After Dawntrails abject Failure of a Story, there need to be serious Consequences

[ZXN]

As back and forth argument threads go though, I am rather enjoying this one. We have made it to page seven already without a nasty ad hominem. For this forum, we are doing well!

Don't get me wrong. I agree that Dawntrail is a giant shitpile right now and that things DEFINITELY need to change going forward. But going scorched earth and wanting so many heads to roll is not really feasible and won't get any criticisms and concerns listened to. My stance is Hiroi and the current MSQ team shouldn't be fired, but instead brought back down to the side-quest/side-story writer status since that seems to be what their specialty is. Firing them all just really isn't viable depending on what is going on behind the scenes.

All you have to do is look at some of the massive threads that have been on for several months / years about various issues and complaints players have had, only to see absolutely none of it be heard. I may have hated Endwalker Main MSQ/Endwalker Post/Dawntrail Main MSQ, but throwing whole teams of people into the garbage with potentially no back up ready is just...not viable. Sure you COULD drag Ishikawa, Oda, and the old team back, and I am sure they would do it. But eventually they WILL just not want to do it anymore, and if the old devs/writers are not going to help the new devs/writers get some footing with that they're putting out then it's only going to keep going downhill.

Don't get me wrong either: I'm definitely not defending the work they have put out given how I've complained about DT in several other threads. But given how Square [Not the FF14 team, Square themselves] have pretty much pissed away so much money the past several years with a "quantity over quality" live-service game mindset along with just throwing so many projects into the dumpster: they probably either give FF14 pennies to work with, or give them none at all. It's a genuine possibility that currently there is no backup plan they can fall back on and it's something you have to consider when looking at the bigger picture. Yoshi-P and the rest of the 14 team might just genuinely be up a creek without a paddle and there is a hole in the boat and Square themselves is just shrugging at them and going "You'll figure it out, or else" and leaving them to fend for themselves.

Yoshi-P has stated he wants younger generations to handle the future of Final Fantasy, like with FF17 for example. But right now specifically Yoshi-P and the creative studio III team just might not be able produce the results they want, be it because they have stretched themselves too thin working on too many projects [like they announced they are doing currently], or because Square needs to throw away more money on shit that'll flop or be shut down a year or two later, so they won't spare FF14 pennies right now and are just banking on the fact the hardcore fans WILL continue to pay and play no matter what.

[Eyrilona]

Another useless thread derailed.

like, for example, an X-box version launch?
like, for example, an higher pc requirement to run the game smoothly (and graphic cards cost more than a console).

At last, I have been waiting all day for someone to make that argument on that point. I was expecting it from someone else, but even so, you should be commended.

I also have to take some wind out of your sails though, for the following reasons- those numbers are simply not in yet. I do in fact expect that this will be a mitigating circumstance why Steam playership may see a greater relative decline than total, all category playership.

Now for a few problems with that though, because in the big picture we are not out of the woods yet.

To start with the easiest, the effect of the new higher pc requirements and cost of graphics cards: If people are leaving Steam and moving to console over the cost of higher end graphics cards, that does not give SE either more players or more subscriptions, they are only moving between categories. You want new players, and there is no reason why someone who wasn't playing the game before the requirements went up, would start playing it now for the reason that they have gone up.

Opening up to XBox players opened up a new market which was originally zero and so could only shoot up. But that is a one-time effect. It does not in any way say that how people react to the state of the game undergoes a fundamental change. And I rather hope in fact that not a lot of xbox players are even at Dawntrail yet, because that would mean going through the whole of ARR, HW, SB, ShB, and EW way too fast for a healthy work/life balance, so we can't even measure in that population yet if there is a "Dawntrail effect" without it being chockful of statistically confounding factors.

So if there was a Dawntrail decline effect, the influx of xbox players would mask it, not reverse the trend. And if there was not a Dawntrail decline effect, we now can't prove that either because we need the shock of the xbox launch out of the player numbers first. Whichever trend there really was before the xbox launch, is likely to continue. Unless, again that word, people who own Xbox consoles are on some fundamental level psychologically different from PC or PS players, and I kind of don't think they are.


EDIT: There are a few more of you who made posts I would have liked to respond to, but it seems I have reached my daily post limit so I am prevented from answering the rest.

[honest_psycho]

I just hope this disaster is a wake-up call for SOMEONE in Squares managment.

But maybe I need to use more Dynamis to LB3 the bad writing.

[BabyYoda]

I just hope this disaster is a wake-up call for SOMEONE in Squares managment.

But maybe I need to use more Dynamis to LB3 the bad writing.

They are releasing their NFT game chapter 3 this year fam

Be excited I can't wait to get scammed

[Hallarem]

I just hope this disaster is a wake-up call for SOMEONE in Squares managment.

But maybe I need to use more Dynamis to LB3 the bad writing.

Yoshi P already basically said that they can't rely on FF14 and need to do multiple other projects, so we're pretty much f*cked. Translation for that between the lines is that FFXIV isn't getting any money or development besides the bare minimum. Hrotgar Viera hat enjoyers sayonaraaaaaaa and ohayooooooooo for 5 more years of "Its a bit hard, we will look into it."

[Kes13a]

you SAID this:

we should expect for a product that at least WORKS.

implying that the game was released as a buggy mess. it may surprise you, but some people only come for the dungeons and raids.

if you misunderstood what i wrote, I did say the story could have been better, but a majority of mmo stories are made with "plot holes and contrivances"

or is his the only work of fiction you have ever been exposed to? because it rather sounds like it from your meltdown

[honest_psycho]

you SAID this:



implying that the game was released as a buggy mess. it may surprise you, but some people only come for the dungeons and raids.

if you misunderstood what i wrote, I did say the story could have been better, but a majority of mmo stories are made with "plot holes and contrivances"

or is his the only work of fiction you have ever been exposed to? because it rather sounds like it from your meltdown

It baffles me how people can look at the MSQ and not see the blatant problems with it.
Where have been hundreds of examples in hundreds of threads already, including this one.

Second: In the last year, I played a lot of story focused games, some 30 hours long, sometimes Visualnovels over 100 hours long.
So don't give me that crap about "only work of fiction you consumed".

[Awkward]

Please make me understand why ignoring 80% of the playerbase/population is a good statistic for things? And if that is how other companies do so as well, basing it on 20%, then yes, I will say that. Because it's largely ignoring the majority and should be looked at.

You are not 'ignoring 80% of the population, math is neat like that. Let's say I was organizing some FFXIV event in which 100 people showed up and I wanted to ask who among the attendees like Wuk Lamat, but asking all 100 of them is impractical so I ask 15 of them at random(important) and 7 said no and 3 said yes(no response for the rest, so unsure). There are two possibilities here, either a lot more people dislike Wuk Lamat, or I got really unlucky and just happened to pick Wuk Lamat haters. We can mathematically measure exactly how unlucky I'd have to be. In the given example, there is a 90% chance my sample group result is within 20% of the full population, meaning between 50% and 90% of the people dislike Wuk Lamat. 10% of the time I'd get unlucky and the real number falls out of that range. The bigger the sample, the more accurate the results, and so long as the sample is truly random, the size of the total population is largely irrelevant. A random sample of 3000 people (assuming truly random picking and that they are truthful) is enough to predict the entire world population's views within 3% regardless of how big the population is. This is a pretty standard fact in statistics, it's just the central limit theorem applied to iid Bernoulli variables and plugging in 2sigma then solving for n with confidence interval. You don't need to flip a 2 sided coin a million times to get a prediction on results any more than you need to poll every FFXIV player about DT. I can copy paste my AP statistics book formulae if you're interested in the actual math, but there's plenty of online calculators that can solve almost all statistical problems for you.

[Raikai]

Dawntrail is not that bad.

You're absolutely right. However... paired with a poor MSQ technical execution - bland fetch quests, talk instead of show, weird pacing, lack of combat duties, boring get useless info from the locals quests, etc - the actual "fine, but not great" story gets no good padding for the player experience. It's only natural that the bad aspects of it would be amplified a bit.

Edit: My breakpoint with the MSQ was during the first encounter with Otis. After a really monotonous pursuit for Gulool Ja, I get to do a fetch quest for some cooking... Then when I finally think I'm done and I'll get an important exposition of lore. Bam, grab more stuff from another fetch quest. I closed the game and, out of frustration, went ahead to spoil myself with the rest of the story to see where the heck that was ending. I didn't regret doing that.

[CuteBucket]

2. The current writers need to be replaced or outright fired.
For the sake of brevity, I will refer to all the threads in this forum, who already did the work to point out the many problems/plotholes/basic logic etc. this story had, with Wuk Lamat taking the top position as a textbook case of a 'Mary Sue'.

It is clear that the current writers don't have the skill or talent required for this game and need to be replaced or even outright fired.

I agree with most of the issues raised in this post, but I will disagree on this one. I don't know why this story ended up as such a dumpster fire, because I don't think any of these writer's previous works were nearly this bad. Something strange happened here. Maybe they just weren't ready for an MSQ story, it's possible, but I'll refer to this post I made in another thread about what I think.

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.

Maybe I am being overly defensive of the writers here as a writer myself, but this plot reeked of meddling and last minute rewrites if you ask me. It's quite possible that this isn't the story the writers wanted to tell either. They've all written much better content in the past that isn't riddled with the sloppy mistakes of Dawntrail's writing. That said, it may be best to let them just write side content again for the time being.