Quote Originally Posted by NegativeS View Post
Considering I jumped ship from WoW mainly because FFXIV actually made leveling and story a pleasant experience, this is bad news bears for me.

I'm honestly glad I'm not the only one with such huge qualms with the quality of this expansion's worldbuilding and MSQ--I've been afraid that I'd be labeled a bigot or something for speaking out against the "diversity good!" plot.
(Also, since WoW is apparently focusing more on its story in their upcoming expansion, I'm going to die laughing if their ""MSQ"" ends up better than DT's.)
I don't think the "diversity" of the cultures is the issue. Even Stormblood had us addressing some cultural differences. As much as I disliked Stormblood, I really think they did a better job at showing how people of different cultures may think or react when going through a change of power or leadership. And people keep blaming this "Sweetbaby" company (remember, we don't know for a fact they are involved), but if they were so into diversity why would they gloss over such important and relevant issues? This "cultural exploration" doesn't feel that deep to me honestly because they wanted to rush through it to get to Solution 9 etc.

Also, in the expansions where the story did not revolve around the WoL or ancients, we were exposed to the world through a variety of characters. This time it's just through one character and I think that is a large problem. In other expansions we meet a variety of characters and speak to them directly. We don't speak to pirates through Hien for example.

As for WoW, I had made the move more permanent after SL release, but had played before the exodus. The reality is most don't play WoW for the story and that would include me. Part of the reason I quit WoW is I felt I was being constantly deceived by the devs. They would make a lot of promises about game design and even plot design only for us to buy the next expansion and it was more of the same. I will stay around for post content here, but I'm feeling I did not get a low stakes vacation in DT as we were told. In fact, Dawntrail feels like a WoW expansion to me where it's designed so players can just get it over with.