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

[Cleretic]

Imagine how much more impactful the story would've been if we, for example, talked to Cahciua in our first trip to Shaaloani, then we met the robot she is remotely controlling there would be a stronger sense that she is fine because viera are naturally long-lived, only to then much more harder shatter that illusion the player has to reveal that she is an endless.

I don't actually think this would do anything.

Cahciua isn't really meant to be a character that exists independently, if that makes sense; her story is an extension of others, and our interactions with Cahciua are rather intentionally all through Erenville as a lens. She largely exists within the story as the person who, through both action and inaction, shaped who he is. Dawntrail is a story preoccupied with legacy, and with Erenville and Cahciua we see that manifest in a more abstract way than the much more concrete form we got with Gulool and the Promises.

...In fact I actually think it's rather telling, when we also keep in mind that theme of memory, that Cahciua only exists in memory; it's actually rather clever that we never meet her ourselves, we only ever meet her memory, as she appears in Gulool's journey across Yok Tural, and then later as an Endless. It might in fact be why we don't see her as an older woman, so she can only exist as that youthful memory. That would've been fun to do more with.

Namikka could've used one more scene during the first trip to Shaaloani, just to define her as a character a little more, but I don't think anything more than that. I don't particularly care about her as a character, but I also don't really think the story falls apart because I don't; I buy that Wuk Lamat cares about her, and that's much more important.


As for the fact that Heritage Found's people don't really get to exist outside of Sphene's presence, I think that's true but I think it's also intentional. In large part I'm thinking about how 7.1 established that A: there's governmental uncertainty about who owns what parts of that stretch, and B: that we actually do see some wobbly interpersonal stuff around people's relationships with that. That there's people from Yyasulani that don't feel comfortable going back to Tural because it's been thirty years and they're just fundamentally different places in terms of day-to-day life. We're never going to be detached and neutral about our own responses to seeing that, but I think by deliberately not letting us visit Yyasulani pre-dome, they're priming us to be a bit more inclined to sympathize with the people in that place who 'grew up Alexandrian', to at least recognize the validity of their stances, whereas if we saw them pre-dome we'd be more inclined to look at that as their 'default state' to return to. (It's actually a little similar to how I generally look at Seven of Nine from Star Trek, but that's too tangential to go into.)

With that one we're delving more into the still-ongoing patch storylines, so I can't say with confidence why they're doing it, or if I like the result. But I can say that I do think that they did it deliberately, and that it wasn't just 'rushed writing'.