Hello everyone,

I seem to recall seeing that the dev team didn't get why Dawntrail has done so poorly, so I thought I'd write up something of an exit survey. To start, I've been playing this since the end of ARR, and I have genuinely considered this one of the best games ever made for a good portion of that time. I kept my subscription running with minimal playtime up until Dawntrail's release, because I had faith that something at least enjoyable would be offered, but after keeping it open for one more month to wait for the first patch and realizing I don't want to be a part of this story anymore, I'm calling it here.

But lets start this with Shadowbringers. I've been playing long enough to remember when holiday events were packed with people and great rewards. They were great fun, felt like a community get together. And in Shadowbringers, we all noticed that they started to get lazier. Smaller stories, lesser rewards, and not coincidently the cash shop offerings started to get bigger. But, Shadowbringers was generally wonderful. And there were very reasonable excuses for some quality dips (some larger than others), so because Shadowbringers overall was of such great quality everything was 'ok'.

Endwalker rolls around, and it's more of the same. The story is wonderful, but other things are getting lazier. Epics went from Eureka (Beautiful, open zones with semi-dodgy mechanics) to Bozja (Better mechanics with kinda dull, uninspiring, and very linear zones) to being part of a side questline that was great in part because you didn't have to interact with it if you didn't like it's brand of humor. 1-4 player mini dungeons that were 'fun' but had very limited replayability, a terrible browser game, cash shop expansion while dungeon armor is mostly recolors, another deep dungeon that goes empty almost instantly, and so on. The story is still beautiful, the music wonderful, and so we handwave the problems (mostly) because we love the game, and because there are lots of reasonable excuses. New graphics engine, lots of work on XVI, etc.

Then, after a postgame story that in retrospect was being heavily propped up by FFIV, we get Dawntrail. But this time, instead of a fantastic story with lazier design that we're willing to forgive, we get lazier design with one of the worst stories I've ever seen. None of it makes sense, and the last few zones are actively damaging to the up to this point amazing world building. The voice acting is largely bad, some due to the script quality and some due to just being bad, the dungeons are mediocre, even more cash shop - the only thing I can commend it on is Soken continuing to be amazing. I didn't need a masterpiece of writing, but I did need something that had been written by a competent writer that was aimed at adults.

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