Why are people settling for an "ARR Tier" story?

[sylphlands]

Yoshida said during his damage control tour that this isn't the opening chapter. 8.X is allegedly the actual opening chapter, so they could have just finished 6.X with us getting the hourglass and skipped DT entirely.

This gives me hope that DT will eventually be inconsequential and none of these beats will matter later on in the story, because I've never been less invested in anything set up by MSQ than the entirety of this expansion.

To those complaining about the story, it's the opening chapter, you don't get finale energy in the prologue of a story.

DT is a roughly 30-hour experience. This isn't the same as a book having a slow introductory chapter - this is the equivalent of a series that starts boring, continues to be boring, and ends on a boring note. Respectfully, I don't think "as a story skipper DT was great" is a good review of the quality of this expac's writing.

[ZephyrMenodora]

DT is a roughly 30-hour experience. This isn't the same as a book having a slow introductory chapter - this is the equivalent of a series that starts boring, continues to be boring, and ends on a boring note.

Unfortunately this. I was so bored I kept looking at the MSQ list on the wiki to see how much more of it I had to suffer through.

Dungeons were a nice break from the story though and offered some new challenges the first few times. I made an alt to re-do the story but I think I'll let him end at EW lol.

[Daralii]

DT is a roughly 30-hour experience. This isn't the same as a book having a slow introductory chapter - this is the equivalent of a series that starts boring, continues to be boring, and ends on a boring note.

A prologue or opening chapter of a book is also not a separate $40 purchase with a subscription fee.

[sindriiisgaming]

Arr story is actually good btw. Has great villians great exposition great character building and that good ff feel. Not sure why ppl hate on it so fervently. It's like they didn't pay attention

[Oizen]

This thread is slander against ARR. ARR's story is far better than dawntrail and anyone who even compares the two is coping.

Nothing in dawntrail even comes close to how cool Praetorium or the Banquet are.

[Dorito_Burrito]

This thread is slander against ARR. ARR's story is far better than dawntrail and anyone who even compares the two is coping.

Nothing in dawntrail even comes close to how cool Praetorium or the Banquet are.

I thought the (old) Praetorium was pretty bad even during my first run. The whole dungeon was ruined by both structure and overly generous item level scaling. What should've been an epic final confrontation ended up feeling like the Warrior of Light chasing the Garlean Empire's sorest loser through a playground, and once you catch him he basically cries "nuh uh! That didn't count!" Twice. Then you got to fight Lahabrea as an endnote, who was pretty much just a punching bag despite leveling the entire fortress just one cutscene earlier.

No wonder it got a revamp.

[Mondschnee]

I feel bad for saying this but imo DT is not ARR tier level. At least ARR had some mystery to it and you could feel they‘re going somewhere. A large portion of Dawntrail felt directionless, forced and sloppy. I expected a slow start and a lot of world building – I was ok with that. I did not expect the maturity and intelligence levels to drop this much, and most people I’ve talked to, regardless of wether they liked the story or not, admit this to be true.

Besides, them setting up a new story arc is no excuse if they can‘t make the current story experience worthwhile and exciting. That‘s like saying „the story will get good in 5 years from now, please standby.“ I can‘t wait that long.

[Lorika]

ARR was the beginning of journey and it wasn't that bad.... Up until the patch which was horrible but necessary, with the banquet as one of the best cutscene of the game.

DT feel like a bad filler made in Studio Pierrot (Naruto/Bleach for their most well know anime) and it's not even remotly close to SB which, for me, it's worse than ARR (except the patch that i like a lot)

[Ephremjlm]

Honestly I think from a story perspective ARR was better, however its hard to say if the MSQ quests were better. As much as Dawntrail dragged on I wanna be fair and say it was more digestible on a first run, and idk maybe the aesthetics helped with that. What I can say for sure is, as someone who started at the beginning of Stormblood, the old ARR msq structure was REALLY bad, but had SIGNIFICANTLY more heart and that there are two levels of goggles I think people are seeing through.

1. the ARR is bad and the story doesn't get good until maybe HW argument which taints peoples thoughts right off the bat.
2. anyone who played from 1.0-1.23b or started at ARR will inherently feel like it was better because the game was vastly different, and those piece of lore dialog meant A LOT more to people.

FFXIV used to have incredible lore that unfortunately was kinda killed off in the post patches of EW (an actual travesty), and what I can say is that if someone took their time to do just a LITTLE bit of research on 1.0 and its lore, maybe even watched some of those videos speakers network did, and THEN you went to play AAR, the feeling changes completely. In fact ill go as far to say that some of those side quests which have legit cutscenes in them, should have been MSQ. When I originally played ARR I quit like halfway through it because I was so bored by the dialog and they didn't do a good job of explaining wtf the calamity was or wtf the umberal eras were, etc. but that's because it was made for people who already knew to some degree. Once I had that knowledge, talking with the NPC's in La Noscea about how the land shifted, and how their families were killed by Bahamut, and even the people in Coerthas who tell you how the land used to not be an icy wasteland and how the deep freeze came in so fast that it literally froze people in solid blocks of ice (which you then literally help one of them dig out a body if i remember correctly.) And even seeing old 1.0 camps must have been emotional for those bearing the tattoo. Going into HW I thought it was a nice touch to see an area that used to be show camps that were completely frozen over with the old aetheryte still there.

It's a significant difference story wise and it's one that I expected the devs should have known. There was also a lot more gameplay loops in ARR, gearing was more varied, there were more RPG stat things going on. By all means even if the DT story is more digestible from a blank starting point, the whole experience is completely stripped down compared to ARR.

[Basteala]

ARR is not bad and DT is better than today's ARR.
We can't have Shadowbringer everytime.

I would have taken Stormblood over this in a heartbeat. Heavensward would have been a marked improvement, too.