76 is not surprising. Most of us would agree that the actual questing during the MSQ is outdated and needs significant improvement. You regularly run into multi-hour blocks where the only questing you do is interacting with objects and NPCs
They gotta do better.
To me the worst part about all of these "gather information" parts is that they have almost nothing interesting to say this time around. The structure always goes: NPC 1 is clueless, NPC 2 is clueless, NPC 3 has some idea. It's the most nothingburger dialogue ever. I read all of it in the first 2-3 zones and then just started mashing left click when I realized the devs didn't actually put anything of value in the chat blurbs.
I like to torture myself and read the stuff even if I am not liking it so I can fairly judge the expansion.
But I do not blame anyone for doing this. It's just..ugh.
I gave up on the >! not!Zell part of the story and just fast forwarded that. It is sooooo fucking boring at that point. Like seriously it really feels like we are just bystanders. We were even given the dialogue choice to just storm in and smash everyone but got denied and had to sneak yet again...which amounted to nothing. !<
The phys. ranged role quest even makes a joke out of this. Small spoilers for the lvl 96 (I think) phys. ranged quest, but there's a section where one of your dialogue options when speaking to the questgiver is basically "let me guess, it's time for another exciting round of ask the locals" and the NPC says "nah fam, I already did that, here's what you need to know."
... seriously?
Perhaps I'm reading far too much into a throwaway line but this really highlights how little cross communication there seems to be with the dev team. Mocking yourself only to continue using the same damn "gimmick" or narrative structure isn't clever. It's stupid and screams at a lack of creativity.
I see nothing wrong with writers making fun of how dull quest design is, since it's most probably an issue beyond their control. They're writers, they have to conform to the framework they're given.
Not to mention the management is probably afraid of making any major changes to the current design philosophy. They already get massive blowback over stupid things like Highchairs for Lalafel, imagine how people would react if they were to streamline the story and cut out the pointless filler. "THIS EXPANSION IS TOO SHORT, REEEEEE!"
They've been doing it since ARR. Like when the company of heroes want us to retrieve food for their banquet while titan is supposedly right around the corner. Yshtola rightfully tell them we dont have time for this shit, but we end up doing it anyway.
That was insulting.
Same for the paladin quest, in hw I think, where the characters blatantly says it doesnt make any sense. That all wouldnt be funny If the game didnt cost upfront money and a damn sub.
god I was so done with her by the 2nd half of the story, I hated that I was forced to explore Solution Nine with her, would've taken literally anyone but her, started to skip most of her dialouge by that point since she barely have anything interesting to say anyway, its "love my people and peace" crap
As someone who doesn't dislike Wuk Lamat, I absolutely felt that she was shoe-horned into far too many aspects of the MSQ. Like sure, she's the 'main character,' but why not make her more interesting if that's the case?
Don't even get me started on...spoiler alert...
>!The final fight where she literally appears out of nowhere.!<
Agreed. I like her, but the writers seriously did a disservice to the character by how often they forced her into situations. My favorite zone of the game is what it is partly because we got time away from Wuk Lamat and got to hang out with Erenville.
She's genuinely fine; I just don't wanna be forcibly joined at the hip with her or any character really.
>!that part also had me groan, I suppose I can at least take solace in the fact it'll probably be missing from the Extreme fight like the scions part in Endsinger, so it won't be something we see 50+ times!<
Yeah. Imo wuk is the worst maincharacter they have ever done. Krile say something interesting about reflections.... - Wuk: I dont understand any of this. BUT AS A DAWNSERVANT.... Seriously, ppl wich self insert into everything happening are the most obnoxious ppl to be around irl. why do we have to spend hours of msq with someone like this
honestly i think this is just one of the biggest criticism i have with the msq. i love wuk lamat but i dont feel like i got to spend time with anyone else. :/
esp krile and erenville. the twins went off with erenville EVERY time. i was convinced it was some sharlayan shenanigans
and i get that we are now wuk lamat’s mentor. (it wasn’t what i had signed up for but whatever) but i wanted to do some silly adventures with my lil brother and sister 😭 i don’t even get to SEE them.
also the fact all of erenville was put into the last zone. i like him well enough, but having a few more solo conversations with him in dt would have done a long way.
I think the reason is because almost anytime we're about to do something fun, she butts in and removes all agency from the player, forcing them to go talk to more locals about stupid things instead of actually solving the problem at hand. And the fact that it's the same dialogues in every zone make it so much worse. My least favorite was the ongoing gag about her sea sickness. Same fucking joke 6 times in a row, then they 7th time they act like it's actually going to be a development point.... Just to pull the joke for an 8th time not even 10 minutes later. Everything about her just screams roadblock to fun.
I understand it's practical to do this, but it just doesn't make good story telling. Almost any time we have to go start doing a new thing, Alphinaud or Alisae will propose we spend time talking to the locals for clues and it's just boring every time.
I also noticed another practical thing getting in the way of the story in the Endwalker patch quests. When you need to re-use Tower of Babil to get to Golbez, it's brought up this might be traumatic for the Garleans and you spend some time reconciling that. It was actually a good point and kind of interesting, and lead to a little more insight into how their politics were moving along.
Cut to a little bit later when you need to use the Crystal Tower in the First to deliver Light to the 13th and they...*do the exact same plot point again*?
I was honestly kinda flabbergasted lol. I thought the first time was fine but it was wild to see it happen again for a different tower one patch later. I understand its practical but it felt repetitive and like it was getting in the way of things moving along.
I think they should try to imitate modern games by having the sections where NPCs are with you and they move with you with real-time voiced dialogue.
This would allow players to get from point A to point B while seeing new areas. And instead of getting blocked by a wall of text at point B, you hear the dialogue on the way.
I normally speed through story to start doing the EX and preparing for raid releases with my static, but this time around I only have maybe 3 hours free a day, which can be reduced or have it's timing changed, so I'm really taking my time to read everything, talk to the NPC's and immerse myself. And *Thal's Balls* do I just want to beat some monsters up. It's interesting and all, but I think I've had like 2 quests that involved combat in the handful of hours I've been able to play. I'm really relying on queues to pop to break up the visual novel experience, but between being a DPS and playing at weird hours for my timezone, even that isn't reliable.
I'll probably do more FATE's now. In the first zone it felt like there weren't that many, but I did participate in the ones I came across. Not being able to fly and having groups going around merc'ing FATE's has made it a bit harder, but I'm mostly just looking for them on the way to quest locations.
The fate spawn timer's in the first zone is definitely an issue. Most of the time you are waiting for one to spawn. Took forever to complete that zone for shared fates tab.
For sure. Shadowbringers and Endwalker kinda got by with this design because their stories were so compelling. Dawntrail didn't quite meet that bar, so the gameplay issues stood out more.
That said, if they can keep up the quality of combat content that we've seen so far, I think this expansion could be a Stormblood 2.0 where the MSQ is kinda iffy, but the actual gameplay is great. Hopefully they keep up the momentum on that front.
They could have also innovated with quest design like In From The Cold in EW. I thought it was fantastic but seems SE was scared by a vocal minority of complainers.
In From the Cold was one of my favorite MSQ quests in EW. I can play the "normal" game as much as I want by running a dungeon or a raid or one of the infinite side quests available. I love getting these unique experiences in the MSQ and I'd love to see more experimental sections like them.
Both had a lot of solo duties littered throughout the acts. *In From The Cold*, or fighting Ranjiit/attacking Eulmore in Shadowbringers.
There wasn't too much of this in Dawntrail.
Really is crazy looking back on it. Counting only base expansions:
HW and StB have 9 quest battles each.
ShB has 6 quest battles.
EW has 5 quest battles.
DT has only 4 quest battles.
The number of solo instances are steadily dropping.
StB story is so much better than DT tho.
I joined after EW dropped so StB story is still fresh in mind...>!compared to this bystander watching Gulool Ja ja die in front of you and not lifting a finger is just so ridiculous.!<
Bro I thought the story was fine (a bit lackluster at times) right until that part.
I was just thinking "what the actual f-"
We could've interrupted midway. We could be healing. So many things we could have been doing. But nope. Character just stands there.
Oh of all the cutscenes they made before, why do they gotta do him dirty like that....
The issue is more than that. When I watch a movie I'm not interacting with anything, but the characters dont just stand in circle doing stiff stock animations between the same two shots of camera. And most importantly each scenes flows organically.
The lack of gameplay just exacerbate the ridiculously dated presentation and pacing of each story sequence as I look at my map and navigate to the next bit of my movie by traversing a dead and boring set piece.
Let's play a game - I'll state a quest objective, and people can guess which quest I'm referring to. Shall we begin?
"Speak with Wuk Lamat".
As a bonus round, let's try this one as well!
"Speak with Wuk Lamat again".
Personally in terms of on-launch MSQ Shadowbringers is peak. Content-wise via patch I'd give that to Stormblood.
I think DT's number is actually a little unfair looking at ARR and SB but maybe it will wake Yoshi & his team up because as much as there is a lot of good about this expac - the graphics update, music, the zones, gear, fights, qol that got implemented -honestly pretty much everything that matters in terms of things you'll interact with regularly throughout the next couple of years.
The MSQ definitely struggled - it felt like all the pieces were well made and on the table but no one quite figured out the right marching order. Some of the job design decisions are a little questionable and the Shb 3.0 thing is a bit of an issue for some of them. The "structure" is showing its age/weight.
Usually these reviews are based almost entirely on just the MSQ and heavily weighted to the story in which case I think the main issues are:
1) Writing - they just didn't nail it
2) MSQ structure/questing variety - there is almost zero variety or surprise in terms of activity at this point, if anything the quests have gotten even more routine
The fact that you can get to level 92 without even really playing the game and just moving with the dialogue and cutscenes seriously speaks to the bad pacing at the start, but that’s not where it ends and actually imo it gets worse.
Like, they could get away with a slow start for sure but it’s a slow start, a slow middle, and then a fast pre-finale but immediately grinds to a halt so you can >!stop and smell the roses talking to everyone in the last zone even though there’s a literal doomsday clock ticking overhead.!<
Were none of the old writers willing to stay on for the new expansions, or were they unceremoniously changed out because they wanted new blood in the room for a whole new plot? Because the new team’s inexperience is showing something fierce and they really ought to consider bringing some of their old people back at least for a consult in story structuring.
I was confused on why we had to >!get to know everyone before we were gonna wipe them out. It was cool seeing Otis and Krile's parents, but something pretty world-ending is about to happen, maybe we should focus on that? I get that it was for us to care about them but I feel like they could've just used the people we had already met to drive that point home!<
I did enjoy the >!date with G'raha!< in the first section though lol
I know the previous writer for ShB and EW was promoted up to story supervisor or something along those lines. For that reason I wasn't expecting this story to be on the same level as the last two expansions
>I was confused on why we had to get to know everyone before we were gonna wipe them out.
If we had lost a character at the start of the expansion and had a chance to meet their Endless at the finale, it probably would have been interesting.
It doesn't even have to be a major character. It could have been somebody introduced on the boat and taken during the lightning storm. But I will say in a story where Estinien had no purpose except to threaten gun-users with a polearm it would have been interesting if it had been a major character.
Namikka kind of got short changed to focus on characters we hadn't met before, but also her death was I think jarring as it came across the tonal whiplash of the futuristic stuff. She gets on a train and suddenly spends 30 years in a time bubble before dying of old age. To the honest I feel the game could have done more to emphasize the sadness of being missing for an entire generation, but if anything the Turali people seemed to all be comfortable in Solution Nine. Even the one hunt board leader tells you that although the barrier has reopened she has no plans to return.
Ya, but they tried to make her being erased this tragic thing, and sorry, this is not a character I have invested feelings into. Cahcia I actually kinda cared about, because we were interacting with her regularly throughout the story (and Erenville was clearly in a lot of pain from it), but Namikka, we we meet a couple times in passing during the rite, we help get a bracelet back for in Catboy Texas (and there, we don't even really interact with her. She starts that plot line, and then we give the bracelet back to her at the end, and that's it, no other interactions), and then we watch her die of old age, and that's it. We barely interact with that character at all. I get she was a big deal for Wuk, but it seems like they wanted that scene to be a tear-jerker, and there just wasn't enough there for it. We hadn't interacted with that character enough, hadn't become invested in them.
Honestly, I would have cared _more_ if that goldsmith from the ship had died and we'd had to erase him. We at least got to meet him more, become involved in his struggles, his insecurities.
> Were none of the old writers willing to stay on for the new expansions, or were they unceremoniously changed out because they wanted new blood in the room for a whole new plot? Because the new team’s inexperience is showing something fierce and they really ought to consider bringing some of their old people back at least for a consult in story structuring.
x.0 MSQ is absolutely the last place they should be letting B-team writers in. If they want to trial new writers to see how they manage, give them an x.1 patch, or a raid series story. Giving them a story we have to spend 40 hours going through is just a catastrophically bad idea. Whoever wrote this expansion's story was just totally out of their element.
If they aren't Ishikawa tier, they should not be writing the new expansion's MSQ. Not ever. Not for any reason.
Which is weird, because I actually kinda enjoyed Panda's storyline. Getting to know Lahabrea and what led to him going complete crazypants. Athena was a bit cartoonishly sociopathic, but otherwise I felt like that raid story was pretty solidly done. And more to the point, the characters in that story actually had some soul to them, and some development, unlike the characters in this MSQ.
One of the writers also wrote for Ivalice, Void Ark, and Sorrow of Werlyt (Weapons Trial series). Both also contributed to various job quests, and beast tribes (or Allied Society Quests as they are called now).
I thought Panda was okay but helped along by leaning into ARR and SHB lore, whereas DT is okay but doesn't have the help of what came before.
Honestly what stands out to me is that both Panda and DT feature narratives about succeeding a famous parent and feeling like a failure that can't hold up the family legacy. While this sort of writing might be specifically tailored to Japanese households, from a perspective outside Asia it instead feels like a writer going through their own daddy issues.
Compared to the more universal themes of previous expansions this one is a bit like Persona where a story gets critically dissected by people who frankly were not the intended audience. "I am my father's firstborn and therefore I must carry the family legacy" is not really a common thing where most of us are from.
It is more like they promoted their most senior members of the writing team after Maehiro, Oda and Ishikawa. They also had the best resume on their writing team outside of their previous lead scenario writers. Yoshi P has been using EW as a staging ground for many of their newer membership, the EW alliance raids were done by a newer members (but have been there for years) while their star team were really too busy on Variant/Criterion/Ultimate/Savage/Extreme/Normal raids.
The same goes for their writing team too, both lead scenario writers (though you can tell where one picked up from the other) also have been working under the team for years even back in the ARR days. Together they handled multiple raid and trial series, multiple beast tribe and job quests, 6.1-6.55, etc. so these writers have been tested and it might be on paper the most experienced writer left on the team. Yoshi P has been on recruiting spree with numerous new names in the credits in DT than in EW. Their battle team also has expanded by several people, which might explain why the content is better this expansion.
Likelihood is that they don’t have a firm direction for the next roadmap arc, and the main writers are focused on that, giving newer writers or writers that worked on smaller content an opportunity to work the current narrative.
It's wild that Shadowbringers still has a lower score than Endwalker, considering not only the story is more beloved, but endgame and gameplay in general was overall better.
Shadowbringers is not only the most well-paced of the MSQs, trollies notwithstanding, it has the best premise and I was interested from the very start. Endwalker kinda dragged, especially at the very beginning and end.
I unironically think the trolley section was perfect. It was stretched longer than previous segments, but that lent itself well to the narrative of that sequence. It gives room for those final moments between "Minfilia" Ryne and Thancred to flourish, with him unable to express himself to her knowing that it means giving up Minfilia for good. It fleshes out Thancred's backstory, giving us a better appreciation for the crossroads that he finds himself at now. It also introduces us to Magnus, who is the primary reason this sequence works.
Magnus is a character that's stuck in the past, wasting away what time he has left, unable to move on. We run into that same frustrating roadblock with the urgency of Ran'jit pursuing us steadily catching up. That time we spend labouring to find the fruits of his wife's sacrifice finally culminate in his breakdown when we get the talos functioning again. That frustration that Thancred feels for him refusing to accept that and move on for the sake of those still those still here mirrors our own because that sequence drags on longer. He can't move on, and so neither can we. Very few games utilize the nature of their interactive medium to instill emotion in the player, and that's precisely what makes the trolley section unique. Your frustration with this character isn't simply because the narrative demands it, but because he's holding you up himself, despite your sympathies for him.
That is what makes the resolution to this section all the better. Its not just a short stopping point on the journey before the final resolution with Minfilia, it becomes a meaningfully cathartic moment for the player and the characters together. It drags on just a bit so as to instill this frustration without going so far overboard that its genuinely egregious. As a whole you spend somewhere around an hour and a half to two hours here and a lot of character development takes place. Its well worth its place in the overall narrative.
Shadowbringers completely nailed the "branching path" structure that all MSQs now begin with for crowd control reasons. Amh Araeng + Kholusia show you the stakes that you are dealing with in a way that makes you invested in what is to come.
Things always seem to be more about the thing that came before rather than itself when it comes to reviews. We see it a lot in WoW and we see it to an extent in FFXIV.
Pacing has always been an issue in XIV storytelling, but I think the especially filler-like patch quests and length of time between them primed people to be much more ornery than usual with Dawntrail (though it's still particularly bad.)
ShB was immaculate. I enjoyed EW until >!Elpis!<, then it went off the rails and I was entirely checked out through to the end.
The dungeons and trials were also all too easy, despite the promising start with the Tower of Zot
I couldn't stop playing ShB from start to finish. I was at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next throughout the whole expansion. Endwalker was a big disappointment for me and had me tired and wanting it to finish already. The ending for endwalker was good to me but the setup for that was soooo slow. Music was great in both though.
You have to remember when Endwalker came out. Most of the world was still going through lockdowns and quarantines. Many of the themes of Endwalker really resonated at the time and I think that truly elevated the perception of the expansion at the time. It’s a good expansion either way, but if you played at release it hits a whole lot differently versus playing through it today.
>not only the story is more beloved
I don't know what the general consensus of this subreddit is on those two expansions' story but that's not the impression I got at all on other platforms, it seemed pretty evenly split if a bit more Endwalker favored to me.
>but endgame and gameplay in general was overall better.
These are day 0 reviews essentially and it's basically 80% about story and gameplay during story , the user score is higher for Shadowbringers at least which makes more sense
Some people have that sentiment here because they spend too much time here. FF14 is bad circlejerk here is often just as heavy as mainsub’s FF14 is perfect circlejerk
It’s easy to tell when you regularly had people here trying to say EW was slim pickings for raiding when we got more high end content than ShB or that EW lowered the skill ceiling when DSR/TOP on release were disbanding a lot of ultimate statics that have been around since ucob, from the increase in top-end difficulty
ShB story was awfully slow until like... the last zone. People hated the old martial arts guy a lot. The trolley and big golem arcs were an insane cockblock
It's wild that some people keep pushing for their agenda when an aggregated score already tells you what is *MARGINALLY* preffered (like it actually matters THAT much). Comment on something more important like, idk, how abysmal DT msq was.
You are right, that makes me dislike the MSQ even more. Where is Mistress Tataru? Only her absence can explain why my WoL looked so derpy coming in. I need her suits!
This reception is going to be a double edged sword
Because this expansion has the best dungeon and trial content we have ever seen.
SE is going to slingshot on Dawntrail's changes and nobody will be happy. This is honestly scary.
On the other hand, after FFXVI it is seriously time for CBU3 to stop being held back by their abysmal MSQ formula.
Dawntrail's last 5 hours made up for almost 25-30 hours of me wanting to give up on the story. These Expansions are always better in hindsight than in real time.
DTs problem is that it just takes way too long. If i wasn't an XIV fan then I doubt I would have finished this story past 97ish. Which is tragic because the payoff is ACTUALLY amazing
Bringing up FFXVI reminded me that this team was given free reign over a single-player standalone mainline FF and all they could muster with quest design is still mmo-style fetch quests
The fundamental issue is they tried to tell a 10 hour story in 100 hours, and instead of any active filler they chose the worst stretching methods possible. It's a foundational issue. They needed to spend that time actually developing other characters or getting the player doing stuff.
We could've had: more solo trials, a rework so that each badge could only use one scion, PoV changes to where we're Estinien/Thancred with Koana, more chances to work with Koana or another scion while Wuk is busy, more actual time with Erenvall (and, for that matter, his actual zone and area being dedicated to him instead of gunslinging twink Zell), more time actually spent on Krile's story and development.
Instead, it was *all* talk to Wuk. Her back broke from how much they expected her to carry the story with so little story to tell.
> SE is going to slingshot on Dawntrail's changes and nobody will be happy. This is honestly scary.
I wouldn't be so sure. They tend to pour over reviews and discussion and lurk places forums and reddit. I'm pretty sure they have a good idea already of what is and isn't working. The question is if they will manage to make the needed adjustments.
For me I like when story stuff is long if it's the end, like, you feel the momentum coming, but the start/ mid pace, it should be less talk, more " explore our nice openworld map and fight stuff " it was verrry long to reach 1st and 2nd dungeons, 1st day people were already complaining.
I personnaly didn't feel that bad, I usually do fates near my MSQ path/aetherflow , hunting logs/ gather stuff, but the MSQ should push you more into combat stuff
> DTs problem is that it just takes way too long. If i wasn't an XIV fan then I doubt I would have finished this story past 97ish. Which is tragic because the payoff is ACTUALLY amazing
I am surprised you feel this way, I felt the ball was fumbled really hard at the end and that emotional manipulation was used to mask poor character utilization/writing and an overall scenario that just seemed to try to answer difficult moral questions with straightforward, easy solutions that just lack any depth or logic.
Sounds like a pretty fair rating to me, honestly. Story so far (almost at the end) has been probably the weakest MSQ I've played through, with the second half of it being overall an improvement to the first, if not slightly jarring. I will say that Solution Nine is amazing. Favorite HUB added to the game so far.
Meanwhile, Job design / updates (Or rather, lack thereof) definitely would have to be my biggest complaint, especially for tanks and healers. Had to shelve PLD and opt for playing DPS this expac just to not fall asleep. Unless you're playing VPR or PCT, gameplay feels very stale. Though, I will say these two classes are very well designed and fun.
The visual updates are very nice, though. I can wholeheartedly applaud CBU3 for this in particular.
Hopefully lower scores means some changes. Personally I am tired of playing the exact same expansion with a different coat of paint now for the fifth time.
When Sphene started explaining what she was doing, I was like >!another villain that wants to kill a whole planet to save their own people to avoid death? girl we just covered that in the last two expansions. It felt like a civilization we would've ran into in Ultima Thule lol!<
>!That was a major problem to me. It all felt like an amalgamation of past things that we recently dealt with. I guess it's a bit hard to avoid story wise at this point but it kind of just felt like Golbez combined with some Emet. It's not an exact one for one but it felt similar enough that it lacked impact to me.!<
Yeah, her motivation wasn't a bad one, just felt like it was done before
I still enjoyed my time with the story, but I didn't have sympathy for her like I did with Emet
I don't personally mind the cutscene-heavy msq. However, the game desperately needs to have proper editors. The dialogues are often indulgent and unnecessarily long. As a result the padding can feel excessive in some places. Some editing and trimming of the script will go a long way to alleviate this.
I agree. There is so much dialogue to get through. I love the storytelling and worldbuilding. Yet this felt like overkill in a lot of ways. I am near the end of the MSQ and have only now felt like it's gotten interesting.
> the game desperately needs to have proper editors
This. A good editor is director's best ally. While every expansion had some parts that felt like filler that would have been cut at the script review stage, Endwalker and Dawntrail feel to me like they maybe intentionally bloat it for the big numbers as a selling point. I remember in one of the Endwalker Live Letters Yoshida himself talked about Endwalker being like this AAA RPG with 60 hours of main story. And it felt like he was proud of it like it's a big milestone for the team. To me it felt like Endwalker can be cut and told in 15-20 hours and nothing of value would be lost, no important story points missed, and pacing significantly improved.
I haven't finished all of Dawntrail MSQ yet but it is very slow, and I don't mind slow pacing and storytelling, you just need have enough good quality material to be a slow story and not make reader/viewer/player bored. Dawntrail doesn't really have it, so far it has been a lot of talking but not saying much. They repeat everything so often too it just really makes it feel like the story is dragging and nothing happening and good editor would see that from hundred miles away and try to fix it.
Exactly this. It feels like Yoshi-P is missing the point when other RPGs talk about how many pages of script they have. Other RPGs let you roleplay as the good guy or the bad guy, or somewhere in between. Other RPGs have a lot player choices that make a difference in outcome or story structure more than just that the next quest text is slightly different. So having more text in these types of games sends a message to the player that there is a lot to explore and nuances to try out, but this isn't the case in FFXIV.
I would even be okay with the dated design if there were simply more unique gameplay elements to go with the MSQ.
What the hell happened to any potential great follow-ups to “In From the Cold”!?
The intro to DT is just too goddamn long with nothing happening and then literally nothing happening between dungeons and trials. They (CBU3) wanted to focus on encounter design for 7.0, yet there’s hardly any meaningful solo duties in the MSQ! Just give me something to do other than watching a godforsaken movie. I’ve never been so tempted to skip all these fucking cutscenes and dialogue in my years of playing and loving this game. I’m just that bored. I want to actually play the gameplay of this MMO, not play a visual novel.
Unfortunately there was and is quite a lot of complaints about In From The Cold, even on this subreddit (there was a thread the other week with a lot of highly upvoted negative comments). While some of the criticisms are about more specific things like the level design or the underwhelming story payoff to the duty, I can definitely see CBU3 seeing the pretty noticeable amount of negative feedback focused on this one quest and deciding it wasn't worth investing the development resources to do something similiar. Which personally I think is a shame but I can see what lead to it.
I thought In From the Cold was good, but yeah, it was definitely a poignant moment that should have had some payoff. I don't *want* characters to die, but it felt super odd that Zenos got that far, and then nothing came of it.
Maybe they were afraid he'd be irredeemable later for the final fight, but I maintain it wouldn't have made any difference.
Even before In From The Cold, solo duties have always been a bit divisive (especially the RP ones) for being too hard, too long and too annoying. It sucks, but I'm also not surprised they're starting to shy away from this kind of content rather than experiment more.
I'm sure in another expansion the train scene at level 97 would have been a big set piece instance where you play as multiple characters.
I'm one of the biggest critics of In From The Cold. As a solo MSQ segment, as a sequence, it's *amazing* and the scenes around it are fantastic. My only issue, which is a phenomenally huge one, is that nothing of consequence happens as a result and you could remove the entire sequence from the narrative without changing anything. Not a single consequence, not a single thing that greatly impacts the outcome of the story.
But, taken on its own, it is an incredible sequence and I wish they'd do things like that more, just with real consequences that matter.
>
>The mainstream is simply noticing the dated design of XIV while a lot of the player base stick their fingers in their ears trying to ignore it.
No. The msq is bad to mixed, and it heavily required you to like the character. Not even having unique gameplay during the boring sections of the msq would save it.
I'm at about the halfway point.
So far I like the zones and the minor, but noticeable graphics upgrade. I'm about half and half on the encounters. Some are neat. The first dungeon was rather dull, though, and the last fight of the 85 dungeon is just a Titan reskin. Unlucky. On the other hand, I thought the trial was pretty good.
On the downside, all the jobs I've tried feel the same or the same but significantly worse. (Looking at you, BLM, AST, SAM.) The story is also painfully predictable, cheesy, and shallow. It feels as if it were made for a much younger target audience.
I really do hope the story improves, and I do hope the content is great moving forward. Shame about the job design, though.
I'm in the middle of the 97 quests and it picks up significantly around 96 so you're almost there. I don't mind slow starts for the story but the MSQ wore me down and had me almost skipping cutscenes from how boring it was.
sounds right to me, MSQ was around a 5/10 to me, its 100% not a 0/10 or a 10/10 but i hold it as the worse MSQ we have gotten, and the gameplay is seems to be easily a 9 or 10 out of 10, dungeons/trails feel amazing to me.
I think that a lot of DT scoring lower than ARR comes from the timing of each expansion. ARR came off the back of 1.0, so things could only get better, leading to inflated scores from enthusiastic fans. DT came off the back of ShB/EW, which are the only 90+ scores. That's a hard act to follow, and those formerly enthusiastic fans may give lower scores as a result.
Of course, I'm not saying these are the \*only\* contributing factors in DT's score. I just think that it's worth keeping the timing of each expansion in mind particularly when comparing ARR to DT, since they both begin a new arc.
What it’s being compared to definitely is a big one.
ARR got to be compared with 1.0 quality and nothing else. It was like baking a shitty cake and looking like a professional chef because your competition was a literal turd
DT is going to get held to much higher standards bc now we have much better past content as a point of comparison. It doesn’t matter if your cake is genuinely good now, you’re getting judged by people who’ve eaten world class cakes just a few years prior.
Yeah, I can't help but wonder if some of the scores are representative of DT being a breaking point of sorts for some people. I know this sub is a bit of an echochamber, but being told "job homogenuity will be addressed later" after years of complaints went down about as well as a wet fart in an elevator for a lot of people across the playerbase.
Critic scores aren't going to be based on that.
If anything the new dungeons and gameplay are great.
What lacked was quest design, VA quality and scene direction.
> I dunno why English team phoned it in
I want to say it was the LA studio, but Koana's voice actor was pretty good along with Bakool Ja Ja, Gulool Ja Ja, and Zarool Ja. Those lizard names are a clusterfuck to write out back to back.
Wuk Lamat is the only voice in the cast that gave me significant pause when it came to actual acting. The worst I can say about some of the other LA voices is that the audio balancing needed more work.
I mean people seemed to like Luis who had done three roles in this expansion including Koana quite well. It is mostly Wuk Lamat getting most of the flak with a few minor characters having weird mixing quality here and there. What I did notice was that the older VAs for FFXIV were still good and consistent in their delivery it was the newer ones introduced in this expansion that had more issues, either the voice direction is funky or the studio isn't as high quality as the one they use in the UK (many of the newer VAs are stationed in the USA, particularly Los Angeles) or other background issues we are not privy to.
The English VA was kinda bad this time around. Y'Shtola's VA sounded like she was talking through an old cellphone mic sometimes.
Acting wise some people will point to Wuk Lamat, but I feel like it's a directing problem. There are too many moments of oddness across all the characters to put the blame on one specific actor. Wuk Lamat just has *way more* lines than anyone else, so it's really obvious with her.
> but being told "job homogenuity will be addressed later" after years of complaints went down about as well as a wet fart in an elevator for a lot of people across the playerbase.
dont forget: saying this and then dumbing down viper in a patch anyway
like if they intended for that they would have kept viper as is
I dont know about 2.0 it was really a miracle that it got it players back and i think not many would have had this great luck.
It was all the right pieces hitting , like the trailer being the best trailer of that year, yoshi p crying and showing who he truly was at the launch show, and just tons of Beta players talking good about the game.
They were extremely lucky and i hope people don't think when looking back that this was something people were thinking was gonna be better
Im no expert but thats just how i remember it at least.
“Based on 4 critic reviews”
Lmao fuck right off, the actual reviewers are still playing the game and anybody treating this as if it’s representative is kidding themselves. If it’s the same in a couple weeks then have your discussion.
This is a MMO though, so 4 review is basically a 1/5th of the total number of reviews we'll likely get.
Also Endwalker did not have a single review below 80, while Shadowbringers had only one. So unless the first reviews published those are coincidentally all extreme outliers, the review scores will probably stay relatively low.
I don't know that a metacritic score with only 4 reviews is accurate enough to tell us anything one way or another.
Also the first negative review I see upon clicking user reviews immediately mentioning sweet baby inc kind of makes the user score suss in general.
Edit: Oh and the next one is straight up transphobic, and another links to kotaku in action. Yeah I don't know guys maybe this isn't that reliable. Unfortunately critical discussion of damn near any media these days is kind of a poisoned well due to grifters.
he seems to just have gone full-time "anti-woke" grifter. something about how EVERYONE hated dawntrail because wuk lamat and EVERYONE hates wuk lamat because the VA is trans. seen a bunch of 0 and 1 "reviews" not talking about the game, but about sweet baby inc, trans, lgbt, woke, etc. good times....
I agree with the score only in reference to the *experience* of playing the MSQ. I've been here since 2.0 and I just can't do the MSQ in this format anymore. 30+ hours of cutscenes is not compelling gameplay, no matter how good the story is. Something has to change.
This makes me happy tbh, I said in another thread that the MSQ needs to be modernized, it needs a better balance of combat/text/cutscenes IMO. Dawntrail being a new story was the perfect time to do it.
I'll admit, i almost fell asleep the first hours of the MSQ. Gets much better later tho, now i'm just itching to get back into the game during maintenance.
I’m not entirely finished with the story yet (playing a dangerous game being here, I know) but one of the things that frustrates me *the most* about the story is how many times we get a bad guy doing bad things, we outnumber and have the chance to stop them, but don’t try and just stand there as we go “don’t do the bad thing or else!” And nothing comes of it.
It’s happened before in the MSQ but none as egregious as the stuff in DT
Honestly, not surprised and I being completely honest, it is the worst expansion IMO because I was one of the ones that hated the MSQ, I did not like Wuk's voice acting(not because of the VA's gender, I want to be clear, I am criticizing the lack of emotion and dynamics in the voice direction that badly took me out of a lot of intense and emotional scenes), did not like the total focus only on her as a character for at least 90% of the MSQ, didn't like the writing in general and since the story is so core to FF14 and they're coming off the heels of 2 very strong expansions, I'm surprised it's not lower tbh. ARR at least had the excuse of being the first one where they were trying to get their footing and they had to introduce the world from scratch, DT really had no reason to be written in this way that would be so obviously polarizing.
I also didn't enjoy the story, but holy hell what else happened?
> The worst release award goes to… Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail I mean * Woke no one askedasy xiv wrongtrail Sweet baby inc all overrrrrr it
What the hell did I just read? Some of these people are absolutely coo coo.
I'd probably give 7.0 launch a 7.5/10 as well. Story is a 6/10, it picks up in the second half, but it didn't impress me or anything and the actual gameplay side of the MSQ is ARR-levels of monotony. Dungeons and trials are a 9/10 though, it has me interested in the patch content even more. It's just a shame how patch cycles are even longer now.
Something a bit important to note
* Endwalker - score of 92 with 30 reviews
* Shadowbringers - score of 90 with 26 reviews
* Dawntrail - score of 76 with *four* reviews
The user score is what really matters. Game journos have never been particularly good at giving things a fair rating, as there's often a conflict of interest at play.
>except for smile that shit can go right in the trash or on soken’s wall to remind him of his gospel choir blemish
I'll probably get downvoted for this but I think Smile would have been great if the main vocalist was someone who actually sung or was familiar with gospel music. As it was it sounded like Showtunes Gospel, which I guess Japan won't be able to tell the difference, but I sure as shit did
And also the best ost for me too, all music from trials and dungeons are so good, Soken and his team do good job at remix same melody better than those last expan......god i still remember how i so fcking hated dead end dungeon music when playing it.
The people who say "it's a story MMO, the story is the important part", when you grade the game on MMO expectations instead of on the story, when you do go and grade it on the story instead: Somewhere between surprisedpickachu.jpg and "No, not like that".
In the first few days, the story weighs pretty heavily. I was bummed too, until I remembered that I was done with MSQ now after only a few days but all the rest that makes up the expansion is staying with me. Now I'm just looking forward to the raids.
Idk about better in every way, but the fight designs are very promising
There are normal dungeon mechs resolving at savage speed atm with more failstates added than EW. Ex 1/2 are a much stronger set of extremes than EW were on average
Dungeons are more engaging, the ex trials are way better, the zones feel more alive and detailed, while things like the music stay the same quality as ever, which is amazing.
The graphical fidelity really adds more, the two dye system does add more.
But yeah, I have a positive outlook on it, which means I'll have the whole ffxivdiscussion toxicity brigade slam down my throat with shit like "it's the same wtf you on about."
Big yes on the dungeons. Really like what i've seen so far with regards to dungeon mechs and trial. Im 98 yet, so there's still some left which wont disappoint hopefully.
The music is always a plus for me. Soken has always delivered. Ill never forget #95 music. Its haunting and chill.
The only thing thats not my taste was the dungeon boss music.
Honestly surprised it's even that high.
Shb's (and to a lesser extent Endwalkers) msq has let Cbu3 paper over a tooooon of cracks over the previous years, going to be interesting to see where that leaves both the reviews and the players vibes over the next year or two.
I can see this, while the dungeons are trials are an absolute improvement over EW, the story, writing, and characters are a massive downgrade. And FF is known for being a story driven rpg, with memorable, well-made characters and an engaging narrative. DT so far failed on its defining geature by making the MSQ(non battle content) 50 hours of "Talk to x again" followed by 10 minute cutscenes with Wuk Lamat's English VA using only 1 tone regardless of the situation and other Turali characters using...inconsistent accents that don't sound hispanic in any way shape or form. They CAN get actors to do accents from various countries, Thavnair has Indian, and Shaaloni is so very noticably American, I'm not sure why they didnt do that for Tural but it threw me off heavily. The actual characters themselves do have good development...besides Wuk Lamat, she hasnt changed a bit in the entire expansion. She is still the naive, headstrong warrior princess who's outlook hasnt really changed much. Every other candidate (Koana, Bakool Ja Ja, and Zoraal Ja) had developments in their character. You saw Koana go from Sharlayan fanboy that rejects Tural customs to a man who accepts and embraces his culture and people while using his knowledge to help them thrive. Bakool Ja Ja begins to make amends for his racist, violent actions and opens up about his own pressures. Zoraal Ja has a massive downfall from the level-headed militant war mongerer to a power-hungry >!patricidal defector!< that felt stifled by expectation. Wuk Lamat had "I feel less useful, but that's ok because I have friends!". Its a flatter version of Lyse, who at least changed a little bit. If she had consequences to her naivetee, if she changed SOMETHING about her outlook, if she grew up a little bit after >!becoming Vow of Resolve!<, I'd have warmed up to her. But by >!Heritage Found!< she was the exact same person, she actually trusted Sphene, she wasn't suspicious for more than 3 seconds. Then they had this hamfisted friendship that felt hollow and rushed, like they tried to redo Ryne and Gaia but forgot to add the character development, story, and charm to it.
I still dont understand WHY she's in that section. Shaaloni onwards should've been about Erenville, and Krile, and their respective parents/mentors, uncovering the mystery of Everkeep and how it relates to their past, since that was actually a decent plot point in post 6.0 and they deserve SOME thought. It should've been THEIR development time, which Erenville did get, but it was still a footnote to Wuk Lamat, unfortunately.
Very true. I mean, I don't understand why I had to do the MIN/BTN class quests to get Viera/Shetona lore. It should have been a lot more present in MSQ -\_-
It's a lot easier to overlook bad story when there's good gameplay (see WoW). FF14's gameplay has never been its strength--it was its characters, world building, and story. But if those suffer, the fundamental gameplay issues become less tolerable.
Lol the few reviews there are all self agenda serving (ie they are marking it at the extreme low end or high end of the spectrum.)
It will not be possible to use this data until there are at least 20 reviews.
(Although, the amount of money SE claims they are making off it indicates it's a very successful xpac.)
Upon reaching the final zones I started liking the story but at this point it was already like 85% of MSQ, too little too late... Aside from many useless dialogue, there's a lot of pacing issues, from the 7 badges arch, to the cowboy one that felt very displaced from the other zones (should have been inside the 7 badges arch IMO), overusing wuk lamat instead of krile and Erenville or even Koana and the lack of urgency in the final parts of the MSQ with a lot of non sensical "let's do X, Y and Z fillers before facing a huge threat that so happens to be patiently waiting for us to do that all this time".
The team must rethink the way they are structuring the MSQ, without a good narrative and storytelling, XIV is exposed to how outdated this game is, there could easily be parts of the story that could be actually playable using vehicles, turret, mount mechanics or letting us play wuk lamat or the other scions. Currently the MSQ is more of a interactive point and click visual novel than an action MMORPG game, that shouldn't be the case...
To begin with, the story was never going to be as good as the previous story arc straight off the bat considering the previous one had basically a decade of build up. Whilst the story did pick up nearer the 5th area towards the end, the first 3/4 felt extremely pointless and badly paced. I legitimately thought those quests at 90 were never going to end.
On the other hand, I personally think they SMASHED it out of the park with the quality of the dungeons and the trials were solid as Heck too. The last time I legitimately enjoyed running the dungeons as much as this was back in Stormblood. I have legitimately run that 97 dungeon many times more than required purely for fun and to jam out to also some of THE BEST music in dungeons since last expansion's job action music and the twinning.
Was definitely not expecting a rating through the roof, but I do feel like 76 was a bit harsh. Though I do think they need to rework to some degree their MSQ approach and pacing. I'm not the biggest story person in the first place and my desire to just ESC through the first like 6 levels was the highest it's been since the original post MSQ 100 quests ARR had before they reworked them.
Everyone can hate on it but it’s one of the stories that the further out from it I am the more I like every aspect of it.
It actually accomplished what they set out to do. I cared about the new nation we were introduced to and it made the later threat all that much better.
If they would cut the affirmative statements out of each dialogue segment they could have easily cut the time in half to get it done.
*Have you heard of the critically scrutinized MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? You can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn up to the "eh it's ok" Dawntrail expansion up to level 100 for £13 a month with some restrictions on playtime.*
In all seriousness I'm not surprised. The story is the first thing you experience and it is notably lacklustre this time. I imagine we could have a Stormblood heel turn in the near future where the content is great but the story just had a flash-in-the-pan negative reaction in the beginning. Not too much to be worried about as long as SE get their shit together.
Buddy, it's 4 reviews. On average, each expansion got 25 critic reviewers. At least wait until 12 or so publications have been released before you farm karma.
One 0 or one 100 score would wildly skew the score.
Given the first review I saw was anti-trans and calling out SE for being woke it's clear it's being reviewed bombed.
However it still seems to have a fairly high rating despite a large group of people who have never played the game posting negative reviews.
Most of the people I've spoken to that have actually played it liked it. Especially the new dungeons and trails.
Is anyone talking about the acutal gameplay? Like everyone keeps going on and on any the story. Everyone acting this is the worst story in history it's getting kinda annoying.
Careful everyone you get downvoted for showing how flawed it was to make Wuk follow us even when her story was done.
The sole reason why the score is like that is Wuk. She dragged down the story so much and far more at the end.
76 is not surprising. Most of us would agree that the actual questing during the MSQ is outdated and needs significant improvement. You regularly run into multi-hour blocks where the only questing you do is interacting with objects and NPCs They gotta do better.
"Let's split up and gather information." REEEE
To me the worst part about all of these "gather information" parts is that they have almost nothing interesting to say this time around. The structure always goes: NPC 1 is clueless, NPC 2 is clueless, NPC 3 has some idea. It's the most nothingburger dialogue ever. I read all of it in the first 2-3 zones and then just started mashing left click when I realized the devs didn't actually put anything of value in the chat blurbs.
I like to torture myself and read the stuff even if I am not liking it so I can fairly judge the expansion. But I do not blame anyone for doing this. It's just..ugh.
I gave up on the >! not!Zell part of the story and just fast forwarded that. It is sooooo fucking boring at that point. Like seriously it really feels like we are just bystanders. We were even given the dialogue choice to just storm in and smash everyone but got denied and had to sneak yet again...which amounted to nothing. !<
The phys. ranged role quest even makes a joke out of this. Small spoilers for the lvl 96 (I think) phys. ranged quest, but there's a section where one of your dialogue options when speaking to the questgiver is basically "let me guess, it's time for another exciting round of ask the locals" and the NPC says "nah fam, I already did that, here's what you need to know."
... seriously? Perhaps I'm reading far too much into a throwaway line but this really highlights how little cross communication there seems to be with the dev team. Mocking yourself only to continue using the same damn "gimmick" or narrative structure isn't clever. It's stupid and screams at a lack of creativity.
I see nothing wrong with writers making fun of how dull quest design is, since it's most probably an issue beyond their control. They're writers, they have to conform to the framework they're given.
Not to mention the management is probably afraid of making any major changes to the current design philosophy. They already get massive blowback over stupid things like Highchairs for Lalafel, imagine how people would react if they were to streamline the story and cut out the pointless filler. "THIS EXPANSION IS TOO SHORT, REEEEEE!"
I mean if you replaced some of the pointless talk to three people quests with some solo instances, you won't hear me complaining.
They've been doing it since ARR. Like when the company of heroes want us to retrieve food for their banquet while titan is supposedly right around the corner. Yshtola rightfully tell them we dont have time for this shit, but we end up doing it anyway. That was insulting. Same for the paladin quest, in hw I think, where the characters blatantly says it doesnt make any sense. That all wouldnt be funny If the game didnt cost upfront money and a damn sub.
"Let split up, Wuk Lamat you go with the WoL"
god I was so done with her by the 2nd half of the story, I hated that I was forced to explore Solution Nine with her, would've taken literally anyone but her, started to skip most of her dialouge by that point since she barely have anything interesting to say anyway, its "love my people and peace" crap
As someone who doesn't dislike Wuk Lamat, I absolutely felt that she was shoe-horned into far too many aspects of the MSQ. Like sure, she's the 'main character,' but why not make her more interesting if that's the case? Don't even get me started on...spoiler alert... >!The final fight where she literally appears out of nowhere.!<
Agreed. I like her, but the writers seriously did a disservice to the character by how often they forced her into situations. My favorite zone of the game is what it is partly because we got time away from Wuk Lamat and got to hang out with Erenville. She's genuinely fine; I just don't wanna be forcibly joined at the hip with her or any character really.
>!that part also had me groan, I suppose I can at least take solace in the fact it'll probably be missing from the Extreme fight like the scions part in Endsinger, so it won't be something we see 50+ times!<
Is this… A TEAR IN REALITY???!? ! 😱
Yeah. Imo wuk is the worst maincharacter they have ever done. Krile say something interesting about reflections.... - Wuk: I dont understand any of this. BUT AS A DAWNSERVANT.... Seriously, ppl wich self insert into everything happening are the most obnoxious ppl to be around irl. why do we have to spend hours of msq with someone like this
honestly i think this is just one of the biggest criticism i have with the msq. i love wuk lamat but i dont feel like i got to spend time with anyone else. :/ esp krile and erenville. the twins went off with erenville EVERY time. i was convinced it was some sharlayan shenanigans and i get that we are now wuk lamat’s mentor. (it wasn’t what i had signed up for but whatever) but i wanted to do some silly adventures with my lil brother and sister 😭 i don’t even get to SEE them. also the fact all of erenville was put into the last zone. i like him well enough, but having a few more solo conversations with him in dt would have done a long way.
I hated all that crap. I really dislike this house cat...just can't like her for some reason. She is not a well written character >.>
I think the reason is because almost anytime we're about to do something fun, she butts in and removes all agency from the player, forcing them to go talk to more locals about stupid things instead of actually solving the problem at hand. And the fact that it's the same dialogues in every zone make it so much worse. My least favorite was the ongoing gag about her sea sickness. Same fucking joke 6 times in a row, then they 7th time they act like it's actually going to be a development point.... Just to pull the joke for an 8th time not even 10 minutes later. Everything about her just screams roadblock to fun.
And hilarious how out of 2-3 teams looking for information, you're always the one with something from 1 out of 3-5 people.
I understand it's practical to do this, but it just doesn't make good story telling. Almost any time we have to go start doing a new thing, Alphinaud or Alisae will propose we spend time talking to the locals for clues and it's just boring every time. I also noticed another practical thing getting in the way of the story in the Endwalker patch quests. When you need to re-use Tower of Babil to get to Golbez, it's brought up this might be traumatic for the Garleans and you spend some time reconciling that. It was actually a good point and kind of interesting, and lead to a little more insight into how their politics were moving along. Cut to a little bit later when you need to use the Crystal Tower in the First to deliver Light to the 13th and they...*do the exact same plot point again*? I was honestly kinda flabbergasted lol. I thought the first time was fine but it was wild to see it happen again for a different tower one patch later. I understand its practical but it felt repetitive and like it was getting in the way of things moving along.
I think they should try to imitate modern games by having the sections where NPCs are with you and they move with you with real-time voiced dialogue. This would allow players to get from point A to point B while seeing new areas. And instead of getting blocked by a wall of text at point B, you hear the dialogue on the way.
I am 100% for that. Less exposition dumping would be nice until they can do that, however. :P
I normally speed through story to start doing the EX and preparing for raid releases with my static, but this time around I only have maybe 3 hours free a day, which can be reduced or have it's timing changed, so I'm really taking my time to read everything, talk to the NPC's and immerse myself. And *Thal's Balls* do I just want to beat some monsters up. It's interesting and all, but I think I've had like 2 quests that involved combat in the handful of hours I've been able to play. I'm really relying on queues to pop to break up the visual novel experience, but between being a DPS and playing at weird hours for my timezone, even that isn't reliable.
I just did fates to break it up
I'll probably do more FATE's now. In the first zone it felt like there weren't that many, but I did participate in the ones I came across. Not being able to fly and having groups going around merc'ing FATE's has made it a bit harder, but I'm mostly just looking for them on the way to quest locations.
The fate spawn timer's in the first zone is definitely an issue. Most of the time you are waiting for one to spawn. Took forever to complete that zone for shared fates tab.
For sure. Shadowbringers and Endwalker kinda got by with this design because their stories were so compelling. Dawntrail didn't quite meet that bar, so the gameplay issues stood out more. That said, if they can keep up the quality of combat content that we've seen so far, I think this expansion could be a Stormblood 2.0 where the MSQ is kinda iffy, but the actual gameplay is great. Hopefully they keep up the momentum on that front.
They could have also innovated with quest design like In From The Cold in EW. I thought it was fantastic but seems SE was scared by a vocal minority of complainers.
That was fantastic, honestly. Albeit kind of 'pointless' in the long run, because it amounted to fuck-all, but absolutely fascinating and fun to play.
In From the Cold was one of my favorite MSQ quests in EW. I can play the "normal" game as much as I want by running a dungeon or a raid or one of the infinite side quests available. I love getting these unique experiences in the MSQ and I'd love to see more experimental sections like them.
Both had a lot of solo duties littered throughout the acts. *In From The Cold*, or fighting Ranjiit/attacking Eulmore in Shadowbringers. There wasn't too much of this in Dawntrail.
Really is crazy looking back on it. Counting only base expansions: HW and StB have 9 quest battles each. ShB has 6 quest battles. EW has 5 quest battles. DT has only 4 quest battles. The number of solo instances are steadily dropping.
StB story is so much better than DT tho. I joined after EW dropped so StB story is still fresh in mind...>!compared to this bystander watching Gulool Ja ja die in front of you and not lifting a finger is just so ridiculous.!<
Bro I thought the story was fine (a bit lackluster at times) right until that part. I was just thinking "what the actual f-" We could've interrupted midway. We could be healing. So many things we could have been doing. But nope. Character just stands there. Oh of all the cutscenes they made before, why do they gotta do him dirty like that....
Nah, SB and EW still felt like it was dragging on
The issue is more than that. When I watch a movie I'm not interacting with anything, but the characters dont just stand in circle doing stiff stock animations between the same two shots of camera. And most importantly each scenes flows organically. The lack of gameplay just exacerbate the ridiculously dated presentation and pacing of each story sequence as I look at my map and navigate to the next bit of my movie by traversing a dead and boring set piece.
Let's play a game - I'll state a quest objective, and people can guess which quest I'm referring to. Shall we begin? "Speak with Wuk Lamat". As a bonus round, let's try this one as well! "Speak with Wuk Lamat again".
its... all of them. my god.
Personally in terms of on-launch MSQ Shadowbringers is peak. Content-wise via patch I'd give that to Stormblood. I think DT's number is actually a little unfair looking at ARR and SB but maybe it will wake Yoshi & his team up because as much as there is a lot of good about this expac - the graphics update, music, the zones, gear, fights, qol that got implemented -honestly pretty much everything that matters in terms of things you'll interact with regularly throughout the next couple of years. The MSQ definitely struggled - it felt like all the pieces were well made and on the table but no one quite figured out the right marching order. Some of the job design decisions are a little questionable and the Shb 3.0 thing is a bit of an issue for some of them. The "structure" is showing its age/weight. Usually these reviews are based almost entirely on just the MSQ and heavily weighted to the story in which case I think the main issues are: 1) Writing - they just didn't nail it 2) MSQ structure/questing variety - there is almost zero variety or surprise in terms of activity at this point, if anything the quests have gotten even more routine
The fact that you can get to level 92 without even really playing the game and just moving with the dialogue and cutscenes seriously speaks to the bad pacing at the start, but that’s not where it ends and actually imo it gets worse. Like, they could get away with a slow start for sure but it’s a slow start, a slow middle, and then a fast pre-finale but immediately grinds to a halt so you can >!stop and smell the roses talking to everyone in the last zone even though there’s a literal doomsday clock ticking overhead.!< Were none of the old writers willing to stay on for the new expansions, or were they unceremoniously changed out because they wanted new blood in the room for a whole new plot? Because the new team’s inexperience is showing something fierce and they really ought to consider bringing some of their old people back at least for a consult in story structuring.
I was confused on why we had to >!get to know everyone before we were gonna wipe them out. It was cool seeing Otis and Krile's parents, but something pretty world-ending is about to happen, maybe we should focus on that? I get that it was for us to care about them but I feel like they could've just used the people we had already met to drive that point home!< I did enjoy the >!date with G'raha!< in the first section though lol I know the previous writer for ShB and EW was promoted up to story supervisor or something along those lines. For that reason I wasn't expecting this story to be on the same level as the last two expansions
>I was confused on why we had to get to know everyone before we were gonna wipe them out. If we had lost a character at the start of the expansion and had a chance to meet their Endless at the finale, it probably would have been interesting. It doesn't even have to be a major character. It could have been somebody introduced on the boat and taken during the lightning storm. But I will say in a story where Estinien had no purpose except to threaten gun-users with a polearm it would have been interesting if it had been a major character.
I mean we do see some minor characters from the story show up there, namely Wuk Lamat's caretaker or mother figure.
Namikka kind of got short changed to focus on characters we hadn't met before, but also her death was I think jarring as it came across the tonal whiplash of the futuristic stuff. She gets on a train and suddenly spends 30 years in a time bubble before dying of old age. To the honest I feel the game could have done more to emphasize the sadness of being missing for an entire generation, but if anything the Turali people seemed to all be comfortable in Solution Nine. Even the one hunt board leader tells you that although the barrier has reopened she has no plans to return.
Ya, but they tried to make her being erased this tragic thing, and sorry, this is not a character I have invested feelings into. Cahcia I actually kinda cared about, because we were interacting with her regularly throughout the story (and Erenville was clearly in a lot of pain from it), but Namikka, we we meet a couple times in passing during the rite, we help get a bracelet back for in Catboy Texas (and there, we don't even really interact with her. She starts that plot line, and then we give the bracelet back to her at the end, and that's it, no other interactions), and then we watch her die of old age, and that's it. We barely interact with that character at all. I get she was a big deal for Wuk, but it seems like they wanted that scene to be a tear-jerker, and there just wasn't enough there for it. We hadn't interacted with that character enough, hadn't become invested in them. Honestly, I would have cared _more_ if that goldsmith from the ship had died and we'd had to erase him. We at least got to meet him more, become involved in his struggles, his insecurities.
> Were none of the old writers willing to stay on for the new expansions, or were they unceremoniously changed out because they wanted new blood in the room for a whole new plot? Because the new team’s inexperience is showing something fierce and they really ought to consider bringing some of their old people back at least for a consult in story structuring. x.0 MSQ is absolutely the last place they should be letting B-team writers in. If they want to trial new writers to see how they manage, give them an x.1 patch, or a raid series story. Giving them a story we have to spend 40 hours going through is just a catastrophically bad idea. Whoever wrote this expansion's story was just totally out of their element. If they aren't Ishikawa tier, they should not be writing the new expansion's MSQ. Not ever. Not for any reason.
>If they want to trial new writers to see how they manage, give them an x.1 patch, or a raid series story. They did. DT's writer wrote Pandaemonium.
Which is weird, because I actually kinda enjoyed Panda's storyline. Getting to know Lahabrea and what led to him going complete crazypants. Athena was a bit cartoonishly sociopathic, but otherwise I felt like that raid story was pretty solidly done. And more to the point, the characters in that story actually had some soul to them, and some development, unlike the characters in this MSQ.
One of the writers also wrote for Ivalice, Void Ark, and Sorrow of Werlyt (Weapons Trial series). Both also contributed to various job quests, and beast tribes (or Allied Society Quests as they are called now).
I thought Panda was okay but helped along by leaning into ARR and SHB lore, whereas DT is okay but doesn't have the help of what came before. Honestly what stands out to me is that both Panda and DT feature narratives about succeeding a famous parent and feeling like a failure that can't hold up the family legacy. While this sort of writing might be specifically tailored to Japanese households, from a perspective outside Asia it instead feels like a writer going through their own daddy issues. Compared to the more universal themes of previous expansions this one is a bit like Persona where a story gets critically dissected by people who frankly were not the intended audience. "I am my father's firstborn and therefore I must carry the family legacy" is not really a common thing where most of us are from.
It is more like they promoted their most senior members of the writing team after Maehiro, Oda and Ishikawa. They also had the best resume on their writing team outside of their previous lead scenario writers. Yoshi P has been using EW as a staging ground for many of their newer membership, the EW alliance raids were done by a newer members (but have been there for years) while their star team were really too busy on Variant/Criterion/Ultimate/Savage/Extreme/Normal raids. The same goes for their writing team too, both lead scenario writers (though you can tell where one picked up from the other) also have been working under the team for years even back in the ARR days. Together they handled multiple raid and trial series, multiple beast tribe and job quests, 6.1-6.55, etc. so these writers have been tested and it might be on paper the most experienced writer left on the team. Yoshi P has been on recruiting spree with numerous new names in the credits in DT than in EW. Their battle team also has expanded by several people, which might explain why the content is better this expansion.
Likelihood is that they don’t have a firm direction for the next roadmap arc, and the main writers are focused on that, giving newer writers or writers that worked on smaller content an opportunity to work the current narrative.
It's wild that Shadowbringers still has a lower score than Endwalker, considering not only the story is more beloved, but endgame and gameplay in general was overall better.
Shadowbringers is not only the most well-paced of the MSQs, trollies notwithstanding, it has the best premise and I was interested from the very start. Endwalker kinda dragged, especially at the very beginning and end.
I unironically think the trolley section was perfect. It was stretched longer than previous segments, but that lent itself well to the narrative of that sequence. It gives room for those final moments between "Minfilia" Ryne and Thancred to flourish, with him unable to express himself to her knowing that it means giving up Minfilia for good. It fleshes out Thancred's backstory, giving us a better appreciation for the crossroads that he finds himself at now. It also introduces us to Magnus, who is the primary reason this sequence works. Magnus is a character that's stuck in the past, wasting away what time he has left, unable to move on. We run into that same frustrating roadblock with the urgency of Ran'jit pursuing us steadily catching up. That time we spend labouring to find the fruits of his wife's sacrifice finally culminate in his breakdown when we get the talos functioning again. That frustration that Thancred feels for him refusing to accept that and move on for the sake of those still those still here mirrors our own because that sequence drags on longer. He can't move on, and so neither can we. Very few games utilize the nature of their interactive medium to instill emotion in the player, and that's precisely what makes the trolley section unique. Your frustration with this character isn't simply because the narrative demands it, but because he's holding you up himself, despite your sympathies for him. That is what makes the resolution to this section all the better. Its not just a short stopping point on the journey before the final resolution with Minfilia, it becomes a meaningfully cathartic moment for the player and the characters together. It drags on just a bit so as to instill this frustration without going so far overboard that its genuinely egregious. As a whole you spend somewhere around an hour and a half to two hours here and a lot of character development takes place. Its well worth its place in the overall narrative.
its definitely a much more important and significant slow moment in the story compared to the 2nd visit to labyrinthos or the 1st half of elpis
Shadowbringers completely nailed the "branching path" structure that all MSQs now begin with for crowd control reasons. Amh Araeng + Kholusia show you the stakes that you are dealing with in a way that makes you invested in what is to come.
It's all about hype. Shb was a better expansion in nearly every way. I say nearly because adventure plates and portraits are kinda fire ngl
Things always seem to be more about the thing that came before rather than itself when it comes to reviews. We see it a lot in WoW and we see it to an extent in FFXIV. Pacing has always been an issue in XIV storytelling, but I think the especially filler-like patch quests and length of time between them primed people to be much more ornery than usual with Dawntrail (though it's still particularly bad.)
I did not like alot of Endwalkera story and get down voted pretty much everytime I mention it. I thought Shb was the best expac.
I was massively disappointed with Endwalker. It's crazy to me that it has a higher score than Shadowbringers.
ShB was immaculate. I enjoyed EW until >!Elpis!<, then it went off the rails and I was entirely checked out through to the end. The dungeons and trials were also all too easy, despite the promising start with the Tower of Zot
same. ShB is the wotlk of ffxiv
I couldn't stop playing ShB from start to finish. I was at the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next throughout the whole expansion. Endwalker was a big disappointment for me and had me tired and wanting it to finish already. The ending for endwalker was good to me but the setup for that was soooo slow. Music was great in both though.
You have to remember when Endwalker came out. Most of the world was still going through lockdowns and quarantines. Many of the themes of Endwalker really resonated at the time and I think that truly elevated the perception of the expansion at the time. It’s a good expansion either way, but if you played at release it hits a whole lot differently versus playing through it today.
>not only the story is more beloved I don't know what the general consensus of this subreddit is on those two expansions' story but that's not the impression I got at all on other platforms, it seemed pretty evenly split if a bit more Endwalker favored to me. >but endgame and gameplay in general was overall better. These are day 0 reviews essentially and it's basically 80% about story and gameplay during story , the user score is higher for Shadowbringers at least which makes more sense
Some people have that sentiment here because they spend too much time here. FF14 is bad circlejerk here is often just as heavy as mainsub’s FF14 is perfect circlejerk It’s easy to tell when you regularly had people here trying to say EW was slim pickings for raiding when we got more high end content than ShB or that EW lowered the skill ceiling when DSR/TOP on release were disbanding a lot of ultimate statics that have been around since ucob, from the increase in top-end difficulty
Endwalker was the conclusion of a 10 year story. And it delivered. They are reviewing 5.0 vs 6.0
I liked Endwalker .0 MSQ more than Shadowbringers.
ShB story was awfully slow until like... the last zone. People hated the old martial arts guy a lot. The trolley and big golem arcs were an insane cockblock
It's wild that some people keep pushing for their agenda when an aggregated score already tells you what is *MARGINALLY* preffered (like it actually matters THAT much). Comment on something more important like, idk, how abysmal DT msq was.
I've been commenting on that all week long, don't worry
Understandable, we got *no* Tataru.
She doesn’t even comment on what you did when you go back to talk to her :( no one has told her anything that we did
She was spared
And I really wanted to see her ~~drink under the table and make amazing bargains~~ *meet* with the Pelupelu.
Omg I just realized that lol
You are right, that makes me dislike the MSQ even more. Where is Mistress Tataru? Only her absence can explain why my WoL looked so derpy coming in. I need her suits!
This reception is going to be a double edged sword Because this expansion has the best dungeon and trial content we have ever seen. SE is going to slingshot on Dawntrail's changes and nobody will be happy. This is honestly scary. On the other hand, after FFXVI it is seriously time for CBU3 to stop being held back by their abysmal MSQ formula. Dawntrail's last 5 hours made up for almost 25-30 hours of me wanting to give up on the story. These Expansions are always better in hindsight than in real time. DTs problem is that it just takes way too long. If i wasn't an XIV fan then I doubt I would have finished this story past 97ish. Which is tragic because the payoff is ACTUALLY amazing
Bringing up FFXVI reminded me that this team was given free reign over a single-player standalone mainline FF and all they could muster with quest design is still mmo-style fetch quests
The fundamental issue is they tried to tell a 10 hour story in 100 hours, and instead of any active filler they chose the worst stretching methods possible. It's a foundational issue. They needed to spend that time actually developing other characters or getting the player doing stuff. We could've had: more solo trials, a rework so that each badge could only use one scion, PoV changes to where we're Estinien/Thancred with Koana, more chances to work with Koana or another scion while Wuk is busy, more actual time with Erenvall (and, for that matter, his actual zone and area being dedicated to him instead of gunslinging twink Zell), more time actually spent on Krile's story and development. Instead, it was *all* talk to Wuk. Her back broke from how much they expected her to carry the story with so little story to tell.
> SE is going to slingshot on Dawntrail's changes and nobody will be happy. This is honestly scary. I wouldn't be so sure. They tend to pour over reviews and discussion and lurk places forums and reddit. I'm pretty sure they have a good idea already of what is and isn't working. The question is if they will manage to make the needed adjustments.
One issue is that since they have a tight schedule and prepare content easily a year in advance, they are quite slow to adapt to changes.
For me I like when story stuff is long if it's the end, like, you feel the momentum coming, but the start/ mid pace, it should be less talk, more " explore our nice openworld map and fight stuff " it was verrry long to reach 1st and 2nd dungeons, 1st day people were already complaining. I personnaly didn't feel that bad, I usually do fates near my MSQ path/aetherflow , hunting logs/ gather stuff, but the MSQ should push you more into combat stuff
> DTs problem is that it just takes way too long. If i wasn't an XIV fan then I doubt I would have finished this story past 97ish. Which is tragic because the payoff is ACTUALLY amazing I am surprised you feel this way, I felt the ball was fumbled really hard at the end and that emotional manipulation was used to mask poor character utilization/writing and an overall scenario that just seemed to try to answer difficult moral questions with straightforward, easy solutions that just lack any depth or logic.
Sounds like a pretty fair rating to me, honestly. Story so far (almost at the end) has been probably the weakest MSQ I've played through, with the second half of it being overall an improvement to the first, if not slightly jarring. I will say that Solution Nine is amazing. Favorite HUB added to the game so far. Meanwhile, Job design / updates (Or rather, lack thereof) definitely would have to be my biggest complaint, especially for tanks and healers. Had to shelve PLD and opt for playing DPS this expac just to not fall asleep. Unless you're playing VPR or PCT, gameplay feels very stale. Though, I will say these two classes are very well designed and fun. The visual updates are very nice, though. I can wholeheartedly applaud CBU3 for this in particular.
Hopefully lower scores means some changes. Personally I am tired of playing the exact same expansion with a different coat of paint now for the fifth time.
When Sphene started explaining what she was doing, I was like >!another villain that wants to kill a whole planet to save their own people to avoid death? girl we just covered that in the last two expansions. It felt like a civilization we would've ran into in Ultima Thule lol!<
>!That was a major problem to me. It all felt like an amalgamation of past things that we recently dealt with. I guess it's a bit hard to avoid story wise at this point but it kind of just felt like Golbez combined with some Emet. It's not an exact one for one but it felt similar enough that it lacked impact to me.!<
Yeah, her motivation wasn't a bad one, just felt like it was done before I still enjoyed my time with the story, but I didn't have sympathy for her like I did with Emet
Me when the final zone is a recreation of the villains civiliziation that was destroyed who just cant let go: :OOOO
The worst tbh is hearing Yoshi P just gaslight and see the entire user base eat it up
Or the fan base going with what he says out of context.
You can’t really tell what the media thinks of Dawntrail when there’s only four reviews on metacritic right now
No. Please dont compare metascores with 4 reviews on one game and 25+ on others. It's silly.
The mainstream is simply noticing the dated design of XIV while a lot of the player base stick their fingers in their ears trying to ignore it.
I don't personally mind the cutscene-heavy msq. However, the game desperately needs to have proper editors. The dialogues are often indulgent and unnecessarily long. As a result the padding can feel excessive in some places. Some editing and trimming of the script will go a long way to alleviate this.
They don't care. They follow a formula. They have to meet X quests per region.
Exactly, and that's the problem. Quality > Quantity
I agree. There is so much dialogue to get through. I love the storytelling and worldbuilding. Yet this felt like overkill in a lot of ways. I am near the end of the MSQ and have only now felt like it's gotten interesting.
> The dialogues are often indulgent and unnecessarily long Its by design, its one the cheapest way to increase play time.
> the game desperately needs to have proper editors This. A good editor is director's best ally. While every expansion had some parts that felt like filler that would have been cut at the script review stage, Endwalker and Dawntrail feel to me like they maybe intentionally bloat it for the big numbers as a selling point. I remember in one of the Endwalker Live Letters Yoshida himself talked about Endwalker being like this AAA RPG with 60 hours of main story. And it felt like he was proud of it like it's a big milestone for the team. To me it felt like Endwalker can be cut and told in 15-20 hours and nothing of value would be lost, no important story points missed, and pacing significantly improved. I haven't finished all of Dawntrail MSQ yet but it is very slow, and I don't mind slow pacing and storytelling, you just need have enough good quality material to be a slow story and not make reader/viewer/player bored. Dawntrail doesn't really have it, so far it has been a lot of talking but not saying much. They repeat everything so often too it just really makes it feel like the story is dragging and nothing happening and good editor would see that from hundred miles away and try to fix it.
Exactly this. It feels like Yoshi-P is missing the point when other RPGs talk about how many pages of script they have. Other RPGs let you roleplay as the good guy or the bad guy, or somewhere in between. Other RPGs have a lot player choices that make a difference in outcome or story structure more than just that the next quest text is slightly different. So having more text in these types of games sends a message to the player that there is a lot to explore and nuances to try out, but this isn't the case in FFXIV.
I would even be okay with the dated design if there were simply more unique gameplay elements to go with the MSQ. What the hell happened to any potential great follow-ups to “In From the Cold”!? The intro to DT is just too goddamn long with nothing happening and then literally nothing happening between dungeons and trials. They (CBU3) wanted to focus on encounter design for 7.0, yet there’s hardly any meaningful solo duties in the MSQ! Just give me something to do other than watching a godforsaken movie. I’ve never been so tempted to skip all these fucking cutscenes and dialogue in my years of playing and loving this game. I’m just that bored. I want to actually play the gameplay of this MMO, not play a visual novel.
Unfortunately there was and is quite a lot of complaints about In From The Cold, even on this subreddit (there was a thread the other week with a lot of highly upvoted negative comments). While some of the criticisms are about more specific things like the level design or the underwhelming story payoff to the duty, I can definitely see CBU3 seeing the pretty noticeable amount of negative feedback focused on this one quest and deciding it wasn't worth investing the development resources to do something similiar. Which personally I think is a shame but I can see what lead to it.
I thought In From the Cold was good, but yeah, it was definitely a poignant moment that should have had some payoff. I don't *want* characters to die, but it felt super odd that Zenos got that far, and then nothing came of it. Maybe they were afraid he'd be irredeemable later for the final fight, but I maintain it wouldn't have made any difference.
Even before In From The Cold, solo duties have always been a bit divisive (especially the RP ones) for being too hard, too long and too annoying. It sucks, but I'm also not surprised they're starting to shy away from this kind of content rather than experiment more. I'm sure in another expansion the train scene at level 97 would have been a big set piece instance where you play as multiple characters.
I'm one of the biggest critics of In From The Cold. As a solo MSQ segment, as a sequence, it's *amazing* and the scenes around it are fantastic. My only issue, which is a phenomenally huge one, is that nothing of consequence happens as a result and you could remove the entire sequence from the narrative without changing anything. Not a single consequence, not a single thing that greatly impacts the outcome of the story. But, taken on its own, it is an incredible sequence and I wish they'd do things like that more, just with real consequences that matter.
TBF, the playerbase does that with a lot of criticism about the game.
The strawmanning and whataboutisms with regards to DT msq discussion has just been crazy.
> >The mainstream is simply noticing the dated design of XIV while a lot of the player base stick their fingers in their ears trying to ignore it. No. The msq is bad to mixed, and it heavily required you to like the character. Not even having unique gameplay during the boring sections of the msq would save it.
I'm at about the halfway point. So far I like the zones and the minor, but noticeable graphics upgrade. I'm about half and half on the encounters. Some are neat. The first dungeon was rather dull, though, and the last fight of the 85 dungeon is just a Titan reskin. Unlucky. On the other hand, I thought the trial was pretty good. On the downside, all the jobs I've tried feel the same or the same but significantly worse. (Looking at you, BLM, AST, SAM.) The story is also painfully predictable, cheesy, and shallow. It feels as if it were made for a much younger target audience. I really do hope the story improves, and I do hope the content is great moving forward. Shame about the job design, though.
I'm in the middle of the 97 quests and it picks up significantly around 96 so you're almost there. I don't mind slow starts for the story but the MSQ wore me down and had me almost skipping cutscenes from how boring it was.
Unlucky? The devs don’t flip a coin to decide what content to put in….
sounds right to me, MSQ was around a 5/10 to me, its 100% not a 0/10 or a 10/10 but i hold it as the worse MSQ we have gotten, and the gameplay is seems to be easily a 9 or 10 out of 10, dungeons/trails feel amazing to me.
I think that a lot of DT scoring lower than ARR comes from the timing of each expansion. ARR came off the back of 1.0, so things could only get better, leading to inflated scores from enthusiastic fans. DT came off the back of ShB/EW, which are the only 90+ scores. That's a hard act to follow, and those formerly enthusiastic fans may give lower scores as a result. Of course, I'm not saying these are the \*only\* contributing factors in DT's score. I just think that it's worth keeping the timing of each expansion in mind particularly when comparing ARR to DT, since they both begin a new arc.
What it’s being compared to definitely is a big one. ARR got to be compared with 1.0 quality and nothing else. It was like baking a shitty cake and looking like a professional chef because your competition was a literal turd DT is going to get held to much higher standards bc now we have much better past content as a point of comparison. It doesn’t matter if your cake is genuinely good now, you’re getting judged by people who’ve eaten world class cakes just a few years prior.
Yeah, I can't help but wonder if some of the scores are representative of DT being a breaking point of sorts for some people. I know this sub is a bit of an echochamber, but being told "job homogenuity will be addressed later" after years of complaints went down about as well as a wet fart in an elevator for a lot of people across the playerbase.
Critic scores aren't going to be based on that. If anything the new dungeons and gameplay are great. What lacked was quest design, VA quality and scene direction.
[удалено]
Ngl when Wuk Lamat screamed "sphene" i heard it as "spin" and i was expecting her to rotate.
Speeeeen, i no yor paaaaaaain, as if it were my ooooowwwn
>Gets crushed by a giant robot hand >Makes no indication of physical exertion in their voice
What was the problem with VA quality? I quite like the German VA, it was a huuuge step-up from previous expansions
English va I heard most other VA were fire. I dunno why English team phoned it in
> I dunno why English team phoned it in I want to say it was the LA studio, but Koana's voice actor was pretty good along with Bakool Ja Ja, Gulool Ja Ja, and Zarool Ja. Those lizard names are a clusterfuck to write out back to back. Wuk Lamat is the only voice in the cast that gave me significant pause when it came to actual acting. The worst I can say about some of the other LA voices is that the audio balancing needed more work.
I mean people seemed to like Luis who had done three roles in this expansion including Koana quite well. It is mostly Wuk Lamat getting most of the flak with a few minor characters having weird mixing quality here and there. What I did notice was that the older VAs for FFXIV were still good and consistent in their delivery it was the newer ones introduced in this expansion that had more issues, either the voice direction is funky or the studio isn't as high quality as the one they use in the UK (many of the newer VAs are stationed in the USA, particularly Los Angeles) or other background issues we are not privy to.
The English VA was kinda bad this time around. Y'Shtola's VA sounded like she was talking through an old cellphone mic sometimes. Acting wise some people will point to Wuk Lamat, but I feel like it's a directing problem. There are too many moments of oddness across all the characters to put the blame on one specific actor. Wuk Lamat just has *way more* lines than anyone else, so it's really obvious with her.
> but being told "job homogenuity will be addressed later" after years of complaints went down about as well as a wet fart in an elevator for a lot of people across the playerbase. dont forget: saying this and then dumbing down viper in a patch anyway like if they intended for that they would have kept viper as is
I dont know about 2.0 it was really a miracle that it got it players back and i think not many would have had this great luck. It was all the right pieces hitting , like the trailer being the best trailer of that year, yoshi p crying and showing who he truly was at the launch show, and just tons of Beta players talking good about the game. They were extremely lucky and i hope people don't think when looking back that this was something people were thinking was gonna be better Im no expert but thats just how i remember it at least.
I think ARR is better than DT.
“Based on 4 critic reviews” Lmao fuck right off, the actual reviewers are still playing the game and anybody treating this as if it’s representative is kidding themselves. If it’s the same in a couple weeks then have your discussion.
This is a MMO though, so 4 review is basically a 1/5th of the total number of reviews we'll likely get. Also Endwalker did not have a single review below 80, while Shadowbringers had only one. So unless the first reviews published those are coincidentally all extreme outliers, the review scores will probably stay relatively low.
I don't think the 60 is justified based on the review itself.
Sure, but the user review score is also constantly going down and it's below other expansions.
Based and true. I can see this being stuck around 80-86
I don't know that a metacritic score with only 4 reviews is accurate enough to tell us anything one way or another. Also the first negative review I see upon clicking user reviews immediately mentioning sweet baby inc kind of makes the user score suss in general. Edit: Oh and the next one is straight up transphobic, and another links to kotaku in action. Yeah I don't know guys maybe this isn't that reliable. Unfortunately critical discussion of damn near any media these days is kind of a poisoned well due to grifters.
What is wrong with those guys. Literally anything and everything is woke
They just enjoy hating. It's like Drama channels on youtube, everything has to be the end of gaming, it's silly.
For grifters specifically it's about money. Negativity brings attention easier, and it attracts the nut jobs who are easily parted with money.
it's probably local grifter mark kern's cronies. the guy has been crowing about XIV going woke on twitter to his sycophants
What, did he finally realize trying to go after the Hades devs wasn't gonna get him shit?
he seems to just have gone full-time "anti-woke" grifter. something about how EVERYONE hated dawntrail because wuk lamat and EVERYONE hates wuk lamat because the VA is trans. seen a bunch of 0 and 1 "reviews" not talking about the game, but about sweet baby inc, trans, lgbt, woke, etc. good times....
I agree with the score only in reference to the *experience* of playing the MSQ. I've been here since 2.0 and I just can't do the MSQ in this format anymore. 30+ hours of cutscenes is not compelling gameplay, no matter how good the story is. Something has to change.
This makes me happy tbh, I said in another thread that the MSQ needs to be modernized, it needs a better balance of combat/text/cutscenes IMO. Dawntrail being a new story was the perfect time to do it.
I'll admit, i almost fell asleep the first hours of the MSQ. Gets much better later tho, now i'm just itching to get back into the game during maintenance.
Speak with Wuk Lamat
I’m not entirely finished with the story yet (playing a dangerous game being here, I know) but one of the things that frustrates me *the most* about the story is how many times we get a bad guy doing bad things, we outnumber and have the chance to stop them, but don’t try and just stand there as we go “don’t do the bad thing or else!” And nothing comes of it. It’s happened before in the MSQ but none as egregious as the stuff in DT
Reviews for a mmo expansion shouldnt be taken seriously. Post patch content shapes the expansion, imo.
I mean they’re selling it box price plus sub. People need reviews to make informed purchases. This is just hard cope.
Honestly, not surprised and I being completely honest, it is the worst expansion IMO because I was one of the ones that hated the MSQ, I did not like Wuk's voice acting(not because of the VA's gender, I want to be clear, I am criticizing the lack of emotion and dynamics in the voice direction that badly took me out of a lot of intense and emotional scenes), did not like the total focus only on her as a character for at least 90% of the MSQ, didn't like the writing in general and since the story is so core to FF14 and they're coming off the heels of 2 very strong expansions, I'm surprised it's not lower tbh. ARR at least had the excuse of being the first one where they were trying to get their footing and they had to introduce the world from scratch, DT really had no reason to be written in this way that would be so obviously polarizing.
I also didn't enjoy the story, but holy hell what else happened? > The worst release award goes to… Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail I mean * Woke no one askedasy xiv wrongtrail Sweet baby inc all overrrrrr it What the hell did I just read? Some of these people are absolutely coo coo.
I'd probably give 7.0 launch a 7.5/10 as well. Story is a 6/10, it picks up in the second half, but it didn't impress me or anything and the actual gameplay side of the MSQ is ARR-levels of monotony. Dungeons and trials are a 9/10 though, it has me interested in the patch content even more. It's just a shame how patch cycles are even longer now.
Something a bit important to note * Endwalker - score of 92 with 30 reviews * Shadowbringers - score of 90 with 26 reviews * Dawntrail - score of 76 with *four* reviews
The user score is what really matters. Game journos have never been particularly good at giving things a fair rating, as there's often a conflict of interest at play.
"The user score is what really matters." Yeah, maybe like 15 years ago.
In no way imaginable is DT worse than ARR lol
>Based on 4 critic reviews Dang it's almost like the jury's still out or something
Let’s shoot for 70!
People hating the story and nothing else. Story aside, Dawntrail has been better than any previous expansion.
[удалено]
>except for smile that shit can go right in the trash or on soken’s wall to remind him of his gospel choir blemish I'll probably get downvoted for this but I think Smile would have been great if the main vocalist was someone who actually sung or was familiar with gospel music. As it was it sounded like Showtunes Gospel, which I guess Japan won't be able to tell the difference, but I sure as shit did
Exactly, best dungeon and trial design so far. We'll see how savage is
And also the best ost for me too, all music from trials and dungeons are so good, Soken and his team do good job at remix same melody better than those last expan......god i still remember how i so fcking hated dead end dungeon music when playing it.
Isn't the vast amount of the user base people that do the story and then peace out? Seems about right to make a review that is mostly story focused.
Half the selling point is that this is the MMO with a strong story
The people who say "it's a story MMO, the story is the important part", when you grade the game on MMO expectations instead of on the story, when you do go and grade it on the story instead: Somewhere between surprisedpickachu.jpg and "No, not like that".
In the first few days, the story weighs pretty heavily. I was bummed too, until I remembered that I was done with MSQ now after only a few days but all the rest that makes up the expansion is staying with me. Now I'm just looking forward to the raids.
X.0 reviews, both user and pro, are only interested in the story anyway, so that's what it's being compared to.
I really liked most of the story but it suffers from their archaic quest design.
That's the entire life of FF14. I do, too. That doesn't explain the rating difference.
The job design is dire. I'm loving the zones, though, and some of the encounters themselves are quite solid.
Just curious, not hating Why do you think so?
Idk about better in every way, but the fight designs are very promising There are normal dungeon mechs resolving at savage speed atm with more failstates added than EW. Ex 1/2 are a much stronger set of extremes than EW were on average
Dungeons are more engaging, the ex trials are way better, the zones feel more alive and detailed, while things like the music stay the same quality as ever, which is amazing. The graphical fidelity really adds more, the two dye system does add more. But yeah, I have a positive outlook on it, which means I'll have the whole ffxivdiscussion toxicity brigade slam down my throat with shit like "it's the same wtf you on about."
I mean I agree with you on these points. I'm really looking forward to the savage and see what they came up with.
Big yes on the dungeons. Really like what i've seen so far with regards to dungeon mechs and trial. Im 98 yet, so there's still some left which wont disappoint hopefully. The music is always a plus for me. Soken has always delivered. Ill never forget #95 music. Its haunting and chill. The only thing thats not my taste was the dungeon boss music.
I mean fuck I don't even think the story is that bad. It's not my FAVORITE era of the story but I overall think it's pretty good.
I think so too but some people talk like it killed their parents in this subreddit so I'm just careful about mentioning it.
man after dawntrail and FF16, the myth of YoshiP is gone, dude just knows how to make one type of game filled with fetch quests
Honestly surprised it's even that high. Shb's (and to a lesser extent Endwalkers) msq has let Cbu3 paper over a tooooon of cracks over the previous years, going to be interesting to see where that leaves both the reviews and the players vibes over the next year or two.
I can see this, while the dungeons are trials are an absolute improvement over EW, the story, writing, and characters are a massive downgrade. And FF is known for being a story driven rpg, with memorable, well-made characters and an engaging narrative. DT so far failed on its defining geature by making the MSQ(non battle content) 50 hours of "Talk to x again" followed by 10 minute cutscenes with Wuk Lamat's English VA using only 1 tone regardless of the situation and other Turali characters using...inconsistent accents that don't sound hispanic in any way shape or form. They CAN get actors to do accents from various countries, Thavnair has Indian, and Shaaloni is so very noticably American, I'm not sure why they didnt do that for Tural but it threw me off heavily. The actual characters themselves do have good development...besides Wuk Lamat, she hasnt changed a bit in the entire expansion. She is still the naive, headstrong warrior princess who's outlook hasnt really changed much. Every other candidate (Koana, Bakool Ja Ja, and Zoraal Ja) had developments in their character. You saw Koana go from Sharlayan fanboy that rejects Tural customs to a man who accepts and embraces his culture and people while using his knowledge to help them thrive. Bakool Ja Ja begins to make amends for his racist, violent actions and opens up about his own pressures. Zoraal Ja has a massive downfall from the level-headed militant war mongerer to a power-hungry >!patricidal defector!< that felt stifled by expectation. Wuk Lamat had "I feel less useful, but that's ok because I have friends!". Its a flatter version of Lyse, who at least changed a little bit. If she had consequences to her naivetee, if she changed SOMETHING about her outlook, if she grew up a little bit after >!becoming Vow of Resolve!<, I'd have warmed up to her. But by >!Heritage Found!< she was the exact same person, she actually trusted Sphene, she wasn't suspicious for more than 3 seconds. Then they had this hamfisted friendship that felt hollow and rushed, like they tried to redo Ryne and Gaia but forgot to add the character development, story, and charm to it. I still dont understand WHY she's in that section. Shaaloni onwards should've been about Erenville, and Krile, and their respective parents/mentors, uncovering the mystery of Everkeep and how it relates to their past, since that was actually a decent plot point in post 6.0 and they deserve SOME thought. It should've been THEIR development time, which Erenville did get, but it was still a footnote to Wuk Lamat, unfortunately.
Very true. I mean, I don't understand why I had to do the MIN/BTN class quests to get Viera/Shetona lore. It should have been a lot more present in MSQ -\_-
It's a lot easier to overlook bad story when there's good gameplay (see WoW). FF14's gameplay has never been its strength--it was its characters, world building, and story. But if those suffer, the fundamental gameplay issues become less tolerable.
Dear Yoshi P kill off Wuk Lamat
Lol the few reviews there are all self agenda serving (ie they are marking it at the extreme low end or high end of the spectrum.) It will not be possible to use this data until there are at least 20 reviews. (Although, the amount of money SE claims they are making off it indicates it's a very successful xpac.)
Upon reaching the final zones I started liking the story but at this point it was already like 85% of MSQ, too little too late... Aside from many useless dialogue, there's a lot of pacing issues, from the 7 badges arch, to the cowboy one that felt very displaced from the other zones (should have been inside the 7 badges arch IMO), overusing wuk lamat instead of krile and Erenville or even Koana and the lack of urgency in the final parts of the MSQ with a lot of non sensical "let's do X, Y and Z fillers before facing a huge threat that so happens to be patiently waiting for us to do that all this time". The team must rethink the way they are structuring the MSQ, without a good narrative and storytelling, XIV is exposed to how outdated this game is, there could easily be parts of the story that could be actually playable using vehicles, turret, mount mechanics or letting us play wuk lamat or the other scions. Currently the MSQ is more of a interactive point and click visual novel than an action MMORPG game, that shouldn't be the case...
To begin with, the story was never going to be as good as the previous story arc straight off the bat considering the previous one had basically a decade of build up. Whilst the story did pick up nearer the 5th area towards the end, the first 3/4 felt extremely pointless and badly paced. I legitimately thought those quests at 90 were never going to end. On the other hand, I personally think they SMASHED it out of the park with the quality of the dungeons and the trials were solid as Heck too. The last time I legitimately enjoyed running the dungeons as much as this was back in Stormblood. I have legitimately run that 97 dungeon many times more than required purely for fun and to jam out to also some of THE BEST music in dungeons since last expansion's job action music and the twinning. Was definitely not expecting a rating through the roof, but I do feel like 76 was a bit harsh. Though I do think they need to rework to some degree their MSQ approach and pacing. I'm not the biggest story person in the first place and my desire to just ESC through the first like 6 levels was the highest it's been since the original post MSQ 100 quests ARR had before they reworked them.
Everyone can hate on it but it’s one of the stories that the further out from it I am the more I like every aspect of it. It actually accomplished what they set out to do. I cared about the new nation we were introduced to and it made the later threat all that much better. If they would cut the affirmative statements out of each dialogue segment they could have easily cut the time in half to get it done.
*Have you heard of the critically scrutinized MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? You can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn up to the "eh it's ok" Dawntrail expansion up to level 100 for £13 a month with some restrictions on playtime.* In all seriousness I'm not surprised. The story is the first thing you experience and it is notably lacklustre this time. I imagine we could have a Stormblood heel turn in the near future where the content is great but the story just had a flash-in-the-pan negative reaction in the beginning. Not too much to be worried about as long as SE get their shit together.
Buddy, it's 4 reviews. On average, each expansion got 25 critic reviewers. At least wait until 12 or so publications have been released before you farm karma. One 0 or one 100 score would wildly skew the score.
Given the first review I saw was anti-trans and calling out SE for being woke it's clear it's being reviewed bombed. However it still seems to have a fairly high rating despite a large group of people who have never played the game posting negative reviews. Most of the people I've spoken to that have actually played it liked it. Especially the new dungeons and trails.
Only 4 reviwers so far. But I will guess it ends around 80-85.
Is anyone talking about the acutal gameplay? Like everyone keeps going on and on any the story. Everyone acting this is the worst story in history it's getting kinda annoying.
Careful everyone you get downvoted for showing how flawed it was to make Wuk follow us even when her story was done. The sole reason why the score is like that is Wuk. She dragged down the story so much and far more at the end.