Dawntrail's Misleading Advertising

[Oizen]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, to be honest I'm not one to buy into hype. I consider myself very attuned to corporate PR speak and marketing, occupational hazard really. But One thing I cant get out of my head is how misleading all of the promotional material for Dawntrail has been up until now.


This was a slide from one of the fanfests, it describes an expansion we ended up not getting.

I don't think we ever spend any meaningful time with Erenville, Alphinaud or Alisae this entire expansion. Erenville's development is very backloaded and while I like the cutscenes and story he got, it was a sidequest in a larger narritive. Alisae and Alphinaud might as well have not been there.

To make matters worse the tagline of
"Little do they know that it will also see the scions divided..."

ended up describing the scenario where Thancred uses the lv 90 Gunbreaker Skill Double Down to drop some rocks on a path to make a dungeon slightly longer, and then is more or less our ally for the remainder of the adventure. Calling this divided is a stretch. This was such a big tagline they kept touting and its not even a part of the story.
No battle against the other scions, no heated arguments, quite literally nothing. Nothing except some rocks in a path.


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Moving onto the trailer itself, its just odd to me



Right off the bat after the boat scene, Estinien is given a large focus off the front. Taking up around 40 seconds to show him exploring the wilderness and fighting a beast in there. This never happens in the game, and while that isn't new its weird they give him focus at all. He's also barely in the final product, only showing up in Shaaloani. We only briefly get to see him before that and its not in the jungle, its just fighting Galool Jaja.

Moving into the biggest mislead of the trailer, the scenes with the scions walking the streets of Tuliyollal do not happen until after the MSQ concludes.



While this is presented as a cute re-creation of the trailer for the credits, I can't help but feel like it was deliberately done this way to mislead people into thinking that more marketable characters would have a higher presence in the narrative. Characters like G'Raha Tia and Y'shtola do not even show up until the 2nd half of the story, and even then their actual involvement and contributions to the plot are very minimal, borderline cameo roles.

This comes off as less charming and more deceitful to me.

Now one of the biggest criticisms of Dawntrail as a whole is Krile, she was another large segment of the trailer is devoted to, and the last bit before we wrap up with the WoL on the boat.


In previous expansions, characters taking on new jobs was a big deal as it symbolized growth and development. Thancred picked up a tank job to be Ryne's protector, Alphinaud picked up Sage as a form of inheriting it from his father. You get the idea. Pictomancer felt like a very poor job to put Krile on, it doesn't match her personality up until now, and unlike the previous examples. Krile's role as a pictomancer has no baring on the story. Its all just used for visual fluff in this trailer, she might as well have not had a new job here. This is more of a potential narrative being wasted, I understand the game needs new jobs and they make characters posters for that job to help sell it, but I like a bit more meat to it than "look the character you know is the job now please play the new job".

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Enough on the trailer, lets look at some real world marketing


This was a big mural they painted on the side of a building for the release of dawntrail. Again its more of what we've talked about. The WoL and two characters introduced in previous expansions. Not a single new character advertised here. I get playing it safe and going with the marketable cast, but its so consistent across the board by this point.


I'm very curious how this came to be, was it deceitful marketing, or was this all just made for an expansion that got rewritten so many times that it might as well have been a different expansion entirely?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Dang, why did no one bring this up for shadowbringers where they have the WoL fight a giant version of the lost city boss who isn't even part of the expansion at all?

[koko-on-da-forumz]

FFXIV CGI trailers are notoriously non-representative. They give a vibe, that's all.

[Volgia]

The most Karen post I've ever seen.

[Astronis]

Dang, why did no one bring this up for shadowbringers where they have the WoL fight a giant version of the lost city boss who isn't even part of the expansion at all?

The first boss of Holminster Switch?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

The first boss of Holminster Switch?

Minor boss, not giant, and certainly not something we struggled heavily with as in the trailer.

[hydralus]

Dang, why did no one bring this up for shadowbringers where they have the WoL fight a giant version of the lost city boss who isn't even part of the expansion at all?

... what? You fight it in the first fight of the first dungeon.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

... what? You fight it in the first fight of the first dungeon.

No, we do not fight a giant version of it. We fight the same version that's in lost city. And it's a minor boss that we do not struggle against at all, unlike the trailer shows.


I'm being slightly pedantic to show how silly the OP is.

[hydralus]

No, we do not fight a giant version of it. We fight the same version that's in lost city.

... no? The size relative to the trailer is actually very consistent with how they appear in the game (A hyur is only about the size of their shin, same in the trailer). I mean if you wanted to make a pedantic point say "What the Hell we didn't even get shit talked by a furry imp in shadowbringers" not something that was actually consistent.

[Mikey_R]

It is worth noting that the trailers don't necessarily reflect exactly what is going to be in the game itself. For example, in the EW trailer, we have the WoL fight off a blasphemy on the moon, but we never see them on the moon ever.

What I have a bigger issue is the fact it was sold as a new adventure for the WoL, but it didn't feel like an adventure, at least, not how I would see it. I expected to go to the different areas naturally, just going with the flow, but instead we are stuck following Wuk Lamat as her shadow.

The conflict between the scions is another one, what conflict? Honestly, having a narrative around the final zone, where different scions have differing opinions about the ethics of shutting down the terminals.

If you want my honest opinion, the whole rite of succession was a detriment to the story. We could literally cut it out completely and have the first half focus on finding the city of gold, alongside Krile. We go to Tuliyollal, find out some points of interest in the nearby settlements, and go there ourselves. Our adventure is finding the city of gold and along the way, we get to see various locales, interact with the people, help them out, just as we have done throughout our whole adventure. I felt more like the Warrior of Light doing the side quests than I did during the story.

As the OP said, we were sold one thing, but given something else.