB were in. Simply put, none of those expansions had a practical chance of being 10/10. To make a baseball analogy, every batter who steps up to the plate can't hit a grand slam. It's literally impossible, because it requires three of their teammates to all get on base ahead of them. The same goes in practical and psychological terms with expansions. Not every one can be a 10/10, because reaching that point requires a build-up. DT itself won't be a 10/10, but looking down the road, a future expansion may well become a 10/10 again like ShB was, and a key reason for it will be the groundwork laid by DT.

[Voidmage]

Except we don't speak for "the playerbase" which had over 1 million players even before DT launched. As long as we acknowledge that we only speak for our own individual selves, and that the forum only represents a tiny grain of sand on the beach that is the playerbase, we're probably good. It's when people start believing the few of us here actually matter for major decision-making that we end up just frustrating ourselves. (Fifty people on the forum agreed with me - why didn't they change this? Oh, right, because SE has data showing that tens of thousands of people disagreed through their in-game choices.)

True, this here is not the majority but:

This is the official place for feedback and normaly the devs look at the forum first or at least should be. Also it's not just the english forum.

I don't get your last point though. They don't have data ingame on how people liked the story. only data on how many people engage in other stuff.
The enjoymend of the story is purely subjective and you have to to it anyway.
Or was that just an overall example?

[DaveFishnomer]

The writers from SHB and EW got promotions, so with Dawntrail we have new writers. Simple as that.

Any sources on that? From what I remmber the main writer for SHB is not the same as EW and the writer for SHB left square after the release of SHB

[DaveFishnomer]

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

If you hate the game so much you should stop playing it, and if you dont hate it, then why are you so adamant about it not improving?