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

[Turtledeluxe]

I don't think it matters where we are going because they introduced a plot mcguffin that, as far as I can tell, is going to result in a couple patches of G'raha and Y'shtola studying in Sharalyan while we do some bs. Then the plot will move forward to some random new place. This is exactly how they executed the EW patches.

To be clear, they're going to say the tool needs to be unlocked to use, which means we're going to inevitably unlock it and use it to traverse shards.

[Remiferia]

I don't think it matters where we are going because they introduced a plot mcguffin that, as far as I can tell, is going to result in a couple patches of G'raha and Y'shtola studying in Sharalyan while we do some bs. Then the plot will move forward to some random new place. This is exactly how they executed the EW patches.

To be clear, they're going to say the tool needs to be unlocked to use, which means we're going to inevitably unlock it and use it to traverse shards.

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

[BigBoom550]

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

There's been hints about a Jenova-type thing in the Lifestream... but I don't trust these writers.

We still have Meracydia, we have the extreme north. Give them to some writers with skill before new Reflections.

[chizLemons]

Indeed. Yoshi-P's comments of 'throwing many things at a wall and seeing what fans like' is really bizarre because he's really only left us one thing and that's Azem's McGuffin. Tuliyollal and Tural as a continent is mostly solved and it took the plot to quite literally crash land into us for anything interesting to start happening there.

Feels very obvious to me that the future of these expansions will be less setting up political fantasy plot points to be resolved over time and more using a magical portal to travel to shards where anything could be happening, solve their problem, and move on to the next shard. A series of one-offs, if you will; except, unlike Norvrandt, they'll lack the same degree of personal stakes that Dawntrail did because they've wasted this entire xpac setting up its own insulated story and not laying the groundwork for the future.

The sad thing is that I feel like they tried to leave a lot of things open. If you think about it, there's a lot of "unresolved loose ends" around Tural..but the ONLY one that we remember and "care" about is the McGuffin cup, because it's the only one that is directly tied to our character. Everything else is Tural cultural stuff that we don't have any personal connection to. Like, wasn't Erenville going to investigate something going on in Shaaloani? There's the baby ruler issue and the whole complication with souls in Solution 9, the Milala stuff they lore dumped on Living Memory, among other meaningless stuff. But none of it matters.

The very basics of good storytelling is that people care about what happens in a story if we care about the characters, and Dawntrail gave us very little reason to care about any of them. They're badly developed, shallow and didn't form any connections to the characters we already cared about - it actually attempted to ruin them by making them disappear as soon as they arrive and not giving them any personality or things to do, and robbed some of them of good character arcs when there should be one. And our own character also has no reason to care abou any of it, unless you count the story forcing us to like Wuk Lamat.

...and even the cup, I hate it. Why would they say it's a "low stakes new beginning" when they immediately go back to shard hopping? I want to explore Etheirys. They delayed EW by 2 weeks so they could have Emet tell us we should explore Etheirys, so why are we talking about shards and reflections again?!

[CuteBucket]

I was initially excited about the reveal of the Azem symbol on the weird grail item, because I was DESPERATE for all of Dawntrail to get ANY little tiny crumb of lore that related to the Ancients because they're some of my favorite characters and setting the game has shown us, but now I'm worried. I don't want shard travel to feel easy. I think it makes sense to eventually explore more shards if they plan to keep the game going for another decade of story, but it needs to be exceedingly complicated and difficult to achieve shard travel. It should be a massive undertaking requiring insane amounts of aether. Anything less would cheapen everything that happened around shard travel in Shadowbringers. But I don't trust the current writing team to handle that well at all. And for now, I would much rather explore Ilsabard and Meracydia before we go shard hopping. Especially if they're going to treat the shards like they did Alexandria. Wow look, it's just a really shallow and bastardized version of a previous Final Fantasy game shoved into one final zone! How fun... -_-

[HighlanderClone]

There's been hints about a Jenova-type thing in the Lifestream... but I don't trust these writers.

We still have Meracydia, we have the extreme north. Give them to some writers with skill before new Reflections.

I really hope they're not going to retroactively ruin FF7. FF7R has already did that enough (even if the gameplay in that game was superb, the plot is just...)

[franklinwi]

I really hope they're not going to retroactively ruin FF7. FF7R has already did that enough (even if the gameplay in that game was superb, the plot is just...)

VII survived Advent Children. It can survive anything.

[BigBoom550]

I was initially excited about the reveal of the Azem symbol on the weird grail item, because I was DESPERATE for all of Dawntrail to get ANY little tiny crumb of lore that related to the Ancients because they're some of my favorite characters and setting the game has shown us, but now I'm worried. I don't want shard travel to feel easy. I think it makes sense to eventually explore more shards if they plan to keep the game going for another decade of story, but it needs to be exceedingly complicated and difficult to achieve shard travel. It should be a massive undertaking requiring insane amounts of aether. Anything less would cheapen everything that happened around shard travel in Shadowbringers. But I don't trust the current writing team to handle that well at all. And for now, I would much rather explore Ilsabard and Meracydia before we go shard hopping. Especially if they're going to treat the shards like they did Alexandria. Wow look, it's just a really shallow and bastardized version of a previous Final Fantasy game shoved into one final zone! How fun... -_-

The safe option would be the next expac doing stuff in Meracydia to set up for a return to the 13th, with the final zone being a restored chunk of it. Final dungeon/boss are the Cloud of Darkness, no need for complicated motives, and the 13th becomes a springboard to other Reflections in another expansion. Finish up the Source before full commitment to Reflections, seed a larger plot there.

Basically 8.0 Meracydia+sliver of 13> 9.0 Ilsabard+twist (underground zone?)> 10.0 *Maybe* another Reflection.>11.0 Definitely by this point.

[Neirene]

Hello, I wanted to share my thoughts about Dawntrail, as I don't really use these forums but in this case I think it's worth due how bad the expansion has been.

Been playing since ARR Open Beta and religiously had purchased every single expansion ever since, some of them had their boring moments and their highlights usually towards the end always had a blast when things gets straightened out (usually by the time you unlock the final Dungeon leading to the final Boss battle climax)

I was REALLY hoping in the case of Dawntrail the same was going to happen towards the end but sadly it didn't, it didn't triggered that magical moment of finishing the expansion with a huge applause.

The post is gonna be too long and I'm sure it has been discussed thousands of times in this same thread but it was a mixture of everything that failed, uninteresting main scenario characters, boring plotline that is all over the place, maps that are mostly the same old tired jungle, very boring dungeons, very ugly armor sets, music is also a mismatch in several areas, lack of proper research and direction is very clear in many areas, and it's very clear the attempt to go the route of very dry and dumb stories a la disney style.

Overall it felt like a chore to finish it and I skipped many scenes (something I very rarely do) due to how much unneeded fluff was added to several dialogs just to make it last longer in scenes "trying" to lead to a climax"?".

This game is alive due to a miracle and miracles don't happen twice, dont fall into the same trap that got you in the 1.0 vs 2.0 situation, if the game quality begins to go down people won't buy it "just cause" is a Final Fantasy.

Is not a matter of throwing random contents or increased textures just to appease people complaining, id rather prefer you focus on less contents but with very good stories, refined dungeons/bosses, characters and backgrounds, like always has been up to this point.

I'm looking forward for your team to reorganize and try to recover from this horrible mistakes in the upcoming patches and extra contents that this expansion will have, otherwise the next 2 years will be very very boring...

The worst expansion of FFXIV

[Hallarem]

Aside from all the horrid writing and pacing the MSQ was, I wonder if all this stems from Yoshi-P's article about "being done with Dark Fantasy"

You can't shower us with happy moments if there aren't dark things to get over, there has to be a balance.
You can't start the game with a world building of "Oh there's a bunch of dark stuff happening" and suddenly handwave them like they don't exist anymore, because people shared a dish. Were we supposed to mix Garlean Pizza with Sushi all along to make peace between the East and Garlemald?
People want a fantasy world, not a 1 for 1 copy of the ideals and morals of the real world, they want world building done in a believable way.

The first sign for me was when they wrote in the TWELVE RAID "Oh, don't be mad at the elementals, they are just showing their love." WHAT!?