According to some players, Final Fantasy 14it’s new Dawn Trail The expansion has a story problem. It’s boring, plot points aren’t explained properly, and it’s generally unimportant, at least that’s what the critics say. Of course, what those complaints don’t tell you is that many of the people behind them are also skipping large chunks of the story. This isn’t a new problem. Final Fantasy 14but it is one who Dawn Trail brings back to the forefront. Some Final Fantasy 14 Players have their own problem of not wanting to engage with the game’s methodical narrative in its entirety.
The speech on how Dawn TrailAnd Final Fantasy 14 in general, tells his story warmed up thanks to a publish on X from a user complaining that story-critical information was placed in unvoiced cutscenes in the last expansion. For non-Warriors of Light fans, FF14 The game tells its story in three main ways. The first is voiced cutscenes, which are usually climactic moments in the story brought to life by the game’s wonderful cast. The second is non-voiced cutscenes, which use text bubbles at the bottom of the screen for dialogue between characters. Finally, less important dialogue and story details are usually communicated outside of cutscenes via text bubbles when taking on quests. As the initial social media post shows, many players have created a hierarchy in their heads about how important each type of cutscene is to the story to determine whether or not they can skip it.
It’s no surprise that skipping large chunks of dialogue can make it difficult to understand the story Square Enix is trying to tell. As an MMO, FF14 Narrative threads sometimes span an entire expansion or multiple expansions. In the case of Dawn Trail, The main story quest (MSQ) consists of 100 individual quests that will take most players around 50 hours to complete. Most cutscenes will not be voiced, meaning that for a certain type of player, the majority of the game can be skipped simply because it requires reading. This is a fundamentally flawed way to interact with the game, as it assumes that one of its primary means of communicating with the player is meaningless.
To try to lend credence to the argument that unvoiced cutscenes are avoidable, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of them can feel like massive exposition and lore dumps. I understand that wading through a story this long can be tedious, but that attitude ignores the fact that you usually need exposition and table setting in a plot to reach a point where a climax can occur. All of the most significant narrative moments in FF14 seen in extensions like Endwalker, Toward the skyAnd The Shadow Bearers rely on meticulous character and world building that plays out in seemingly boring quests filled with dialogue you have to read.
Also, Final Fantasy 14 don’t force yourself to do as much stupid stuff as some people seem to think. MSQ is labeled as such because the developers created a critical story path. If you want to learn more about the details of the story of a new location and the various groups that live and fight there, that’s what side quests and the game’s never-ending Codex are for. But everything in MSQ is deliberately designed to guide you through the emotional ups and downs of the story. Yes, sometimes that includes dialogue that you have to read. It’s already labeled as part of MSQ, I don’t know what more some players need to understand that it’s probably important.
This lack of engagement with Final Fantasy 14The narrative of , in its own words, seems to be rooted in a need to rush through the expansion as quickly as possible, as well as a lack of value placed on anything that isn’t double-dubbed. To do a little math, Howlongtobeat.com has an average playtime of 50 hours for the main story of Endwalker. A YouTube compilation of all the voiced cutscenes in this expansion are just under 16 hours long. That means you spend about a third of your time in voiced cutscenes, while the other two-thirds is spent primarily on active quests in the world. Dungeons, trials, and even boring fetch quests make up a large portion of the remaining two-thirds, meaning that unvoiced cutscenes make up a relatively small percentage of the game’s time. Give credit where credit is due, and that’s partly because each expansion has increased the number of voiced cutscenes. The Shadow Bearersthe expansion immediately before Endwalkerhad about nine and a half hours of dubbed cutscenes. While the revelation that the undubbed cutscenes are relatively few in number might make you think it wouldn’t be a big deal to skip them, I’d argue that it just means they’re not as big of a barrier to attention span as some suggest. Yes, the dubbed cutscenes may be where the most iconic, action-packed, or emotionally resonant moments usually occur, but like I said, they only work with the weight of all the undubbed dialogue that helps establish the conflicts at play and the magnitude of the stakes.
It’s not that Final Fantasy 14The narration is perfect. I think Endwalker The game suffers from poor pacing, even if it still manages to pull off its emotional finale. But the discussion of non-voiced dialogue as something we should be able to ignore without any impact on our investment and understanding of the overall story is not the same as the real criticisms of the game’s narrative. It’s a dissatisfaction with the vehicle through which that story is told.
I think Dawn Trail is accused of many of the same faults as A kingdom is reborn did it, and there is a reason for that. ARR And Dawn Trail are the beginnings of larger stories. It took a decade and four expansions for each story thread that was laid in ARR to pay. Because of this, ARR is an introductory arc that, on its own, can feel unsatisfying, which is why it is so maligned despite being so essential. Dawn Trail is in the same place now. It lays the foundation for the next decade of FF14That doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means it’s part of a tapestry that’s still incomplete.
The rush mentality of so many players, forcing them to skip through perceived unimportant scenes to finish a meticulously crafted expansion in a weekend, is part of a larger problem with the lack of patience for the grand narrative that the game constantly does. Eorzea is a living, breathing world of players and NPCs that is supposed to be the setting for a wonderful adventure. Adventures like this need room to breathe, which requires breaks and time not only to get through them, but to digest them. It’s no wonder a wolfed-down meal doesn’t sit well with players; it’s not meant to be consumed that way. As simple as it may seem, what players need is patience.
I am on Dawn Trail has its issues, and I bet the story isn’t perfect (based on first impressions), but the only way to know that and really care about it is to read the fucking text.
.
News Source : kotaku.com
Gn tech
