Players are already lowering their bar for Downtrail

[AngelCheese77]

Nothing good can come from having blown out of proportion ultra high expectations.

Never expect anything and you will be pleasantly surprised when you do experience it.

After the crap that was Dragon Age 2 … I always keep my gaming expectations low.

[FenyxRising]

Yeah, I don't see what the problem is.

It's probably the most reasonable and level-headed thing they can say in regards to the storyline for the next 10 years.

Personally, I'll reserve my judgement on Dawntrail for when it comes out and I play it. Until then, I'm keeping an open mind on what to expect.

I will be very sad if we don't get a llama/alpaca mount, though.

No hype = no one cares about the game anymore.

It's that simple really. Capiche ?

[Shikiseki]

I don't think it's because we're starting a new MSQ arc - if anything this should hype people even more, going on a fresh and brand new adventure and yet SE fails to deliver because of one simple thing: We basically know exactly how the expansion will be like - a couple of dungeons, a new "raid" tier which is just 4 ex trials stringed together and 6+1 zones that are exactly the same as before. And don't get me started that more than 50% of the new gear will be recolors of pre-existing ones as well as the 2 new jobs that will just be a variation of their shared gear role 2minute carbon copy but painted in a fresh coat (also the returning scion characters left a sour taste for me personally though...)

Then you have several stuff that appear in the 7.xx instead on full release to space things out like variants, pvp updates etc.
We just know that we can already expect the barebones effort as displayed recently and thus our expectations are low. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though as I love this game but the game just doesn't give the same love back anymore as it used to...

[ronibosch]

No hype = no one cares about the game anymore.

It's that simple really. Capiche ?

I care. ;_;

[Striker44]

From the Youtube comments of Zepla's new video

This is the first problem right here. It's not a random sample of players. It's a selective sample of people who follow a streamer that whines about the game. The game could be the next N64 Goldeneye and I wouldn't expect to find anything positive in the chat.

If this is not an indicator for the current state of the game, I don't know what is.

I know what is - the fact that the game world itself is thriving, people are having a blast playing, and we keep seeing higher active populations every expansion when you compare similar points in the patch sequence. What you're showing is just the state of the negative echo chamber.

[Atelier-Bagur]

OP. You cant have rising action after rising action in a story. So expecting Dawntrail to be in the same level as the previous 2 expansions stories is foolish. Especially after the devs have been hitting us in the head time after time that this'll be the beginning of a new story arc.

Its not about lowering standards, its about setting realistic expectations. And at the same time, I expect that Dawntrail's story has some interesting story twists and beats that would get us hooked for whatever is coming up in this new arc.


Now this only applies to the story. In terms of game content, I really am expecting that to be much better than the previous expansions.

[Ivtrix]

I hardly think they plan to make the game easier, but there may just be plot points that may not make sense for 2 expansions.

[VictorSpoils]

Was waiting for the "literally" in the OP and it didn't disappoint.

[Fyrebrand]

It was an entirely positive video about looking forward to a new expansion, but you zeroed in on this one specific quote just so you could intentionally spin and twist it into something Zepla did not intend it to mean.

Dawntrail is the beginning of a new story, as opposed to Endwalker which was the climax of an epic ten-year build-up. What do you want? Endwalker 2? The story can't keep jumping the shark into infinity.

I don't know why people think the whole expansion is just going to be summer vacation or "beach episode" fluff, just based on a short teaser video. Jurassic Park started out as just being about a theme park visit, and look how that went.

[Raikai]

I actually think the "Vacation expansion' (which is totally not a smokescreen) is the perfect tone to start off a new story arc, especially if it's a story that can potentially carry over a couple other expansions. And the vibrant tone of Tural kind of breaks from the gloomy vibes from the Final Days and the Thirteenth.

I came to the conclusion that the Scion's presence is fine. It's like a TV series, where we get the seasons and same cast with some additions/subtractions here and there. It's kind of a mis opportunity though, that we didn't get an actual break from them with the EW patch MSQ. It's probably a storyline that could've featured just Estinien (due to the proxy to Vrtra) from the Scions cast and Nidhana could've taken Y'shtola's role as the problem solver.