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

[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.

[Raven2014]

One of the thing that worries me is that not only the MSQ was bad, it doesn't seem to leave a lot potential for further development that I feel would interest me.

For example, even though SB's MSQ wasn't good, it was still filled with memorable characters and moment. Yotsusu, Maigna, Sadu, Fedolra, and factions like the Confederated, Tamanizu, Azim tribes were interesting enough that I wanted to know more about them even after the MSQ was over. I can't say there is a single characters or factions in DT that spark any kind of interest for me currently.

- I know there are some degree of interest in Erenvile, Kona, and Bakool but ... tbh, I'm pretty apathetic about them. IMO they're popularity came from the fact they're standing next to a walking disaster that makes everything else look good. Comparing to other expansion's NPC, they're plain and average.

- I don't care about any tribes in Tulya because ... frankly, there isn't much to care about them. It felt like each of them were given a token introduction so shallow that fail to provoke any sense of curiousity.

- The Mamook has a more elaborate story, but its plot has so much holes in it that it feels like a trainwreck.

It's obvious we gonna learn more about S9 and Alexandrian, and I really really hope they will come up with some thing really really good to spark my interest again, but honestly right now I can't really say I care about them either.

One of my chief complain in the past is the fact the MSQ often introduce a lot of interesting new lead, yet the post MSQ often don't explore half of them, leading to what feel like waste opportunity. DT on the other hand doesn't seem to leave me with anything I can be excited for in the post MSQ.

[Turtledeluxe]

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.

I was thinking of Destiny. Either way i think we know how that goes. XIV was frankly blessed to reach it's maximum output at the end of its original 10-year run. I felt like saying I had another 10-year run was a little delusional and perhaps even dishonest because this seems like the kind of team that would already be cooking up something new after an arc like the one we experienced. My secret delusional fan theory was that the 10-year thing was a lie and that they were developing Final Fantasy XVII which would be the next online MMO.

One of the thing that worries me is that not only the MSQ was bad, it doesn't seem to leave a lot potential for further development that I feel would interest me.

Same. I don't find the concept of the relic and traveling to reflections interesting at all. I don't care about any of the DT characters that much. The next xpac is an all or nothing deal for me. I suspect for many others as well.

[AhnSateo]

At this point I think the next expansion would need to be Cataclysm...

A total revisit of La Nosca, Twelveswood, and Thanalan. But they'll never do that.

[sharplysurreal]

At this point I think the next expansion would need to be Cataclysm...

A total revisit of La Nosca, Twelveswood, and Thanalan. But they'll never do that.

big agree, I think we need to stay grounded and expand on what's already rooted rather than treat it like a forgotten foundation. i was kind of hoping dawntrail would be this way when they said we were going to be back in adventurer mode, solving local crises and tending to the realm and its people. not what we got at all and i hope the right people in charge read this and what we are all saying.