Quote Originally Posted by jonimated View Post
I get this sinking feeling that Dawntrail has the potential to be FFXIV's "Shadowlands" if something drastic doesn't change. As in a not insignificant portion of the player base is going to come to the conclusion during the next 2 years that FFXIV is simply not for them anymore, and honestly that feels bad.

I mean what is an RPG that has uninteresting combat and a mid story? Ask WoW players circa 2020 - 2022.
Really? Because in WoW that was more an issue of it capping off a steady decline in production quality and a steadily more idiotic story, and then this weird slingshotting on class design. That came to a head in Shadowlands, but the individual problems were all not only around before, but partially actually worse before.

With Shadowlands, it was the thing tha the players as a joke predicted the story beats, meant to be "Hey at least the story isn't this stupid!" and then they go and do exactly that. But gameplay wise, WoW had been at far worse points. And better points. And everything in between. Keep in mind the age of WoW ~2020 already. And just how many iterations everything had gone through.

That's maybe actually the problem here, in FFXIV: We haven't had that yet. Even their "reworks" were mostly rather benign. The only total rework so far was really Summoner. Everything else kept many of the overall elements, it just shuffled things around, merged, split and restructured. Maybe what FFXIV in fact needs is more willingness to actually go and break stuff. WoW had by the time of Shadowlands gone through... five talent systems? FFXIV never even had one!