Interview with YoshiP - PAX Aus 2024

[Alice_Rivers]

If they insist on ramming her down our throats patch after patch with five months between patches they might realise eventually people actually hate the character. Thing is, I'm beginning to think they actually believe what they're saying about her.

[Mortex]

When I read the article and they said they'd double down on Wuk Lamat since they fumbled the first time, I just knew I had to see the forum's reaction. Gonna be an absolute crapstorm here for the next 8 months.

The problem is (and we all know it’s gonna happen) that the story will suffer even more because Wuk has the depth of a puddle in the mid summer and final is a STORY mmo. Most people play final for the story and the characters and how they play around each other/work around each other. Dawntrails characters in general are a pretty massive nothing burger. Like going in a restaurant and ordering a massive steak only too get soup and you still have to pay for the steak so you get up and ask in the kitchen/waiter/waitress for the steak and get another soup. It’s just a bad feeling.

[Reinha]

The other factor was Wuk Lamat. She’s a very complex character, and she even has a bit of a complex about herself. Unfortunately, we didn’t delve very far into the background of why she had those feelings, so it appeared as if she left a negative impression. We accept that feedback. I feel a little sorry that we weren’t able to properly depict her. We may have been able to make her more straightforward, so we’re pushing her in the forefront as this character. But again, we’re going to be reflecting that learning into [content patch 7.1] and onward, we’re hoping that we can show more of what makes Wuk Lamat so great, and I’m hoping that we can regain from there.

Wow... they are unbelievably out of touch. It's one thing to admit there isn't enough time to pivot into a different direction and to say they will do that later. But that's not what they are doing. They didn't run out of time; they are choosing to double down.

[Daralii]

If they insist on ramming her down our throats patch after patch with five months between patches they might realise eventually people actually hate the character. Thing is, I'm beginning to think they actually believe what they're saying about her.

I wonder what internal reasoning they're using to just brush past the fact that the people that like her seem to be an outlier in every region. China finally got the expansion more recently, had their own most liked and disliked polls, and the results of the most disliked poll weren't exactly surprising.



I also very much doubt they're using the English dub.

[undull1]

Genuinely amazed, in true poochie fashion the corpo's will push wuk to the player base relentlessly until they "realise" that they actually love them.

Never in my life have I seen such vigor and passion shown for such a creatively bankrupt and garbage piece of s*** character. Wuk lamat is antithetical to most of the lore and world building of prior expansions.

Haurchefant dies? Guess he just wasn't as determined as Wuk Lamat
Garlemald starving to death? "Ohhh we should just talkkk it out, have a taco!"
Fandaniel awakens zodiark and starts the apocalypse?, "That was a bad thing.....but I'm sure you had reasons, let's be friends *SMILE BLAIRS IN THE BACKGROUND*"

Yoshi-p no longer plays or no longer cares, that's been obvious for awhile now, I implore people to stop treating his word as gospel, the team under his leadership have made countless mistakes over the years with no feedback implemented.

Vote with your wallets.

[Talael]

Im afraid Yoshida will only learn when its too late and the number of ppl playing the game goes down to a low not see since ARR release. I have nothing to do in the game and even when i do, my experience is affected by the abomination of MSQ we got in DT.

[Aniise]

The other factor was Wuk Lamat. She’s a very complex character, and she even has a bit of a complex about herself. Unfortunately, we didn’t delve very far into the background of why she had those feelings, so it appeared as if she left a negative impression. We accept that feedback. I feel a little sorry that we weren’t able to properly depict her. We may have been able to make her more straightforward, so we’re pushing her in the forefront as this character. But again, we’re going to be reflecting that learning into [content patch 7.1] and onward, we’re hoping that we can show more of what makes Wuk Lamat so great, and I’m hoping that we can regain from there.

Lol. Lmao even.

[honest_psycho]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

[Daralii]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

He said previously that the reception is what he expected and that the main problem with Wuk's writing was that she didn't have enough confidence. "WE understand that this character is great, even if you don't" is seemingly the hill that they've chosen to die on, genuine or not.

[VerdeLuck]

Fellas, I'm gonna be honest:
This game was a source of stability and sturcture for a few years now, and still do roullettes for the fun of it (got everything on lv100, mentor-mount, Tripletriad-mount, even the stupid Pteranodon so I did a lot)

Now, witnessing this absolute trainwreck of a story after investing that much time and effort into the game was not good for my mental well-being.
Of course I was trying to not let this 'drag' me down further (working on my games-backlog etc.)

But now I even see Yoshi-P himself join the ranks of people, who defend this story, this character...
There is no way in hell that he didn't see all the negative responses to Wuk Lamat.
I refuse to believe that he saw the endproduct and said "yep, this is great! Ship it!".

I REALLY hope, that he's just lying to save 'face' and not throw the writers under the bus (which he absolutely should btw.).

From my perspective this seems like both Yoshida and his team put way too much stock into Wuk in the 10 year plan, they were really hoping this would be a grand slam character everyone would love, the next Graha Tia, the next Zenos, the next Haurchefaunt. The fact player very decidedly do not like her on every poll and in every metric shown, every time she gets even a slight feature in the back ground of a promotional image, that post on reddit/twitter explodes with 10x the comment all fighting each other, and so on tells them they were wrong. But they have an ego now, they're the great CS3, the best developers in SE and in MMOs, they know better than us. It seems like they took this personally and also are reluctant to change the story they had mapped out years in advance to allow for Wuk Lamat to fall into the background.

It's so weird to see an entirely different Yoshida from ARR coming into this game, at the start he was humble, took player opinion seriously, read the forums, changed entire sections ased on player feedback. Now we have a monolithic dev team who churns out templated content on a regular schedule and the story is planned out years in advance so if anything goes wrong, they have to power through it and there's no stopping it. We are at a crossroads, either Yoshi-P and the team get it in gear and fix longstanding issues and become more flexible again, or this game starts to fall off and we hit maintenance mode much faster than we anticipated.