Dawntrail is so painful; is it on purpose?

[Xieldras]

I think the biggest time that flaw could be seen was the one with the train.
The train is loud and makes animals aggresive.
You have a native tribe there that has problems because of that.
All it takes for them to be ok with that is:
"Tell us a story and promise to solve the problem".
That's it. The problem is not even brought back ever again. Even the sidequests seem to ignore it as far as I could see.

Why couldn't there be more conflict?
I don't even want blood or fighting but there was not even grumpling or even a discussion. That whole scene couldn't even be called a dialogue.
Remember the Blue mage questline? It was all about the natives and Ceruleum sheningans. Even that is just brushed aside there.
You tell me there isn't even some unrest by getting that stuff?

At points it feels like they were so afraid of cultural backlash they overplayed the safecard.

Speaking of, didn't we have a set up for the Whalaquee Tribe from the BLU questlines? Where are they? I was half-hoping a zone dedicated for them a bit like the Azim Steppes, but they're nowhere to be seen save for that FSH questline in Tuliyollal. Would've been nice to get one zone dedicated to them rather than 2 grey-blobs in Heritage Found and the dead Golden City we shut down.

The expansion is clean of actual grey conflict and leans so hard into black-or-white characters that it's kind of sad.

[Voidmage]

Speaking of, didn't we have a set up for the Whalaquee Tribe from the BLU questlines? Where are they? I was half-hoping a zone dedicated for them a bit like the Azim Steppes, but they're nowhere to be seen save for that FSH questline in Tuliyollal. Would've been nice to get one zone dedicated to them rather than 2 grey-blobs in Heritage Found and the dead Golden City we shut down.

The expansion is either clean of actual grey conflict or leaning so hard into black-or-white characters that it's kind of sad.

Huh yeah, completely forgot them tbh (as did the game).

Agree fully with you.

Even the Ancients had more biggering and disputes going on and the game made no mistake of how utterly crazy some of their experiments were (Pandaemonium, Behemoth) and they were more or less an almost utopia in peace and happiness.

And somehow Gulool Ja Ja achieved a better peace in 80 years where no one argues for more than 5 minutes. Dang, how impressive!

(Also I only remembered the BLU questline because I did it recently, so it's fresh in my memory. Despite that, I'm kind of shocked that it seems plot points like these are not kept track of. Do they not have an internal search engine over there?).

Gulool Ja Ja is a bigger badass then we thought. We should have just brought the people of the new world to endsinger with us.

I wouldn't be surprised if they actually forget stuff. I don't know how they are structured. Wasn't it more or less just one guy who does the worldbuilding and has the lore answers?
I faintly remember something like that when Kate explained some stuff on stage.

[Xieldras]

Huh yeah, completely forgot them tbh (as did the game).

Agree fully with you.

Even the Ancients had more biggering and disputes going on and the game made no mistake of how utterly crazy some of their experiments were (Pandaemonium, Behemoth) and they were more or less an almost utopia in peace and happiness.

And somehow Gulool Ja Ja achieved a better peace in 80 years where no one argues for more than 5 minutes. Dang, how impressive!

(Also I only remembered the BLU questline because I did it recently, so it's fresh in my memory. Despite that, I'm kind of shocked that it seems plot points like these are not kept track of. Do they not have an internal search engine over there?).

[KisaiTenshi]

Kind of a monkey's paw situation.

Either the gameplay is going to be stepping in a purple puddle and using 3 GCDs, a story fight that takes 60 seconds, or it's going to be a full on sequence like In From The Cold. 'The Community' hated In From The Cold with a passion, despite it being the best bit of storytelling of the MSQ over the last decade. I don't think we'll ever see that again, and if even if we did, SE will go overboard like they always do and half of them will end up sub-par.

I'm only mildly discontent with FFXIV being a feature-barren visual novel. But they've gotta hit gold every time to make it work.

The biggest sin of Dawntrail's MSQ was how stretched out it was. It comes from having a pretty loose idea of what constitutes an expansion. In other games, especially back in the day, an expansion was a huge systems change along with the aesthetics. In FFXIV it's just the aesthetics, so they feel like they have to keep increasing and increasing the length and scope of the story even when the only story they have is on-par with a free update beast tribe quest.

"In from the Cold" was a perfect representation of how to do present something right while doing it wrong. "Role Play" stuff is fine because you otherwise have to create a situation for the player that is counter-intuitive to how they play "DPS". Fun ways of doing that is the requirement to use the Magitek Armor to get through an area. However there's rarely a situation in the game where "doing anything but playing yourself" is preferrable. So I would much rather have a solo quest require using the magitek armor to "do some kind of crazy damage that we can't reasonably do", but that only makes sense during ARR. Bringing it back four expansions later as a one minute last-leg of a difficult hide-and-seek-smuggle quest makes it unfun because it has to be used as a crutch for the weak RP character we are stuck with.

Was it unique? Yes. Was it fun? Not particularly. Consider that it would be more fun to just be able to have Maggie show up as a solo instance where you WoL need to escape a crumbling facility and the RP is just using Maggie to blow holes through doors/walls/barricades for like 10 minutes before you are returned to WoL control and then just have to follow Maggie's trail of destruction back out.

Contrast with most of DT where the seven McGuffin quest is setup, but not even our competitors seem interested in actually doing it. Only Wuk Lamat and Koana seem to have any genuine interest in doing it. "Brother" views every test as an obstacle (even going so far as to comment that it was stupid to do it all) and the two-headed guy genuinely doesn't care about it either, but has his reasons (basically being a child.) Like from the initial setup we know who is going to win because Krile gives it away commenting on Zoraal Ja's aura being absolutely frightening.

It doesn't feel like we're here for any reason other than to be a cheerleader to Wuk Lamat, and that gives off echos of that hated Banquet quest in ARR. (Which used to be longer.)

People dislike ARR now, because it's two games worth of content (1-30, 30-50) where the first half of the game is just a lot of "get to know the locals", just like DT. Why the developers thought we wanted to do that again, is a huge shrug. DT doesn't feel like it actually has any stakes at all until "And the Land Would Tremble" quest, 60% of the way into the expansion.

Compare that with EW, where "Hope Upon a Flower", 46% into the expansion, is where we are sent to figure out one thing and learn all the threads woven into the game since 1.0. Even then, even if you didn't play Shadowbringers, the stakes are immediately evident as of quest 40 (the Tower of Babil), which is 25% into the game. "Isn't this the Zodiark we've been hearing about since forever?"

DT didn't have a chance to make something as compelling as the Moon, Elpis, or Ultima Thule. But we at least got Solution Nine and The Unlost World right? Yeah about that. The Unlost World and Ultima Thule feel like they are places we are supposed to visit once because they are empty. Contrast with Shadowbringers, where we are basically stuck on a version of Aldenard (Eorzea) with only the Crystal Tower being in the exact same place.

If you look at the map and compare it to the map we've seen up to Shadowbringers, you notice somethings:

a) Hey doesn't that silhouette of Eulmore where Limsa Lominsa is?
b) Amh Araeng is sitting right where Uldah would be
c) Il Mheg is where Ishgard would be
d) Rak'tika is where the Black Shroud/Gridania would be

Considering that one of the expert dungeons directly calls back to a quest chain in Shadowbringers ("The Great Deceiver" leading to unlocking the Qitari quests), it is my hope that these connections are explored, but it makes me wonder if the writers of DT maybe did not look at the map since it's location doesn't make a lot of sense unless you do some lore-bending and realize that the landmass Tuliyollal sits on is even larger than the Aldenarld landmass and is much farther west. Thus it would have been an area consumed by the light in the first, since "the first"'s map is basically the 1.0/2.0 map. And likely intended to be that way.

Since second half of the plot involves going

to a partial merge of Alexandria into this other reflection, you would think we would get more lore about the history of Eorzea 's previous calamities, but we have to basically settle for some backwards lore, where the key and the lalafells brought it to Alexandria from the source in the first place.

So I don't know. I think had the entire first half of the expansion been cut, and we started right at "And the Land Would Tremble", it would have felt like there were stakes for being here. But it feels like we're instead repeating the ARR 1-30 quests again.