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FFXIV Dawntrail MSQ Thoughts

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Good Morning Folks! I took a bit of a break this week as I worked my way through the Dawntrail expansion Main Story Quest. I decided to just pause my blog posts until I had finished because I did not really want to discuss this expansion piecemeal. First I feel like we need to talk about the journey leading up until this point. Endwalker was released in December 2021 and represented the culmination of a ten-year journey the Warrior of Light has made since the bungled launch of the game in 2010 and relaunch in 2013. It felt like the awkwardly named “Creative Business Unit III” stuck the landing and apart from a few sour notes… gave us the finale to this series that we all wanted and deserved. Zenos can still fuck the hell off, but that is a rant for another day.

The challenge with Dawntrail is that honestly, I was uncertain I would be playing it. I had thought I was ready to say goodbye to this franchise as it had given me everything that I had wanted. Dawntrail is a new beginning and ultimately will be looked upon to set the pace for the next ten years, and I was uncertain how well anyone could do with the challenge of a clean slate. Last night I finished the Main Story quest and completed all of the expert dungeons, and I have to say it feels like Yoshi P and crew managed to pull off a miracle. Dawntrail is a deeply weird expansion, but it is no less compelling than anything we have gotten to this point and should blaze a trail for the new role that the Warrior of Light plays in the coming years.

The first ten years of Final Fantasy XIV were unequivocally the hero’s journey of the Warrior of Light. It was our tale being told as we begin humbly and arise to the stature of being one of the most powerful beings on our star. Dawntrail is not our story. If Dawntrail were Highlander we would be Ramirez, not Connor MacLeod. If Dawntrail were Star Wars we would be Obi-Wan Kenobi, not Luke Skywalker. We’ve had our tale and are now helping out others as they build their own legacy. This is potentially going to rub some players the wrong way, but it felt so perfectly crafted to me playing through it. Much of this game centers around Wuk Lamat a young uncertain Warrior who has set forth to prove herself because she has to for the good of her people. We are her mentor and as a result, we are not actually the person driving most of the story.

The sights that we see and the battles that we tackle are no less spectacular than anything we have experienced to date. We are very much the elder statesman, lending our gravitas to the cause of others and it feels fitting. We are not about to languish in retirement… we are an adventurer after all first and foremost. We will see the world and help those who we can along the way, and occasionally it will mean teaching someone else how to stand on their own two feet and be confident in the face of certain destruction. Because of this, it feels like we are playing an even more important role in the fate of our star than being the sole savior figure who can accomplish great things. The challenge I think is that Dawntrail is as meaningful as it is… only because I experienced the last ten years worth of content and felt like I successfully completed my own hero’s journey.

Do I think Dawntrail was perfect? Absolutely not. It feels like they listened to the wrong people and made a good deal of content that large swaths of the player base are going to struggle to get through. I figure there will be rounds of nerfs to bring things back in line with the rest of the content in the game, which should help those who struggle. Do I think Dawntrail is a good first step out into a new journey… absolutely. I am curious where we go from here and what becomes of our fledgling group of “not-Scions”. There are some aspects I probably would have seen play out differently. I would say the first half of Dawntrail is perfect… no notes are needed. The second half of Dawntrail lingers a bit too much for my taste and becomes more visual novel than MMORPG. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the final “zone” of the game… but hopefully subsequent patch content will color my feelings.

Dawntrail succeeded massively in being this love letter to Central and South America and I am here for it. I am happy to see Final Fantasy XIV branch out into brand-new themes, and I am very interested to see what other new areas of Eorzea we discover in the coming expansions. I am also largely happy with our role in the new scheme of things, as a helper rather than the de facto leader. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, some patches will sand off the rough bits around the edges and Dawntrail will set itself up as one of the better expansions. I think right now in my current mindset I would rank the content like this:

  • Shadowbringer – This is still the best expansion
  • Endwalker – A great Expansion but benefits from wrapping up the entire journey.
  • Dawntrail – A promising new beginning.
  • A Realm Reborn – Especially in its current state I feel like it is amazing.
  • Heavensward – Good but I don’t like Ishgard.
  • Stormblood – Largely solid but has some deeply disappointing notes.

So while I don’t consider Dawntrail the best thing ever, I feel like it is on solid footing given that there are none of the expansions that I would consider “bad”. I’ve tried to keep things spoiler-free as best I could other than talking about some general themes. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines of Final Fantasy XIV you owe it to yourself to play through ALL of the story… and don’t be a cutscene skipper. You can skip them if you like, but you are only robbing yourself of the best RPG experience of the last several decades. I still feel firmly that taken as a whole, few games can hold up to the story that is told within Final Fantasy XIV, and Dawntrail is no exception to that lineage.

Anyways! I would love to hear your own thoughts as you finish your journey. I know I am out ahead of the curve a bit here, so feel free to return later or ping me over any number of ways folks can contact me. Please however keep things spoiler-free for the moment. Everyone deserves to experience FFXIV without the experience being tarnished.

Rolling out the VHS Cart

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Good Morning Friends! I apologize but you are likely not going to get a proper blog post from me until I have spent some more time in Dawntrail. With a new expansion comes a bunch of spoilers information and it would not do well for me to be part of that problem. So I am going to be careful what I do share. Suffice it to say I am having a lot of fun already and I am enjoying the vibe of the new lands. The new coffer gear is 645 so 5 points ahead of the base level of the highest crafted gear from Endwalker. It makes me extremely glad that I did not go through a lot of effort trying to grind up my item level much higher.

While my friends who attempted to log in as the servers went online faced queues in the 2000s… by the time I got up and around at 6 am CDT Cactuar was down to a 45-player queue. I am sure this will not hold as the day goes on and as more players join the fray. I am pleasantly surprised at how well things appear to be working. I do wonder how many folks Data Center Transferred to Dynamis in hopes of lower congestion. I am very happy that it is an option nonetheless if things do end up getting a bit busy.

One thing I will say is that you are probably going to want to avail yourself of the new feature to push player models away from Quest NPCs. This can be found under Character Configuration > General Tab > and towers the bottom under Quest Progression Settings. I’ve turned it on and the entire experience of questing through the zones has improved greatly. No longer do I need to try and hold my camera angle just right to click on the NPCs.

I wish you all a fun journey in Dawntrail, and I will see you again once the weekend is done and I have more that I feel like I can say.

Uncomfortably Jaded

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I made my way through the last part of the Alliance Raid for Endwalker and really enjoyed the story. Mastodon was sort of adorable last night as we all said goodnight to our Warriors of Light and put them to bed for a two-day nap. It feels really weird waking up this morning and knowing that I can’t log back into the game until the Dawntrail expansion has launched. I think I am fully back in the swing of all things Final Fantasy XIV and my mind is swimming with all of these goals. I am trying to pace myself so that I don’t burn out, but there are so many objectives that I want to complete. Will this be the expansion when I finally stick around for a while and do things like leveling my crafters? I have no clue… and honestly, I am supremely doubtful.

Yesterday this amazing video came out with 300 Musicians performing a medley of themes from Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV in general. Firstly I was overwhelmed with emotions while watching this video. I am not sure what it is about music in general being an amazing vehicle for conveying emotions but it certainly is for me. When I hear something I am often transported back to exactly what I was thinking and feeling when I heard that same music at a pivotal time in my life. It was all I could do to keep myself from weeping as I remembered how fundamental the ten-year ride leading up to Endwalker was. As much as I love the joy that can surround a gaming community… I struggle to maintain this shine for long. I want to unabashedly love something without reservation and allow myself to get wrapped up in a thing for years at a time.

The problem is… I also know myself. Even games like World of Warcraft… I never played consistently for the entire run of the years I was extremely active in the game. I remember not even making it to 60 before bouncing and going off to play some Everquest II with a different group of friends. When A Realm Reborn launched… I am not sure I made it to 1.1 before checking out until about a year into the game’s release schedule and then playing catch-up. We were extremely active for the second year of ARR and a good chunk of Heavensward, even consistently raiding. However, for Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker I have been an MSQ-only player who played through the story quests and then bounced to come back late in the release cycle when the excitement for the next expansion reached its fever pitch. Side note… the above image is of my pre-Lalafel version of my FFXIV character.

There are times when I wonder if I simply have forgotten how to love something without reservation. Slightly related… let’s take the concept of Christmas as a holiday event. As a kid… from the moment the “wishbooks” started arriving until the day you were physically going to all the different houses… everything was manic levels of excitement about all of the possibilities that the season had to offer. Everything from the gigantic tree to the twinkling lights to the rituals surrounding it… seems like pure magic. As I got older… it became harder and harder for me to slip into the “Christmas Spirit” usually as an adult taking me until I was actually visiting family or seeing the magic reflected in the eyes of kids… before I really got there. However now that all our Grandparents are gone, and the rituals have been broken… I am not sure I ever really get into the spirit, or at least not the same way I once did.

The same is somewhat true for gaming events. I remember “Blizzcon Fever” used to hit me in the lead-up to that show and I would inevitably resubscribe to the game and fall back in love with Warcraft for a few months. I would look forward to the E3 press conferences and even devote a series of blog posts talking about the finer points of things I was looking forward to from each. While I know we technically no longer have E3 and it could be said that we have not for several years now… we still have big press conferences in June from each of the companies. I don’t think I wrote a single blog post this year about any of it… because I was struggling to muster the excitement that I once had. I find myself uncomfortably jaded, and I am not sure how I back away from that precipice.

I find myself in a mindset where I am very much enjoying Final Fantasy XIV again… and have all of these things that I want to do. I am back tanking for random strangers on the regular which is an impressive feat given that I simply was not doing that at all for most of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I am having a lot of fun, but I am scared I am going to fuck this up. I always figure out some way to deflate my balloon of hopes and dreams. Maybe that is just what becoming an adult does to you, or maybe I am just more pessimistic than the average person. Whatever the case I would really appreciate it if my brain could accept the unabashed enjoyment of something for once without trying to analyze it to death. We will have to see how that goes.

Anyways sorry for a bit of a bummer blog post but it has been the thing that has been bouncing around in my skull. Maybe now that I have committed it to “paper” I can stop thinking about it. I think in this downtime from FFXIV I will probably be working on getting another world completion done in GW2 or grinding out another gift of battle.

Chilling with the Gods

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Good Morning Folks! I started my mission in Final Fantasy XIV back in 2013 here in Limsa Lominsa as a Marauder main and I will be continuing that same lineage as Warrior in Dawntrail. Throughout all of it, however… I have sort of wished that the Aetheryte in Limsa was not the hub for the entire server. I feel like with the opening of Solution 9… a city that is way more fitting for all the folks who prefer to do modern glams with their catgirls is going to become the new hub. Not that I begrudge anyone hanging out in Limsa, it just makes loading into my free Aetheryte a bit slower due to the congestion. I’ve always personally preferred Hawker’s Alley or the Aftcastle as my haunts in the city.

I’ve been working my way through the Alliance raid from Endwalker and this morning I unlocked the final part. I have to say I really dig this content, not just because of the fights but because we are getting to learn more about the “Gods” of Eorzea. When you start the game you are asked to choose a patron deity, but up until this point, it had largely been a meaningless choice. You interact with various cults associated with the gods, but it is never in a positive manner. Hanging out with the gods during this quest chain has been delightful and it finally feels like this game has a proper pantheon. That was always something that Everquest nailed but World of Warcraft never seemed to really address, the religion of the folk of the land. Planes of Power is still one of the best expansions to hit ANY game because it did so much cool stuff with its pantheon.

This is going to get a bit spoilery so be warned. One of the things I had wondered about… is if during the quest chain, there would ever be a moment when my patron Deity acknowledges that fact. There is a point where you can bip around the phantom realm and summon forth various Gods to talk with. When I summoned Rhalgr, sure enough, he did in fact mention the fact that I was aligned with him. He also singled out something that I suspected… that the primals that we have fought are essentially incomplete reflections of these gods. Rhalgr mentions his connection to Ramuh and the Sylphs and if you go around the rest of the pantheon you can kinda connect the dots back to the other primals that have been summoned. Byregot seems somewhat like Titan, Azeyma somewhat like Ifrit, and Llymlaen maybe Leviathan. Anyway, there is a thread of connection there that I really dig.

In 2021 Square ran a promotion with Butterfinger that involved buying $5 of qualifying products and then submitting a photo of the receipt in order to get a code for a “chocolate” themed mount. This was a bit of a cumbersome mess and I never bothered. So while I will NEVER this mount because it looks entirely too much like poop… I will absolutely collect it just like I collected the Mountain Dew Zuu from this current promotion. Essentially Square has partnered with Twitch and is offering up the Chocorpokkur mount as a drop that comes from watching six hours of FFXIV-related streams. I will of course be farming this in a tab in the background… because six hours of Twitch viewership is sort of a “big ask” for someone who never really watches streams. Still cool that this is available again without needing to make any sort of purchase.

Also this morning the preliminary patch notes for 7.0 dropped, and if you are so inclined you can read through them all and daydream about the features coming into the game. It is a rather long read and I am slowly chewing my way through them. I gotta say though there is an armor set that seems to be leaning directly into the whole gunslinger vibe that I have been going for with my Mechanist. If nothing else I am going to need to collect that coat and I am hoping it has full support for both of the new dye channels. This reminds me that I REALLY need to level up my crafters because I hate paying the markup for dies. I’ve largely ignored that entire segment of the game because I didn’t want to buy them. Now that items have multiple dye channels though, I figure it will be too enticing to ignore.