How FFXIV state change from ShB to DT?

[Voidmage]

I am just viewing it as a transition period. established people leave and its a rebuilding period.

hopefully they find their footing before the building collapses around them.

We really shouldn‘t have to expect a drop in quality just because of a transition period. This is a product overall.
Slower yes but not worse.

There are supervisors and higher positions this stuff has to go through.
This wasn‘t just the fault of the writer. They WANTED the story to be like this.

I really hope they take the feedback to heart and get an grip like you wrote.
Otherwise the building can collapse and burn down for all I care and I will never again buy a SE game.

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

It’s called feedback.
This is a new expansion not even a month old. Of course people will post feedback it’s the same even outside the forum.

Every normal company should and would be happy for so much feedback. If it’s mostly negative that’s on them.
They got their praise singing in ShB and EW. Now they got the opposite.

[kinslayer-]

It's even weird when you realize they were responsible for the Pandemonium quests, which i consider more mature and serious than Ew (yes yes i know Athena is saturday morning villain but Alabhrea, Ericthonios and Elidibus were great).

[Striker44]

How can story writer so perfectly in Shadowbringers to be as disappointment as we see in Dawntrail?

For me, I'd say the biggest reason is simply that this is a new story, so there is very little to build off. I compare it to WotLK from WoW. WotLK was far and away the most popular expansion and the "peak" of that game's playerbase. And it owes a great deal of that success to Arthas, who will probably go down as one of the "best" villains in gaming history. Yes, the dev team still had to execute the opportunity they had really well, which they did. But that opportunity existed in the first place precisely because of the groundwork laid by Vanilla WoW and BC, coupled with Arthas - a character that wasn't even introduced in WoW itself but goes all the way back to their previous game (Warcraft III). Point being - WotLK would not have been as massively successful as it was without the buildup leading to it.

I see the same applying here. ShB had the opportunity to be as good as it was because of what came before it. We needed to have the longstanding antagonists in the Ascians, the knowledge of other reflections, etc. for ShB to have the impact it had. Again, the dev team still needed to execute, which they did. But the opportunity for a 10/10 expansion was there precisely because of the other expansions that came before which weren't 10/10. That 10/10 doesn't occur in a vacuum. Or look at EW. Surveys of the playerbase consistently rank ShB as the #1 favorite expansion of players, with EW consistently ranking #2. And again, much of EW's success was due to it being the culmination of all the other expansions. Even more pointedly, one of the main criticisms of EW (and a key reason it's #2 instead of #1) is how Meteion came out of left field while people were expecting Zodiark to be the main villain - notice how the complaint is about a character we just met that expansion and how the "desire" leaned to the one that had already been established.

Personally, I'm very much enjoying the story writing in DT. I've loved seeing the various characters mature, whether that be having skills but lacking self-confidence, or having confidence but not realizing there's skills they lack, and making those discoveries about themselves and growing. I've loved the ambiance of the different zones, the background music has resonated with me, and most of the classes are still very familiar (one of my personal dislikes is when games fundamentally re-work classes with each new expansion and effectively make you have to relearn them - I like keeping the familiar and focusing on the new content). I've also really liked the ways they still managed to sprinkle in various tie-ins from the past (which I'll detail in another thread with a spoiler note at some point). So, yeah, I take into consideration that DT is the start of something new, and as such I can't realistically expect it to be as good as ShB. Doing so would just set me up for disappointment. I'm just looking for it to be solid in its own right, and for me, it's done that.

That puts DT in a position that ARR, HW, and SB were in. Simply put, none of those expansions had a practical chance of being 10/10. To make a baseball analogy, every batter who steps up to the plate can't hit a grand slam. It's literally impossible, because it requires three of their teammates to all get on base ahead of them. The same goes in practical and psychological terms with expansions. Not every one can be a 10/10, because reaching that point requires a build-up. DT itself won't be a 10/10, but looking down the road, a future expansion may well become a 10/10 again like ShB was, and a key reason for it will be the groundwork laid by DT.

[1313]

Dawntrail story is better than Shadowbringers by a landslide, but the delivery is on par with Shadowbringers. The delivery of the story in both expansion fell flat.

[Ririta]

How can story writer so perfectly in Shadowbringers to be as disappointment as we see in Dawntrail?

I was trying to compare each aspect each character each area each event each conflict..
it doesn't look like the same game!

How things can turn this bad?

It's easy when you have 6+ years of stories setting it up.
SHB wouldn't be good if ARR didn't present us the ascians and garleans (and yall love to complain about ARR)
SHB wouldn't be good if HW didn't start the multiple shard and the warrior of darkness plotline.
SHB wouldn't be good if SB didn't Varian didn't go to war in Ghimlyt Dark and state that he wants to destroy the world.

What did EW leave for DT? Nothing. It spent all of its patches telling a non-consequential (for now) void story. DT had to start everything up from scratch, something that not even ARR had to (1.0 had Bahamut bring a calamity and ARR starts there).

That DT turned out as good as it did after it had every disavantage is a miracle. DT is excellent, it not only tells us the story it set out to tell, but it also laid out a new story to explore. All that without trouncing everything that built FFXIV, like EW and SHB (to a lesser extent) did.

Look, I get it, dumping on Dawntrail's story is a popular thing to do right now and an easy way to fish for replies. You don't need to keep churning out new threads ad nauseum.

Yeah, make a main thread like we did for EW. I'm not even checking this board daily anymore because it's the same thing on loop, it's boring.

[Isala]

It's easy when you have 6+ years of stories setting it up.
SHB wouldn't be good if ARR didn't present us the ascians and garleans (and yall love to complain about ARR)
SHB wouldn't be good if HW didn't start the multiple shard and the warrior of darkness plotline.
SHB wouldn't be good if SB didn't Varian didn't go to war in Ghimlyt Dark and state that he wants to destroy the world.

What did EW leave for DT? Nothing. It spent all of its patches telling a non-consequential (for now) void story. DT had to start everything up from scratch, something that not even ARR had to (1.0 had Bahamut bring a calamity and ARR starts there).

That DT turned out as good as it did after it had every disavantage is a miracle. DT is excellent, it not only tells us the story it set out to tell, but it also laid out a new story to explore. All that without trouncing everything that built FFXIV, like EW and SHB (to a lesser extent) did.



Yeah, make a main thread like we did for EW. I'm not even checking this board daily anymore because it's the same thing on loop, it's boring.

Bullcrap. I'm so tired of this "It doesn't have enough setup!" when they could have taken their time setting it up instead of speeding through any plot points. We were told this was supposed to be a vacation. It very well could have been a low stakes, expansion long vacation, where we got to know Tural, and their people, and their culture, and then used that build up to give us a reason to care when the Alexandrian stuff happened. We didn't need to have a multi-world ending threat dropped on us at level ninety-effing-five. They took FIVE LEVELS before they threw out everything, and went "Suddenly, the fire nation attacked."

The story didn't fail because it didn't have buildup. The story failed because the F-Tier writing team couldn't be assed to build up.

[Ririta]

Bullcrap. I'm so tired of this "It doesn't have enough setup!" when they could have taken their time setting it up instead of speeding through any plot points. We were told this was supposed to be a vacation. It very well could have been a low stakes, expansion long vacation, where we got to know Tural, and their people, and their culture, and then used that build up to give us a reason to care when the Alexandrian stuff happened.

But that's literally what they did... I mean, there were people on this very board complaining that it spent too much time with the low stakes setup of Tural before the Alexandria stuff started, to the point where they'd compare it with ARR.

[Jojoya]

Bullcrap. I'm so tired of this "It doesn't have enough setup!" when they could have taken their time setting it up instead of speeding through any plot points. We were told this was supposed to be a vacation. It very well could have been a low stakes, expansion long vacation, where we got to know Tural, and their people, and their culture, and then used that build up to give us a reason to care when the Alexandrian stuff happened. We didn't need to have a multi-world ending threat dropped on us at level ninety-effing-five. They took FIVE LEVELS before they threw out everything, and went "Suddenly, the fire nation attacked."

The story didn't fail because it didn't have buildup. The story failed because the F-Tier writing team couldn't be assed to build up.

Like Endwalker, it really needed to be 2 different expansions instead of one.

[ForteNightshade]

What did EW leave for DT? Nothing. It spent all of its patches telling a non-consequential (for now) void story. DT had to start everything up from scratch, something that not even ARR had to (1.0 had Bahamut bring a calamity and ARR starts there).

That DT turned out as good as it did after it had every disavantage is a miracle. DT is excellent, it not only tells us the story it set out to tell, but it also laid out a new story to explore. All that without trouncing everything that built FFXIV, like EW and SHB (to a lesser extent) did.

If this is the case, why did FFXVI not completely fail? After all, it had to tell a completely original tell, do all the setup for itself and build brand new characters. All while, coincidentally, has several of the FFXIV staff team and writers.

Could it be those writers were simply better and the person/team they assigned to Dawntrail was mediocre at best? By your line of logic, no beginning book in a trilogy could ever be good since it has to do all the legwork of setting up future sequels. Ironically, a lot of Shadowbringers works because Ishikawa made several retcons to fix some rather poor decisions previously expansions made. A prime example being both Lahabrea and Elidibus. Neither were remotely the characters they wound up being when first introduced but she was given free reign to alter them. Which speaks to their confidence in her writing talent because they already attempted that with Lyse to mixed reception.

Dawntrail didn't need setup to tell a good story, especially because it wasn't trying to be a continuation like Shadowbringers and Endwalker were. It needed a good writer to craft a cohesive narrative that was mostly resolved by the end. In other words, Dawntrail was more like a single player game since we don't necessarily know if they're planning to do another drawn out arc or stick to more self contained, shorter stories. Regardless, Dawntrail failed spectacularly in that objective. The pacing is completely horrendous even within its own structure, nothing of note happens for several hours worth of gameplay and virtually every character not named Wuk Lamat is rendered a hollow shell of themselves only there to prop up the clear "main character" who hogs the spotlight to the point of strangling it.

Shadowbringers would still be a good, if not an excellent story even without any previous setup whatsoever. Things would have to change to better accommodate that direction but the core aspect of its narrative are relatively self contained. Conversely, Dawntrail is a weak story made weaken by how little desire or respect it seemingly has for any previous character.

[Ririta]

snip

I never said that beginnings can't be good. I'm saying that SHB had more going for it than DT did. You're arguing this point as if DT can't be possibly good, as if what you decided is already a fact of life, then use a single player game that has been in development since 2015 as "evidence" as if MMOs have no narrative constraints at all.

Then you take SHB, an expansion where almost every single point of it has been built up in a previous expansion, and claim that it's self contained and would be excellent even without all the baggage, as if all the previous knowledge that we built up over how FFXIV's world works doesn't matter to put everything that happens in context. I don't even know what to say, do you seriously think the wall of piss or Elidibus' entire existence would have any impact without all the previous knowledge that we gained from the other expansions?

Arguing the way you do I can easily claim that literally everything in existence is, by objective fact, garbage.