Video

Dawntrail defenders be like: "It's impossible to make the first 30 hours of a new story anything but terrible. you've just got to have faith that it'll get better after a few more years"

The fact that people attack other players criticism and censor discourse. These really are the dark ages of gaming...what happened to the times where we as a community stood up for each other and demanded the best from game companies who WE the consumer pay out money toward. Zepla if you see this comment. Know that I agree with you. This expansion personally for me was worse than stormblood. You are a huge FF14 influencer on CZcams and Twitch. You have the means to bring change for the better. Please don't shy from being honest and true to what you think.

I just think of Dawn trail as the start to a new book, rather than a new chapter in a book, because End Walker really was the end of a book and now they are starting a new one. and where do you go anyways from the end of End Walker? that was the one of the highest highs in FF and especially XIV as a whole. it was a return the being just an adventurer rather than the Warrior of Light, I thought it was nice.

I'm usually too stupid to criticize things and just generally enjoy things for what things are, but dawntrail felt like a drag in the first half. Once Solution 9 came into play (too late in the story in my opinion) is when the story actually got good for me. Video games are meant to play into Main Character Syndrome and DT failed in that department. I didn't make Wuk Lamat in the character creator when I started the game, I made my own character. Look, I'm a simpleton, I love the futuristic aesthetic, and I love the FF series. While I'm perfectly fine with the olden times style/aesthetic, we have had the same medieval, ethnic, cultural, style/aesthetic for over 10 years now in FFXIV, the addition of Solution 9 is a long overdue need. Before anyone says it's Final "Fantasy" and not Final Sci-fi and FF has always been medieval, 1: You're wrong, look at FF7, FF13, FF15, just to name a few. Those weren't medieval themed. so FF CAN do modern and futuristic. 2: The "fi" in sci-fi means fiction, and fiction is the same meaning of fantasy; therefore, sci-fi does fit in the FF universe. But small tangent aside, Solution 9 is the most OP and greatest character in all of FFXIV.

This "in the middle" is such a weird logical fallacy, sometimes the factual answer is down one end of that spectrum of ideas and the other end is just ... wrong. I worship this game and Yoshi-P but I have some brain cells to rub together and I've read books more complex than "See Spot Run" so I can unequivocally state that Dawntrail's MSQ is apocalyptically bad on almost every level, it makes ARR look like Shakespeare. People seem to think that opinion and reality and taste all merge in this sort of blameless, unverifiable mess in the centre. Opinions are NOT automatically correct because of "subjectivity". If my opinion is that See Spot Run is more sophisticated literature than King Lear then I am simply an idiot whose opinion is wrong, just say it, wrong. If I say "I enjoyed reading See Spot Run more than I enjoyed reading King Lear" then this is objectively fine because my tastes and feelings are 100% subjective to me. People can say I might need to improve my taste but it's still mine. This logic doesn't apply to previous idiot opinion. Dawntrail is bad, there are so many crimes against writing and game design that yes it probably takes 50 pages to list them all, don't shy away from saying that. There's no cognitive dissonance in saying FF14 = good, mechanical elements of Dawntrail = good, MSQ = beyond awful.

He was working on ff16 while most of the heavy work was as being done on dawntrail

I worry about the future of this game.

Hey everyone! Sprout speaking ... I've just gotten through Heaven's Ward. So I recognize I'm not going to understand all the ends and outs of what people are upset about. But I just wanted to remind all you old guys that many of the things you're saying about DT now, is what you warn us sprouts about concerning the beginning of the game. Just a little food for thought here ... the FF team is starting a new line of stories. Stories are always slow in the beginning. Especially those with large amounts of content. There's a reason many people prefer the LoTR movies over the books. It's a lot and the buildup is slow! The FF team has to work through all the ideas they're having, and figure out where it's going to go. And not all those ideas are going to be gems. They are human after all. But they've always come through in the past. This is just the beginning of a new story and it needs time to develop. I haven't been playing as long as many of you, and I don't know anything about the DT story. Nor do I want to until I get there. But my understanding is that the FF community is very important to Yoshi-P. Do you really think he's going to leave us hanging with a bad story? Personally, I have faith in Yoshi-P. He really cares and that's super rare in game companies. I think they just need a little time to get it moving. Yoshi-P had no problem admitting things are not the best they can be. Which means he's going to be working to improve things. Just have faith in the process ... have faith in Yoshi-P. He's earned it. It'll all be good =)

I think we have to read between the lines a little bit. He isn't the CEO or a private owner, he's an employee with bosses (as well as a boss with a team of employees). I think the company decided to prioritize XVI over XIV. If you look at the release dates, it looks to me like time and resources were very likely (maybe inevitably) taken away from DT. Yoshi P may well have been ok with this, given his position, the conclusion that was EW, and the feeling that whatever came after EW would have to be lesser and so downplayed. I think YoshiP's perspective is that DT needs to be good enough, not great, and it needs to set up plot threads for later. I think the more interesting thing to watch will be SE's financials over the next year or so. Not my thing, but given what has been said in the past, it will shape their priorities in the future if XIV starts losing subscribers. That doesn't mean they will learn the right lesson of course.

Of course he's not shocked. Endwalker was the end of a very long climactic story. Dawntrail is basically ARR over again. It is the start of a new story. To try and look at Dawntrail as the next big epic story is ridiculous. You don't go from a climactic story ending to a climactic beginning.

We didnt like AAR that much either but it was the start of somthing great lol

Some of my favorite anime’s have a weird beach episode filler arc thrown in there, maybe this is the same

This piece was the singular biggest orchestral mistake in the entirety of the MMO, and that's not me exaggerating. I'd rather listen to the basic battle them from ARR than have to listen to this one ever again. I actually quit out of the game, turned off the BGM, replayed the chapter and its CS and had Donkey Kong Country music playing in the background instead. 🤣

Another word for growth, wrt a character arc, is change. Growth implies, optimistically, change for the better, but it doesn't have to be. One way they could have made Wuk Lamat a more interesting character would be to have her change for the worse. After her father's murder she could have been overcome with grief and rage. We go do Vanguard without her, maybe Koana comes along to lend his knowledge in defeating the techno-barrier. We open up a pathway permanently, and get the dreaded message to return and speak with WL, but this time its implied something is wrong. When we arrive, WL is giving speech rallying her people to war. Her countenance is changed for the darker. Maybe her job class changes to Viper (or DrK) and she now wields her fathers sword(s). Maybe its later revealed an Ascian visited her and offered her power. Koana tries to stop her but is rebuffed, maybe she calls him a coward and exiles him, or maybe she calls him a traitor and kills him, but maybe that's too much too soon. Arriving at Solution9, she acts the complete opposite, clearly out for blood. The rest of the story plays out much differently, with Speen remaining a sympathetic figure for now (push that arc to patch content maybe), and WL is the final Trial.

This expansion almost turned me into Zenos. An uncaring and bloodthirsty beast.

I'll be honest: Perhaps the team would have had a better reception for Wuk Lamat if they hadn't stuck her in our face like a record player turned up to full-blast and with no means to get away from her, not to mention we had no criticism to that character AT ALL (every response you can give is cheerleading, and even if you choose the "...", it's painted up as if you're so awestruck that you don't know what to say). She had the most screentime with the most redundancy and the biggest amount of plot armor to rival the Shield of Light we once had in ARR; she was not all that interesting. The biggest rage-inducing moment I had was her LB3 fight with Bakool Ja Ja and the hint that her 'resolve was bigger than his' and that's why she won. The guy was packing a major weight in his corner [that hardly got explored] and an entire culture that had been left to rot with nothing but bananas to eat [due to a cold war], thanks to the lack of maintenance from Gulool Ja Ja, so how the power of 'resolve' didn't at least plant the pair at a stalemate (since the power gap was that immense) is a major error in judgment to me and the deciding factor that the character had jumped the shark. Take away any weakness from a character and you find it unrelatable; a fear of heights and boats do not count in this fantasy world where weakness can make characters endearing, like Hauchefant.

At least Yoshi-P is acknowledging the player base. You can't make everyone happy and nothing will be great 100% of the time. Trends are bound to go down and this expansion just happens to be a downtrend of an experience for some (or a lot) of the fanbase. We all have our own opinions of the game and ultimately it'll be the choice of the fan to continue to see what's to come, or to walk away. Those are just a few choices. It is what it is.

It felt like a stream of consciousness rough draft. Kind of like the unmitigated disaster the benchmark was. Lol

I like the story but yea was too much slow progress to get to the next dungeon or trial as Yoshi P some quest should of been optional or side quests examining statues or catching a lama basic example of boring questing

It's a filler expansion that was so flawed that they had to introduce the next expac into it to take over. Solution 9 was never meant to be part of this expac if I'm right. Wuk Lamat story was probably going to carry longer but it was so crap they had to remove big chunks of it in order to fit solution 9 into it.

I'm sorry journey to a new land is not an excuse SB also journeyed to a new land and was so much better recieved than DT all the final fantasy expacs including 2.0 was 8 or higher on Metacritic and DT is a 6, sorry new land and culture is not an excuse here.

Why does Directors was like so detached with Writers? They should atleast manage the Writers. If feels like if I am the writer I could do whatever I want and the Director won't even question my work. Hummm.

Post-EW flopped hard on writing, and once the narrative spell is broken, you start to see all the cracks in the foundation even if you're not looking for them. This spell isn't broken by choice, and it really is time they say goodbye to the awful ShB paradigm and make the game fun to play again.

He once said "One complaint is worth two compliments". I hope he still believes this. Cause this expansion wasn't it. I respect that man and I pray he hasn't fallen. This might be the second time he has had to save a storyline. This is probably his ARR moment all over again. I love this game. I'm not going anywhere, but this direction needs to change. Starting with never letting us see Wuk Lamat again.

This is almost like a genuine reaction! And here I thought her chat already beat out of her any honest Dawntrail reactions instead of 'no feedback, only praise, drop it cause its been a month'. Might be hope yet.

I do feel for the writers of Dawntrail. It seems like they were new, and while this will be a valuable learning experience they were facing an uphill battle from the get go-I mean, you're making a story following the conclusion of a story with *10 years of build up* and this might even be your first big break...how do you even begin to measure up to what you're up against so fresh out the gate?

After skimming this article and then hearing Zepla going over it in more detail... yeah I don't regret unsubbing. I sub FOR THE STORY. I raid in wow, I have enjoyed the story in wow, cried sometimes, but I play ff14 for the damned story, it makes me cry /a lot/ and brings me joy and makes me smile. DT purely annoyed me. It's so disappointing and disheartening. Let me know when the next story is out and I can pay to skip DT because honestly? Fuck this elementary school writing. I'm not supporting it.

Keep up the great work Zepla!!!

just bring back Ishikawa, problem solved lmao.

So much of this expansion feels "phoned in."

i knew Xalatath was going to be a power player with the old gods

Can't wait for the 7.X series to come out and be the same slop. And even then people will still be copeing, saying it's not that bad. 😂

I wouldn't expect Ishikawa to come back. She's likely onto bigger things.

You know what would make the story exciting? Take one of the scions and turn them into the next major villain. It might upset some people, but it would still be good story writing imo.

I stopped genshin after doing Fontaines story and genuinely i do not want to go back and invest in dailys and have to play through a bunch of characters storys i genuinely do not care about so unless CS skipping or a fast forward i am not going back

It's understandable that YP has a responsibility to protect the brand and company but it's concerning to hear that he doesn't seem to understand the negative criticism for DT. I can only hope he either actually does understand but has failed to properly explain it. Otherwise I fear our feedback is failing to reach the ears of those who need to hear it most.

Promise? Wuk lamet ✅ Resolve? Wuk lamet ✅

The way I kind of understand the explanation of the pacing is that they wanted to spend a lot of time introducing the individual cultures of the pelupelu, the bird people, the giants, the mamool ja etc. But they overdid it. We did not need a full map to get that the pelupelu are human child merchant people with one singular character model between them.

When Yoshi-P says that EW was a huge climax and that led him to predict a mixed response to the next arc I don't think he meant he thought DT would be BAD, just that the RECEPTION to it would be mixed because it's a denoument arc coming off an incredible ten year crescendo. It's the beginning of a new arc that needs to build back up from a lower starting point and is inevitably going to be less exciting than EW. I don't necessarily AGREE with that sentiment, especially since he previously stated that he didn't view the relationship between EW and DT that way - he saw DT as just a continuation of the story.

I greatly disagree with you on a lot of fronts here. While I do agree that there are parts that need trimming and refinement, I think that there is a solid core that makes Dawntrail at least as good as Heavensward. You talked a lot about seeing a lack of character development, particularly for Wuk Lamat. Lamat's development goes from a somewhat sheltered princess trying to emulate her father and older siblings to a ruler with a solidified philosophy. We see her come to understand how she doesn't really know her people throughout the first two zones, but resolve to be better. We see Bakool Ja Ja challenge that resolve. Even after Lamat overcomes him, physically, she holds fast to that conviction and seeks to understand why he has acted the way he has and why the Mamool Ja of Mamook behave as they do, which is her overcoming Zoraal Ja. Shortly after, she is made co-Dawnservant, which now puts her in direct comparison against Gulool Ja Ja. Now introduce the Alexandrians. With them being literally at war and the very souls of her people under threat, many would have abandoned ideals in favor of survival and scouring the threat. Instead, at every turn, Lamat makes the choice to stick to her ideals and do everything in her power to find a peaceful solution. Even when she fails, she sticks with her resolve and tries to talk Sphene down. By the end of the MSQ, we've gone from Wuk Lamat, a laissez-faire princess who hides from her insecurities behind a veil of bravado, the the Vow of Resolve, the protector of her people who values compassion and understanding. Solid 8/10. A fun little amuse-bouche while they set up the board for the next major saga.

For the better? People do y want to stay and help mount farm anymore, and if you see a farm group fail once people leave, the healer strike, statics blowing up more than ever before, people used to help you both through main story and side content and even give you tips now it’s none of that it’s more toxic now since endwalker imho

I like Guild Wars 2. Everyone is a DPS, including the healer. Also Warclaw is not a new mount, it's just that you had to PvP to get it, now there's a PvE method of getting it.

Wow I feel like I'm in the minority that really liked dawntrail

this story was not only worse than SHB and EW. It was the worst story arc of the entire mmo. if the Void arc and this swapped places it would have been wayyy better.

Well yeah anyone would expect this i mean you cant keep writing shadowbringer level of story telling its impossible lol how is this even a shocker most shows suffer from this and very few manage to end well and in a game that is a neverending story yeah thats eventually gonna happen i mean it kind of has too

Honestly I don't think Yoshi P is admitting that the character writing is a "failure". I think he told the story he and his team set out to tell. But after 10 years of of him dealing with a diverse fan base that never 100% likes anything. As good as the story for Shadowbringers and Endwalker are, there are still story skippers who play the game only for the gameplay. He knows that after this long 10 year saga, a brand new story, setting, and characters wouldn't be regarded as well as Endwalker. That's all he's really admitting to.

Glad to see WoW content! The new expansion has been great so far

I still hate that they sell you this idea of going on an adventure and a race to find a golden city!! Only for you to go around fixing a wooden boat, jewelry and a godam cooking contest!!! Was the writer trying to make a script for a TLC SHOW??????

I am willing to bet that Yoshi p is working on another project and in a way neglected DT(not sure by choice or forced). Because thing is you are telling me in these 10years time there isn’t enough people with experience to craft a good story? As a producer you would also know in get go if the story is good or not. Unless it could be either he thought it’s time to take a risk and hand over to someone new or someone not talented thought they can do the job better. Or SE is being greedy again and decided to have his team spread so very thin and just designate the job to anyone they favourited. My thought? It most likely is SE being greedy. Anyway, the DT MSQ is the wonkiest and personaly its the lowest among all the stories. It’s not about pacing or being slow, it felt like it’s written by someone who has no passion, someone who don’t respect the players thinking we a bunch of morons. And that is what gets me every time. It felt like SE has squandered my passion for their game. I really don’t enjoy it one bit.

"No no, you see, its supposed to be bad on purpose" - YoshiP, wearing a clown wig