Yoshi P - Your next live letter, DT msq and the damage to the brand

[Voidmage]

Yeah, if there is one area you don't want to see the players fractured or divisive in FF14, it's the story. Samething with WoW's end game, its lowest point wasn't when the story suck, but when it tried the most asine end game loop.

I think thats basically it.
There will always be different opinions and different tastes regarding "parts" of the story but to completely divide the playerbase so much is something.
There is either love or hate for DT MSQ nothing really in between other then "i kinda liked the western part" or "I liked Wuk lamat but she was a bit too much in the focus".

This whole thing as become some kind of mini faction war on all websites.
This one here isn't even the biggest. Just look at some youtube comments.

I get they wanted to try something new and take a risk and that they wanted newer writers to get experience but imo they have bite to much with this one I think.
But if they don't treat carefully now the game could decline in the future. Not today, not next year but the next expansion can suffer from it as much as DT profited from EW regarding preorders.

[Evergrey]

There is either love or hate for DT MSQ nothing really in between other then "i kinda liked the western part" or "I liked Wuk lamat but she was a bit too much in the focus".

I guess I'm an anomaly then since I neither hate nor love the story and I am there "in between". It's good for what it is. It could've been worse and it could've been better.

[Aurelius2625]

"Just wait 2 more years and keep subbing you little slaves" lol. "it will get better!" No. To quote Josh Strife Hayes: A story and game should be good IMMEDIATELY you should NOT have to play for 100 hours or w/e length of time "until it gets good". It should be good FROM THE START OF THE STORY. "It's just how it is" WITH AN ATTITUDE LIKE THAT? YES. "Just consume, slave".

[Voidmage]

I guess I'm an anomaly then since I neither hate nor love the story and I am there "in between". It's good for what it is. It could've been worse and it could've been better.

Wouldn't call it an anomaly.
There will always be people who are more or less "indifferent" for lack of a better word.
I'm mostly talking about the broad population and the dicussion forums.

Of course all of that is just theory of mine. Who knows, maybe I'm completely wrong.

[Zackneifein]

WoW has always had a story. And long story going way back to the RTS games, the Warcraft series.

No. War 1 / 2 / 3 had story with their campaigns.
There is no story in Vanilla, there is Lore, books, comics, but the game has no story. There is barely a storyline for Burning Crusade and they started implementing something close to a story with Wotlk and they tried to put more and more with game like Swtor, GW2 or FFXIV becoming a hit, because they realized people started to like when there is storyline to follow. The best of it is Legion (which is one of the favorite expansion in all WoW history).

But it doesn't changed what I said : WoW never was about the story, even now where they are actively trying for WoW to become one.

So it's not like the story never had a big focus only because the player character wasn't the "chosen one".

Ironically, they are so much trying to do that since Legion (and even Mist of Pandaria in fact), but they just fail again and again because they don't know how to do it right.
Leader of it's faction in Draenor, Leader of an important faction in Azeroth, The Champion of Azeroth (not the planet, the being), Maw Walker, the Dragonrider.

Or are people subconsciously admiting that FFXIV is a boring/bad game unless the story is good?

I'm saying it consciously, not about being a bad game obviously, but about being boring... yes. I would never have played this game if it was not for the MSQ and the Raid that are released at the same time as the said MSQ.
There is objectively far less things to do in FFXIV than in most, if not all the the MMORPG, and that's one of it's strenght. Like Yoshi-P said, it allow me to play plenty of other games. Not saying that there aren't people that can only play FFXIV and be satisfied, but they are minority, they aren't enough to make FFXIV a success.

[Evergrey]

Wouldn't call it an anomaly.
There will always be people who are more or less "indifferent" for lack of a better word.
I'm mostly talking about the broad population and the dicussion forums.

Of course all of that is just theory of mine. Who knows, maybe I'm completely wrong.

Ah, speaking in broad spectrum I agree with you.

[Volgia]

Since 6.x, the MSQ reputation is on the downstill, and Dawntrail didn't repaired it, we are in the longest period I have ever seen where the MSQ has been so criticized. In a MMO where the story is so important, it's a problem. Not a life threatening one - yet -, but still a problem.

Well then the "Brand damage" was happening in Endwalker, not in Dawntrail. Dawntrail in fact saved FFXIV for me because now I have fun playing it. EW was just so boring I saw myself leaving if DT dropped the ball on content. I've been in this forum before, and I was super highly critical of this game both in MSQ and Content. I don't think the MSQ in DT is perfect and I have my crits on it, but it's hard to discuss with so much disingenuity going on here.

Damage is damage, you can argue the degree all you want. What I mean by that is. If I say, it's not good I smashed my car into a bollard and smashed the bumper lights and bonnet. Then someone says, that's nothing see this complete wreck. It's irrelevant to my situation that other cars have been damaged worse, the same as it's irrelevant to SE that Blizz dropped the ball with OW2.

That's what you're implying though, that there was so much damage it hurt the brand, and I don't know how you can measure that other than the fact that you feel that you are right in that this expansion sucked and the VAST majority of players hate it, it's such a confirmation bias argument, man. We'll only know if the brand was hurt if there's massive unsubbing, or if no one buys next expansion.

You're also wrong, the characters are all terribly written and from a writing standpoint this is the worst expac they have released. Now many will still enjoy the dungeon and raids, and some may enjoy the story, but it's a none starter arguing the story isn't an example of terrible writing.

I mean that's your opinion, I didn't find them to be terribly written to the point we should send the writer to a backroom.

[SteakDriven]

How about a calamity-level redo?

[Raven2014]

How about a calamity-level redo?

Nah, you don't need to erase a reflection or wipe out the population of a continent just to delete one orange cat, she's not worth it.

[OgruMogru]

Nah, you don't need to erase a reflection or wipe out the population of a continent just to delete one orange cat, she's not worth it.

the cat came back
the very next day
the cat came back
he thought it was a goner
but the cat came back
it just wouldn't stay away