So I'm about 20% done with Dawntrail, and...it feels like the "Titan feast" part of 2.0 all over again. But for an entire expansion. Lowering the stakes of the journey is fine, but most of what we're doing is talking and running menial fetch quests.
It feels like the MSQ designers really wanted to create a movie but settled for working on a game instead, and have left out as much "gaming" as possible, leading to a walking simulator and dialog viewer. I have this giant toolkit to fight things, and I'm mostly following around Wuk Lamat and discussing every development in exhaustive detail with the party, replete with exaggerated reaction shots. I counted less than 10 mandatory mobs encountered between the start of the story and the first dungeon.
Why not structure the story to be more interactive? Instead of having me point and click a scene like a child's first game (Look, one eye is missing off the boat! Look, the worker has dull tools!), tell me to go harvest some rare materials off of enemies in the area. You don't need to carefully spawn them at precise points that I click on to minimize interaction with the environment; just tell me to check for X in the North and slay Y in the West or whatever. Heck, tell me to complete 10 FATEs in the area as part of getting the succession trial stones. Anything. The world feels completely empty right now, because I walk from point to point to trigger endless dialog without interacting with the world.
I get that part of this journey is Wuk Lamat winning over the people by helping them with their troubles, but you can structure that story to involve heroism and not just scutwork. And then even that scutwork is slowed down, because I have to stop every 20 paces to discuss what I'm seeing with the Scions.
I get that this is stock FFXIV MSQ, but something about the low stakes and annoying protagonist make the lack of interactivity worse than prior outings.
Continue reading...
It feels like the MSQ designers really wanted to create a movie but settled for working on a game instead, and have left out as much "gaming" as possible, leading to a walking simulator and dialog viewer. I have this giant toolkit to fight things, and I'm mostly following around Wuk Lamat and discussing every development in exhaustive detail with the party, replete with exaggerated reaction shots. I counted less than 10 mandatory mobs encountered between the start of the story and the first dungeon.
Why not structure the story to be more interactive? Instead of having me point and click a scene like a child's first game (Look, one eye is missing off the boat! Look, the worker has dull tools!), tell me to go harvest some rare materials off of enemies in the area. You don't need to carefully spawn them at precise points that I click on to minimize interaction with the environment; just tell me to check for X in the North and slay Y in the West or whatever. Heck, tell me to complete 10 FATEs in the area as part of getting the succession trial stones. Anything. The world feels completely empty right now, because I walk from point to point to trigger endless dialog without interacting with the world.
I get that part of this journey is Wuk Lamat winning over the people by helping them with their troubles, but you can structure that story to involve heroism and not just scutwork. And then even that scutwork is slowed down, because I have to stop every 20 paces to discuss what I'm seeing with the Scions.
I get that this is stock FFXIV MSQ, but something about the low stakes and annoying protagonist make the lack of interactivity worse than prior outings.
Continue reading...