Please stop spoiling the appearance of big enemies before we meet them

[Valence]

This has been a recurring problem in XIV, and this time with Patch 7.4 the main story pulled the same thing: NPCs mention for the first time Doomtrain and talk how scary of a scourge this menace is to them. And then the game immediately proceed into showing us a full picture of the boss.

Like why? Why do you do that? We can't you let us imagine what that fearsome enemy may look like until we finally get to see it? Why do you have to spoil us like that with a picture on screen before? It feels very crummy and I struggle to understand the storytelling intent behind such a move - do you think every player watches patch trailers and live letters?...

Please don't do this again?

[0blivion]

To be fair, I think they assume everyone knows what the Doomtrain looks like from FFVIII. (Irrespective of whether that's true or not.)

[Avoidy]

That's a good point, yeah. Letting the player come up with their own idea of what the monster looks like might actually build it up as more fearsome and make the situation even more tense. Sort of like in Jaws, how you don't actually see the shark all that much. I never really thought about it, but most boss fights really do tell you what you're gonna fight before you do it. In this case, we're in another world essentially, and have no point of reference for what we're facing at all, so this could have been a great opportunity to hide details from us and surprise us at the last minute.

Oh well.

[Valence]

Even if the characters know what the enemy looks like in universe, it's the first time the WoL actually gets to see them. And even if it wasn't the case and something was known all over to the WoL visually, it would still not be to the player and the audience, and this ruins expectations and spoils the whole experience.

[Connor]

That would require competent storytelling though (and apparently they can’t do both lol). So…visual spectacle it is.

‘Who cares how it’s introduced or justified, just make it look good for the trailer’ - Yoshi P probably

[CaptainLagbeard]

Doomtrain being an FF8 reference kinda makes it hard to not have any spoilers on what it looks like.

[Jaltaer]

Also they do preserve the element of surprise... but it's saved for final bosses primarily, not "random boss in the middle of the patch series because we have to have a trial in every patch".

[ServerCollaps]

Another case for the category of first world problems

[ZephyrMenodora]

Don't we also get clips of these things in a lot of the trailers / patch preview sites?

I guess some of these things aren't meant to be big secrets to the player.

[Roda]

This has been a recurring problem in XIV, and this time with Patch 7.4 the main story pulled the same thing: NPCs mention for the first time Doomtrain and talk how scary of a scourge this menace is to them. And then the game immediately proceed into showing us a full picture of the boss.

Like why? Why do you do that? We can't you let us imagine what that fearsome enemy may look like until we finally get to see it? Why do you have to spoil us like that with a picture on screen before? It feels very crummy and I struggle to understand the storytelling intent behind such a move - do you think every player watches patch trailers and live letters?...

Please don't do this again?

It's not just "spoiling" stuff, it's like the writers/storyboarders don't trust us to know what the characters are talking about without doing children's TV programming tropes of word & picture associations every time they reference an event or proper noun. It has really been disrupting the flow lately.