Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has had some time simmering in the minds of its fanbase—and while I had a blast with everything else outside of it, the main scenario questline left me a little less enthused than usual.
The problems it does have, however, are of a complex nature. Dawntrail’s story is one of those annoying mishmashes that gets stuck in my throat. It’s full of great ideas with some genuinely funny moments, but the plot lines and dialogue are both so messily executed that they almost spoil the whole exercise. Ultimately, Dawntrail suffers from a bumpy script and an inability to properly prioritize the cast, which is a shame.
I was recently at Gamescom and was able to speak to the game director, Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P), in person. I asked him (to put it more diplomatically) what he thought about the fan reaction and he seemed to understand the story’s successes and failures quite well. As is usual with such interviews, Yoshi-P’s answers were immediately translated by an interpreter.
“Because this is a game, it’s a form of entertainment, and you’re always going to see mixed reactions to entertainment,” Yoshi-P begins. “A second factor is that with Endwalker we reached a major climax of a long-running, overarching story. To some extent, I had already predicted that we would get mixed reactions this time around.
“So if the question is, was I really shocked, the answer is no, not really.”
It’s interesting to hear that Yoshi-P expected some sort of contradictory reaction – and that’s entirely fair, considering the pressure of expectations he had from classics like Shadowbringers and Endwalker. However, from what Yoshi-P tells it, the biggest problem with developing Dawntrail seems to have been the pacing.
“The concept was a journey to a new land – we would go to a new continent where we would see new cultures, new races and characters… so both in the development team and on my side we had this concept in mind of introducing these new aspects to the player cleanly and very carefully.”
However, Yoshi-P notes that while many people enjoyed the new horizon, others found the pacing less than optimal: “Some people found the pacing in the main scenario too slow. And they wanted to get to the more exciting parts of the story more quickly.”
He then admits that there were some important aspects of the story that the team “could have incorporated into the side quests – so that anyone who wanted to learn more could play the side quests in their own time and enjoy them at their own pace.”
“We’ve gotten feedback from people who wanted to get through the combat content faster. As we’ve seen that kind of feedback, we’ll take it into account as a learning process and experience.”
Yoshi-P also commented on the mixed feedback on Wuk Lamat. Although she has become the scapegoat for everything wrong with Dawntrail’s story in the eyes of fans, I generally think she’s fine, but a walking symptom complex for other flaws – she’s an example of how hard it is for Dawntrail to prioritize its characters by making her the focus while other characters like Krile, Erenville, and the descendants suffer.
One of the problems Yoshi-P observed in the community was the character’s initial difficulties in filling the role of the future Dawnservant, which typically manifested itself in bouts of seasickness and patchy knowledge of her people’s culture outside of her hometown of Tural:
“We portrayed Wuk Lamat as someone who has a slight complex towards his parents and also towards his siblings, and this lack of confidence, I think, also contributed to the slow pace and the feeling of frustration.
“Maybe if we had portrayed her as a more confident character, we might not have gotten into this situation. In that respect, I feel like we did something pretty bad to Wuk Lamat as a character. And that experience made me realize that it’s important to take these things into account when it comes to introducing the character to players.”
Ultimately, I think I agree with PC Gamer contributor Daniella Lucas when she says that Dawntrail’s endgame overshadows the story – I really enjoy the wrestling kayfabe of Arcadion, and my mouth is watering at the chance to get back into an exploration zone, something I really missed in Endwalker’s patch cadence. While the story is very important to FF14, it’s far from everything – and the actual game I’ll be playing for the next few years is rock solid.
