SPOILER WARNING.
I'm not going to tag every individual thing or the whole post as hidden. You shouldn't be here if you care about spoilers, for Dawntrail* and previous expansions too.
*Mostly early spoilers though because that's all I need to make my point, but discussion posts may go into other aspects.
Part 1: The problem
So, I'll get right into it.
Dawntrail feels like a sidequest (one of the simple ones) sudden got bigger production values, cutscenes, and padding. But left out one very important thing: Substance. It's boring. It doesn't have good hooks (the best was the pre-expansion lead in quest but after that, not so much).
Now if we look back to previous works - a novel could be written on what they did right and the fewer things they did wrong, but briefly. Consider Endwalker: Most players probably assumed Zodiark would be the final boss going in. Instead there was that "wait what?" moment when we defeat him super early and "oh gods what do we do now" as things seem to get even worse and so on. Consider Shadowbringers: Where we explore the past and motives of one character in particular, uncovering many mysteries (and leaving some more), but we still have to deal with a new world's woes and politics.
And then we have drawn. The problem is not that the stakes aren't "Oh no the world's in peril!" (though, that two candidates want to start wars that may drag the rest of the world in means y'all are still beating that drum anyways). But it's shallow. The characters are cartoonish. Even though they do reveal more complex motives sometimes, they still feel cartoonish.
And while there's some interesting lore and worldbuilding in the academic sense, much of the presentation is bad.
Continue reading...
I'm not going to tag every individual thing or the whole post as hidden. You shouldn't be here if you care about spoilers, for Dawntrail* and previous expansions too.
*Mostly early spoilers though because that's all I need to make my point, but discussion posts may go into other aspects.
Part 1: The problem
So, I'll get right into it.
Dawntrail feels like a sidequest (one of the simple ones) sudden got bigger production values, cutscenes, and padding. But left out one very important thing: Substance. It's boring. It doesn't have good hooks (the best was the pre-expansion lead in quest but after that, not so much).
Now if we look back to previous works - a novel could be written on what they did right and the fewer things they did wrong, but briefly. Consider Endwalker: Most players probably assumed Zodiark would be the final boss going in. Instead there was that "wait what?" moment when we defeat him super early and "oh gods what do we do now" as things seem to get even worse and so on. Consider Shadowbringers: Where we explore the past and motives of one character in particular, uncovering many mysteries (and leaving some more), but we still have to deal with a new world's woes and politics.
And then we have drawn. The problem is not that the stakes aren't "Oh no the world's in peril!" (though, that two candidates want to start wars that may drag the rest of the world in means y'all are still beating that drum anyways). But it's shallow. The characters are cartoonish. Even though they do reveal more complex motives sometimes, they still feel cartoonish.
And while there's some interesting lore and worldbuilding in the academic sense, much of the presentation is bad.
Continue reading...