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

[Remiferia]

I've not cared about the MSQ since 6.1, so I guess that tracks.

Sad thing is I'm a massive FF4 fan, FF4 was my first RPG so it feels like it should've been directed at me, but no the writing and characterization was just a drop off a cliff in quality.

I feel this way about Dawntrail and FF9.

There's some genuinely good stuff there like Sphene and the Endless creating a reverse-Garland/Terra solution to their problem of wanting souls to bring others back, but it was executed better in a game that came out 25 years ago on PS1 hardware because it was led by a better writer. Otis is a genuinely endearing character but that's because he's a carbon copy of Steiner in words and actions.

There's brief flashes of emotional notes about the meaning of life and the importance of memetic legacy but, once again, FF9 simply did it better with Vivi's short life, Zidane and Kuja's opposing worldviews on their true nature. Instead, Hiroi draws so much from FF4 and FF9 that the things he writes just become Member Berries for these older, much better games. FF14 itself now has its own internal spectrum of 'inspiration' to 'plagiarism' in how much it chooses to 'celebrate' these older works and Hiroi is at the forefront of coming dangerously close to just writing these older FF titles into FF14 wholesale every time he's given the opportunity.

Really excited for Gulool Ja to be a clone of his murderous father and we watch as he stumbles down a long corridor while Wuk Lamat and the Scions tell him he isn't alone.

[Shibi]

The worst monkey paw outcome would be an accident where Gulool Ja's head is somehow fused to Poochies body in a transporter accident.

[OgruMogru]

I feel this way about Dawntrail and FF9.

There's some genuinely good stuff there like Sphene and the Endless creating a reverse-Garland/Terra solution to their problem of wanting souls to bring others back, but it was executed better in a game that came out 25 years ago on PS1 hardware because it was led by a better writer. Otis is a genuinely endearing character but that's because he's a carbon copy of Steiner in words and actions.

There's brief flashes of emotional notes about the meaning of life and the importance of memetic legacy but, once again, FF9 simply did it better with Vivi's short life, Zidane and Kuja's opposing worldviews on their true nature. Instead, Hiroi draws so much from FF4 and FF9 that the things he writes just become Member Berries for these older, much better games. FF14 itself now has its own internal spectrum of 'inspiration' to 'plagiarism' in how much it chooses to 'celebrate' these older works and Hiroi is at the forefront of coming dangerously close to just writing these older FF titles into FF14 wholesale every time he's given the opportunity.

Really excited for Gulool Ja to be a clone of his murderous father and we watch as he stumbles down a long corridor while Wuk Lamat and the Scions tell him he isn't alone.

The first time DT whacked out some 9 music it actually made me cry, but not because I found it so emotionally resonant. I could tell it was a bellwether for all the things you just mentioned. I was crying and laughing and angry and was like Alan Partridge when people keep misquoting James Bond

[Pricia]

Agreed.

And mostly for me - foreshadowing has its uses but it ruined everything in DT. Might as well put a huge sign saying "Sphene is the bad guy who once again wants to kill others to save her people (so original at this point)" and "Koana is going to let Wuk Lamat win."

Ok, it was predictable anyway, but... come on.

[CuteBucket]

So many things went wrong with Dawntrail's story that I feel like something has gone very awry in workplace of CS3. We'll likely never know what really happened behind the scenes, but I have some thoughts.

We have three writers listed for Dawntrail's MSQ: Daichi Hiroi, Tomohiro Kawasaki, and Megumi Onozuka. Of these three, we know the most about Hiroi because he was in a previous Live Letter where the team talked about his history and which parts of FFXIV he'd worked on before. He's credited as the "Lead Story Designer" for Dawntrail. The list of his credits has already been posted previously in this thread if you want to find it.

Most of Hiroi's writing credits for FFXIV are...just fine. He's no Ishikawa, yeah, but I still enjoyed most of these stories and sidequests except for the 6.x patch series. I liked the Void Ark raids with the sky pirates, I liked Pandaemonium and had fun learning about Lahabrea's fucked up family, I liked a lot of the Stormblood patch quests story beats. When it comes to people pointing fingers at "who ruined Dawntrail" though, everyone seems to be pointing at him, because he's the team lead. I don't want to say "Hiroi did nothing wrong," because I don't think that's true, but I also think something is missing here to only blame him.

There's two other writers listed in the credits. Tomohiro Kawasaki is the lead writer of the Four Lords and Shadow of Werlyt Trial sidequests. The only other writing credit I can find for him online is for, uh...two games called "Nurse Love Syndrome" and "Nurse Love Addiction." He's not the lead writer in either, he's just listed in the writing credits. Despite the suspicious names, they are visual novels available on the Nintendo Switch, so they're not R18+ games. I have no idea if the story in these are good or not, but...yeah, not exactly a notable history of game writing.

Of those two, I would say Hiroi is already a better writer than Kawasaki. Hiroi wrote some job quests ranging from amusing to meh, but nothing in his portfolio stands out as something I actively disliked in any way (even the beginning of the 6.x at least had me interested, though it fell flat later), while Four Lords was pretty boring and Werlyt was...oof, what a can of worms. A big case of "interesting ideas, horrendous execution" if you ask me, which is also a consistent problem in Dawntrail's writing.

The last writer credited is Megumi Onozuka. Unlike Kawasaki, she has no previous writing credits to her name. The only thing we know she wrote is the Pixie and Dwarf quests in ShB. As Tribal Allied Society quests go, I'd say they're some of the better ones. I quite liked the Pixies, at any rate, but they're also not really that long or deep of quest lines. But nothing in those quests would indicate to me that she's a terrible writer or raise red flags. (source for the two other writers previous work here.

[CuteBucket]

So what happened? I think it's one of these things, or some combination of parts of all of them.

1) Management asleep at the wheel
For whatever reason this team was given way too much freedom to run wild with little to no oversight except for the occasional "yeah how's the MSQ going?" and they could reply with some basic plot beats and bullet points that, isolated out like that, all looked pretty good and got the green light from the high-ups, who were way too busy working on other things now that CBU3 is developing two other games in addition to running FFXIV. Because at a stripped down level, the story of Dawntrail isn't all that bad. It's in the details and execution of that plot where all the Bad comes in. A lot of this writing feels like the rough draft that needs some editing passes to polish it up. So many of the little things that add up into big problems like inconsistent character voice, unclear character motivation mixed with other character motivation shoved down our throats at every turn, characters describing to WoL what literally just happened on screen, etc., could be cleaned up in a few editing passes. But they never were. No one caught any of these consistent problems and flagged it, or if they did, they were ignored.

2) Bad communication and/or breakdown of communication. Someone locked these writers in separate rooms and didn't let them talk to each other or anyone else for that matter. Or they didn't want to talk to each other. Or the time they had to talk together each day was very limited. Or there was some social factor that made everyone communicating clearly with one another way more difficult than it had to be. I can keep trying to make up reasons, the point is, people aren't talking to each other and it's leading to problems, because there's no clear style guide on how to write each character and an agreement on what the themes and mood of any given scene should be, hence it shifting rapidly from scene to scene, especially in the last two zones.

[CuteBucket]

3) Corporate Meddling aka people who have no business dictating the writing and story direction nevertheless getting their grubby little hands all over the artwork. Someone with more power than sense comes along and says "We really want to push Wuk Lamat for this expansion, she needs to be center stage at all times!" (insert Simpsons Poochie reference). Or someone took a look at the script and said, "Well it's okay I guess, but everyone loved that big reveal of Amaurot in Shadowbringers, right? Can you make something like that again? Everyone will love that!" And now a writer has to come back and tell the team, "X-san said we need to make Living Memory more like Amaurot but with Final Fantasy XI." In some places of the story, (rubber bullets cough cough), it feels like someone or some group came in and demanded constant rewrites to include more X, less Y. Some amount of feedback and rewriting is normal and good, but only if it's coming from a person who understands how good writing and storytelling work, a thing corporate types are notoriously terrible at. This is kind of approaching problem 1 from the opposite angle and giving the writers the benefit of the doubt while blaming some part of management that was trying to micromanage everything. Perhaps the reason the writing gets so messy and everywhere is because they were having to rewrite things constantly as they went because more "requests" from higher-ups were brought to the table in a way that just didn't happen during the writing of previous expansions. I know it's been floated in other threads that what we were shown in early Dawntrail and what we actually got seem very different, like the story was being written and rewritten up to the last second. That could also explain some of clunky voice acting, as they didn't give the VAs time for several takes due to running behind schedule with the script.

[KazukoHimura]

-snip due to spanning multiple posts-

You know what? Everything makes sense there (Though if RDM questline is part of any of the three's prior contributions, I didn't like that one outside of the first few quests), completely. Only thing I'm really going to scrutinize if this turns out to be the case is the scene I mentioned in my initial post.

[Turtledeluxe]

So what happened?

I share similar suspicions. Mine are:

1. Management is busy with other projects. CS3 is also handling two new console games.
2. Communication, specifically a seeming reluctance for anyone to say "hey, this isn't up to our standard of quality".
3. Over reliance on surveys/corporate meddling. I think it just speaks for itself, along with what you said. People who have no idea how to make games pushing for things based on trends.
4. Budgetary shortfalls. With SE in the state it's in, spreading itself so thin, this kind of quality might be the new normal for XIV. Maybe the budget, time, and creative desire just aren't there anymore. Stressful work environments can hamper creativity as well.

It's very possible that all of the "next 10 year" talk was just empty rhetoric and SE anticipated a decline, secretly plans to sunset the game long before that.

[DonutSteel]

It's very possible that all of the "next 10 year" talk was just empty rhetoric and SE anticipated a decline, secretly plans to sunset the game long before that.

Whenever I read about the "10 more years" for XIV, I think back on the original Phantasy Star Online 2 and how the director about 6-ish years back talked about celebrating a 10 year anniversary. This ultimately coincided with the disaster that was Episode 5 which irrevocably damaged the game to the point where Sega chose to move onto New Genesis after Episode 6 failed to salvage 5's damage, which from what I've heard is even worse. Though I guess in the end the original PSO2 did get to enjoy a 10 year anniversary... In maintenance mode.