I'm not exactly looking forward to the patch quests for Dawntrail... (Spoilers)

[NeoORoark]

Dawntrail. Loved this expansion to death, genuinely think it could trump Shadowbringers for me, but I want to see what the patch quests are before I end up deciding definitively what I think about it, and I'm saying this for a specific reason.

I loved the story and gameplay of Dawntrail. From the Rite of Succession, the story that takes place in each of the areas across Tural, and then the sudden shift to (what I can only presume is) The Twelfth, where the game goes from a budding anthropologists dream, to a story about dealing with grief and moving on from the past. Not to mention that the duties introduced here are some of the most fun I've had in this game (Are you still alive?) and the new jobs they introduced have been my absolute favorite currently. All this said, while the story conveys a very good message *especially* after 6.0's story, making this expansion feel like Endwalker's perfect companion piece, I don't think that continuing in that direction is a good idea for a number of reasons.

Number 1 is obviously that we've had 3 expansions now dealing with world ending threats and themes of grief and despair as things the antagonists spread and make groups that the Warrior of Light is affiliated with, deal with. I am such a sucker for this kind of stuff, I'm not going to lie- but we're hitting a point where if it happens again, I honestly don't know if I'll be as interested in the story from that point on. I would genuinely love a story where the thing we deal with is just... Something that makes us angry. Something like Zenos in Stormblood, where by the time you get to him, your blood is boiling.

(1/2)

[NeoORoark]

Number 2 is that it sort of takes away from the other theme of Dawntrail- that being respecting other people's cultures, and learning more about them. Now this might sound weird, but hear me out. A big part of Alexandria's culture was never having to mourn, and I'm not saying it should continue exactly as it was with the regulators being used to wipe memories of dead people from everyone, but what I am saying is that the Endless could be reintroduced to society in an interesting way. When someone dies, they become the same sort of model that Otis was. Would the cast from the Source like it? No, and it could very well come with another handful of problems, but it would be something that the people of (maybe) The Twelfth would want, and since this is their culture and lifestyle, more than anything I think they should be the ones to decide. Of course, The Arcadion raids coming out in just a couple days could exposit on how people are dealing with the grief right now, and how they're looking into forms of entertainment to deal with it. Either way, I don't think the way to go about it is to *just* have the Source cast come in and say, "Well it should be like this because hope, yaaay!" whatever decision The (probably) Twelfth comes to, it should be something that even if it feels weird, wouldn't just be making Alexandria conform to Turali standards just because Wuk Lamat and Koana want that, with our group agreeing with them.

Number 3 actually involve the (maybe) other shards, the ones we saw in The Interphos during Virtual Shift. I WOULD *ADORE* going to these other shards just to see more about them, because I find the shards, ESPECIALLY the ones that have suffered from a Rejoining to be very interesting after this expansion, if this is The Twelfth, then it opens up a whole slew of questions that would make so many interesting stories. Are there still people in these other shards? What do they do to survive? What is their history, their food, their traditions? Do they have their own forms of Levinsickness, and would we cure them the same way that we would cure tempering, or is this a wholly different thing because their aether was and will always be like this? Hell, there's other things in The (probably) Twelfth that I'm dying to know more about.

I'd be interested to hear what other people think about this. I'll probably come back and check in a few days, though I might also just forget about it like a goober.

[17cupsofcoffee]

On number 2 - I agree that it would feel a bit weird for us to come in and completely upend how society works in Alexandria, regardless of how justified we'd be in doing it. I'm very interested to see how they deal with all this in the patches, and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they'll handle it well (for now at least!)

Personally, I can't see them bringing back the Endless, for a couple of reasons:

• It would fly in the face of the themes of the final zone (about moving on and accepting loss).
• I don't think the majority of the citizens of Alexandria even know the Endless existed - just that their memories go somewhere when a person dies. I can't see them clamouring to bring back a system they weren't really aware of in the first place.

It's the regulators that I'm more interested in seeing how they deal with - partly because they're a more integral/concious part of Alexandrian society, but also because I don't think what they do is really that objectionable? It's just how they do it.

Imagine if defibrillators in our world were powered by souls. Sure, we could take everyone's defibrillators away and let a load of people die as a result, but wouldn't it be better to just... find a different power source?

Doing some of the yellow quests in Solution Nine has me convinced this might be the direction they're going in the patch quests, as I feel like too much dialogue mentions the regulators for us to get rid of them completely (e.g. Towering Troubles has an NPC who's actively trying to get money to restock their souls, which would be a bit weird if that wasn't a thing you could do any more).

I can see us spending some time trying to figure out how to replace souls with 'souls', so that people can keep having their extra lives without messing with the natural order.

Or maybe I'm totally overthinking this, and we're just going to let them keep munching real souls. I feel like this game is usually better at tying off loose ends than that, though, so I'm staying optimistic that they'll find an interesting way to resolve it.

We'll see if the normal raids make any of this less/more plausible tomorrow

[Cleretic]

The thing I'm noticing is that you're immediately parking all your speculation in Alexandria exclusively. And I don't think that's as much of a given as you seem to; remember that Endwalker's patch MSQ basically left everything that wasn't Thavnair, Garlemald and Sharlayan alone (and Sharlayan basically just got footnotes).

What I suspect is that the patch MSQs will mostly be focused on Tural (with probably a bit of Alexandrian stuff but maybe more on the 'what does international relations between these two nations look like' angle), and the exploration of Alexandria as a society might be mostly left to the Arcadion. Sure, the Arcadion is basically the WWE as far as we've been made aware, but normal raids always take giant weird swerves, I wouldn't be surprised to get a helping of Alexandrian politics in there, and that window would be basically entirely on their terms.

[Luzzu]

The thing I'm noticing is that you're immediately parking all your speculation in Alexandria exclusively. And I don't think that's as much of a given as you seem to; remember that Endwalker's patch MSQ basically left everything that wasn't Thavnair, Garlemald and Sharlayan alone (and Sharlayan basically just got footnotes).

What I suspect is that the patch MSQs will mostly be focused on Tural (with probably a bit of Alexandrian stuff but maybe more on the 'what does international relations between these two nations look like' angle), and the exploration of Alexandria as a society might be mostly left to the Arcadion. Sure, the Arcadion is basically the WWE as far as we've been made aware, but normal raids always take giant weird swerves, I wouldn't be surprised to get a helping of Alexandrian politics in there, and that window would be basically entirely on their terms.

I agree with this. It was made pretty clear that Yok Tural and Xak Tural both had substantially more locations to see and given what is shown in both Skydeep Cenote and Tender Valley, I'd say we should be paying close attention to unexplored locations in Tural as well as turning our attention to the south sea isles. I suspect the Arcadion will be our lens into Alexandria's past and future, with potential hints about Sphene's crown and Preservation that tie in to later MSQ.

The process by which the regulators work is painted in such a way that makes it seem unnatural and even abhorrent - this is likely intentional. We're seeing a lot of varying ways of soul tampering and disruptions to the flow of aether and to the Lifestream. There are too many pieces of dialogue suggesting that something is disturbing the greater flow. This is the impression I get and where I would guess the story will go. It would be odd to bring up all these different story beats and not show how they begin this next saga of the game's story.