[Thought Experiment] Is Dawntrail's 7.0 MSQ Planned to be "Terrible"?

[PercibelTheren]

I think you're giving them too much credit. The writing was already on the decline - I know people love to hype up Endwalker because it had some really good moments, however, the rest of Endwalker was pretty bad. Bad pacing, dull filler quests, endless cutscenes that told us nothing new. Post-Endwalker was even worse - it was a storyline lifted right out of older FF games. A raid series sidequest turned into MSQ. As a raid series side story, it would have been more or less acceptable. As MSQ, it got really boring really fast because, instead of more exploration on the 13th (like I had been hoping for), we were forced to spend time with Zero, someone's Deviantart OC.

I had been hoping that this decline in quality was temporary as the writing team was focusing on Dawntrail. Instead. Dawntrail just turned all the previous writing problems up to 11. Instead of complex characters who evolve, we have flat characters with one or two gimmicks. They barely change and, when they do, it's incredibly abrupt and nonsensical. The Scions are shells of themselves with none of the original personality. Raha had already been turned into "WoL's biggest fan" comic relief in Endwalker but in DT, that is all he is. Estinien is just a comic relief himbo now - again, something that started in Endwalker.

Personally, the biggest sin of the writing for me is that it forces my WoL to be an absolute idiot. There is no other explanation for why we just allowed Zoraal Ja to do his thing like he did in Dawntrail. This, I think, is a symptom of the writers having backed themselves into a corner where the WoL is so powerful that they need to constantly come up with excuses for why we don't just solve problems with our immense capacity for violence. Unfortunately, the reasons they do bring in are so asinine that it makes the WoL seem like a bumbling fool instead of a hero who has saved the world many times over.

All in all, I don't believe Dawntrail is an experiment. I believe it's simply a downward slope of a decline in writing quality that already started in Endwalker. I do not know why this happened - the change in lead writer can't be the only cause considering Endwalker already showed many of these symptoms. It is far from the only story in gaming in the recent years that is horribly written. Maybe the writers are burned out. Maybe SE is putting too much pressure on them. Maybe they just ran out of good ideas. Who knows? The result remains the same - an underwhelming story that left me thinking "why should I care about any of this" the whole way through.

[Cilia]

I think you're giving them too much credit. The writing was already on the decline - I know people love to hype up Endwalker because it had some really good moments, however, the rest of Endwalker was pretty bad. Bad pacing, dull filler quests, endless cutscenes that told us nothing new. Post-Endwalker was even worse - it was a storyline lifted right out of older FF games. A raid series sidequest turned into MSQ. As a raid series side story, it would have been more or less acceptable. As MSQ, it got really boring really fast because, instead of more exploration on the 13th (like I had been hoping for), we were forced to spend time with Zero, someone's Deviantart OC.

...

All in all, I don't believe Dawntrail is an experiment. I believe it's simply a downward slope of a decline in writing quality that already started in Endwalker. I do not know why this happened - the change in lead writer can't be the only cause considering Endwalker already showed many of these symptoms.

While I don't agree that Endwalker was bad, I do agree it had flaws (mostly pacing) and there are circumstances behind that.

1. Shadowbringers was mostly Natsuko Ishikawa given free reign. Endwalker was a collaborative effort between her, Banri Oda, and maybe Koji Fox and Yoshi-P. Their styles... clash, to put it lightly.
2. Endwalker was a late-in-development mashup of two planned expansions - one a war with Garlemald, the second actually concluding the Hy/Zo myth arc. A second "War with Garlemald" expansion after Stormblood was deemed redundant, and in the interest of finishing the Hy/Zo myth arc they mashed it into the concluding expansion. Hence pacing issues.
3. Post-Endwalker (6.X) is from a different writer / writing team led by Daichi Hiroi. He has worked on stuff for this game in the past (Shadow of Mhach, Pandaemonium, assistant to Yasumi Matsuno for the Ivalice derivative side content), though I can't say I'm super impressed with it. Either way, it was not disguised as being filler content for Dawntrail's preparation, so I'm not going to be so harsh on it. Filler content is usually bad. Add in the constraints they have to work in when writing for this game and...

Dawntrail's had its own issues - the Scions being present but not engaged with the plot, excessive focus on Wuk Lamat, and Lamaty'i's shounen characterization in a game that's been quite seinen in tone since Shadowbringers - but while I did not enjoy the first two acts, the third has been pretty good.

No, I don't think the writing quality going downhill is a clue there's some grand experiment to make Dawntrail garbage on purpose. Endwalker had too many fingers in the pie and some last-minute rewrites that screwed it up; post-Endwalker was the understudy's first crack at big time content; Dawntrail was advertised as being a "beach holiday" expansion and that's what it was for half of the story (relatively speaking). I agree that writing's not as good as past content, but that doesn't mean it's worthless garbage.

[Veritas-Ancora]

Post-Endwalker was even worse - it was a storyline lifted right out of older FF games. A raid series sidequest turned into MSQ. As a raid series side story, it would have been more or less acceptable. As MSQ, it got really boring really fast because, instead of more exploration on the 13th (like I had been hoping for), we were forced to spend time with Zero, someone's Deviantart OC.

Some of us enjoyed the FFIV content.

[PorxiesRCute]

Post-Endwalker was even worse - it was a storyline lifted right out of older FF games.

Tell us you never played FFIV without telling us you never played FFIV.

It lifts character designs, aesthetics, music, and location names, but the story is completely unrelated to the plot of FFIV.