Dawntrail's MSQ story is a disaster and waste of potential. [full spoilers]

[Galvuu]

There is a difference between an actual "plot hole" and "in universe context". What part of the current raid story is a plot holes? At the same times, I can give you at least 5 plot hole in the MSQ from the top of my head.

In fairness, XIV has introduced time travel, memory manipulation, creation of matter from nearly thin air (electrope) and pseudo-revival. We're at a point where we've jumped so far above the shark that, with enough contrivance, any plot hole can be "explained". It's nonsense, paradox-inducing, causality-breaking lazy writing, but sadly it's what we have.
Current XIV, using the aforementioned plot points that keep rearing their ugly heads can nearly have a story arc where we say that the world was attacked by space chickens with Sun-lasers on cornbread spaceships, but we traveled back into the past to stop it and then memory wiped the WoL. Is it dumb as hell? Yes. But that's the problem with this kind of plot device. It's poison that destroys/retcons everything over time, invalidate causality and stakes and forces handwaving of basic paradoxes (time travel in loops always breaks causality in a paradox).
It's hard for me to be invested when I know they can retcon/unwrite it at will in the next patch, and probably will.

Raid series has no immediate plot hole, but needing to believe Sphene, who apparently has power over all the Alexandrian infrastructure at all times and was very close to her subjects did not know of the apparent conspiracy in Arcadion really stretches the suspension of disbelief. Maybe it actually becomes an interesting plot point, but I kinda doubt it...

[Raven2014]

In fairness, XIV has introduced time travel, memory manipulation, creation of matter from nearly thin air (electrope) and pseudo-revival. We're at a point where we've jumped so far above the shark that, with enough contrivance, any plot hole can be "explained". It's nonsense, paradox-inducing, causality-breaking lazy writing, but sadly it's what we have..

This is why I don't consider convenience Deus Ex devices as plot hole, even without an explanation. For example:

- In Star War the force can do crazy thing, and it can mind control. And we simply accept it's an in universe thing.

- The lack of explanation for mind control does not constitute a plot hole. And the writer can freely use Mind Control as plot device.

- But if the story presents 2 situations, in one mind control works and another where it doesn't. Then it must explain WHY.

- The lack of such explanation will constitute a plot hole.

In short, a plot hole simply mean the writing went against its own established elements. Here an in example for Dawn Trail:

- The Mamook tribe lived in hostile and inhospitable land.

- They started a war with the Iq Br'aax so they can gain access to better living area.

- Tuliyollal is united, and they can freely go everywhere for a better life, many of them did. **this is an important fact established very early in the MSQ**

- We are told some portion of hardline Mamook still lived in their forest who are not welcoming to outsider.

- And with Bakool Ja presented as he was, it's very obvious the writers want to lead us to think of 3 things: the Mamook are xenophobic, power hungry, and war like, and maybe the reason they don't want to leave Mamook because personal attachment.

But when we get to the end of their story, literally everything fell apart:

- Nope, they hate living in that dark, inhospitable forest.

- That's why they wanted the power of the bless, so it can give them the strength to leave.

- That's why they went through all those baby killing business out of desperation for that shake of that goal.


It's fairly obvious what the intentions were. They were trying to lead the player to think in a certain way, so the "big reveal" can subvert our expectation, 'cause that's what good writing does. They want you to think the Mamook is bad, so they can tell you "no, they're just desperate-abandoned-forgotten people who simply want to move to a better life, pulling our heartstring and sympathy and all that. But for me, it was just ... stupidity. I was like ... if that's truly ALL you want, you can just ... leave? There were never a need for any of these baby killing business or the strength of a blessed.


And the irritable thing is this is hardly the only time it happens. Throughout the story, the writers kept trying to angle for cheap emotional shot at the cost of pacing and consistency in the story, and it's absolutely drive me nut. It's like seeing a middleschooler try to recreate Shakespeare.

[SieyaM]

I'm just going to say it and get all the ire of the board here. I hated having to spend any time with Krile. I found her mildly annoying before and I don't think I rolled my eyes harder than when we find out she happens to also be the super special child of super important people from the place we just happen to be going to. I think it's just a little too mary sue for me and I don't understand how anyone is supposed to take her seriously when she pulls out the paint brush to start a fight. Bakool Ja Ja could have simply stepped on her and ended it.

[TheJamJam]

Yoshi-P checking all of Hiroi's submitted drafts.

[Yuuki_Isshiki]

Yet Penacony is just that, and its such an amazing story filled with many likeable characters (well cos Mihoyo actually have to sell 10-20 new ones a year)

Yeaaaah no. Penacony was BAD. So bad that I quit HSR because of it. It was boring and bland. I couldn't get past the first patch. Kudos to you and others for making it through.


And Syln, I am sure SE will look at the forums and take notes so they can improve on the next expansion and future patches, however, I find majority of this thread is a wall of complaints instead of constructive criticism. It would be nice to read what people actually loved about previous expansions in comparison to DT that way it gives SE an idea on how to improve.

[Striker44]

- DT's story is bad isn't because EW or ShB were good.

It's not "bad" because the ones before it were good. However, it's not reasonable to expect it to be as good as ShB and EW because those had the advantage of building on the multiple expansions that came before them, whereas DT is a fresh start. I like to make the comparison to WoW. In that game, WotLK is considered the "peak" - most commonly rated as people's favorite expansion, largest playerbase, etc.. And the biggest reason people give for enjoying it is Arthas, who will likely go down as one of the Top-10 villains in video game history...and he wasn't even introduced in WoW itself, but was built up in their entire previous game (Warcraft III). WotLK still needed solid writing to pull off what it did, but it also needed the foundation laid by their previous two expansions and entire previous game. Same deal here. ShB and EW still needed to take advantage of what they had, and they did. But they only had the opportunity to be as good as they were because they were building off of years of foundation. DT doesn't have that. DT is the foundation that will allow a future expansion to be a 10/10 again. But DT won't reasonably be it. (Or to use my baseball analogy, not every batter that steps up to the plate can hit a grand slam - it requires several other batters to first get on base.)

- DT's story is bad because it is bad, even in a vacuum.

No, it is not "bad". It is not "good", either. This is nothing more and nothing less than your personal opinion. Travel outside this forum (I recommend YT) and you'll see lots of people talking about how much they've enjoyed DT and found the ending zone in particular meaningful.

- Do you think if DT were released as a stand-alone tittle, most of us will magically think the story is good?

Simply put? Yes. Consider how the ARR story is widely viewed now, with the infamous "the story doesn't get good until HW" remarks...and yet, when ARR first released, its story was considered one of the strongest points. The view of everything related to ARR was inflated in our minds because of the disaster that was 1.0. The same happens in reverse, too. When you have something exceptionally good (ShB and EW), then anything that follows it will be naturally deflated in our minds as a result. Think about how you'd feel if you got Kyrie Irving or James Harden on your basketball team. Then think about how you'd feel if you traded away Michael Jordan or LeBron James to get one of them. In the first case, you'd probably be celebrating. In the second case, you'd likely be harping on them even though they're the same great basketball players, purely because what you had before was even more fantastic.

[Turtledeluxe]

The audience of the game has been spoiled by previous expansions because those expansions did exponentially better at communicating their themes and balancing their characters. DT doesn't really have a "thing" to say like the other expansions do. It's just a collection of desires to explore things like traditions, parenthood, family, avoidance (of grief), etc but most of the time it feels unearned, unoriginal, unsatisfying, or all 3. Inspiration is so important if you are going to write a story, but execution equally so, and DT is so inconsistent at hitting one or the other. DT is very much a "I get what you were going for but what is your point?" experience.

That's why HW, SHB and EW are the most popular expansions. They really leave an impression and it has very little to do with the Ascian plotline. It's in the maps, the dialogue, the subplots, the characters, all harmoniously progressing toward a thematic conclusion.

I've heard people say DT is about legacy. It's like..ok did you play SHB? You probably didn't realize how much SHB explored legacy because it did it in such an effortless but powerful way, it's something you feel before you even really think deeply about it. DT just bashes you over the head with it without really offering its own unique perspective on legacy.

[OMGJesuis66]

I've heard people say DT is about legacy. It's like..ok did you play SHB? You probably didn't realize how much SHB explored legacy because it did it in such an effortless but powerful way, it's something you feel before you even really think deeply about it. DT just bashes you over the head with it without really offering its own unique perspective on legacy.

I was one who said DT speaks about Legacy. It is not a unique perspective, it is about carrying over culture, tradition, family values, and memories as you move forward. And yeah, yeah. ShB did that, and honestly? I hated it. That's my personal take, but they introduce us to an illusion of a people whose impact on the world over millennia has been nothing but negative, so when the narrative burdened us with carrying over their legacy and fulfilling promises to those people, it lost my interest completely. I prefer the approach of DT as it was displayed. We have Zoraal Ja, a very simple villain, who was burdened with expectations and left with nothing to carry over from his Father, which built resentment and a lack of purpose. Not only that, his goal was also because he saw the younger generations had forgotten about the past. We had the Hanu Hanu having the conflict over young generations not knowing the past meaning behind their cultural values. It is very on the nose that Dawntrail brought over all the themes around the legacy, as both villains' motivations were due to their inability to either have or let go of their own in the hands of others.

But in the end, that's my personal preference.

[Raven2014]

No, it is not "bad". It is not "good", either. This is nothing more and nothing less than your personal opinion. Travel outside this forum (I recommend YT) and you'll see lots of people talking about how much they've enjoyed DT and found the ending zone in particular meaningful.

Uhm ... is there a point in telling someone it's just their "opinion" using something that's also nothing than ... an opinion? My opinion is my own, people are free to agree or disagree, I don't need to seek validation.

I didn't just say DT was bad, I gave reasons why it is bad. So if you want to disagree, maybe you can to address and counter the specific reasons instead of just saying "it's just your personal opinion"? I have stated them many time in several thread, but I'll put a short summary here for you:

- A story should not have one character hogging and suffocating the majority of screen time. This is how real movie and show are evaluated in real life as well.

- Even if you have an main actor or actress putting up an award winning performance, the movie itself won't win any acolyte if that star completely outshine and obscure the rest of the cast.

- On the other hand, having a well balance casts is the hallmarks of most success show and movie. In case of DT it's even worse because the character hogging the screen does not even have a strong performance.

- The main character should not spend the majority of their dialogue repeat 50 different shades of the same line. This is not up for debate, this is a basic - entry - writing 101 level. Excessive repetition is never a good thing, under any circumstance. Even a highschool English teacher will tell you that.

- A story should not introduce later element that directly contradict what it had said earlier, that's called a plot hole, and plot hole is never a good thing.

- An MMO will never have real divergent story so all choice will be an illusion. But that doesn't mean the narrative should not try to respect and maintain that illusion. If it doesn't do that, than it's better to not providing the illusion at all. It's offensive to present the illusion of choice to the player just to rub it in their face. Don't give an option that if the player select, they will be immediately overwriten by the NPC in a condescending way, that's like breaking the 4th wall in the worst way possible.

+Good Example:

NPC: can you help me?
Choice 1: I would love to help you!
Choice 2: I don't really have a choice but to help you do I?


+Bad Example:

NPC1: can you help me?
Choice 1: I would love to help you!
Choice 2: No I don't want to help you.
NPC2: actually what they meant is they would love to help you.

In both case the story gonna move forward the same way regardless of our choice, but in the first one it leaves enough room to role play and insert our own attitude toward the task whether in the second, it just completely disregard your agency and overwrite it. If you have an example of why this is a good idea I would love to hear it, because I can't come up with any.


So you see, it's not even a quality question, to me DT's problem happens on a basic and technical level. Now you can argue seasoning is a matter of taste, it's much harder to argue raw chicken or burnt food as anything but bad. Now, there gonna be people who are ok with it, that won't change the fact raw chicken and burnt food is bad. I had eaten my own undercook chicken and burnt food before, I actually think they taste fine, doesn't change the fact I did screw up the cooking though. DT's problem to me isn't even about it has too much salt or not enough sugar, it's the raw chicken and burnt food.

Simply put? Yes.

Simply put? What you said may apply to you, doesn't mean they applied to me. I don't think the same way you do.

The reason I still play DT is because it's an MMO, and the MSQ is just a part of the cake. If DT is a single player and the story is all it has, I would not pay 10$ for it had I known. And even if I did, I would quit by at most ... the mid game and never look back. I don't need to compare it to previous stronger entries, the story of DT is bad even if I compare it to a $10/$20 indie JRPG on Steam.

[TBerry]

In fairness, XIV has introduced time travel, memory manipulation, creation of matter from nearly thin air (electrope) and pseudo-revival. We're at a point where we've jumped so far above the shark that, with enough contrivance, any plot hole can be "explained". It's nonsense, paradox-inducing, causality-breaking lazy writing, but sadly it's what we have.
Current XIV, using the aforementioned plot points that keep rearing their ugly heads can nearly have a story arc where we say that the world was attacked by space chickens with Sun-lasers on cornbread spaceships, but we traveled back into the past to stop it and then memory wiped the WoL. Is it dumb as hell? Yes. But that's the problem with this kind of plot device. It's poison that destroys/retcons everything over time, invalidate causality and stakes and forces handwaving of basic paradoxes (time travel in loops always breaks causality in a paradox).
It's hard for me to be invested when I know they can retcon/unwrite it at will in the next patch, and probably will.

Raid series has no immediate plot hole, but needing to believe Sphene, who apparently has power over all the Alexandrian infrastructure at all times and was very close to her subjects did not know of the apparent conspiracy in Arcadion really stretches the suspension of disbelief. Maybe it actually becomes an interesting plot point, but I kinda doubt it...

So there are crystals of pure aether all over the known world, and some people essentially do mathematical magic to build constructs of Aether. Not to mention creatures created by a fervent wish.
But a mineral that comes from a shard that has/had a problem with too much aspected aether like the First, the Thirteenth and so many other Shards that absorbs and stores a certain kind of aspected aether, and can, with some fiddling, convert said aspected aether into other aspected aether and caused a war of resources is where you draw the line?