Yoshi-P NOT Shocked?! | Zepla reviews PC Gamer article on Community Reaction to FFXIV DAWNTRAIL MSQ

Yoshi-P! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! You saved us once! Why have you forsaken us this time?!

But for real. Doesn’t he constantly say that 14 is his life’s work? Yet he just dropped the baby on the floor and it was Wuk Lamat syndrome now.

This is the only expansion I didn't finish out of sheer boredom. Not going to touch the game until the next one.
Couldn't manage to bring myself to care about any of the characters or the story.
Was a chore to get as far as I did.
The level 97 dungeon gear was the only thing that motivated me to play that far.

Yoshi P: "I had already predicted that we would have some sort of mixed response."

Zepla: "So you knew it wasn't good. You knew that everyone wouldn't like it."

…I still don't get how she repeatedly misread the word "mixed" as "universally disliked" throughout this video.

Lv90-95, DT felt more like the pilgrimage from FFX with the only entertainment being Wuk not knowing anything about the country she's lived her entire life in, and looking to rule over. Lv96-100 DT MSQ was like….. chill monster city next door to Juraasic Park meets the old wild west, then jumps an entire few millennia in the future, then "hey lets go turn off the fake afterlife!" So much of the MSQ made little sense…. still kind of like Solution 9 though, as out of place as it is in FFXIV.

If I'd been watching the proceedings for DT move forward, I wouldn't be shocked by the reception it got either.
It's a narrative disaster that focuses on protecting a golden-girl boss with a VA that contains an ego the size of Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel combined yet could not be more shallow than a drop of water. And the PR protection of it all just threw gasoline on the fire while the one they're defending is gaslighting everyone on Twitter for remotely disliking the "smile" song. I hope they slap their cheeks together and get their heads back in the game. Hells, not even the JP community liked it and they shared many criticisms the EN side had.

I simply cannot force myself to get through this MSQ. I started DT day 1 early access & I'm not even at solution 9 yet. I am falling asleep watching cutscenes so I started to skip ALL of them. Now I'm falling asleep while doing quest battles. For example, the other day I fell asleep at like 1pm while I was doing a quest where you play as Wuk Lamat.

I was really excited to go against my fellow Scions. We never got to fight against them or really even compete. They would have made a fantastic trial or dungeon boss!! Major missed opportunity..

I hope the reason this got through is Yoshi P working on another project, meanwhile Ishikawa let these two morons write this horrific story out of spite for being promoted out of a job she loved and was good at, and Square Enix was meddling in the creative process by trying to shove DEI into it so Yoshi P just said “Eff it.” and let the fire burn so they would get the message and get out of his hair. Because all of those are solvable problems.

Also I hope they don’t do another exploration zone. Or if they do that there is a means to get the relics without ever having to go into them. They’re boring and grindy, their stories suck, and I would rather go without the relic gear than suffer through them. I hate them that much. Nobody should be saying that about content that is required in order to get relic gear that is designed to be obtainable outside of Savage. If they can’t find a way not to make it repetitive and agonizingly tedious, they shouldn’t make it at all.

For me DT wasnt that bad. It was okay, kinda. I went into it thinking of it as a ARR 2.0 but holy moly, my low expectations got crushed pretty quickly. There are some minor points I'm mad about but my biggest issue was the first half's repetition. Getting to know the tribes in the more or less exact same way with the exact same outcome was so damn boring to play. Go find the judge, talk to them, get to know the problems those ppl face and present a solution. So far so good. But except for the Moblins and Yak'Tel and the Mamool it was all the same! I don't need to learn how to trade. Or why should I honestly believe that a tribe who hosts a festival every damn year for decades had no idea how big an impact it has for their reed harvest? Come on, we're not 3 years old anymore. Please treat us like the adults we are.
And the story with Lamat'yis Dad could've been so much better! But nope…same thing at the end of the game with the Endless. As soon as I realized the same formula will guide us through the map it took me days to even gather the enthusiasm to pick up the MSQ again to finish it off. And it was exactly as boring as predicted. The city of gold was the part of the story I was looking forward to. But we got a horribly voiced family reunion, another very poorly written 'I kill my mom' scene and all I felt was annoyance bc by now we are used to so much better storytelling. If Yoshida calls that 'trying out new things' I call that let the writer apprentices handle this bc that's what it felt like.

All in all we have boring and lifeless written characters in the main cast (Zoraal Ja), very mixed quality voice acting and a loveless, confused story. In total it was very foreseeable and felt like a lot of wasted time. I'm still disappointed even as I'm replaying DT just now to have my 2nd main on 100.

I really hope we get some more quality back in future updates. I don't mind experimenting, but I do mind crappy quality. Shb and EW brought so much money to the table and all we got is this. Thanks, but no thanks. If it wasn't for my house I'd already unsubscribed.

Even the lowest standards are still too high for that joke "dawntrail".

Story line and class results is what made it bad. Take summoner for example. wtf is that bahamut reskin

Ffxiv will never be fucked or dead fhe dev team ia amazing and actually listen to their fan base

If he really said that about confidence then Yoshi P. Jumped the shark.

I disagree, no producer expects to release something someone all likes. Like yes a lot of people like heavensward, and shadowbringers but not everyone likes it. Some like stormblood and endwalker while other people don't like them and that's ok. He expected some to dislike it which is good , if he thought everyone would like it that'd be foolish, you have to test the waters and try new things otherwise things will get stagnant

What they probably should have done when it came to introducing the new continent and establishing a baseline for the culture, is bring players to a zone from the new continent of Tural PRIOR to the expansion and spent all their time setting things up with the pre-launch content. That or start talking about the continent prior to the release. With Endwalker we had already heard a ton about Sharlyan prior to getting there.

I want him to stop dumbing down combat/job complexity. Baking every single self-buff or DoT into passives in the base 1-2-3-4-5-6 sucks and makes me want to not play (and I'm not).

Could you turn off the fucking organ in the background if you want to read something?????

Its not that DT story was bad, People are comparing ShadowBringers and Endwalker to Dawntrail, you are comparing the END of a chapter to the START of a new story, of course it will be boring and slow, its there to introduce new characters and SET UP the new chapters with a new conflict that will all come full circle like ARR to Endwalker did, but he knew ppl wouldnt like it cause FF players love to cry, the thing about DT is the story isnt centered around you as Warrior of Light, but showing how other countries outside of Eorzea also struggles ,solves their problems, but also but also introducing us to the possibility of different worlds, now that we have the Item from the end of the story which we have no clue how to power and can leave to different reflections. There is much to go for the DT stuff

Lee Jason Clark Jason Miller Lisa

Dear Yoshi, please actually give a shit next time. Don't make another Dawntrail or Stormblood. We need another Heavensward or Shadowbringers please.

i'm curious what peoples opinion is on the lack of content release…..

People are overreacting, story wasnt bad, wasnt good neither, is just there.. BUT it is a new arc, is just the begining, is like ARR.

That's why we need more constructive criticism and less comments that seems like coming from a hater or a fanboy.

I don’t get why they didn’t just do meracydia for this expac, it felt like that’s what the post endwalker story was building to. It’s a place thats been mentioned repeatedly throughout the story and there was plenty of room to get a fresh start while also revisiting some old lore (maybe get more lore about the real bahamut and the meracydian dragons before they got overrun by the Allagans, explore the cultures that worshipped the warring triad, etc). Tural and our motivations for going there felt so out of left field and underdeveloped. Culturally it’s mostly Just a bunch of reused beast tribes that feel less fleshed out than their eorzean counterparts. It really just feels like bad filler and I hope the next expac gets us back on track.

I feel like what he meant with expecting negative feedback was that he expected people to not like dawntrail because it's new adventure that needs set up, new characters etc. ,not because it's writing was bad

Yoshi P on corpo mode, I don't like it!

Erasing Wuk Lamat would help out a lot. Replacing English VA would help even more.

I feel like the dev team is hesitant to address the main problems with Wuk Lamat. With how vocal the playerbase is even in Japan, they HAVE to know that one of the most criticized aspects of Wuk Lamat was her excessive screen time, but I don't know if this is something they would admit publicly

The best example of small-scale but engaging stakes was Heavensward. There are no world threats. Not even multi-nation threats. Everything that was a stake was a single nation, Ishgard. And yet it is my favorite story in the whole game.

To be fair, the rite of succession was an interesting and compelling idea to me as well, with plenty of potential, until Wuk Lamat ran it into the ground like stepping on PEAS. And then they introduced a world threat with interdimensional fusion particularly nearing the expansion's final boss.

Yup, the concept that the producers, directors and editors just let this pass through unchallenged is mind-boggling. I get that a new team of junior writers might have trouble finding their feet but the seniors should have known better.

"We did see feedback from people who wanted to tackle the battle content faster. So because we saw that type of feedback we will take that on board as a learning process and experience." That is the most wild statement I've ever heard from an MMO director who has been working on FFXIV since two months after 1.0 launched (that was 14 years ago). How, HOW did they figure this out in ARR that you need to intersperse gameplay elements within the MSQ, you know, have gameplay within the game so you're not just watching cutscenes and then dungeons, cutscenes then trial, cutscenes, then dungeon.
I can't believe that is a sentence said from YoshiP. Learning process? They should be experienced old hands and know exactly how to deliver he's talking about pacing but does he realise it felt so slow because there was nothing to do but watch cutscenes and read none va'd lines over and over and over for 8 hours before the first dungeon?

The idea that only a good reception is possible is silly. Yoshi-P's expectation of a mixed reception in modern media is a healthy expectation for him to hold and the best one for the game going forward.
As soon as we met Wuk, it was obvious that there would be a mixed reception – 15 minutes into DT only confirmed it. Some people. like me, enjoyed the story, and it was also obvious that others wouldn't enjoy it for all too familiar reasons in the modern media landscape (all of which I've seen now).
My real fear is that the people like me that enjoyed DT will be too quiet.

Am I being gaslit in real time? I vividly remember people being very vocally disdainful of Endwalker's story and now we're going full 180 on that because Dawntrail is the new thing to hate on?

He wasn't dodging the question. He admitted that Dawntrail suffered more because it came after the hype that Endwalker ended with.

I know ppl wanted him to trash writing, dialogue, and so on. But wat kind of leader would he be if he just got on a random interview and roasted his staff like that. He did his best not to be too critical while admitting they did fuck up. As ppl pointed out this is the first time since 2.0 that hes ever admitted faults in the story. Only the patch cycles will tell if he actually listened to the feedback or not. Also. Damn the bg music was so old i could barely hear her at points. LOL

honestly it was fine though. He knew there would be a mixed response because Gamers are shitheads with bad opinions a lot of the time. Sometimes people have well thought out reasons if they didn't like it, that are nuanced but mostly it's a skill issue

Wuk Lamat was a Mary Sue. Instantly overpowered. Don't tell us she's weak in combat compared to the other candidates, then watch as she absolutely destroys them.
No character growth, no struggles, just her whining about herself and being OVERCONFIDENT. It was like following a 6year-old around.

It entirely sounds like Yoshi-P doesn't understand the issue AT ALL. Like he thinks the bad reviews are that it's "not exciting" or "not deep" or "not intriguing" enough….like he's not hearing at all that the issue is that the story is written like an amateur's fanfic for tweens.

ARR was "a new story needing to introduce a lot of characters and world building" also….the writing in ARR was good. Being a new arc does NOT excuse bad writing. Almost no one is complaining about the plot…the plot is okay…it's WRITTEN badly!

The bright side about FFXIV Dawntrail's story is that they can do what ever they want in 7.1 because pretty much everything was wrapped up in the ending except the WOL having the key now and sphene's crown tease. I hope we can get a break from Wuk Lamat and have some dope adventures in the future. I also think Zepla probably should stop playing for while a lot of her critique I agree with but she just seems like she is outgrowing the game or she needs time to decompress from the disappointment she has of the game at the moment. I am being hopeful that the story will improve through the expansion, but it is still no excuse for the story ( specifically the first half) being as poor as it was while I will not say its out right bad because it isn't, it's also not good, the concept was great but the execution in dialogue, pacing and the lack of combat or story combat solo instances ( why didnt they let us shoot bad guys on top of a train?) was poor.

Makes you wonder how Yoshi thinks about the mixed reception in a more "unfiltered" fashion.

What likely happened was they had a bad first draft but squeenix simply NEVER gives them enough time or money to actually fulfill what they want to do.

I was one of the players who finally decided to pause my FFXIV sub because of Dawntrail MSQ. It was a good ride, starting at ARR for me.

To me It felt like we were suddenly dropped in a typical shounen manga story, including all of the clichés and predicability, Wuk Lamat is your typical optimistic cinnamon roll who's only weakness is that they care too much. And for someone who cares so much about getting to know others/her people, we know surprisingly little about her. Really would've loved to see some more weakness (not just seasickness and being literally weak) and setbacks and her learning from those moments, from us and from the rest of the cast. Also would've liked more interaction with Zoraal Ja, dude's character was as flat as a pancake.

I can't be the only one who watched this and was annoyed at Zepla repeatedly saying things along the lines of "he knew it would be bad" when that's absolutely not what he said; he said that he wasn't surprised that it got mixed reception, meaning that some people liked it and some didn't, but that's not at all the same thing as what Zepla kept saying for most of the video except for a tiny few times where she later quoted the word "mixed" but still doubled down on earlier.

How is it a gigantic shock that he expected narrative reception to be mixed (meaning that many people might subjectively like it, for the record) anyway? We knew going into this that it would be a notably different story with different writers that wasn't the culmination of a longer arc, was intended to be more lighthearted and less apocalyptic for most of it, and that we would have more of a support presence; of course not everyone who plays the game is necessarily going to react the same way to it. How would he make a story subjectively received positively by every single person who plays it?

Personally, I definitely didn't like the overall story as much as the prior two expansions, but there were parts that I did like and the second half in particular really grabbed my active attention and moved me at times; even if the writing was weak at points and too much time was spent planning rather than doing at random points throughout the campaign, I do not at all think that the game is doomed, and I feel that some of the "we're in huge trouble" reactions online are kind of exaggerated. It's perfectly fine to not like the story; don't also act like it's weird if some people who aren't you did like lots of it or that it's somehow insane that the director might expect mixed (note: not universally bad) reactions to an expectedly different story.

Estinien, Graha’tia, Ysayle, Hien, Lyse, Minfillia, Uriange, Nero, Cid…..dont mind me I’m just listing characters who were plot-focused without having to eat an ENTIRE expansion’s worth of dialogue just to develop fully. You could even throw Nanamo and Raubahn in there too. 😊

Square enix woke western ethic departments hired woke writers and a dude dressing up as a female voice actor that sucks , they made wuk lomat into a marry sue, and we wanted krael story instead of woke lomat, and to make it worse woke lomat e glish va attacked people for disliking his character. Yoshi p needs to have full control again and give the story to krael and her hunt for her relative.

Man, I guess I'm just crazy or something… I didn't have a bad time with Dawntrail. It had its flaws, but I wasn't crying bloody tears because it didn't wow me like ShB did? But ya know what else didn't…? Stormblood, Heavensward, and Realm Reborn. Dear god, realm reborn is what I saved those bloody tears for.
Wuk didn't irk me nearly as much as Lyse and her absolute pointless ass did, the lush world and fun little build up kept me from dwelling on major issues too much, and I paced myself on the story. The second half was a marked improvement as well. Yeah, wuk's character wasn't as well done as it could be and she bit the delivery on some important lines, oh well. The worse part was actually a lack of combat engagement for everything before cowboy town, imo, but again… not quite the sand milkshake that ARR was, and as the "fresh lowstakes start" to a new story arc we were told this was, I came to things with expectations tempered anyhow. I don't think this is the end times, and I feel everyone's kinda over-reacting.