Thread: [Thought Experiment] Is Dawntrail's 7.0 MSQ Planned to be "Terrible"?

Originally Posted by Masekase_Hurricane

Right—because when loads of people are saying the same thing, it must still just be a personal issue.

Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

There are fairly objective measures of good quality writing, though. I don't think anyone is going to tell you that stilted dialogue is a good thing, for example. Same goes for bad pacing and similar issues Dawntrail is absolutely plagued with. There are absolutely things that come down to taste (personally, I hated Wuk Ewu and didn't find him funny at all), but if a house is structurally unsound, you can't tell me I don't like it just because of the color of its walls.

Cleretic's point is that this isn't a "planned failure" or whatever. The writing they gave us was flawed and easily criticized and a lot of people disliked it including you. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy. There's plenty of people who like Dawntrail's story who don't frequent the forums so they don't comment here because of the Forum's (justified) reputation of a circlejerk of negativity and hateposting.

Again, there are plenty of valid criticisms of Dawntrail's writing that I agree with, but it's not intentionally bad.

For all its faults, Dawntrail is sincere in its themes of the weight of legacy, the importance of understanding the people you live with (even your enemies), and the dangers of toxic nostalgia. While it could have been executed better, the writer's themes still showed through and came together powerfully in the finale of the main story. And the patch story continues to build upon this with the dark sides of Alexandria and the reintroduction of Queen Sphene to give a contrasting voice to its current state.

I enjoyed Dawntrail's main story a lot. We asked for a summer vacation expansion and we got it. Heck, I'm more sympathetic to Zoraal Ja than most since I know what golden child burnout looks like.

It's fine to criticize something, but to descend into conspiracy theories like this feels wrong when there's nothing to corroborate it.

Originally Posted by Cleretic

(mostly; the first trip to Shaaloani's a dud)

Personally it was the second trip to Shaaloani where the story went worse, not the first. Rushed pacing where you don't even get to meet the inhabitants of Heritage Found before Zoraal Ja and Sphene's influence happened. Its meant to be some big game-changing moment, but instead its cheapened by the lack of proper emotional connection to what the territory was before. If the dome and solution 9 and the lightning storms happened to somewhere we already visited, it would be more weighted as we been there before. Such as when the various towers that sprang up with the lunar primals and lunar tempered, that was more impactful because those were attacks on established places that we had visited. If the dome appeared where Shaaloani was, not Heritage Found, that would have created a stronger narrative as we actually got to spend time with and learn from the people who lived there as the people met there would have aged 30 years and any who died well nobody would remember them except for the player and Erenville.

The closest emotional connections you can even have is Namikka, Wuk Lamat's nurse maid who is already middle-aged, and Cahciua, Erenville's mom, which we didn't even meet her before she became an endless as she was at best mentioned. Imagine how much more impactful the story would've been if we, for example, talked to Cahciua in our first trip to Shaaloani, then we met the robot she is remotely controlling there would be a stronger sense that she is fine because viera are naturally long-lived, only to then much more harder shatter that illusion the player has to reveal that she is an endless.

Originally Posted by Chasingstars

Imagine how much more impactful the story would've been if we, for example, talked to Cahciua in our first trip to Shaaloani, then we met the robot she is remotely controlling there would be a stronger sense that she is fine because viera are naturally long-lived, only to then much more harder shatter that illusion the player has to reveal that she is an endless.

I don't actually think this would do anything.

Cahciua isn't really meant to be a character that exists independently, if that makes sense; her story is an extension of others, and our interactions with Cahciua are rather intentionally all through Erenville as a lens. She largely exists within the story as the person who, through both action and inaction, shaped who he is. Dawntrail is a story preoccupied with legacy, and with Erenville and Cahciua we see that manifest in a more abstract way than the much more concrete form we got with Gulool and the Promises.

...In fact I actually think it's rather telling, when we also keep in mind that theme of memory, that Cahciua only exists in memory; it's actually rather clever that we never meet her ourselves, we only ever meet her memory, as she appears in Gulool's journey across Yok Tural, and then later as an Endless. It might in fact be why we don't see her as an older woman, so she can only exist as that youthful memory. That would've been fun to do more with.

Namikka could've used one more scene during the first trip to Shaaloani, just to define her as a character a little more, but I don't think anything more than that. I don't particularly care about her as a character, but I also don't really think the story falls apart because I don't; I buy that Wuk Lamat cares about her, and that's much more important.


As for the fact that Heritage Found's people don't really get to exist outside of Sphene's presence, I think that's true but I think it's also intentional. In large part I'm thinking about how 7.1 established that A: there's governmental uncertainty about who owns what parts of that stretch, and B: that we actually do see some wobbly interpersonal stuff around people's relationships with that. That there's people from Yyasulani that don't feel comfortable going back to Tural because it's been thirty years and they're just fundamentally different places in terms of day-to-day life. We're never going to be detached and neutral about our own responses to seeing that, but I think by deliberately not letting us visit Yyasulani pre-dome, they're priming us to be a bit more inclined to sympathize with the people in that place who 'grew up Alexandrian', to at least recognize the validity of their stances, whereas if we saw them pre-dome we'd be more inclined to look at that as their 'default state' to return to. (It's actually a little similar to how I generally look at Seven of Nine from Star Trek, but that's too tangential to go into.)

With that one we're delving more into the still-ongoing patch storylines, so I can't say with confidence why they're doing it, or if I like the result. But I can say that I do think that they did it deliberately, and that it wasn't just 'rushed writing'.

Originally Posted by Dikatis

Cleretic's point is that this isn't a "planned failure" or whatever. The writing they gave us was flawed and easily criticized and a lot of people disliked it including you. That's it. It's not some grand conspiracy. There's plenty of people who like Dawntrail's story who don't frequent the forums so they don't comment here because of the Forum's (justified) reputation of a circlejerk of negativity and hateposting.

Again, there are plenty of valid criticisms of Dawntrail's writing that I agree with, but it's not intentionally bad.

For all its faults, Dawntrail is sincere in its themes of the weight of legacy, the importance of understanding the people you live with (even your enemies), and the dangers of toxic nostalgia. While it could have been executed better, the writer's themes still showed through and came together powerfully in the finale of the main story. And the patch story continues to build upon this with the dark sides of Alexandria and the reintroduction of Queen Sphene to give a contrasting voice to its current state.

I enjoyed Dawntrail's main story a lot. We asked for a summer vacation expansion and we got it. Heck, I'm more sympathetic to Zoraal Ja than most since I know what golden child burnout looks like.

It's fine to criticize something, but to descend into conspiracy theories like this feels wrong when there's nothing to corroborate it.

I'm in agreement, and to be honest.... it's refreshing to read positive opinion regarding Dawntrail and I've always disagreed with this narrative from many in the community that Dawntrail was the most catastrophic piece of fiction ever produced in gaming.

I've always said I enjoyed it - it wasn't my favourite expansion (Endwalker takes that spot for me, personally) but I did nonetheless enjoy my initial playthrough and didn't reflect on the negative plot points until I'd completed 7.0. In fact, one element I've found difficult is how easy it is to feel gaslit (through the negativity) into thinking the elements I enjoyed were not as good as I remember.
I guess it helps that I don't view Wuk Lamat as negatively as most forumites too - there was only one instance in the story where her presence annoyed me, and that was the Queen Eternal fight - I won't elaborate on that, as I've expressed my thoughts on that matter numerous times in numerous threads.