The Negative Impact of Poor Character Writing on the Quality of Dawntrail's MSQ

[vonKlippe]

This was such a cool discussion until the regulars got here.

[Bhearil]

Even if G'ahara original time lined got erased, it will still be stupid to call his action genocidal. He didn't come up with the plan, he was entrusted with it by the very people at risk of being erased. This is like accusing a doctor who performing a consented euthanasia on terminally ill patients "murderer". Yes, someone people truly believe that, doesn't make them right.

But people always use the most extreme and hyperbolic words to push their message, what else is news?

Graha's timeline still exists but is kinda of a dead end timeline. It was actually mentioned that even if Graha changes the past their "present" would not change at all telling the player that is basically a new timeline that diverged from when Graha appeared in the past.

They just tried to give one world a chance even if theirs is kinda done for no matter what

[Raven2014]

You are the one claiming that having the consent of a handful of scientists means that wiping out their universe is no longer omnicide. You are the one claiming that consent of a tiny group of people given the vastness of the universe removes responsibility for wiping out millions if not billions of people who did not consent and would have never had a clue who the WoL is.

I'm sorry, but did you play the same expansion I did? Or were you a cutsceen skipper?

- His timeline were described as completely broken, there was no way just a "tiny group" of people, no matter how smart can accomplish the project.

- Rather, it was described it was a pan-generational projects that were only realized by a collective effort of the people of that time line.

- And the thread that tied the world together were the legend of the WoL.

- His timeline wasnt on a mission to erase itself. They are on the mission to revive the one figure that they believe can delivery them. Erasure wasn't the goal, it was just an accepted risk.

- Just like when you try a dangerous procedure that may kill the patience, the doctor is not accused of murder when the treatmeant went wrong.

He did not carry out "the will of the people" he carried out the will of one group of people on one continent, on one shard, which ran the risk of wiping out an entire universe.

Now you're just reaching. Should we start discussing quantum physic next? The heck is this entire universe thing come from.

Did you forget that in his time line, the First already cease to exist and merge into the source? Can genocide a world that's already no longer exist. Even if you try to argue intention, it doesn't change the fact his mission gave an entire Shard a chance it would never have otherwise.

They just tried to give one world a chance even if theirs is kinda done for no matter what

Exactly

His mission if success, at worst would be able to spare the First from annihilation at the cost of their own. And at best, it will save both if that's what they dare to hope for.

[All_Nonsense]

I think a lot of the issues people have taken with how the WoL is handled is how stripped of character they were this expac. I'll elaborate on one example of this.

One of the things I can't shake and troubles me greatly is how quickly our WoL is made to defy their pre-established philosophy. I want to bring you back to Shadowbringers for a quote:

Emet-Selch: "I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you."

I don't need to get into the details - we all played ShadowBringers and know what happened there. So why then do we - the great heroes who oppose this philosophy then go to Living Memory and murder the last traces of human life on one of the Source's reflections? Because we don't consider them to be truly alive; ergo, we're not guilty of murder for killing them? Why was the solution to the last vestiges of humanity on a reflection clawing onto anything they could for dear life killing them? Because Sphene was being bad? Because the "low stakes" we were promised are actually the highest they've ever been since blasphemies literally almost wiped out The Source? Because we went from "haha rite of succession" to "all life on the source will be wiped out in 10 minutes better hurry lol?" Was there really no other solution there? It's truly baffling to me how we made that logical and philosophical leap with little to no exploration of the situation at all minus G'raha's musings on the boat ride.

The way the story as a whole was handled is baffling to me moreso than anything else. I can't make sense of most of it.

[vonKlippe]

I think the lowest level of all of this -- below character depth and development, cutscene torture, plot holes, etc. -- is that the Dawntrail writer(s) had absolutely *no* respect for the people who were expected to pay to experience this story.

I take back what I said before about no one at Square saying "this is awful, we can't ship this." Now I think that probably a lot of people who worked on this expac thought and maybe even said "I really don't like this game, but our target audience will." They thought it was crap, but they thought we'd *love* it. Maybe they wrote it for kids and they think kids are too stupid to comprehend and enjoy a rich and detailed story with a cast of extraordinary characters, or maybe they wrote it for all of us and they think we're all a bunch of cheap Anime-worshipping morons who will just buy whatever they sell. Whomever they imagined the audience to be, the people at Square thought very, very little of them.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I'm sorry, but did you play the same expansion I did? Or were you a cutsceen skipper?

- His timeline were described as completely broken, there was no way just a "tiny group" of people, no matter how smart can accomplish the project.

- Rather, it was described it was a pan-generational projects that were only realized by a collective effort of the people of that time line.

- And the thread that tied the world together were the legend of the WoL.

- His timeline wasnt on a mission to erase itself. They are on the mission to revive the one figure that they believe can delivery them. Erasure wasn't the goal, it was just an accepted risk.

- Just like when you try a dangerous procedure that may kill the patience, the doctor is not accused of murder when the treatmeant went wrong.

The timeline isn't "completely broken." People on the Source are fighting over limited resources, yet they have enough resources to dedicate centuries to figuring out timetravel. And you claim that it wasn't even a small group that had enough free time and support to do this, so by your own argument there is a society functional enough to work on getting into the Crystal Tower and rewriting history, imagine what they could have accomplished if they had put all that effort towards moving forward rather than looking back. Do you really believe the First was in better shape than the Source in the alternate timeline?

And keep in mind, because of the short story we know that Midgard woke up and is helping them forge a path forward which means there was a path forward, but they spent 200 years looking back, even if it meant ending their own existence, but it didn't, which means now they have to move forward and fix their problems anyway. Had G'raha stayed, they could have had their own Crystarium, they knew changing history would do absolutely nothing for them and they were okay with that, but they also risked wiping out people who wouldn't have been okay with that.

Like you can't argue that it was this massive generational project AND they were so fubared it was okay for them to give up on their own universe because one piece of one planet was going through it's 7th dark age.

[Vyrerus]

This was such a cool discussion until the regulars got here.

But the regulars have been here since the first couple of pages

[JohnLakeside]

This deserves a bump. I read it on xivd and I had a few thoughts but don't really have the time to write it down right now...



I agree with most of your points but the biggest thing I don't agree with is that character writing is the biggest problem this expansion. Wuk Lamat is annoying but an equivalently serious problem is the complete absence of depth with the story's themes...

I will expand on it later. I know that a lot of people enjoyed ShB, EW because the characters were written decently in those two xpacs. But IMO the themes also got shallower and shallower and deep philosophical issues are just raised without much exploration. Ishikawa to me is a worse writer than what came before because she doesn't seem to care much for sociological storytelling. An entire avenue for depth has been removed with her writing. One of the biggest reasons why I thought Les Miserables or War and Peace are great works is because they tell the story of a society through its characters. ShB and EW don't have much of that and therefore despite the stakes actually feels less epic than SB IMHO.

Subjectively IMO her writing is also less mature. Even in ShB and EW it feels like problems are solved too easily, which robs us of the opportunity to sit with and ponder certain facets of the human condition. The worlds become far less grounded starting in ShB and entire societies start to feel like props that exist just so Ishikawa can moralize about hope.

I am not saying sociogical storytelling is superior, just that the importance of character writing depends on your own preferences. A deep story typically needs to be deep across several dimensions, like character, society, theming. I genuinely think focusing on just the character writing means that the story in FF14 will never be profound and match the heights of great literature. Although, perhaps I should not be expecting a video game to deliver writing as profound as the classics in the first place...

Also with DT we have nothing. So I suppose improvement in any direction would be positive.

I'm playing EW atm and noticed the people of FFXIV just feel empty and culture-less. Like they no longer feel as if they to exist after I exit the game. I realized that what theyre missing is something like a "sociological" heart. So I searched google for Ishikawa and "sociological" and found your comment.

I couldn't agree more with what you said. I LOVED the DRK quests and was super excited when I found out Ishikawa was heading ShB and EW. The people and settlements in ARR-SB had weight to them. They felt real. They had that certain element of soulfulness and life.

I'm still on EW, but starting in ShB, I felt the side characters we meet in the settlements along the way just lost something. They all feel the same. Like the people in Palaka's Stand in EW feel the same as the people in Wright in ShB. Sure, one is Indian inspired, but thats about it. There's just a certain groundedness that's missing. This was really glaring in Eulmore in ShB. I was not convinced at all by their moral, societal, and political transformation.

Edit: I'm in Radz rn and even the people there feel the same as the Crystarium people. Just kinda your boilerplate people experiencing a time of great distress. They just seem to be missing that certain something. I cant even articulate what that is, but its not there.

[Derio]

The writing for the WOL was terrible. I understand they wanted to make Wuk Lamat the main character for this expansion but her character has so many flaws and story elements that contradict themselves that it just puts more pressure on the overall story to be good and its not.

[ReynTime]

I'm playing EW atm and noticed the people of FFXIV just feel empty and culture-less. Like they no longer feel as if they to exist after I exit the game. I realized that what theyre missing is something like a "sociological" heart. So I searched google for Ishikawa and "sociological" and found your comment.

I couldn't agree more with what you said. I LOVED the DRK quests and was super excited when I found out Ishikawa was heading ShB and EW. The people and settlements in ARR-SB had weight to them. They felt real. They had that certain element of soulfulness and life.

I'm still on EW, but starting in ShB, I felt the side characters we meet in the settlements along the way just lost something. They all feel the same. Like the people in Palaka's Stand in EW feel the same as the people in Wright in ShB. Sure, one is Indian inspired, but thats about it. There's just a certain groundedness that's missing. This was really glaring in Eulmore in ShB. I was not convinced at all by their moral, societal, and political transformation.

Edit: I'm in Radz rn and even the people there feel the same as the Crystarium people. Just kinda your boilerplate people experiencing a time of great distress. They just seem to be missing that certain something. I cant even articulate what that is, but its not there.

Nameless NPCs in the settlements of ARR like Swiftperch, Aleport, Golden Bazaar, etc, are written like they have their own little backstories, and the settlements themselves have long pasts leading to what they are when you visit. Meanwhile settlements like the ones in later expansions are basically "this is place where we fish then send fish to city" and the like. To me that's one of the biggest differences.

It also makes the fact after Heavensward the number of hamlets with houses you can enter became a lot more scarce be more than just a coincidence. It highlights how little care they started putting into the design of those locations beyond a surface level.