Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail – a clean slate. Review

Played on PC

Somehow it so happens that in all these years on 3DNews we haven’t talked about Final Fantasy XIV in detail; just news. It’s time to fix this, since I’m the only one in the editorial office who has been living in the world of the game for many years, albeit intermittently. Considering how much has been missed, this material will be less a review of Dawntrail, a new addon, and more an introduction to this MMO as a whole. If you only want to read about the expansion, feel free to skip to the next section. If you want to feel nostalgic or understand what the fourteenth “final” is all about, then let’s start with this.

⇡#What are you?

After the failure of Final Fantasy XIV, also known as version 1.0, Naoki Yoshida, perhaps one of the most talented and stubborn people among producers and project managers at Square Enix, took the helm of the project. Thanks to the efforts of his team, the “birdhouse” bosses were persuaded not to throw the project in the trash, but to give it another chance. This is how Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (2.0) was born – the basis that helped the fourteenth “final” eventually become both a profitable project and one of the best parts of the series, and at the same time one of the most successful MMOs on the market. The entire amazing story of the resurrection can be seen on the gaming documentary channel NoClip – three emotional episodes (one, two, three) tell in detail how they managed to do the impossible.

Please note, this is not a drill. There are flying capybaras here!

Since then, the game has continued to grow rapidly, with each addition offering more and more content, while at the same time telling (most often) interesting and smartly written stories. High fantasy with dragons and religion from the expansion Heavensward (3.0) radically gave way to the theme of the liberation war in Stormblood (4.0), only to suddenly turn everything upside down and send the characters to a parallel world in Shadowbringers (5.0), and then powerfully conclude a long-term plot line in Endwalker (6.0). The last two expansions were the peak of FF XIV in terms of writing and showed how to handle complex narratives and complete giant stories. Which, given the genre, is quite unexpected.

FF XIV is often called a single-player MMO for a reason. It does not require constant interaction with people, grinding is optional, and the emphasis on storytelling is so serious that each of the addons could well be a full-fledged Final Fantasy in itself, there are so many dialogues, events and characters. If desired, you can play it almost like any offline Final Fantasy. Especially considering that the developers have added AI partners to all story dungeons.

Besides the narrative, one of the main advantages of the game, in my opinion, is that all the content, even added more than 10 years ago, is still available. Yes, the very old dungeons were seriously redone, but they didn’t go anywhere. The game did not stage cataclysms in the style of World of Warcraft, which radically changed the world (except that in version 1.0 the end of the world occurred, but there were reasons for that). And they didn’t do outright nonsense, like the Destiny 2 developers who removed the raids you paid for, just because.

In FF XIV as a whole there was always something to do, but now you can get lost in the activities. There are dozens of story and side dungeons combined with various raids. But, besides this, there are still a bunch of mini-games, fishing, crafting, gathering, developing your own island, PvP, special zones for field missions, towers of hundreds of floors with challenges and who knows what else. In addition, all professions are available to one character – they can be changed with one click, rather than making a new hero each time.

Vuk Lamat is the main character of the current addon. She also swears funny

Although, due to such continuity, new arrivals may have a “small” problem. In order to get to the currently relevant content, you will need to go through all previous additions. There is, of course, the opportunity to pay to skip all this, but I would strongly advise against doing so. Firstly, each of the addons, even the most boring ones, is important for the plot. Secondly, optional content will be released gradually, and you will gradually get acquainted with the world and find out what is where. Thirdly, jumping into fresh dungeons without practice and understanding how markers and boss mechanics work is a dubious idea.

For a beginner, this may sound somewhat intimidating, since the path from A Realm Reborn to the latest addon at the moment will take, if you are not in too much of a hurry, a couple of hundred hours. However, this is true for any projects that have been on the market for a long time. Moreover, this is a case where I highly, highly recommend trying the adventure yourself. It’s rare that a game, let alone an MMO, has such depth of character, world, and overall storytelling. Moreover, the free trial version now includes not only the basic version 2.0, but also 3.0 and 4.0, which is indecently large for such an offer.

⇡#A new story stuck at the start

We’ve sorted out FF XIV a little, now we can move on to the Dawntrail (7.0) add-on, which was released in early July. After what the developers did with Shadowbringers (I’m not sure the game will ever be able to offer something as strong again) and Endwalker, I didn’t have any special expectations from the new addon. The game literally took years to reach versions 5.0 and 6.0 – a huge amount of time was spent getting used to the characters, making friends with them and getting to know the world well. Therefore, the plot moves emotionally hit the right points, especially towards the end of Endwalker, where the combination of the beautiful Close in the Distance and what was happening on the screen naturally made me cry.

Thanks to the updated graphics engine, equipment now looks even better, as do the landscapes

Therefore, it was foolish to expect something like this from a fresh addition. Dawntrail had the same goal as A Realm Reborn. This is a fresh start, the beginning of a new adventure that has yet to unfold. However, even with low expectations, I can’t say that Yoshida’s team succeeded this time. I’ve always cited FF XIV as an example of a game with a great narrative – it sometimes spends a lot of time explaining and placing all the active pieces on the board, but later on it’s precisely because of this that the plot twists “pop”.

However, on rare occasions, the writers shot themselves in the foot, delving into unnecessary details so much that it simply became boring. The last time this happened was seven years ago in Stormblood. The addon took a soporificly long time to explain the relationships between different clans and only picked up speed closer to the very end. Which made it perhaps the worst addition in terms of dynamics and usefulness…

…Before the release of Dawntrail. Which turned out to be not only more boring than Stormblood, but was never able to pick up speed throughout its considerable length. This time we are going to the new continent of Tural to take part in the games that will determine the heir to the local throne. Our character, known in the world of FF XIV as The Warrior of Light (or simply WoL), helps the resilient and eternally positive Vuk Lamat pass various tests, but rather in the role of a mentor than the main character. Which, in general, is normal – not every day you save the universe with your own hands. Now quite a few players are criticizing Vuk Lamat herself and calling her a bad character and the story uninteresting. However, I can’t agree with this, because the girl was developed quite well, and the plot raises interesting topics such as conflicts due to cultural differences, life in general, life after death in particular, and so on. Not to mention the sudden details of the biography of one of the main characters.

The problem here is different. The potentially entertaining story is poorly told and drags on waaaay too slow.

Small Torgal from FF XVI was given during the event for the sixteenth part in FF XIV. Since then I can’t stop taking screenshots of it

The supplement meticulously talks about the traditions of local peoples, so historical information about the region, based on the culture of South America, seems to take forever. And then another one. At first, immersing myself in this world seemed interesting, but the further I went, the more I wanted it to finally end. Three hours ago I realized that this ritual is very important for you, why talk about it for another two hours? Why does the first dungeon appear only after 10-12 hours of endless dialogue?

Due to the fact that the story lingers for an excruciatingly long time, without offering any activities, Dawntrail was the first expansion where I simply left the game to take a break from all this tediousness. Yes, the addon has some good moments, the second half is a little livelier, and fans of FF IX will be pleasantly surprised. But all the interesting points are scattered so far from each other that when you get to something interesting, it doesn’t work the way the authors intended – by this point you’re just exhausted with empty fillers.

Moreover, the addon could not really indicate what we would do in the future, except for very vague references. It didn’t introduce any particular threat, nor did it introduce powerful new antagonists like the crazy Zenos or the philosophically melancholy Emet-Selch. Traditionally, throughout the life cycle of an add-on (usually about two years), story patches are released – a kind of connecting bridge between add-ons – so perhaps something interesting will appear next year or the year after. For example, the same A Realm Reborn accelerated only in patches. However, why was it necessary to spend a gigantic chunk of Dawntrail’s timing on explaining things that the game itself forgets about after an hour, rather than on more important information? With such a snail’s pace, it’s no wonder people are complaining and some are simply getting impatient and starting to skip cutscenes.

The new raid boss reminds me a lot of someone from Overwatch

⇡#But it became more interesting to fight

It’s even funnier that Stormblood and Dawntrail are similar not only in their boring plots, but also in their approach to combat content. Stormblood had a lot of changes to the combat system and cool dungeons, and at the same time the game had the best series of raids for 24 people, based on Ivalice (the world of FF XII and FF Tactics). And it looks like history will repeat itself again.

At the end of Endwalker’s life cycle, the developers admitted that they had overdone it and made the game too easy, promising that the balance would be reversed throughout Dawntrail. And this is already noticeable in the more dynamic bosses and dungeons. I can’t say that they have become more complicated, because if you have already reached version 7.0, then you should have several hundred hours of play behind you – you already react to many dangers automatically. However, battles have definitely become much more fun: you need to move more, pay more attention to the mechanics and be more careful than before. The new Expert Dungeons, available at level 100, are some of the coolest in the game.

Dodging hearts is not as easy as it might seem

Two new DPS classes – Viper (melee) and Pictomancer (magic ranged) – also turned out to be quite entertaining. True, both had already been processed a little with a file. Viper was especially hard hit, as some users complained that it was too difficult to play as him, and the team immediately rushed to “fix” the profession instead of letting gamers get used to it. In any case, since I prefer to tank, DPS characters are not particularly interesting to me. And here it’s a bit of a shame, because the game already has a bunch of different classes for dealing damage, but there are still four tanks – and the last one was added five years ago, in Shadowbringers.

Although this does not mean that the characters are not reworked. On the contrary, my favorite paladin in Dawntrail received a couple of powerful abilities – and this version is what I would call the best version of the paladin in the entire existence of the game. The rest of the castmates also received enough changes to feel fresh without being completely overhauled. The developers seemed to say that they want to work more specifically on classes after the main content is released – we’ll see where this leads. Because now quite a lot of professions feel too similar to each other.

If you choose the wrong landing point, you can fly into the abyss. Or break the platform under the others, hehe

The first wave of raid bosses for eight players was also adrenaline-pumping, even on normal difficulty. A bunch of interesting mechanics, ways to interact with the arena, the ability to get an uppercut and fly to hell into the abyss, taking other players with you – even after a few weeks, fighting with opponents is very fun, and more recently their Savage versions (read, hardcore) have appeared . In the future they should add a series of raids for 24 people based on FF XI, new bosses and a fresh field test area in the style of Eureka and Bozja, which has every chance of becoming a black hole for free time. There will clearly be no time to rest.

Despite all the positive changes to combat content, it’s a bit of a shame that the developers don’t seem to be doing anything with regular dungeons. They are normal, but the formula “collect two or three packs of mobs – get to the boss – repeat three times” has become somewhat boring after so many years, and the dungeons themselves are run automatically. Yoshida explained that not too many resources are allocated to this content – they go to more important things – so you shouldn’t expect any drastic changes. However, I would give up 10-20 hours of useless conversations for at least a couple of more interesting dungeons with unique ideas.

Dawntrail is currently at the beginning of its two-year cycle and, as usual, will be adding content during this time. However, the launch of a new storyline is more reminiscent of A Realm Reborn, but with a much slower narrative, a lack of clear hints about future events, and a bunch of problems accumulated over the course of the game’s existence, such as too-easy combat content and classes that play more or less the same way. Version 7.0 touches on this, but only a little so far. Of course, the not very successful addition in terms of plot is definitely not the death of FF XIV, we already went through that with Stormblood. However, when you don’t really expect anything from an addon, but it still disappoints for the most part, it’s a little sad.

Advantages:

• The updated graphics engine definitely benefited the middle-aged game;
• New dungeons and raid bosses are dynamic and fun;
• Many professions have gained interesting abilities.

Disadvantages:

• The plot drags on terribly slowly and wastes a considerable part of the running time on third-rate information;
• Quite a few classes are still not really different from each other;
• Standard dungeons have been using exactly the same template for years;
• As the start of a new grand adventure, Dawntrail can hardly be called successful – the developers did not dare to change too much, and after the finale you are glad that the addon is finally over, and are not waiting for new story quests in patches.

Graphic arts

Final Fantasy XIV in version 7.0 updated the graphics engine, adding normal lighting, high-resolution textures, support for DLSS and other technologies. Graphics are not very important for an MMO, but the innovations definitely helped make the world more beautiful.

Sound

Masayoshi Soken, the permanent composer of FF XIV, once again surprises with a gigantic range of musical themes. From the usual pretentious sound of the finale to jazz and even jpop, Dawntrail is musically beautiful.

Single player game

Technically, the plot part of each FF XIV add-on is a separate, more or less single-player “finale”. Only this time the narrative turned out to be too chaotic and so slow that in places you have to overcome and endure.

Estimated time of completion

A new campaign can be completed in 40-60 hours, depending on how much third-party content you complete. The pursuit of the best equipment, as always, is endless.

Collective game

There are expectedly few new dungeons and raids at the moment, but those that are already available indicate that the development team plans to at least slightly increase the difficulty of regular content. Which is great, because in recent years the game (outside of the completely hardcore modes) has become too easy.

General impression

The story is one of the most important components of every FF XIV addon, and the content that the vast majority of users go through. The addition made the combat more fun and the dungeons and raids more dynamic, but the terrible pacing of the story and the way it wastes a lot of time on unnecessary things greatly weakens the experience. Especially considering that this is the start of a new storyline.

Rating: 7.0 / 10

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