DT: State of the Game

[RinaB]

Imagine healing a drk at 100.
Drk:"hey I popped tbn and it's gone already, my worthless mit will be up again in 30 seconds and I'll struggle on my hands and knees until then ok?"
Healer: "ohh...thanks?"

[IDontPetLalas]

Imagine healing a drk at 100.
Drk:"hey I popped tbn and it's gone already, my worthless mit will be up again in 30 seconds and I'll struggle on my hands and knees until then ok?"
Healer: "ohh...thanks?"

That's far, far better than being in a group with a WAR., and even looking at it from the other side, playing a WAR, I really don't see the challenge. It should be brought much closer to where DRK is , and DRK brought up a bit.

[CuteBucket]

The MSQ Experience: Awful. Actively painful to get through. 2 points because there were a few moments in Shaaloani I enjoyed. I was really trying to give the benefit of the doubt here. The first half was slow and cheesy and predictable, but I thought it was building so something, so I just nodded and went along, even when I had to roll my eyes at parts. But once I got to the "twist" and met Sphene and realized this 4Kids half-baked friendship and understanding narrative was all I was going ever going to get out of Dawntrail, I was done. It was a chore to convince myself to keep playing. I was not expecting a masterpiece out of Dawntrail. I was more than happy to get another Stormblood, as I liked that expansion just fine and thought people dogged on it way too hard.

I genuinely cannot remember the last time I had this much of a bad time trying to get through a video game. Usually I'd just quit if that was the case, but I have years of love built of for this game and thought "they've only given me expansions I loved so far, why would they fail me this time?" and preordered the collectors edition, so I felt obligated to slog through the MSQ to get to the other side. I didn't skip a single cutscene, because I love the lore and worldbuilding of this game so much. Or at least I did. I like the previous stuff. I've also already written extensively about my issues with the story and characters in other threads, so I'll leave it at this: Wuk Lamat is bad but I don't think I've ever quite disliked a character that I felt I was "supposed" to like and feel sorry for as much as Sphene. She could have been so much more than she was. But everything about her is so indecisive and contradictory and half-assed that by the end of the game, I just wanted to delete both her and Wuk Lamat from my memory so I'd never have to think about a story arc so bad again in my life.

That leaves us with about a 4/10 in total for my Dawntrail review. BIG OOF.

[Jamini]

Imagine healing a drk at 100.
Drk:"hey I popped tbn and it's gone already, my worthless mit will be up again in 30 seconds and I'll struggle on my hands and knees until then ok?"
Healer: "ohh...thanks?"

Sounds like you've only experienced shit Dark Knights.

The good ones barely dent their health bar with rotating mits and rapid fire TBN every thirty seconds.

Of course, that requires at least putting our a 3/10 in effort instead of the -1/10 that WAR needs.

[Astronema]

How it is....
https://youtu.be/Mb7IH_UV2Uw

[ZXN]

1. Job+ Encounter Design
These two things can never be effectively separated. Fun fights and satisfying jobs are a fundamental requirement. You’ve done significant damage or outright destroyed a scary number of jobs, including the entire healer group. When I quit this game, on-going failure in this area will be the primary reason.

Fix Healers or retire the trinity. Period.
Revert the BLM changes.
Parity across the Tank group-> Ridiculous imbalance is ridiculous.
etc

Jobs certainly are quite a mess right now. Some have insanely high DPS, some have pathetic DPS. Healers are pretty much jokes. Tanks are insanely unbalanced. They really need to work on them. My only issue is I get the odd feeling they'll "Fix" every job by just looking at the "strongest" job and just buffing everything else a ton to get "close enough" to it instead of actually, you know...taking time to properly balance things. Encounter wise though I will say is leagues above Endwalker. The current battle content is fun and doesn't put me to literal sleep like Endwalker's did, so that's a step in the right direction at the bare minimum and I do have hopes it just keeps getting better.

2. Graphics Problems
Give us the settings we need to resolve the eye-strain, motion sickness, and lighting issues.
This is a deal-breaker for many players.

To me the update is...a mixed bag. While I am fine on it overall, for somethings it's absolutely noticeable. On others it barely looks like it's changed at all. I will say though they did over-correct certain things and it does hurt my eyes once in awhile staring at it for too long.

3. Failed MSQ
“Willing suspension of disbelief” is the critical element in storytelling.
The DT MSQ is an epic fail.
The writing and execution are just plain bad.
They not only failed to make us believe, they insulted our mental and emotional intelligence, and made people downright hostile toward the main character. It feels a bit like players put more thought, time, and heart into their critiques of MSQ than the SE teams put into creating it.

I've...definitely said plenty before about the state of the MSQ and a certain house cat, so I'll just summarize it this time by saying they REALLY need to step it up for the patch series. This whole "Let's take a passive and backseat approach so the newer people can get some experience" they seemed to want to do isn't really working. I won't say the new writers need to get the boot, but they need to be overseen a bit more closely until they can actually get some footing with what they are putting out.

[Zakuyia]

Ill way in. This looks fun.

Ok so grading scale 1 being lowest 10 being highest. Lets goooo.

Job updates....Ill give it a 8.

I haven't tried all classes but I did get what I really wanted. Better use of astro cards outside of always balance.

Story-2

I think the forum has explained this too much.

Characters- 5

There were some characters i really liked in dawn trail. Bakool jaja, kona, wuk lamats father (adopted), I didnt mind Zoraal ja.

But then I have characters I didnt like, wuk ofcourse, sphene, erenville mother are just to name a few.

Locals- 7

I give this a 7 cause of solution 9 being just a bit too empty.

Dungeons - 10

The difficulty visuals my god. Its such a wonderful breath of fresh air.

Boss fights- 8

While i have e joyed the bosses so far the eternal queen is my biggest gripe. Outside of phase 2 drama shes boring design, boring fight, and just overall not interesting villian in my opinion. Vali has one of coolest ex mechanics with tanks being the shield cover.

Raids- 10

My god arcadian raids I can gush over this for days maybe weeks why this raid series is amazing. 1 giant tv shows u ppl watch our fight, the fact the fight is being commentated on, npc notice limit breaks being used, npc call out 1 vs 8 as cheating, honey b lovely, the music. The visuals. The astetics, man I just love this raid series.

With that said if I add the msq Id be giving dawn trail about maybe a 5.5/10 but outside the msq I give dawn trail a 8/10 so far. Theres stuff to enjoy outside msq.

[Zelda206]

No matter what rate I give my experience with DT, it will continue to drop if the team won't stop making PR apologies for the EN VA that will not stop gaslighting people about not liking the most un-Final Fantasy music scroll in FFXIV. Cut the losses and take the overall experience critically in order to move forward with enriching content, whether that's by removing future experiences with Wuk Lamat's character or severely limiting future exposure to it. Separate the game and franchise from the meta-political nonsense being stirred up on social media and bring the S-tier game. I can look past the MSQ, despite the fact that it's the driving heart of the franchise, if they can do that at least.

Jobs, dungeons, current content: I'm a little bit of a 'Boxer', taking the punishment as it comes and doing the best with what I have, but when the story is the worst thing about my experience, then it's time for me to expect to move out if they double down. They set these *expectations for me up to DT (I expected nothing and simply went along for the journey when I started in ARR), they had better find a means to keep them. I'm not the only one.

*I'm not expecting thrills or heroics; I can take a back seat just fine. I want to see a myriad of characters grow, not just me or just one. I'm looking for world-building and not a front-row cheerleading, compliant 'yaas queen' seat to one of the most boorish characters in the franchise, and not limited to FF14 alone. What they did to the WOL's responses was straight up disrespectful.

[Striker44]

No matter what rate I give my experience with DT, it will continue to drop if the team won't stop making PR apologies for the EN VA that will not stop gaslighting people about not liking the most un-Final Fantasy music scroll in FFXIV.

Let's be real. Aside from a very specific sub-segment of the gaming population, people couldn't care less (and probably don't even have the slightest clue) what VA's do in their spare time.

[Mioooh]

I wanted to make this a separate topic, but since you try to gather all of the information, I'll just put this here.

I want to talk about the DT Story-writing.

Short about me for context: I did NOT study creative writing. I write only as a hobby. I'm very passionate about it, I took several masterclasses and I love to analyze, but I'm NOT a professional writer in any way, nor did I ever publish anything. So take all of this with a grain of salt.

That being said: There is a reason why you can actually study creative writing. There are certain rules you have to learn if you want to write a compelling story that is generally received as “good”. Of course there is a lot of wiggle room within these rules, this is where the creativity and writing style etc. comes in place. And if you are really good at it, you can even very specifically break some of those rules to achieve a certain effect.

These rules are not in place to restrict the writer. Rather, they make sure, the reader (or in this case player) has an engaging and immersive experience regarding things like organic character-building and exciting story arcs for example.

Of course, you can also apply these rules to analyze stories to pinpoint problems. This is also the reason why big stories usually go through an extensive editing-process.

I read some comments saying something like: "I can't put my finger on it, but this part of the story just felt off to me”. That is most likely because the writer broke a rule, and you're might not familiar with the concept, hence it just seems "off".

The reason I'm saying this is because I also read a lot of comments saying that “well, in the end it's all just opinions” or “the story might just not be for you”. That is NOT the problem. Of course some just don't like the overall style and that's absolutely okay, you can never appeal to everyone. But the reason that DT got so much critique regarding the MSQ is because if you analyze it, you'll find out that the writers heavily violated the rules of story telling, from start to finish.

Now, do I think the writers a bad? No, I don't, or at least not THAT bad. I will explain: There are several scenes, that are very well written and could have been and excellent base for are smaller arc within the overarching story. The potential is there, the momentum just wasn't used.

At this point I will just assume, that all of the writers at CBU3 have studied the subject, or have at least the reputation to get the job in the first place, especially for such a heavily story driven game. So all of them will be at least familiar with the workings of story telling. And this is what gets me suspicious. I wanna point to a scene, that stood out for me (even tho this might be a very specific example): (Part 2)