Does anyone else miss the feeling of fantasy in this game?

[Doopliss]

I think the three things that've been left unexplained with Tural are how the Alexandrians built the gate in the first place, how proximity to the gate gave the Yok Huy visions of the Golden City, and what it was the ancient Haragin people saw when they sailed east. I was so convinced it was gonna be Solution Nine, but that materialized later in the expansion.

Tural not having much conflict makes some sense because it's been in a period of relative peace for several decades, but the patches should be used to set up more tension. A lot of Alexandrians probably see Gulool Ja as a puppet ruler, especially since his guardian's the leader of another state. There are Turali people who were stuck in the dome for thirty years, and some of them have children who've never known the outside before. How will this affect Tural in the long run?

Yeah, I am aware Tural not having much conflict makes sense with how they have written it, I just think it’s a really, really lame plot point for a lack of better words. Something about the Coolest Dad In The Whole Continent nigh-flawlessly uniting everyone just felt a little…I don’t know the words. It just didn’t feel…interesting? Thoughtful? This is a completely personal opinion of course.

I do think the mysteries with Alexandria are neat but I do hate that they basically had to insert a fraction of another shard into a giant, unexplored-to-us continent to introduce any of those potential mysteries. And admittedly I just don’t currently trust them to make it interesting. Every character, inside and outside of the dome, severely underreacted to what a horrifying situation that actually was. Especially since it also served as a time warp…


Of course I do want to be proven wrong and/or surprised. I also don’t like being too harsh on writing for MMOs, since it is always a kind of weird, cumbersome task… Just, god damn.

[CuteBucket]

Dawntrail feels so deeply incurious about its world and setting, and it's a huge bummer to me. Its people are puddle deep. Its history is bland and unrealistically peaceful. We already solved what few problems it had. Even when we'd finish an expansion previously and solve one major conflict, there were always lingering questions that the game would explore in the patches. We drove the Garleans out of Eorzea, but now there's rising tension among the city states. We defeated Thordan, but Estinien is now corrupted by Nidhogg and the Ishgard is experiencing rampant civil unrest and the structure of their whole society is crumbling. We've freed Ala Mhigo and Doma, but the Garlean Empire is amassing on the boarders to push back in. We've saved the First from Calamity, but the souls of our friends are still trapped there and the Ascians aren't finished with us yet. We can argue over how well the patches addressed these issues, but the point is, we always ended with some further questions and conflict and plot to follow into the next expansion.

But something changed in Endwalker. Instead of taking the time in the patches to address the fallout from the final days raining fire and monsters down and the fall of a massive empire that has been omnipresent since 1.0, thus logically destabilizing the entire continent of Ilsabard, crashing economies, and creating a huge power vacuum, we go mess around on the 13th in what feels like it should have been a Trial sidequest that was made into the MSQ. Apparently there was ZERO fallout from anything that happened in Endwalker? And now, is there any lingering issues to wrap up in Tural for the next two years of MSQ content? Not unless they introduce some new conflict. Solution 9 has some potential to be explored more, as its concept is a dystopian hellscape, but the MSQ treated it like it was a super neato place where everyone is doing great except for the people that aren't but we're not going to talk about them (the side quests explore some darker themes, but they are very short and don't go anywhere or lead to anything, at least for now).

[sylphlands]

I was also a little meh on the gods being ancients. I just wanted them to be gods, I don't think they needed to be explained and demystified the way they were in the alliance raid series. My biggest issue is how DT sapped so much fantasy and magic from the world as a whole, it felt very uninspired and honestly pretty depressing. Tural had the potential to be interesting, and then we get sucked into the cold and empty S9 and it was just...an awful experience in what should have been a fantasy game. I miss how magical things felt in SHB.

[Jojoya]

Especially the feeling of adventure as well. I think the stuff about the Ancients ruined all fantasy elements of this game going forward, like we've seen with the Twelve, the supposed Gods of the planet, they were literally just Ancients as well, so going forward, if we see something magical or wondrous, there's just going to be that thought of "Oh this was just something from Amaurot"

What do you consider fantasy? It isn't a single thing even if most associate it with sword and sorcery set in a medieval era.

The Ancients are about as fantasy as things get - capable of doing anything with their creation magic.

It sounds more like you miss the sense of mystery (how did these things even come to exist?). We got the answer now and that answer seems to apply to just about everything we encounter.

[Eyrilona]

Perhaps what is lacking is not a sense of fantasy, because all the elements of that are still present, but one of suspense and mystery, some idea that there are things afoot that we do not yet understand. In that sense, I agree we are pretty empty handed at the end of Dawntrail. It introduced so little that it didn't immediately resolve right after, and hastily concluded most interesting plot threads we still had going from previous expansions as well. There is no other shoe we are really waiting for to drop at this stage of the game.

[Connor]

I’m still not convinced Dawntrail isn’t going to fall into the standard ‘LOL ASCIANS’ bullshit they’ve done every other expansion. Where it looks like they might actually be introducing something new and different…only to find out, nope, it was ascians all along! . Living Memory? Sphene? The magic key thing? It’s 100% all going to lead to some crappy ‘Ascians STILL trying the same shit they were doing in ARR’. Which is hilarious because they claimed so hard last expansion ‘yeah guys this is TOTALLY the end of that arc we’re totally moving on!’. Until 7.1 when it’s revealed the idea for Living Memory came from…you guessed it…Ascians

[Jojoya]

I’m still not convinced Dawntrail isn’t going to fall into the standard ‘LOL ASCIANS’ bullshit they’ve done every other expansion. Where it looks like they might actually be introducing something new and different…only to find out, nope, it was ascians all along! . Living Memory? Sphene? The magic key thing? It’s 100% all going to lead to some crappy ‘Ascians STILL trying the same shit they were doing in ARR’. Which is hilarious because they claimed so hard last expansion ‘yeah guys this is TOTALLY the end of that arc we’re totally moving on!’. Until 7.1 when it’s revealed the idea for Living Memory came from…you guessed it…Ascians

Oh, we already know it's going to lead back to Ascians. We've had too many hints.

But it's not going to be "they're still trying". What we're looking at is one of their abandoned schemes and the society that resulted from it.

So are we going to spend the next 10 years running around trying to fix what the Ascians screwed up on the remaining reflections?

[Kranel_San]

I’m still not convinced Dawntrail isn’t going to fall into the standard ‘LOL ASCIANS’ bullshit they’ve done every other expansion. Where it looks like they might actually be introducing something new and different…only to find out, nope, it was ascians all along! . Living Memory? Sphene? The magic key thing? It’s 100% all going to lead to some crappy ‘Ascians STILL trying the same shit they were doing in ARR’. Which is hilarious because they claimed so hard last expansion ‘yeah guys this is TOTALLY the end of that arc we’re totally moving on!’. Until 7.1 when it’s revealed the idea for Living Memory came from…you guessed it…Ascians

The entire plot of this expansion, aside from the succession, reeks of Ascians' shenanigans. Except, there are none around. I was expecting Sphene to be an Ascian herself, but apparently not. Nonetheless, I really still feel there's an Ascian nearby.

[Hallarem]

The sense of mystery, the undiscovered, adventure.
The writers dont understand. We dont NEED to know everything down to an exact science. We dont NEED a glimpse beyond the veil.

Twelve RUINED
Anything godlike and mystical? Sharlayan: "lol its primals or ancients"

Any mystery left to solve? Scions or Sharlayan has an instant explanation without ZERO sense of wonder or surprise. Its really jarring.
In fact I think Yshtola had an example of that this expac. "Hiya. Exposition catto here.. its another shard.. ok bye!"

Asspull spaceship. "OH SHARLAYAN HAS A PROBE IN THE AFTERLIFE" sigh, why even bother adventuring. When Sharlayan knows everything and can asspull a solution to everything. Thancred cant teleport? Oh lol nvm! WE JUST HAPPENED TO INVENT A TELEPORTER THAT DOESNT NEED YOUR EFFORT. this games writing physically hurts me

[OMGJesuis66]

The sense of mystery, the undiscovered, adventure.
The writers dont understand. We dont NEED to know everything down to an exact science. We dont NEED a glimpse beyond the veil.

Twelve RUINED
Anything godlike and mystical? Sharlayan: "lol its primals or ancients"

Any mystery left to solve? Scions or Sharlayan has an instant explanation without ZERO sense of wonder or surprise. Its really jarring.
In fact I think Yshtola had an example of that this expac. "Hiya. Exposition catto here.. its another shard.. ok bye!"

Asspull spaceship. "OH SHARLAYAN HAS A PROBE IN THE AFTERLIFE" sigh, why even bother adventuring. When Sharlayan knows everything and can asspull a solution to everything. Thancred cant teleport? Oh lol nvm! WE JUST HAPPENED TO INVENT A TELEPORTER THAT DOESNT NEED YOUR EFFORT. this games writing physically hurts me

Pretty much this. And has ever been like this. Instead they could give us more world building and culture for races that have as much as a stale bread. Let us be immersed in the world. Instead, more solutions to every mystery and everything basically tracking to unveil Ancients web of mess.