Character disconnect and disappointing Player Agency in Dawntrail's MSQ [Spoilers]

[fioravictorine]

They are superficial because our involvement with literally every plot is superficial. We literally can only talk to people by making a choice of 2-3 dialogue choices that can't ever alter the actual plot. "That isn't a good enough example" isn't an actual counter-argument, the fact is the story does establish that Wuk Lamat looks up to us and looks to us for guidance and our influence does change how she views the world.

As for HW, the first half is pretty explicitly a coming of age story for Alphinauld where he comes into his own and realizes what he should do after the disaster of the Crystal Braves and his confidence is utterly shattered. Its why the firewood scene is so legendary. He freaks out utterly over being able to accomplish ANYTHING, and that road trip half culminates with the two adults with him breaking and him meanwhile becoming more resolved. Our involvement in that story is pretty much cheerleading Alphinauld, and he would have gotten there without us. But it wasn't pointless either.

I duno, you keep strawmanning away from my question on 'Wuk's mentor figure' so I guess it's useless to discuss further with you. Have a good day

[dezzmont]

I duno, you keep strawmanning away from my question on 'Wuk's mentor figure' so I guess it's useless to discuss further with you. Have a good day

"The WOL is not a mentor figure"

"Yes they are"

"No they aren't name a time"

"These 3 times"

"I don't like these 3 times"

"These 3 times are pretty similar to other liked parts of the story where the WoL is a mentor figure"

"Strawman"

Lol what? An argument you disagree with doesn't have to be fallacious, especially against something entirely opinion based. You could just say 'I disagree' rather than misusing the term strawman.

You can argue that the story of us being a mentor isn't good or well done. But, again, its literally part of the text. It happens. "How do I handle this situation" "Here is how" "Thanks I learned a lesson" is a pretty clear cut example of what is intended to be mentorship.

[Eyrilona]

In previous expansions, even if someone else was clearly the central character of a story arc, they might ask us to do something, and we would go somewhere and we would do the thing for them and report back. But the key there is that we go do a thing, we are the driving force of something happening.

In DT, there are so many instances where we get to do the part of walking halfway across the map and click on an NPC, only for it to be not our character that then proceeds to talk to the person we clicked, but instead our click starting a scene where Wuk Lamat talks to someone. Erenville is having a character moment? Click Wuk Lamat so that Wuk Lamat can talk to Erenville. We spend several minutes searching a large quest area for an item we have to find? The payoff after we put in all the work is that we get to watch Wuk Lamat find the item. Not we find it and bring it back to her, no, she finds it.

The problem isn't so much that our character isn't the main character, the problem is that we are barely playing the game as our own character at all -- it is as if we are playing Wuk Lamat instead, and everything we do is just an activation device for Wuk Lamat to drive the story forward.

[GartredZW]

Our imporance in Dawntrail was as a mentor figure for Wuk Lamat, a character going through a pretty classic coming of age story. We basically got to be what Thancred was to Ryne, and I don't think many would say Thancred was pointless in that story arc. Likewise, the fact all these people's problems would be kinda solved on their own isn't the point (and also isn't true, the resolution of blessed siblings and the redemption of Bakool Ja would *definitely* not have happened without Wuk Lamat being there with some lessons she learned from the WoL, and that is a major status quo change for the nation), the point is that it illustrates a philosophy the game has about leadership through Wuk Lamat learning it. Its... honestly a pretty basic narrative, "the test is a lesson," but it is a tried and true narrative and saying "the story would be the same if everyone failed the test because everyone actually didn't strictly need help" strikes me as an almost... Cinema Sins style 'plothole ding' complaint that ignores how narratives work.

Yeah, we wouldn't say Thancred was pointless because he actually did stuff.
Before Thancred found her, Ryne was a prisoner resigned to her fate as a mere item. He freed her, treated her like an actual person as she deserves, taught her to fight, introduced her to friends and hobbies, and even nearly died fighting to protect her on multiple occasions.
Wuk Lamat goes through the trials without much pushback, and somehow gets strong enough to best Bakool Ja Ja on her own. We never get any indication that it was anything she learned from us. You could argue that Alphinaud, Alisaie, Krile, Koana, and Erenville all helped her develop and improve, but I see none of that coming from the Warrior of Light.
Nevermind that though, Remember what I said a moment ago? Thancred did things for her. He fought and almost died against Ran'jit all to protect her. We never actually do something like that for Lamat. Even when we finally track her down after being kidnapped (mostly Thancred and Koana who found her by the way.), Bakool pusses out before we get to do any fighting. She beats him at level 94. That's like the perfect time to have her lose, and us to save her so she can be humbled for later development. This story has already been written a thousand times before, and they still can't do it right.

[dezzmont]

In DT, there are so many instances where we get to do the part of walking halfway across the map and click on an NPC, only for it to be not our character that then proceeds to talk to the person we clicked, but instead our click starting a scene where Wuk Lamat talks to someone.

This is especially true in the second half, where Wuk Lamat stops asking us for advice nearly as much and the explicit task of 'let her grow' isn't in play anymore, so us having back to let her do everything becomes... noticeably weird, at least for someone like me who liked the mentor arc of the first half and felt good about the little moment where you tell her to kick Bakool's butt, because that is where the WoL really falls out of the story until Heritage Found.

[dezzmont]

Yeah, we wouldn't say Thancred was pointless because he actually did stuff.
Before Thancred found her, Ryne was a prisoner resigned to her fate as a mere item. He freed her, treated her like an actual person as she deserves, taught her to fight, introduced her to friends and hobbies, and even nearly died fighting to protect her on multiple occasions.
Wuk Lamat goes through the trials without much pushback, and somehow gets strong enough to best Bakool Ja Ja on her own. We never get any indication that it was anything she learned from us. You could argue that Alphinaud, Alisaie, Krile, Koana, and Erenville all helped her develop and improve, but I see none of that coming from the Warrior of Light.
Nevermind that though, Remember what I said a moment ago? Thancred did things for her. He fought and almost died against Ran'jit all to protect her. We never actually do something like that for Lamat. Even when we finally track her down after being kidnapped (mostly Thancred and Koana who found her by the way.), Bakool pusses out before we get to do any fighting. She beats him at level 94. That's like the perfect time to have her lose, and us to save her so she can be humbled for later development. This story has already been written a thousand times before, and they still can't do it right.

I actually really liked that we never fought Bakool, specifically because of Ran'jit. I hated how Ran'jit was handled because we were forced to job against this rando nobody so he could be a threat to Ryne and we could eventually fight him... when he was clearly Thancred's enemy and not ours. In my opinion, we never should have fought Ran'jit once, or at least never 1 on 1, because he is just this jerk who comes out of nowhere with a weirdly unearned amount of power and threat who puts us in the down but not out state despite being just a guy. I had zero opinions on the dude besides hoping Thancred kicks his ass, so the fact he got to kinda be the main villain of the first half of Shadowbringers and constantly was implied to be way more powerful than me was just... irritating. He was a great part of Thancred's arc like you said, but its weird we were forced to resolve it.

Bakool meanwhile was a character who was clearly never our enemy, and the story never treated him like a threat to us. Instead, he was just really in Wuk Lamat's head (Her initial altercation with him wasn't so much 'she got bodied' and more 'she made one big attack that got directly blocked, didn't win instantly, and freaked out a bit), and after she got through a bunch of zones and started to develop a better understanding of what she actually wanted to do, she asks us to let her handle it and our characters say 'get em champ.' It also served as a really good culmination of Wuk Lamat's arc going from 'I am scared of Alpacas' to 'Peace is more than just the absence of war and I will defend the peace' in the first half. Most of our involvement there is psyching Wuk Lamat up, because her main problem in the first half is kinda being a worrywart and very indecisive (low key to the point it becomes a bit old when she freaks out about a mode of travel for the 3rd time), and those are flaws we do clear up in her through the trials.

Obviously that is an opinion, if the mentorship bit missed then it may be a lot more annoying, but that is one instance of the WoL being 'sidelined' that I think served the story masterfully, and I would love for more villains to have resolutions other than 'we specifically beat them for the NPC.' Compared to Wuk Lamat getting a magic platform to fight in the final boss while none of the other characters showed up, which definitely was... weird... Krile 100% should have showed up there too at least (And honestly if I had one big complaint for Dawntrail its that Krile was really underused and really didn't get to have a lot of character moments she should have).

[Endy_Sinkai]

I truly do not understand this whole idea people are coming up with that "this was Wuks story." No. Stop right there ✋️. Every single piece of marketing PR live letter fan fest ect ect said nothing about this being wuks journey.

This was always market since jump as OUR new adventure. So why In the name of bloody twelve am I the BG NPC?

There is a clear difference between 1.0-EW and DT. But at no point where we ever told during any part of the literal year from NA FF to DT launch that this was anything else besides OUR new chapter.

So if you feel lied to by yoshi P and the marketing team then good because you where and you are not a complete white knight simp for this sorry excuse of an msq.

Because had they told us even 1/100th of the truth of what this expansion was I bet no where near the same amount of people would have bought it.

This is the first time since 1.0's launch I genuinely feel lied to by the dev team and wish I could issue a full refund.

I cannot even bring myself to enjoy what content is there because I am primarily a story player and that is a complete mess.

Sorry I have been holding back since I beat the msq on day 3 of early access.

And honestly I wanted to explode with anger then. However I choose to sit on it and see how I felt.

It somehow has gotten even worse the more time I have sat with the story because now that the hype wore off and I can critically think about the story. There where soooooo many plot holes and horrible nonsense writing that its reminded me of season 8 of GOT levels of bad.

Sorry rant over

[aiqa]

While previous expansions had other important characters. There has never been any other expansions where one NPC overshadowed everything, everywhere, anything. FF14 never had a MC to that degree, and now it does. So the complaints that DT has one very obvious MC can't be countered by pointing at characters with very different roles in previous stories. I am not a big a fan of either Alphinaud (though he got better in the last few expansions) or Graha. But I can just grit my teeth and get through their scenes, since there is enough of a MQ besides those two. For people who don't like Wuk there is almost no other MQ.

[Fortecael]

I truly do not understand this whole idea people are coming up with that "this was Wuks story." No. Stop right there ✋️. Every single piece of marketing PR live letter fan fest ect ect said nothing about this being wuks journey.

This was always market since jump as OUR new adventure. So why In the name of bloody twelve am I the BG NPC?

There is a clear difference between 1.0-EW and DT. But at no point where we ever told during any part of the literal year from NA FF to DT launch that this was anything else besides OUR new chapter.

So if you feel lied to by yoshi P and the marketing team then good because you where and you are not a complete white knight simp for this sorry excuse of an msq.

Because had they told us even 1/100th of the truth of what this expansion was I bet no where near the same amount of people would have bought it.

This is the first time since 1.0's launch I genuinely feel lied to by the dev team and wish I could issue a full refund.

I cannot even bring myself to enjoy what content is there because I am primarily a story player and that is a complete mess.

Sorry I have been holding back since I beat the msq on day 3 of early access.

And honestly I wanted to explode with anger then. However I choose to sit on it and see how I felt.

It somehow has gotten even worse the more time I have sat with the story because now that the hype wore off and I can critically think about the story. There where soooooo many plot holes and horrible nonsense writing that its reminded me of season 8 of GOT levels of bad.

Sorry rant over

THIS SO MUCH. SE completely misled us with both trailers, IF they had actually shown how much Wukkie was involved I would have never bought the expansion, I hated that character since the moment she first appeared. What's even worse is that the writing is complete utter trash, the whole MSQ is mechanically boring like never before and it just goes on and on. I've literally skipped almost every cutscene (never skipped before) and I still spent about 4 days going through it just because it was that boring and trash that I needed lots of breaks to cope with it. How did we get to this point?

[Bellybell]

Are we Alphinauld's cheerleading slave in Heavensward? That story is basically us literally doing everything he or Aymeric says and using his solution for literally every problem. It doesn't even have the moments were Wuk Lamat explicitly asks us for advice on how to proceed, which very much DO exist (ex: Its a lot of the trading questline, for example).[/B]

Contexts are very important my guy. In HW we were to established our position and name among the Ishgard whom sheltering us when we were framed outside of their land. WoL'd have every intention to help out whatever House Fortemp and Ayemeric chores.
As for Alphinaud, i don't remember much about we being his cheerlead? wasn't he just act like a puppy and following WoL instead of what you claim to be?

i didn't read any on other paragraphs btw, because i already has enough problems with your analogy on the first one