Dawntrail's MSQ story is a disaster and waste of potential. [full spoilers]

[Nathan_Fuilivain]

The shutting down of Living Memory should have been the 7.x patches so that there was room for krile and erenville to process and let go off their loved ones. It was such an unnecessary shift of focus from trying to stop sphene to talking with the endless and just making the decision to shut them off within a matter of 1-2 lvls of quests. Truly so much potential was wasted just rushing this story beat out before the final boss.

I can almost imagine them also exploring more in depth on the ideology of whether the endless can be considered alive or not. Just thinking about it makes me sad that it probably not gonna happen now.

[Voidmage]

snip

I somewhat agree.

The paralysis ok, we should have a way to deal with that but other than that…

It’s fine to have unresolved problems or problems at all.
Right now Tural is that big peaceful continent without any conflict even after Alexandria appeared.

Eorzea sure, the Ascians were interfering but even then we had Ishgard that had its own conflict with the dragons and even internal with the rich and poor, church and others.
Others also even without Garlemald had social problems, “pirates” in the ruby sea, the extreme isolation of the Au’ra underwater, Azim steppe conflict.
Garlemald itself is only slowly changing and you still see mistrust and fear from all sides.

While there is a path there now to peace it’s a long and hard won one.

Even Thavnair has some fickle problems left as the caster role quest shower or the aftermath of the final days (they have a first brood dragon as a ruler so no wonder they feel safer as others).

Ishgard still struggles with poverty and remnants of the church, Eorzea’s peace with the beast tribes is extremely fragile and the city states themself still have their own old struggles.

Turals conflict when we got there was shallow and resolved completely.
I don’t see any form of potential for unrest in the future.
The new Dawnservants are loved even by those who didn’t support them, bandit problems seem to be shallow at best and almost resolved with “understanding why” approach and Solution 9 was said in the credits to “don’t worry, they will come around to love their new ruler, wink, wink”.
Even when there are different viewpoints of the future like with the Pelupelu or the rogue giants it doesn‘t go anywhere. The later are not even regarded as a nuisance by the other giants.
And the Hrothgar-Mamool Ja hate is only in text but nothing else, not even really in sidequests. It’s all just… monotone.

I have seen some real mental gymnastics to defend that like “no Ascians, the last conflict only 80 years in the past or even Dynamis used as an answer.

I hope we stay in Tural because I don’t want these writers to touch Eorzea.

[Teraluna]

"I hope we stay in Tural because I don’t want these writers to touch Eorzea"

I'd prefer if they never touched ffxiv again.

We have numerous posts outlining different areas of deficiency, of plot holes, of sudden peace by mixing pot noodles (or something similar).
It all boils down to utterly awful writing.

SE - I don't know what persuaded you to go in this direction. Whether you deliriously imagined this was the new path to success.
Take your time to review the reactions. No hurry, you've already inflicted the damage.

Now, what can we expect? One of two paths maybe?
- you continue down this truly terrible road, or
- you do something along the lines of 2.0, at least for the story, and rescue this once great game from the utter mess it has become.

[Oichi]

"I hope we stay in Tural because I don’t want these writers to touch Eorzea"

I'd prefer if they never touched ffxiv again.

We have numerous posts outlining different areas of deficiency, of plot holes, of sudden peace by mixing pot noodles (or something similar).
It all boils down to utterly awful writing.

SE - I don't know what persuaded you to go in this direction. Whether you deliriously imagined this was the new path to success.
Take your time to review the reactions. No hurry, you've already inflicted the damage.

Now, what can we expect? One of two paths maybe?
- you continue down this truly terrible road, or
- you do something along the lines of 2.0, at least for the story, and rescue this once great game from the utter mess it has become.

100% this. I wish it was not so, but unfortunately that's exactly how I see it.

[sharplysurreal]

"I hope we stay in Tural because I don’t want these writers to touch Eorzea"

I'd prefer if they never touched ffxiv again.

We have numerous posts outlining different areas of deficiency, of plot holes, of sudden peace by mixing pot noodles (or something similar).
It all boils down to utterly awful writing.

SE - I don't know what persuaded you to go in this direction. Whether you deliriously imagined this was the new path to success.
Take your time to review the reactions. No hurry, you've already inflicted the damage.

Now, what can we expect? One of two paths maybe?
- you continue down this truly terrible road, or
- you do something along the lines of 2.0, at least for the story, and rescue this once great game from the utter mess it has become.

I think they are delusional in their conceptions of what they think the West is if this is their attempt at "seizing the overseas market". They think everyone is trans and fragile and that we need rubber bullets and pre school level disney songs and leftist safe space cultural representation that is inherently shallow and racist. Hey guys tacos haha nudge nudge wink wink. It really says more about us tho if this is what they think of us. I'd rather just play ARR - Endwalker in New Game + than pretend this shit ever existed.

Fantasy and fiction have always been media to explore the gritty parts of reality and find hope in it. In A Realm Reborn, which at this point is a masterpiece compared to Dawntrail, we deal with real issues. For one example - sex traffickers in Vylbrand. Yeah it's shitty. It sucks. But it exists. And you know what? We deal with it. The level 15 Rogue quest has us assassinate them. In the level 30 Arcanist quest we defeat the captain that abducted Kyl'hia. We transform lives. We fight evil and deliver hope to the people in a way that doesn't come off as insulting to the audience because it is without censorship or erasure or hamfisted overtures of getting along.

These writers need to start getting a clue or they're done.

[Turtledeluxe]

I don't think it matters where we are going because they introduced a plot mcguffin that, as far as I can tell, is going to result in a couple patches of G'raha and Y'shtola studying in Sharalyan while we do some bs. Then the plot will move forward to some random new place. This is exactly how they executed the EW patches.

To be clear, they're going to say the tool needs to be unlocked to use, which means we're going to inevitably unlock it and use it to traverse shards.

[Remiferia]

I don't think it matters where we are going because they introduced a plot mcguffin that, as far as I can tell, is going to result in a couple patches of G'raha and Y'shtola studying in Sharalyan while we do some bs. Then the plot will move forward to some random new place. This is exactly how they executed the EW patches.

To be clear, they're going to say the tool needs to be unlocked to use, which means we're going to inevitably unlock it and use it to traverse shards.

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

[BigBoom550]

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

There's been hints about a Jenova-type thing in the Lifestream... but I don't trust these writers.

We still have Meracydia, we have the extreme north. Give them to some writers with skill before new Reflections.

[chizLemons]

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

The sad thing is that I feel like they tried to leave a lot of things open. If you think about it, there's a lot of "unresolved loose ends" around Tural..but the ONLY one that we remember and "care" about is the McGuffin cup, because it's the only one that is directly tied to our character. Everything else is Tural cultural stuff that we don't have any personal connection to. Like, wasn't Erenville going to investigate something going on in Shaaloani? There's the baby ruler issue and the whole complication with souls in Solution 9, the Milala stuff they lore dumped on Living Memory, among other meaningless stuff. But none of it matters.

The very basics of good storytelling is that people care about what happens in a story if we care about the characters, and Dawntrail gave us very little reason to care about any of them. They're badly developed, shallow and didn't form any connections to the characters we already cared about - it actually attempted to ruin them by making them disappear as soon as they arrive and not giving them any personality or things to do, and robbed some of them of good character arcs when there should be one. And our own character also has no reason to care abou any of it, unless you count the story forcing us to like Wuk Lamat.

...and even the cup, I hate it. Why would they say it's a "low stakes new beginning" when they immediately go back to shard hopping? I want to explore Etheirys. They delayed EW by 2 weeks so they could have Emet tell us we should explore Etheirys, so why are we talking about shards and reflections again?!

[CuteBucket]

I was initially excited about the reveal of the Azem symbol on the weird grail item, because I was DESPERATE for all of Dawntrail to get ANY little tiny crumb of lore that related to the Ancients because they're some of my favorite characters and setting the game has shown us, but now I'm worried. I don't want shard travel to feel easy. I think it makes sense to eventually explore more shards if they plan to keep the game going for another decade of story, but it needs to be exceedingly complicated and difficult to achieve shard travel. It should be a massive undertaking requiring insane amounts of aether. Anything less would cheapen everything that happened around shard travel in Shadowbringers. But I don't trust the current writing team to handle that well at all. And for now, I would much rather explore Ilsabard and Meracydia before we go shard hopping. Especially if they're going to treat the shards like they did Alexandria. Wow look, it's just a really shallow and bastardized version of a previous Final Fantasy game shoved into one final zone! How fun... -_-