Even our content creators cannot pretend to like the trashy writings of Dawntrail.

[chizLemons]

I think the biggest reason DT has such strong backlash isn't just that it has poor world building or even writing mistakes in general. What's really concerning is that Yoshi P signed off on it and didn't correct it. There is a clear issue with this expansion where the team was either forced to release this, or released it and just didn't care.

"Speak to Wuk Lamat yet again."

It almost comes across like "help us".

THIS. This is concerning. Because sure the writer is bad, but it's not just one person...shouldn't be. They said Ishikawa was in a supervising role. What does that mean? Did she read the MSQ? Though I think if I remember corerctly by reading the credits, she was just credited as "Senior Story Designer". What does that mean? Did she only decide on the themes and some plot points, and then never read it again as the main writers tried to connect the themes together?
And not only her, but there's a whole team, there's more than one senior writer there, and there's YoshiP and everyone at Square Enix. How did that get approved? How did no one notice the difference? Did something go extremely wrong? Were there rewrites they had no control over? WHAT HAPPENED??

[antiabz]

THIS. This is concerning. Because sure the writer is bad, but it's not just one person...shouldn't be. They said Ishikawa was in a supervising role. What does that mean? Did she read the MSQ? Though I think if I remember corerctly by reading the credits, she was just credited as "Senior Story Designer". What does that mean? Did she only decide on the themes and some plot points, and then never read it again as the main writers tried to connect the themes together?
And not only her, but there's a whole team, there's more than one senior writer there, and there's YoshiP and everyone at Square Enix. How did that get approved? How did no one notice the difference? Did something go extremely wrong? Were there rewrites they had no control over? WHAT HAPPENED??

I only have a few days left of my sub, but am losing hope that we'll ever have a response to this. I appreciate that to some people the story isn't that important, and that the other aspects of Dawntrail that were done well can more than make up for it. But I don't think I could physically play through anymore MSQ or expansions if they are written like Dawntrail. It was almost a viceral, painful reaction by the end, and it was such a shock as I have LOVED everything MSQ, even from ARR. This story had to go through so many people, so many must have thought it was great, that I just can't trust that it won't be more of the same in the future.

[Galvuu]

Zepla is trash.

If this makes Zepla quit the FF Content creation scene, i'll take all the Dawntrail controversy we can get.

I don't even watch the woman, but you guys sure are making very convincing arguments by blindly hating on her. I'm sure whatever she did definitely deserves this unprovoked reaction It's wonderful when the XIV hardliners show their real colors.

snip.

Even if it were pure expository segments with dumb fetch quests (which is terrible writing and terrible gameplay), what we're offered is an infantilized caricature. Ul'dah is my favorite starting city-state, and the comparison is night and day.
Within the first 25 levels, you get to see that:
- Ul'Dah is a beautiful city in the desert, bustling with commerce and craftsmanship;
- By virtue of that, Ul'Dah is very well-connected and quite innovative (alchemy guild, lots of mercantile trade routes, guilds of magic);
- In Ul'Dah, wealth is the measure of a man's worth, to the point it's tied to their religion ("divinity is the color of gold" on every fountain, the Ossuary rewards better tombs and rites of interment to the wealthy who donate, etc);
- Ul'Dah paid the highest price, in wealth and man, in the battle of Cartenau;
- Their entertainment is tied to gambling, and it's seen as a legitimate avenue of wealth acquisition (Gold Saucer, gladiatorial matches, etc);
All lovely, right? But, on the flip side, you also see:
- Ul'Dah treats the poor and refugees poorly- they, wrongly, believe that you "earn your lot in life", and leaves the Ala Mhigan refugees to starve and bake in the Sun, unwilling to bend to help them, save for rare exceptions, even though they never had a chance to shine or prove their worth;
- The Monetarist faction has an immense amount of influence on the politics and daily life of Ul'Dah, and they will use it to greedily squeeze every bit of profit out of the common citizens they can;
- The Monetarist faction and the Monarchy are at odds, and this friction often leads to problems;
- There is a systemic issue of corruption and bribery in Ul'Dah that reaches all the way to its law enforcement. You're quickly introduced to corrupt members of the Brass Blades, and eventually to spies and corrupt members of the Flames.

So much of this is organically integrated in msq or side quests. Some side quests even delve into Ul'Dah's dark past with the Trader's Spurn. You see the good, the neutral, and the bad. This goes for any of the original city-states, even Ishgard. The racism and religious zeal of Gridania (their disdain of Duskwights, or leaving people to die to appease the Elementals), the crime and piracy of Limsa, the systemic classicism and discrimination in Ishgard, as well as the paranoia regarding dragon-sympathizers brought by the war. Everything is gray, there are good men and cruel men in all these city-states, there is a good, flourishing side to their culture and history but also a dark, grim one.
I get nothing like that in DT. The game even contradicts itself, going on about long-standing problems that are always resolved in a couple of minutes (or days at worse, if it's Gulool Ja Ja's doing). This isn't human. It's so detached from any experience you have- how can I believe this place where everything gets resolved in minutes or is otherwise a perfect fantasy-land? Even in Mamook, we undo decades of strife, suffering and resentment in minutes. I don't know. Maybe it's me, but I just can't really hold my suspension of disbelief.

[Turtledeluxe]

I only have a few days left of my sub, but am losing hope that we'll ever have a response to this. I appreciate that to some people the story isn't that important, and that the other aspects of Dawntrail that were done well can more than make up for it. But I don't think I could physically play through anymore MSQ or expansions if they are written like Dawntrail. It was almost a viceral, painful reaction by the end, and it was such a shock as I have LOVED everything MSQ, even from ARR. This story had to go through so many people, so many must have thought it was great, that I just can't trust that it won't be more of the same in the future.

I don't think there's a way to apologize for the story being bad because ultimately, story quality is subjective and by apologizing for it you are indirectly telling people who did enjoy it that they are mistaken. All they can really do is just do better with the patches imo.

That said, I'm in the same boat and next expansion I'm happily waiting for reviews.

get nothing like that in DT. The game even contradicts itself, going on about long-standing problems that are always resolved in a couple of minutes (or days at worse, if it's Gulool Ja Ja's doing). This isn't human. It's so detached from any experience you have- how can I believe this place where everything gets resolved in minutes or is otherwise a perfect fantasy-land? Even in Mamook, we undo decades of strife, suffering and resentment in minutes. I don't know. Maybe it's me, but I just can't really hold my suspension of disbelief.

That sums up the first half of DT imo. There's just a glaring problem and what's worse, is that this occurs multiple times in succession. Also stories like the XIIIth and Alexandria seem like they should have been full xpacs. They're huge victims of telling vs showing and pretty quick wrap ups, even though they take slightly longer to resolve.

[chizLemons]

I don't think there's a way to apologize for the story being bad because ultimately, story quality is subjective and by apologizing for it you are indirectly telling people who did enjoy it that they are mistaken. All they can really do is just do better with the patches imo.

That said, I'm in the same boat and next expansion I'm happily waiting for reviews.

No, story QUALITY isn't subjective. There are subjective elements to it, but there's also many elements that define if a piece of writing is objectively higher quality.
The enjoyment a piece of writing gives you is subjective - your personal preferences, the emotional responses you had to the writing, even your cultural background and how that affects your enjoyment of it. That's the subjective part.

The objective part are the technical issues we can easily point out in Dawntrail: inconsistent writing, clarity and coherense, the technical issues. Grammar and syntax are also objective problems, which thankfully I don't think is an issue here.
For example, Bakool Ja Ja's character development. You can like it, be emotionally invested into it. The idea is fine, the character is likeable to a lot of people, but the technical part of his development is low quality. His personality changes too suddenly from one zone to the other, and he immediately starts talking like a different character and trusting Wuk Lamat, after just trying to kill her and showing no signs of redemption before. We don't see in any of his prior actions anything that would point out to this development, and his past actions are dismissed and of no consequence anymore. This is OBJECTIVELY bad.

No one is wrong for enjoying something that is "objectively bad", but that doesn't make the thing good. I feel like people have a lot of trouble accepting that.
At the same time, if you don't like something that's considered "objectively good", you're also not wrong. That doesn't make the thing bad.

The issue with Dawntrail is that, from what we've seen in the past, these objective quality problems were not there in past expansions. For people that are more used to noticing stuff like that, it's very glaring.

[Voidmage]

I think the biggest reason DT has such strong backlash isn't just that it has poor world building or even writing mistakes in general. What's really concerning is that Yoshi P signed off on it and didn't correct it. There is a clear issue with this expansion where the team was either forced to release this, or released it and just didn't care.

"Speak to Wuk Lamat yet again."

It almost comes across like "help us".

I wouldn‘t go that far.
I don‘t think anyone held a gun to their head to write the story like that.

They tried something new and probably genuinely thought people would love Wuk Lamat or at least enough to drown the complaints.
They probably sit together right now and think about how they could be so wrong.

Yoshida himself said that he is more and more hands off with the ff14 development in one interview.
I guess he delegated the story this time instead of looking over it in the end (if I remember correctly he said somewhere before that the story always went over his desk at the end).
He probably payed more attention to the combat design and graphics update this time.
He is only one person after all.

The idea itself is good.
You need writers without Ishikawa and you can‘t rely on the big boss controlling everything forever.
The problem could be that that controlling of stuff has been going on for so long that it became the norm for some writers and now it backfired horribly.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if the whole sorrows of werlyt and Pandaemonium were written with heavy handholding and corrections of Ishikawa and Yoshida.

If it helps for the future as a lessons learned then good, that’s whatever game needed. A wake up call for the devs to not tread it as a step child that prints money without any critique.

If they continue this approach into 8.0 then I eat my words because then we have a problem.

Right now I want to see all this as an experiment with fresh blood going wrong.
I still trust the devs.

[Turtledeluxe]

No one is wrong for enjoying something that is "objectively bad", but that doesn't make the thing good. I feel like people have a lot of trouble accepting that.
At the same time, if you don't like something that's considered "objectively good", you're also not wrong. That doesn't make the thing bad.

The issue with Dawntrail is that, from what we've seen in the past, these objective quality problems were not there in past expansions. For people that are more used to noticing stuff like that, it's very glaring.

I agree that there are generally agreed upon, or in some cases indisputable rules of writing that determine whether or not a general audience will get a particular reaction. What I meant there was, as you are saying, every person's take on the story will be subjective. I'll be the first one to tell you that the consensus is what matters and obviously reviews show DT missed the mark.

The problem is as I said, Yoshi P can't really come out and apologize for the story because people who feel it was objectively good will then be invalidated. Maybe he can get away with "sorry if you were disappointed" but I just don't see that happening.

Right now I want to see all this as an experiment with fresh blood going wrong.
I still trust the devs.

Hm. It's an interesting perspective. I personally see it as symptomatic of two things-- SE's Financials and their outdated development practices. I'm not sure XIV had enough budget or time to handle a new expansion and the graphics update all at once. On top of that, CS3 is expected to also work on new games. For me the question is..Will SE finally do the right thing and allot a proper budget for this game? Can they figure out a different way to have CS3 work on new console games and the MMO at one time that allows the top creators to have an even workload? Those are my suspicions as of now and I hope we see meaningful change next time around.

[Voidmage]

Hm. It's an interesting perspective. I personally see it as symptomatic of two things-- SE's Financials and their outdated development practices. I'm not sure XIV had enough budget or time to handle a new expansion and the graphics update all at once. On top of that, CS3 is expected to also work on new games. For me the question is..Will SE finally do the right thing and allot a proper budget for this game? Can they figure out a different way to have CS3 work on new console games and the MMO at one time that allows the top creators to have an even workload? Those are my suspicions as of now and I hope we see meaningful change next time around.

I agree that it shows that the devs probably get less resources than they should.
I also kinda agree with the development practices but in another form.

I think in the past the strict planing through Yoshida was great to bring the game on a certain path.
A bit of railroading is needed for such a thing.
We now probably see the downside of it when there is a phase of change (new writers for example).
Pair that change with a new story beginning and experiments in the expansion and here we are.

I only wished they did such experiments and changes in smaller content or at least said clearly that there would be such a thing.

[anna-steele]

streamer bad

thumbs down

[Mortex]

I never skipped story in Final Fantasy xiv but the last area made me skip for the first time in all my FF xiv game time. It’s so absolutely boring because they want you to care about the endless but on the other hand you can’t be made to care cause they are just memories and not living things so it’s ok to turn them off and not be a genocidal monster. Same with the other area Wuk solving every problem without trying or failing even a little bit. And we do it in less time then even the old king needed. Same as sphene effectively telling us she wanted the genocide for souls and we still help and believe sphene only to be betrayed again after getting the mucuffin back. Also wuk and the talk no jutsu she use is just so irritating because at least naruto had actual character growth and failures happening while Wuk gets everything on a silver plate.

Also the deus ex machina kid so that we have a person that could use the key krile got from the parents after killing his father is just such bad writing it did hurt.