JP: Yoshi P should step down, FF14 is a sinking ship, in response to interview

[LittleArrow]

Once again this just begs the question of why was Dawntrail's story so bad? Hiroi has been around since ARR, just like Ishikawa. I haven't liked everything he's done, but I quite liked some of it, and it had much more dark and complex themes than we got in DT. I haven't been a huge fan of Kawasaki's quests, but they were a stark contrast to the themes of DT, and Onozuka also wrote perfectly fine side content that didn't treat us all like idiots.

It's why I almost have to believe there is something else going on here than just "writers bad." That is a possible answer, but why this bad for all to see only now? I don't know what happened here. I've seen lots of people in other threads point to a boogeyman like Sweet Baby Inc, but they are not credited in the game at all, so I don't think it's them. Consulting firms are pretty normal in the industry anyway. But something strange happened here, that's for sure. This was a noticeable drop in story quality, and I don't understand why. It feels like it must be something outside of the writers that influenced the story in this way.

I've been wrecking my brain trying to figure this out as well. I don't mind a stupid story. I've played so so many stupid stories and I've had lots of fun. I know this may be controversial, but I played the stupid story of a pure Japanese period soap opera drama that is Stormblood - the overly almost comically cruel characters and themes, the hammy / overly dramatic music, the predictable yet satisfying twist of amnesia - it was goofy, and I had a blast playing it.

Stupid stories can be really fun, they don't have to be incredibly deep or a story that you're going to read 10 pages of theories on to try and understand it like Evangelion or some such. It can just be a fun, enjoyable, silly dramatic story.

The problem was it was an exceptionally poorly written stupid story. Characters didn't make sense, their motivations shifted for no reason, there were solutions found for very serious problems without any thought / effort put into them.

I LOVED Wuk Lamat! That's what drives me crazy with those that won't point out the poor quality of writing and just blindly defend the character and expansion - I was a massive fan of Wuk Lamat when she was introduced. She was the starry eyed adventurer coming to seek our help - the champion of Eorzea. She was brash and insecure and showed so much room for growth. She hadn't seen what we had seen. She hadn't been through what us and the scions had went through. She reminded me so much of Moenbryda. Loud, happy, brash, and strong - ready to take on any foe!

Then Dawntrail happened and my goodness, the problems with the writing are problems I've never seen in this game. Even in the infamous paladin job quest it wasn't this bad.

Stupid stories aren't bad. They don't have to be intricate, they just have to be written well, something XIV has championed and set itself apart from all other MMOs whether players skipped or not, XIV has always been THE story mmo.

Honestly I want to know why it was so bad. Why they're trying to make me emotionally invested in memories that are written as living breathing people and not glitchy automatons just repeating a cycle to show us they're not alive. I want to know why the writing quality is so horrendous when there's nothing in this game that comes close to this besides the ridiculous switch-a-roo that is Meteion.

I considered possibly an agenda-riddled consulting agency that cares more about sending out a message than quality of game, but the writers are Japanese and we all know who's SE's favorite community is. Surely the Japanese with all of their crazy complicated anime stories would've expected better than this quality of writing.

[CuteBucket]

I've been wrecking my brain trying to figure this out as well.

Honestly my current conspiracy is that something very strange and unfortunate happened behind the scenes, something we'll probably never find out about due to NDAs unless someone in another 5-10 years goes and makes a documentary about it (like was done with FFXIV 1.0). It could be any number of stupid corporate nonsense and office wankery scenarios. If you've worked in enough teams and been around some types of people, you know how south a project can go if someone is both stupid and has power. Whatever the case may be, it resulted in the team having to scrap and rewrite a huge portion of the story very quickly. Like REALLY quickly. Literally no time to go back and edit and polish, just go go go get it done yesterday.

Because we've seen these writer's works before. We KNOW they're better than this! And there are the bones here for a good (if still generally silly and anime styled) story! I also liked Wuk Lamat when she was first introduced. I liked the idea of being a mentor to her. I liked her dynamic with Erenville. I liked the idea of just exploring the world with some new and old friends both, maybe with some rivalry from the other Scions just to spice things up and change the old dynamics up. And then...I got none of that in the actual expansion! HUH?? Something strange happened here.

[StormChase]

Honestly my current conspiracy is that something very strange and unfortunate happened behind the scenes, something we'll probably never find out about due to NDAs unless someone in another 5-10 years goes and makes a documentary about it (like was done with FFXIV 1.0). It could be any number of stupid corporate nonsense and office wankery scenarios. If you've worked in enough teams and been around some types of people, you know how south a project can go if someone is both stupid and has power. Whatever the case may be, it resulted in the team having to scrap and rewrite a huge portion of the story very quickly. Like REALLY quickly. Literally no time to go back and edit and polish, just go go go get it done yesterday.

Because we've seen these writer's works before. We KNOW they're better than this! And there are the bones here for a good (if still generally silly and anime styled) story! I also liked Wuk Lamat when she was first introduced. I liked the idea of being a mentor to her. I liked her dynamic with Erenville. I liked the idea of just exploring the world with some new and old friends both, maybe with some rivalry from the other Scions just to spice things up and change the old dynamics up. And then...I got none of that in the actual expansion! HUH?? Something strange happened here.

I've been thinking about it for the past month or two and my best conclusion is that the writers didn't have enough time to tell the full story. It's not a new problem. Stormblood and even Endwalker struggled with it. The way the expansions are structured, stories that are too short to be two but too long to neatly fit into one tend to suffer the most.

[LittleArrow]

Honestly my current conspiracy is that something very strange and unfortunate happened behind the scenes, something we'll probably never find out about due to NDAs unless someone in another 5-10 years goes and makes a documentary about it (like was done with FFXIV 1.0). It could be any number of stupid corporate nonsense and office wankery scenarios. If you've worked in enough teams and been around some types of people, you know how south a project can go if someone is both stupid and has power. Whatever the case may be, it resulted in the team having to scrap and rewrite a huge portion of the story very quickly. Like REALLY quickly. Literally no time to go back and edit and polish, just go go go get it done yesterday.

Because we've seen these writer's works before. We KNOW they're better than this! And there are the bones here for a good (if still generally silly and anime styled) story! I also liked Wuk Lamat when she was first introduced. I liked the idea of being a mentor to her. I liked her dynamic with Erenville. I liked the idea of just exploring the world with some new and old friends both, maybe with some rivalry from the other Scions just to spice things up and change the old dynamics up. And then...I got none of that in the actual expansion! HUH?? Something strange happened here.

I couldn't agree more. It definitely smells like a massive rewrite, mainly due to the constant repeated lines of dialogue that were so strangely unnecessary. I remember I counted the same line of dialogue in one of the trial I think 3xs with only one-two lines of dialogue between them. I apologize for not having specifics b/c I honestly don't want to go through any of the story a second time. I also remember it started getting much worse after the bird people trial. The giants trial was probably the only trial I felt had writing that was comparable to pre DT writing - however it all came crashing down when they showed the wall of painted memories and I literally rolled my eyes saying out loud to my monitor, 'Really? You're going to rip off Raktika's wall paintings? You all couldn't have done something different? It's literally the exact same scene..." I wish they had cut that out or replaced it with the stone totems like the later scene with the graves. This is ignoring the blaring plot hole of releasing Valigarmanda and all the can of worms that causes, but just ends up being a big ol' OOPSIE. So dumb...

I've been thinking about it for the past month or two and my best conclusion is that the writers didn't have enough time to tell the full story. It's not a new problem. Stormblood and even Endwalker struggled with it. The way the expansions are structured, stories that are too short to be two but too long to neatly fit into one tend to suffer the most.

The only reason why I would disagree with this theory is due to the insane amount of wasted dialogue. There were SO many times dialogue was almost word for word repeated by multiple characters for no reason. The story kept dying without any padding or reason. There wasn't any connective tissue, just all dried bones of a story. In other words, they were just wasting time. I felt like I was reading some procrastinating student's 5 page essay that they went through and changed the font size of periods. No filler or silly adjectives, just empty dead space that makes no sense.

It looks like the space of the story had plenty of time to tell the story they were going for, it just seems like they didn't know how to connect or transition anything. They also really didn't understand how to build characters at all. Wuk's character seemed so sacred to the writers they literally couldn't have her do anything wrong or fail. The one failure she had was her strike against Bakool Jaja - the two headed one. Then suddenly she can not only beat him with 'resolve,' but also be stronger than an 8xs aether saturated warrior of light. Man, poor Emet and Hydaelyn, picking the wrong warrior. With those haymakers Wuk was suddenly giving Sphene, she definitely could've handled all of that light that Emet was testing on us and then some! She became so overpowered for literally no reason.

Sorry, I know this has been said before, but I just wanted to give a quick example of how badly that's written. It's not just Wuk either, it's literally every character in the story - including us. I didn't even see a problem with the idea of the story - it sounds really incredibly fun and exciting. They just didn't have the skill to do it, or someone -really- messed it up with rewrites.

[Carin-Eri]

I LOVED Wuk Lamat! That's what drives me crazy with those that won't point out the poor quality of writing and just blindly defend the character and expansion - I was a massive fan of Wuk Lamat when she was introduced. She was the starry eyed adventurer coming to seek our help - the champion of Eorzea. She was brash and insecure and showed so much room for growth. She hadn't seen what we had seen. She hadn't been through what us and the scions had went through. She reminded me so much of Moenbryda. Loud, happy, brash, and strong - ready to take on any foe!

Then Dawntrail happened and my goodness, the problems with the writing are problems I've never seen in this game. Even in the infamous paladin job quest it wasn't this bad.

Forced to agree. Whilst I'm not in the 'omg Dawnfail sux!' camp, it did feel like there was a severe disconnect between the Wuk Lamat we met near the conclusion of Endwalker and the one we followed through Dawntrail. It honestly feels like in that moment she removed her turban, on the boat to Tural, she became a different character in all but appearance.

I haven't looked, but was the closing patch of Endwalker written by the same writer who produced Dawntrail's story?