Dawntrail, Endwalkers, and the Death of 2.0

[DisgracedDairy]

...Not only did it kill the mystery of the twelve and the entire religious system of Eorzea. They also somehow made it all about Venat again with the supposed gods just being some random people she knew.

I find it ironic that Endsinger summarizes Endwalkers so well.

"And when one asked, 'What is the point?' there were none left to answer."

I find it even more ironic that you can look at ending of that entire segment of the Dead Ends as a metaphor for Endwalkers itself, taking a hammer to all the carefully laid groundwork placed before it with reckless abandon, leaving nothing but ashes of a realm reborn for anyone to engage with.

It's so deflating to watch the setting be stripped of anything to do or believe in. One of the reasons Dawntrail feels so bleak to me is because... It really just is. It has nothing to do with its original characters or setting.

For further listening on Myths of the Realm, I've always agreed with Echoes of Etheirys' aptly titled "Lore Chat: Myths of the Realm" on the subject matter, which I will link to here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reFKmiBAva4

[CuteBucket]

Endlwalker should have been two expansions: an expansion about Ilsabard and the final defeat of the Garlean Empire, and an expansion about the Final Days and preventing the tragedy of the Ancients from repeating. It was originally supposed to be two expansions so I've heard, but likely due to some corporate fuckery that we will likely never know the full truth of, it was crammed into one, and it did a massive disservice to what could have been an amazing story had it been given time to actually tell the story it wanted to tell. I don't hate Endwalker but I was frustrated by parts of it for sure.

On the other hand, Dawntrail has been such a massive disappointment. And I think this thread really illustrates why: At it's core, it simply doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game, let alone a FFXIV expansion. It feels like another world, another intellectual property entirely, because both lore-wise and tonally it's disconnected from everything that came before. I have not felt so let down by a story in a long time, and I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. I would be okay with another Stormblood. Hell, I'd be okay with another A Realm Reborn. At least 2.0 still had interesting world building and some fun characters even if it wasn't super deep. Dawntrail couldn't even manage that.

[Ayalu]

I mean "not feeling like Final Fantasy" is a common complain towards FF Games since over a decade.
Im not sure which didnt had that complain. I guess Final Fantasy 9...maybe 10 but thats hard to say as it was a age before internet was common.
Heck FF7 would be called that nowadays if it wasnt already established with how much it diverges from what was at the time.

Its true that Dawntrail feels more "Anime" than any expantion before which is a Style change but not a completly new one saw this change before coming.
With the occasional comedy bit in the MSQ. The new World was also long established and heck even that Ketenramm discovered it was already known.
They also still use established lore in there quest design. For example the fact that Dunefolk raised in Traditional Families have a high resistence against Poison comes directly from the original Enzyclopedia Eorzea and got picked up in the Healer Role Quest.

Its not all Doom and Gloom. This expantion was suppose to just be a Adventure and mostly Standalone which is fine, a bit boring but fine.
That they cut so many story threads to get here is unfortuned and i agree it Endwalker should have been two expansions.

But currently we have the mystery of the Artefact - which probably gets used in the patch content.
And we still have 5 large patches of Story ahead of us that could act as path for future expansions.
As Dawntrals story seems told, the patches might be a long prolog for the next expansion or again standalone.

[DeadlyAlbatross]

Well....

It isn't a proper Final Fantasy unless a purehearted shrine maiden gets murdered.

Preferably a shrine maiden, and preferably sacrificed.

Spoilers for proof:

ARR has its Minfillia
HW had its... Iceheart?

SB had.... uhhh... Nothing, except everyone's opinion on Lyse?

Shadowbringers had Minfillia, again
Endwalker had Hydaelin and Minfillia again.

Dawntrail has.... um, WoL's self-esteem, I guess? And Erenville's mother, who does not really fit the type.

[lolnotacat]

SB had.... uhhh... Nothing, except everyone's opinion on Lyse?

Papalymo was a beautiful Shrine Maiden at heart.

[Volgia]

Well....

It isn't a proper Final Fantasy unless a purehearted shrine maiden gets murdered.

Preferably a shrine maiden, and preferably sacrificed.

Spoilers for proof:

ARR has its Minfillia
HW had its... Iceheart?

SB had.... uhhh... Nothing, except everyone's opinion on Lyse?

Shadowbringers had Minfillia, again
Endwalker had Hydaelin and Minfillia again.

Dawntrail has.... um, WoL's self-esteem, I guess? And Erenville's mother, who does not really fit the type.

SB had our most beautiful Shrine Maiden, Zenos sacrificed and brought back to life 3 days later like Jesus.

[Aldath]

Keep voicing your dissatisfaction as a client, that's what you do.
It doesn't matter if we're doing great in plate we numbers, reception has been mixed, pointing towards the lower end of the review spectrum, and player sentiment is at an all time low, which in turn reflects in content churned by creators (and like it or not, we live in an influencer culture where what they say, the public repeats).

Let me tell you the story of a little, unknown game named Helldivers 2, since it's a microcosm of our own situation. The game opened to positive critical acclaim and it's been one of the few games so far to keep a consistently big active player base. However, the more content they introduced and the bigger the fame became, the more distant they became from the playerbase, and they eventually began implementing controversial changes that made the game less and less fun. The playerbase at first said the people complaining were just being negative and their presence wouldn't be missed. Eventually, even those defending the game couldn't do it anymore and also left.
Afterwards, the devs saw the writing in the room, changed leadership, and changed the game the way the playerbase expected, and the sentiment improved. However, they lost 90% of the playerbase and never really recovered.

The difference here being that SE/CBU3 has very rarely taken player feedback into account. Where exactly did they get the idea that people disliked release Viper? Where was the communication when both reddit and the forums had people asking for the changes to stop before being implemented?

[Apolline]

I agree with a lot of the sentiments listed. I don't think the game is dying, but in regards to the story I genuinely feel my character "retired" after Stormblood, esp after losing my 3 favorite characters. Dawntrail would have been an excellent time to do a time skip / portal effect (a la ARR). I like the story overall but my character does not fit if I include the decade long journey she has already been on (regardless of how time flows in game).

[Vyrerus]

I miss Eorzea. Is this really what we killed it in exchange for?

To answer this question you actually don't even need to look at Dawntrail. You must needs look back to Shadowbringers and understand what it did to the setting.

Shadowbringers was a wildly successful expansion with top tier writing. However, the lead in, into Shadowbringers was anything but. Emet-selch was introduced out of left field. The immediate threat of the Empire and Black Rose was sidelined. The Exarch's Calling became front and center. It relied on interest in the mystery of what was happening that was demanding the WoL and Scion's souls.

Enter Shadowbringers. As we all know, it was a tale about The First and the time travel enacted by G'raha Tia and the future 8UC timeline to "unwrite" history and allow the Warrior of Light to live. To stop Black Rose. To stop a calamity and Rejoining. And this monolithic undertaking by the plot's designated good guys had them run up against Emet-selch, who as it turned out, wasn't just any old Convocation Ascian. He was the only mentally stable and Unsundered Convocation Ascian of the supposed three Unsundered.

He spoke the truth behind the setting onto us in Shadowbringers, and this truth behind the setting effectively killed Eorzea. In the Fist of The North Star style, "You are already dead."

It did this by way of telling the player that Eorzea and the entire world at large are actually just a fractured future of a world ripped asunder by the struggle between the setting's two major gods that had been at the periphery of the story since 2.0.

It did this without calling attention to nor calling back to any established lore. Simultaenously, it called all of that lore into question. What's the truth? Only what we're told. What about Hydaelyn's side of the story? We'll answer that in Endwalker.

Only... Endwalker came around, and it became clear that they were eager to trim the fat. They wanted to deliver a second Shadowbringers, but they also didn't want to continue telling the story Shadowbringers turned FFXIV into, this is why Venat has a metaphor scene about The Sundering instead of an actual depiction of the event. This is why they hard turned away from aether into Dynamis. The mechanisms of FFXIV were no longer in service to the writers, so to wrest control back into their hands, they introduced whatever would allow them to do that into the story.

Forget the past. Walk away from it. Forge ahead.

This is the mindset that's made Dawntrail. Everything has to be new. Only new things get the spotlight. But they know that the success for XIV financially relies on The Ancients plotline, even though they want desperately to drop that in its entirety. This why Sphene is a Diet Ascian. This is why the backend plot still echoes with that "familiar" ground.

The old lore died in Shadowbringers. Dawntrail is just the first time they're being in your face about it.

[ReynTime]

Essentially, the story have lost the intricacies and connections that made it more mature. Following the fall of the empire we now lack through world building that went on previously and are left with much more isolated and simpler stories.

Sharlaya was too sterilized in EW and became friendly with us too easily, a nation that straight up bailed on their old territory at the hint of resistance and would send assassins to deal with wayward information, and Garlemald cut too short.

Funny that the foundations for the lore they created for 2.0 onwards wasn't even built by Yoshida's team. They just borrowed what was there and modified or built on top of it. The moment they had to make a new saga from scratch it turns out to be like disney movie aimed exclusively at kids and riddled with inconsistencies.