Zepla's Dawntrail MSQ Analysis

[ServerCollaps]

The only thing I didn't actually spot right away is how Wuk Lamat, during the moment becoming Daenservant and talking to people on the balcony, addresses the Yok Huy being from Kozama'uka, when they're actually from Urqopacha. That's just straight embarassing how CBU3 team made this crucial mistake

I mean.. this also happened to western politicians in the current era..
They just made it more realistic

[CVXIV]

i just cant wait for the inevitable where wuk lamat's role in the story is reduced as the next expansion is hyped up but people are going to treat it as a win like the developers actually listened lmao

as for the video I'll have to check it out when I have the time
but a lot of points have already been made in the forums and in other places, so I don't know why the video is being proped up and praised
I guess it's because she's a big streamer?

I do more or less agree with the point of how draining it is for the whole thing to be turned into a political argument, and for Wuk Lamat to be the scapegoat for any and all problems for the Dawntrail MSQ

[Eldtagg]

As much as I enjoy FFXIV, Dawntrail highlights just how ancient the game is.

From the archaic quest design, which requires you to interact with NPCs along the route to the objective rather than them simply following you in real time and talking while you walk, as the other major MMORPGs have been able to accomplish for at least the previous decade.

The constant usage of ARR music in non-voiced awkward cutscenes, and a dead open landscape that primarily serves as an MSQ device.

I understand that it would be a massive (secondary) endeavor, but FFXIV requires a complete overhaul, including character creation, UI (poor inventory), open world rehaul, and bringing the game up to 2020, like World of Warcraft did years ago, despite its flaws.

FFXIV plays like a game from the early 2000s, and it feels older than both ESO and World of Warcraft combined because, while the other two have made an effort to update their systems over time, FFXIV has stagnated.

[sindriiisgaming]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1bcp-rjOBo

Going to be honest. I don't think this deeply about the story, so most of these things didn't really occur to me and honestly wouldn't in the future either.

But it's at least a constructive analysis of things rather than the vague statements made by everyone else.

(If you don't want to listen for an hour you can set it to 2x speed)

her video is completely scathing and im happy she pointed out everything wrong with wukky. yoshiP said recently he wanted to show "more of her cool side" so wede "like her" and i thought to myself. "OH GOD NO, PLEASE GOD NO" because he doesnt realize that the reason people hate her is because she has no flaws. SEA SICKNESS ISNT A CHARACTER FLAW!

at some point msq tried to draw parallels to emet selch and sphene and it actually offended me because emet is an amazing well rounded character with personality pain and intelligence. that is NOT sphene. how dare they honestly try and compare the two

[Avoidy]

Oh, I watched her play through this live and have been looking forward to this video. I enjoyed her analysis of the characters and the writing while she livestreamed; it took me back to when I was in those English classes in uni and we would pick apart everything in a book from the characters' motives to the writer's word choice, etc.
If you take that sorta "literary analysis" approach to Dawntrail (and I believe Zepla does this; she's stated before that in university she focused mostly on creative writing, so I think it would be difficult for her not to take this approach), the whole narrative falls apart. Even under really basic scrutiny, you're left wondering really superficial things like "if X character wasn't really a bad guy, why did he seem to enjoy being evil so much even when he was alone and didn't have to force it?" If you've ever written even fanfiction for funsies, you probably came away from Dawntrail feeling like they didn't go back and reread their own story. If they had, there would've been a better use of foreshadowing, and lots of the "telling" would've been replaced with showing. There was so much room to improve. I actually paid attention in the DT msq, but by the end I felt like an idiot for trusting the writers to go anywhere with it. It really was ARR all over again in the sense that it took my trust (in the writers and their ability to craft a compelling narrative) and once again threw it in the bin.

And none of this even mentions how it feels from a GAMEPLAY perspective, but others have done a better job of explaining that already imo. Exhibit A: showing us a cutscene during the train moment, instead of letting us actually play the train moment. That alone sums up the problems with DT's story from a gameplay perspective. There were so many lost opportunities like that. So many exposition moments that could've been playable echo flashbacks. If DT's writer had done endwalker, he would have made us read "in from the cold" as an unspoken dialogue box presented to us from wuk lamat herself, instead of letting us play out the experience of crawling along the ground. I could go on and on about this but I'll spare everyone. Thanks for the link OP. I would've missed it otherwise.

edit: LOL, love how she's gotta spend the first two minutes prefacing that "everyone has opinions" and gently nudging the DT lovers away so the fanboys who'll inevitably lose their shit don't attack her for not enjoying their favorite toy.

[Jeeqbit]

This is a bit off topic, but wanted to reply to it.

the archaic quest design, which requires you to interact with NPCs along the route to the objective rather than them simply following you in real time and talking while you walk, as the other major MMORPGs have been able to accomplish for at least the previous decade

Other games (especially single player games) were doing it long before FFXIV even existed and MMORPGs were always reluctant to catch up with those games. So I saw FFXIV doubling down on cutscenes for all interaction as just a unique FFXIV thing where they didn't want to innovate on it but rather double down on it. The cutscenes do allow for more interesting animated events to show with a cinematic camera, which might not show well if the player can move their character, since they could just look away from it or be exploring elsewhere and miss it (I remember this happening in one of the CoD games I played). But there is still value in events happening while you control the character because it's more immersive.

They do have it in the solo duties, dungeons and since Endwalker they have had characters follow you around sometimes like in FF8, but of course all the talking they do is rarely voiced and the vast majority of the story takes place in cutscenes that don't let you move the character. Not voicing them doesn't make sense sometimes, especially alliance and normal raid cutscenes because the boss fights themselves are voiced and the voice actors are right there in the recording studio.

The constant usage of ARR music in non-voiced awkward cutscenes

I actually feel they have kept the emotional music mostly to music from a given expansion and not re-used prior expansion music much - except in Dawntrail. It changed in Dawntrail. They tried to draw upon the greater variety of music from different expansions this time. I respect that they tried this, but it didn't work, because I like the fresh coat of paint (new music, new zones, new dungeons) and don't want to go backwards. I'm also not sure that they particularly used it well enough to justify it a lot of the time.

a dead open landscape that primarily serves as an MSQ device.

Feels intentional though. Older games than this had open world landscapes, so it's not simply that this game is "old", but rather that they just never cared for the open world much. They did a bit (which is why they make FATEs, hunts, maps and sightseeing logs) but still draw us into instances mostly. I think it's a design decision to make people play across worlds on cross-world duty servers, as opposed to people restricting themselves to their homeworld (which means they play with less people, potentially making it feel dead). It also means there are never too many or too few people in most cases, which is an issue with hunts.

FFXIV requires a complete overhaul, including character creation, UI (poor inventory), open world rehaul

I don't think it requires a character creation overall, but it would be a "nice to have" because there are way better character creators out there.

I don't think it requires an open world overhaul either. Because it's obviously a design decision to not be an open world game. If they want it to be an open world game, they could overhaul it, but otherwise I think people should just accept it's not an open world game. Maybe instead of making it an open world game, they could focus on improving the duty servers so we can queue for duties from within Field Operations, join PFs, send tells and speak to friends not in the duty, thereby making it "feel" like it's an open world area that doesn't restrict what we can do, while still being a cross-world area.

What I think IS required is a UI overhall. They keep adding to those menus and never remove anything. I can think of so many menu items that could be merged. It's wasteful and confusing to new players. For example, Raid Finder and Duty Finder are both listed but they are the same thing now! Not a single person uses Duty Recorder, remove it! V&C could be merged into DF as a third tab! Trust could be removed because it's already a button found within Duty Support!

I could go on, and on, and on about how wasteful the UI is like that, and how it's unnecessarily confusing for new players. My understanding is the UI team pride themselves on how amazing they are at designing UI, and while they have done some amazing things such as with controller support, they have become complacent about how good they are at designing UI, resulting in bloated menus, several inventories that serve the same purpose, multiple glamour inventories that serve the same purpose, slow inventory management in some cases, and cases where a request is met with "it's impossible" before subsequently adding it (proving that it was possible and they didn't know).

[TemporalFruitsAndVeggies]

They're probably blaming the specter of "Woke" "DEI" consulting firms or something, just guessing from what I've seen the conspiracy folks around the forums say since DT dropped.

I seriously disliked Dawntrail and was shocked at how incompetent of a story and world it built, but I don't think it has anything to do with Sweet Baby Inc. or whatever company is in people's crosshairs that isn't even confirmed to have worked on the game. I think it's the usual mundane suspects when a project like this goes wrong: bad management and corporate financial decisions on Square Enix's part, shuffling former writers and devs into other projects and leaving FFXIV with less staff and budget.

Oh I knew exactly what they were getting at, haha. I just didn't want to start yet another nonsensical "woke"/anti-"woke" war. People massively over-attribute power to those firms. Doubly so when they just can't accept Occam's Razor's simple truth: that a team just performed the cardinal sin of not doing a spectacular job with something.

[CamuiKushi]

Most of the time I disagree strongly with Zepla's takes but uhhhhh... I found nothing to disagree with here.

[Lunaxia]

The constant usage of ARR music in non-voiced awkward cutscenes, and a dead open landscape that primarily serves as an MSQ device.

Even "ARR music" is being a bit generous. It's basically:

Sentimental cutscene: Unspoken.
Lore/ exposition cutscene: Canticle.
Funny cutscene: Bliss.
Suspicious/ odd incident cutscene: Fracture.
Starting quest: Machinations.

I don't know if DT is much better, but I've been going through bits and pieces of EW content and it feels incredibly awkward and stale at this point, especially when it shifts jarringly from one to the other depending on the current mood.

[Hallarem]

Oh, it is worse than Zepla was willing to go into really, because the final zone is really ambivalent on whether we should or should not care about the plight of the Endless. Many of us who did the allied society quest in Ultima Thule came into the next expansion fully primed to consider recreated memories of life already extinguished, as a worthy new culture in its own right that we got to nurture and care about out there. But then in DT we go all Emet-Selch with "I don't consider you to be truly alive, so it's not murder if I kill you" on basically the same concept!

Now there are no doubt again going to be posters just waiting to jump on this with "ThEy'Re OnLy Ai", and that kind of shows that the same dilemma of deciding what is alive and not is as debatable iRL as it is in fiction, but that's beside the point. Due to the complete lack of our character being able to show any moral qualms about this, I have heard from quite a lot of people that they walked away in disgust that our character has now canonically committed a genocidal extermination of countless innocents, including women and children. Sure, it was a 'necessity' (although the game fails to even really back that point up, because it seems to have no effect whatsoever on what's happening at the Meso Terminal) to prevent our world being destroyed, but that is STILL on the same level as if Emet-Selch had destroyed all sundered life in his pursuit of saving *his* world. The writers really dropped the ball just glossing over how our own actions there look when seen in the context of all the lore of the previous expansions.

I think personally the Ultima Thule questlines cheapened the blow of these cultures being lost and was one of the signs of them cowering out od tragedy to pat us and go all "oj no! Its alright! Look the horrible diseased weasel aquatic people are actually given another chance! Pat pat pat!"