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

[ReynTime]

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

It's because ARR predates the character writing that caused the bizarre parasocial romantic relationship a lot of XIV fans have with Scions and other named npcs that would begin to worship and constantly fawn over their WoL. So it wasn't keeping their interest for long.

[Exmo]

Dawntrail isn't perfect but it's is vastly better than ARR.

[Hyperia]

They should have just called this expansion "Fetch Quest". Utter waste of time.

More like cutscene the visual novel. We spent multiple times more time in cutscenes than actually doing quests.

I felt more like the Wallflower of Light than an actual hero.

[Kaurhz]

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.

Granted we shouldn't settle for such standards regardless, but I am sorry Banquet was the exception not the norm. Nothing in ARR even came close to it, arguably most of HW, and all of SB didn't even come close to Banquet either.

Outside of that, ARR was pretty abysmal, or did you in fact also enjoy the quest for breathing in deep of the Chocobo's musk? If Wishes were Horsebirds, eh? Among many others which were absolutely pointless fodder quests

[Alice_Rivers]

I'm in the "ARR is better than DT" camp, ARR had far better characters, vastly superior world building, actually felt like something was happening and events were connected. ARR had a story, DT just... Happens. The events of North Urqopacha have no bearing on South or vice versa, South Urqopacha and Kozama'uka are apparently completely unaffected by being cut off from their neighbours and Tuliyollal which itself shows no evidence of being impacted by the loss of access to goods from these places. When you look at Yak'Tel, the only way in and out is by hot air balloon and nobody is concerned that the only route to Mamook is cut off, even the residents of Mamook aren't bothered. These are supposed to be places with hundreds of years of shared history, eighty years of it interconnected under one banner, all we see though the briefest of histories and A tradition, one, that's all, what the hell? How long is 7.0 again? How long did it take to make?

On the subject of the local events preceding DT, where is the government? Where are the people trying to restore lines of travel and communication? What is the "Dawnservant" doing while his children run around and make a mockery of running the country? Why does he appear so detached from the affairs of state? How is it that nobody asked these questions of the writers during proof reading or playtesting? Some of ARR's villains might have poor motivations (Nero, Livia) but they're semi-relatable, DT people have such superficial and poorly thought out (if at all) motivations for their actions with the possible exception of Sphene but that has it's own problems.

Basically, yeah, in ARR Eorzea is an actual place populated by actual people doing actual things that relate to an actual history, in DT Tural is a bunch of cardboard cutouts with no history, doing what the writer needs them to do to progress... Whatever they're writing.

[FudoMyoo]

Nah DT is far superior than ARR in 2013.

I don't like carrying boxes from point A to point for B for bazillion times. What you are playing is the new ARR that SE trimmed and streamlined over the years.

[Basteala]

Let's be honest, the fact that this is even a discussion when ARR was considered by far the worst part of FF14 until recently is a bad sign.

More like cutscene the visual novel. We spent multiple times more time in cutscenes than actually doing quests.

I felt more like the Wallflower of Light than an actual hero.

I mean EW was like that, too. The key difference is that EW's story was actually...good, and the WoL felt like an active participant. Those two details are very important when you have MGS4 levels of cutscenes.

[Fatch38]

I'm in the "ARR is better than DT" camp, ARR had far better characters, vastly superior world building, actually felt like something was happening and events were connected.

gonna play devil lawyer here (even if personnaly i have no issue with ARR story while i hated DT) but ARR story has a span of 50 levels to take time for world building etc not 10. and that's the main issue : rythm. i know that some ppl will say that shadowbringer tell a good story on 10 levels too but i would say that ShB may be the exception that proves the rule.

[Archeron]

ARR has its problems but it literally saved this game from the brink of failure. The story pacing in ARR is an issue, but the characters were generally OK, and the general plot of the expansion was enjoyable. A lot of the content has become a slog to go through, and has been made trivial over the years which I think plays a major part in why it's so irritating to replay through it.

Dawntrail on the other hand is plunging this game into failure. Never has the game seemed so desolate as it has during Dawntrail. Never has the community been so hopeless and divided as it has during Dawntrail. The writing of this expansion is absolute rock bottom. Terrible doesn't even begin to describe it. Wuk Lamat is an infuriating idiot. Stupid people, make for terrible leaders, and I feel insulted by some of the dialogue options that we're given, and how dumb our WoL looks and behaves during cutscenes with Wuk Lamat. She is a literal Mary Sue. She faces no lasting consequences for any of her mistakes. The story in Solution Nine is plot hole riddled garbage, the writers put no serious thought into any of our actions we took there, and the last zone especially was disasterous. I don't know if you tried, even deliberately, that you could make a story worse than what we had in Dawntrail.

[Lorika]

Let's be honest, the fact that this is even a discussion when ARR was considered by far the worst part of FF14 until recently is a bad sign.

It's the patch that was always considered the worst.... The base game itself never was bad, more people were inclined to say that Stormblood base was worst than ARR.