The next era of Final Fantasy XIV is here, beginning with Dawntrail, the latest expansion and the beginning of a brand new arc. How did Dawntrail turn out? Well, watch this video to find out what I think.
Table of contents:
Intro – 00:00
General – 03:05
MSQ (SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARD) – 16:30
Enter the GPU (The Arcadion) – 46:05
Outro – 53:29
Sources:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/190h5yc/
final_fantasy_xiv_introducing_beastmaster_a_new/
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Cosmic_Exploration
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/1dzsa14/dawntrail_is_nearly_as_long_as_endwalker_in/
source
Remember: the day is darkest before the dawn. So do not go on the trail until noon
I don't really understand why so many people don't like the story; I agree it starts out pretty weak but the latter half was really interesting! I hope the patch content makes it even better
(SPOILERS BELOW)
20:45 ngl I think even this wouldn't have satisfied people. They just would've been "omg, where's my friends, where's my faves, they could've have [insert situation that was purposefully set up for Wuk Lamat/Koana/Erenville/Krile's development] better and cooler". But this is meant to be their post-Endsinger break too, and I feel like dialogue that hearkens back to their journey and character growth is getting really overlooked. Alisaie and Alphinaud both have great moments of discussion about not comparing yourself to others and not assuming you know everything (aka their own ARR-HW arcs), and having Thancred and Urianger being the ones to talk to Koana about not opening your emotions to others (like they often did) was very good imo. Yet I do agree though that the pacing is very poorly timed esp the zone mentioned around 26:00 , and I think the character interactions kinda suffer for it.
But then… I do find myself wondering what I would've done different. I feel like I would've pushed the latter narrative jump to maybe a cliffhanger surprise right at the end before exploring more in future patches… but then what to do with the original storyline? How to make that more fleshed out without further exacerbating people's complaints about it being boring, not being the main character (while also complaining that they aren't getting the vacation their WOL was promised somehow), not being as huge and bombastic as its predecessors…
I think I've kinda just fallen in a place where I'm like. Yknow. I like it. Not LOVE… but like. I'm curious where they're taking us. And I suspect it's going to be one of those expansions where I look back in later ones and go "ohhhhhhh okay, they were cooking." I've played through tons of other MMO xpacs that left me feeling extremely disheartened or even angry over how the story went, and this hasn't been one of them, imo.
Sorry for this essay of a comment, I didn't realize how big it was until I looked back up. But loved the video, love your stuff, curious to see what your thoughts will be as we get future patches.
24:45 Thank you ! I felt crazy when my FC member laughed at me for liking the first half more but I felt it was a great way to de-escalate after the craziness of EW while the second half felt almost contractually obligated.
This feels mean to write, especially since it's not that bad but when I saw where this was going, it almost felt like someone hit a panic button in the writers' room once they realized Dawntrail only being a vacation / mentor story would antagonize a lot of the power-fantasy side of the fanbase.
I personally did not mind the pacing of DT, but I think that might just be because I have a different perspective as to what kind of story is going on here. It's not one grand epic tale, it's a series of vignettes following an over arching theme. When ever you finish a zone you should be taking a moment to stop and reenter, do the aether current quest, maybe run the dungeon again because your friend just hit it, or you want to try and see what the new weapon is like. Then once you're ready you do the next chunk of story. Viewed from that angle, each of the vignettes in DT were paced fine, interesting in their own right, and focused on the major plot and themes. The only place this isn't true is zone four which is supposed to feel like time is passing, and is doing a lot of leg work to establish the themes of the second half.
The pacing becomes a lot less of a problem for me when you compare it to literally any other FFXIV expansion, because DT makes an effort to justify why every chore is valuable for it's own sake, and is useful thematically, while the others just don't. Sure there might be more cutscenes involved, but let's not forget that in Shadow bringers you make your way up one impossible task with the lift, and then are told "go baby sit a dwarf", have the high of killing vauthry, and before you can even think about saving the exarch you need to clean a whale, do an entire role quest chain, then entertain some fish. The role quest fits thematically, but dealing with bismark, the dwarves, and the ondo do nothing to further the story, or the themese, they just buy time, and fill the zone count. Similarly in Hevansward you are constantly being asked to undo the ending of ARR at points in the story where it feels jarring to do so, and the bismark fight is placed in such a way that it can be fully removed and I don't think anyone would actually notice aside from a trial missing. I don't say this to condemn the rest of FFXIV, I love this story, but if DT's pacing is truly a bother I think it's worth considering if it's truly DT that's the problem, or the chore focused narrative structure the game has settled into. Perhaps by making sure everything is more important and relevant they've simply made the busy work harder to ignore, rather than making it worse.
I also think it's worth noting that the scions do a lot of work in DT, and in the first half, it's just that the twins do not. Thancred and Urianger are constantly guiding and coaching Khona in the way that we are coaching Wuk, but because they are not blank slates, we aren't asked to project the mentorship. We could have left the twins at home, but then it's not "the scions divided" it's "Us vs the Scions", and that would feel a lot more meanspirited. For better or worse the twins are in DT for our moral support, not Wuk Lamat's.
I think it's also worth noting for better or worse the intent to have 6.1 be a new starting point, so all of the retreading we do in DT is basically DT saying what kind of themes are important to FFXIV, this time through the eyes of a new character, rather than us retreading old ground.
Ishikawa has not been the lead writer since Heavensward. She only took that up during Shadowbringers. Heavensward and Stormblood had different writers. Ishikawa also hasn't gone anywhere, despite her work on ff16. She's still a senior story designer on the team, which is presumably just their fancy title for narrative director, in the same sense that Koji Fox wasn't "in charge" of localizing since Stormblood patch content but still had plenty of input well into Shadowbringers.
In nature, there are only constant meeting points and points of blending. We humans draw the hard borders.
I completely agree that combat content is the highlight of the expac so far, for all the reasons you outlined (I think I have a combined like 50 kills on all the normal raids already + 150 extremes lol)
As someone who was incredibly excited for this expac, but was completely disinterested ~2/3rds of the msq, I’m happy for those who were into for those parts. Funny enough, for me the best zone playing through was Shaaloni (though in retrospect I agree with your pacing point about it). Spending a decent chunk of time with Erenville, who I was already interested in and had been wanting to interact more with throughout the msq was enough to set it apart from the 5 zone Wuk focused storyline that I only enjoyed moments of, and needed a break from. Though again, the rubber bullets bit -_-
That said, I agree the normal raid content has made me hopeful and engaged again, I’ve already connected much more with Black Cat and her sis than any of the other new characters introduced this expansion. Not to mention the clear direction and ideas moving forward.
Lastly, thanks for making the point about the voice direction being off vs acting, it annoys me when I see the critique of the VA this expac being placed solely on the actors, when it just doesn't seem like its the case.
I don't know if you''ll read this but to me DT shares similarities to HW than any other expansion. The reason I say this is because a lot of key "plot points" are similar between the two expansions. "Talk to Wuk Lamat most of the time" Same for Alphinaud in HW.
"Have character say the theme of the expansion alot" This was Ysayle in HW.
"Have small stakes in DT" The only thing that would of been effected in HW was Ishgard, no other city state is directly effected by Dragon War.
"Go to a location that no one knows the reputation of the WoL" In Ishgard, almost no one cared about the "feats" that the WoL had. A soldier who killed a young dragon was seen with more respect.
"WoL isn't the focus" In HW, Alphinaud, Estinien and Ysayle were the main characters of HW.
"Scions sidelined or barely used." Same in HW, where the purpose of bringing Yshtola back was to get in touch with her master from which Yshtola was barely used after that.
"A mentorship between two characters" There is far more of a bond between Estinien and Alphinaud in the first half of HW then all of DT with the WoL and Wuk Lamat.
Yet we all remember HW fondly because of how the characters interacted with each other and the WoL. WoL may not of been the focus but for sure he wasn't ignored. Ysayle and Estinien bicker about their point of views like a married couple. You want to talk to Alphinaud more frequently because you see him grow from his mistakes. The Fortemps treat the WoL like a guest to an adopted son/daughter. You care for Ishgard because of a build up of a lot of small interactions that has you care for the people. No one complained about the Ishgard vs Eorzea games because we grew attached to Ishgard like a second home. DT does almost nothing to get the people to like the WoL or want us to honestly care about what traditions DT has. There is so much that HW did correctly, with very similar plot beats, that DT should of learned from.
Zoraal Ja was the only character that even saved the story for me. I would consider it a complete write off without him. While he is criminally under expanded on and under utilized why he is the way he is is pretty well explained. He isn't some flat murder hobo. Ironically this makes Wuk Lamat even worse the way she is written. She can't even be bothered to talk to her brother at his darkest times but can fight through literal sub reality to try and talk it out with a genocidal AI…
Tender Valley is easily my new favorite dungeon in FF14. The sheer joy I felt seeing my little bean as the final boss for the first time cannot be described. The whole dungeon is just fun too.
I also came away from the expansion feeling that the story was "fine" my biggest complaint is that I really felt like they were like "Hey look Krile is a going be a main character now!" and then she does nothing and has her quest resolved all at once at the end of the story. I'm honestly hoping she'll have more to do in the patch quests because I feel like she had more to do in Endwalker than she did in Dawntrail despite her being in the party for the entire story. I have a lot more feeling on the expansion but that probably my largest complaint for better or worse lol.
It's a MMO and it literally just released we haven't even gotten any of the content patches yet ( savage doesn't release until next week )….
Have people already forgotten the shere volume of content that was promised during fanfest and live letters already?
MSQ aside ( we still got post MSQ too ), DT looks like it's going to be the most content packed expansion they've ever made and the content itself has been VERY positively received so far.
If I'm being honest, I felt baited by a bunch of things that was teased in live letters and such.
They were saying how we might be against other members of the scions and while I guess we were, they kept making a big deal about it. I figured at least maybe a solo instance against the others. They even had cutscenes saying that they would love to test themselves against us and it just felt like prep for something that never happened.
There's also the opening cinematic where they showed all the scions supposedly working towards something like they were a big deal, but they were ultimately not. It was solely for the hype and some of the references for the cinematic that we expect didn't happen till the end, like taco cat graha.
I'm not saying that there needed to be great moments to these or that they needed a big pay off, but it really felt off. Even when they were teasing bosses, they used the Alexandria final boss as a "oh check this dood out." When it wasn't even anything. Unless there's some deep lore cut that isn't immediately obvious.
There's just a lot of things that they brought attention to that didn't live up to what they were implying.
I spent time today making a very bespoke hotbar arrangement just for VPR. I want to like the job, but there are certain things about the job gage and button configurations on a controller that were not clicking well. I basically turned the job gage into a Christmas tree of buttons sprouting from and around the gage that looks odd at first glance, but as I cycle through the rotation on a controller, different buttons light up in a way that make me go, “OH, I get it!”
I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this expansion. Dawntrial has got plenty of cool stuff (The Arcadion is so hype! The 4th fight song has been blaring on my speakers constantly) and a lot of bits that didn't quite land as I was hoping for, really wish the Scions had more to do or else just take a nap or something.
Also glad to see I wasn't the only one who was pondering about the Living Memory and the moral implications of it, it was probably the most engaging bit to me. Well done with this and congrats on over 20K subs!!
I was bored until the level 95 content and the dungeon. Then I was all in.
It's interesting to hear your thoughts on viper. I feel like it's probably one of the most straightforward DPS jobs in the game that does a terrible job explaining itself. Every buff you have to manage mostly manages itself if you just follow the glowing buttons, and it has so few buttons to worry about, but it comes with an enormous wall of text trying (in vain) to explain everything, near half of which is dedicated to info that you could entirely replace with "just hit the glowing button" and learn all you need. And for some reason it's the only melee that doesn't have a combo tree in-game?
But yeah it is a fun job, and I like the amount of weaves it gives you (they basically gave continuation from Gunbreaker to most of your GCD's lol), but once you understand how it actually works it's definitely the simplest melee by a long shot.
For me while 7.0 msq wasnt that interesting despite still having some great moments (i still prefer it over heavenward 3.0 msq, but i am the only one that think heavenward was a complete mess with a lot of problems), i found interesting what was stabilished for potential storylines in the near future (arcadeon being one of them). We have the ronkan empire connection (who were aware of the sundering and final days), preservation maybe still at large, the consequence of a civilization being thousand of years ahead in technology, why living memory sky after msq is all…normal and nice, the key, the meteor fragments that mutate plantlife and make wildlife violent, etc…
I feel the first half could have been more entertaining for the player if there was some sort of threat we deal as we aid wuk lamat, like maybe a rogue garlean legion that reached the tural and are being a problem in the region (you can even give them spaniard conquistadores like uniform and armour)
So one big thing i'm just fully disagreeing is that the endless are AI, they're not AI, they are memory recreation, just the same as anyone down there who is resurrecting with a soul, but instead of having a soul they are sustained in a computer. The conflict isn't about if they are AI or real people, its if the memories of people should live on forever in living memory. The only one who is an AI is sphene, the others were made merely from the memories of their living selfs, like otis, but sphene was made as a construct with the built in purpose and drive to sustain the endless endlessly.
My feelings are not all the same as yours, tho in general i agree about most things. I think the shaloaani segment was okay, i didn't actually mind it much, tho i think what was sacrificed to do it was clearly a massive mistake.
What i think was the biggest mistake with the second half of the story was that koana should have been in alexandria and living memories. Because right now there's a very strange lack of explantion or asking obvious questions, the whole thing feels like its stringing along purposely oblivious characters because if any of the charatcers acted like real people the twist would crumble instantly. and then at the end wuk lamat emotion hacks into a computer to friendship is magic the boss, which just feels insane. And i actually quite liked living memory aside from the final fight, it was the first time we actually got to really interact with people from alexandria at all, since before it was all very quick talks with sphene being suspiscious and pretending to be a hostage for literally no reason
A fun little joke in The Greatest Serpent of Tural fight, the boss starts with a raidwide called Dubious Tulidisaster. which immediately got a chuckle out of me since Valigarmanda's biggest attack is called Tulidisaster!
I actually think Living Memory accomplished its thematic goal the best of all the areas through its mechanical significance; it makes you shut it down, area by area, and not only do you leave it a nearly lifeless husk of what it was, I personally keep finding myself wishing I could restore the area to what it was when I first arrived, because was so much more beautiful and alive that way. I do think the story sidestepped the morality of shutting it down to its detriment, especially because the game itself has made a very strong case that memory is indeed the foundation of identity (see G'raha and the other scions both on and returning from the First, Yotsuyu vs. Tsuyu, etc.). I have personally had to grapple with finding a justification for shutting it down, because as far as I'm concerned the Endless are "alive" in every way that matters, and the best that I can come up with is that a society that cannot exist sustainably must either be fundamentally changed so that it becomes sustainable, or be destroyed, and since the former is impossible, the latter becomes the only acceptable option, but even that solution has flaws.
i like zoraal ja as a character but i think his motivation and presence was botched by adding these extra characters that were kinda there to supliment his stoic over the top vagueness. instead of saarel ja being a evil vizier that cultivates zoraal into the warmonger, for maybe having the cultutral lingerings of mamook society, he was just a a nothing burger villain.
the parenting parallel with galool ja is ok as a concept but feels like "yeah…this will be further elaborated in the post patches..idk like find out who his mother is or he was never his son but an endless in a physical interface body, created of really early childhood happy times memories , that zoraal forcebly removed or somthing"- kinda thing, which already seems like a lose lose situation pacing wise.
thats how i understood him: prodigy golden boy with identity crisis over the expectations of surpassing a father that is a arthurian/chalamagne like figure(without agnologing the help of the round table/12 paladins). big brain idea to achive this by getting 2 goals with 1 method. warmongering makes empire bigger and people will be too exausted of the horros of war to incite any type of conflict within.
as i had with the nier video, i agree with a lot of this – MSQ was a definite disappointment, a lot of great ideas that were let down by frankly crappy writing throughout. while i like Wuk Lamat well enough as a character, her shtick – love, understanding and peace – is a theme in this game that i feel is already entirely beaten to death. i would have enjoyed the first half a lot more if the writers had made her a more complicated character that sort of grows more, instead of going from well-intentioned dumbass to well-intentioned dumbass who everyone loves. i think DT is also critically flawed in that it has all of like – a half a patch to set it up, where the usual for these expansions is at least two to three to start rolling the story towards the next arc. DT didn't have that, leaving us with precious little time to actually get to know the principle characters before the expansion starts. your relationship with WL especially comes off as more informed than actually diegetic. while i liked the first arc more and would have preferred if the bulk of the expansion was simply about Tural and the rite of ascension, a good political and intrigue story with less stakes, it has immense flaws in the actual execution.
the back-half is similarly flawed, mostly as you say – too much information all at once, enough so that it becomes a headache to actually catch your grounding and start to really care. sphene is interesting, but doesn't have nearly enough time to actually come into her own, and i think her being a foil to wuk lamat doesn't end up feeling especially earned. i actually really like Living Memory as a sci-fi concept, and even really grew to appreciate it a lot more after MSQ was done, doing all the side quests there and helping these memory ghosts come to rest was a properly somber feeling. but the story going through there is frustrating and doesn't properly engage with its own themes to a degree that i found resonant, like you said it feels almost like it's rushing you through a theme park of 'oh that sucks that you died, glad you got to feel fulfilled at least at the end' without trying to reckon with what that all means. some grappling with the morality of the situation would have went a long way, but the story feels wishy-washy about it in execution.
there's more i could probably wax on about as far as MSQ's failings go and regretting that it was written in such an uneven way, but we'd be here all day. arcadion is peak, combat content is great, i'm glad there's more of the game to play and that it's doing reasonably well. i'll keep eating that trash, but i hope like hell the writing gets better, cause that's what i'm here for.
I don't have much time to expand upon it now, and I will later, but I came to FFXIV from SWTOR. The sheer amount of expansions, that we paid money for, by the way, in SWTOR were just simply "here's a new daily area. NiM raid dropping soon." And that's it.
35:35 Definitely a misunderstanding, removing memories has nothing to do with Endless, it is ONLY to remove grief from the living. They can copy any and all memories without touching the real ones, proof of this is Otis who was copied and sent to Living Memory while the real untouched person remained normal.
Also, the story does go out of its way to show that Endless do have emotions, such as Otis with PTSD and are capable of changing as people while in there as shown with Namikka whose happiest time in life becomes the present when she's already an Endless even. …Which makes it all the more frustrating that the story doesn't then address the fact that we are seemingly just erasing (and depending how alive you believe them to be even killing) myriad people, for as dumb of a reason as "Sphene will have no reason to do what she's doing" which she does anyway and we never mention to her. The party doesn't even mention another possibility, when we literally have a party member whose memory we have moved to another body from another time and dimension and have met the Omicron who were people who made themselves into machines.
Patches are not denoted by “dots”. Those are points. For example it is seven point zero one.