Dawntrail's Doomsayers and Why I Don't Buy What They're Selling

My expectations for Final Fantasy XIV's upcoming expansion and why I think the concerns of naysayers are overblown.

Have you heard about the meme for the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV? It doesn’t come with a spoiler warning, but this essay does.

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Some among you who speak with me a bit more frequently outside of Substack may have already known that I’m a mostly avid player of what’s arguably Square-Enix’s most successful game, Final Fantasy XIV. It’s of little surprise when you think about what it is I chiefly do around here. Writing fantasy fiction has been something I’ve loved doing since I was a pre-teen, so it’s to be expected that if I were attracted to any sort of MMO, it would be one that touts itself as a story driven RPG first and an MMO second. Well as of tail end of 2021, the story part of this story driven game found itself in a very interesting and arguably precarious spot - the end of the overarching main plot of the last decade. Oh, and while it should go without saying, (especially since I already mentioned it in the caption above) minor spoiler warning. A not insignificant amount of my fellow XIV players would clamor to have my head on a pike if I forgot to do that.

For reasons that I’m sure are pretty obvious, this revelation planted some lingering questions about the future of the game into the minds of its player base. Since the game’s relaunch with A Realm Reborn in 2011 - an event which is an entire story in its own right, one which she shan’t get into here - the overarching plot has mainly seen our player character, the technically silent but always expressive Warrior of Light, working alongside friends and allies to deal with the threats and machinations of the shadowy Ascians, a mysterious cabal of powerful beings who’s goals and history have had far reaching effects on the state of the game world we inhabit. As you might imagine, with ten years worth of story dedicated to them across the course of four expansions and the base game, (it’s technically five expansions, but again, getting into the history of A Realm Reborn is too large a story in its own right for this essay) there’s a lot of detail and moving pieces we could dive into. Indeed, doing so is one of the favorite pass times of numerous FFXIV content creators, right alongside setting up stylish and fashionable screenshots, arguing about the use of technically illicit mods and Square’s don’t ask don’t tell policy there, and creating memes.

So…

…so many…

…memes.

Slight diversion, but the amazing performance in that last video came from one of the 2021 Fanfest events, though I don’t recall if it was the Japanese, North American, or European one. The gentleman gracing us with his musical talents, Masayoshi Soken, is the game’s primary composer and apprentice to the legendary Nobuo Uematsu. (Any long-time FF fan will recognize his name.) He’s also a cancer survivor, and when he came out of his fight with cancer in 2021 he made it clear that he wanted to be an active part of the next Fanfest and perform on stage. This was why. Never let it be said that Soken isn’t good humored. Oh, and don’t let the paired Otomatones and whacky singing fool you, he is a legitimately amazing composer, too.

But back on track. Suffice it to say, after most of us played our way through the main story of Endwalker and reached the new max level of 90, sharing in many laughs and shedding more than a few tears along the way - yes, seriously, the story’s not perfect but it’s legitimately quite good - that singular question started to prickle in the backs of our minds: what next? That prickling was very gentle at the early points of the expansion because, well, it was early. We had at least 2 years before we’d even hear about whatever the next expansion was going to be, and in that time we’d have the endgame main story to follow, (generally referred to by the community as post MSQ - meaning post Main Story Quest) the story for the primary 8-man raid series, and the story for the 24-man alliance raid series, alongside a few other extra tidbits here and there. Feedback on these has been mixed for a variety of reasons, but what really matters here is the effect the last couple years had on that prickling question:

With the story of the Ascians finally wrapped, what comes next?

Between the three Fanfests from last summer to earlier this year - July 2023 for the U.S., October 2023 for Europe, and January 2024 for Japan - we got our answer in the form of a new trailer and the announcement of a new expansion: DAWNTRAIL.

As is sometimes the case with early trailer releases, the full trailer above isn’t what we got the first time around. An edited version that carefully omitted certain elements to breed excitement and anticipation in the form of theory crafting and hypothesizing among the player base was released at the U.S. Fanfest well before this full trailer dropped earlier this month. Discussion was quick to fire up, with players all around excitedly sharing their hopes and hypotheses amongst one another. However, something a little different was brewing beneath the surface this time around, a nagging sensation that was borne out of that tiny prickle of concern and curiosity that inserted itself into many people’s minds all the way back when Endwalker was released:

“Dawntrail’s story is gonna be a boring beach vacation plot!”

Okay, before I go on, I need to make some things clear for those who aren’t regular players of the game. In order to help the uninitiated understand why this sentiment started to foment in certain corners of the player base, I need to touch on some very basic aspects of the game’s story. I can already hear the cacophony of shrieking voices thundering toward me as I type this, so for any fans of the game that are in here, rest assured I’m not going to spoil anything major. I’ll only be going over some extremely basic plot elements to help explain the particulars behind why Dawntrail is already being assumed by many to be the “beach episode” of expansions for this game. So, we good?

Good. And if we’re not, well you can claim your pound of flesh at the Wolves’ Den, assuming you can actually manage to drag me to engage in my most hated activity in that game. Seriously, I despise PVP in MMORPGs…

Anyway, the main story in XIV has generally been one in which, expansion by expansion, the stakes in the story have been steadily raised. This is in terms of both forms of stakes that one can find within a story - global stakes, and personal stakes - and FFXIV has done a pretty good job of steadily increasing both over the course of its main story over the last twelve years now. Has it been perfect? No, far from it. Good as the story is, and I do think it’s quite good, there have been a fair share of stumbling blocks along the way. On the whole though, when the story hits its stride, it hits it confidently and carries your investment along for the ride. When it doesn’t, most of the time it’s still pretty good, just not as good as it could be.

Endwalker, quite appropriately, represents the pinnacle of raised stakes for this story, particularly on the global scale. After all, we’re wrapping up a decade long story that involves a shadowy cabal of powerful beings who quite literally have the power to shape the course of entire worlds. A story like that is naturally going to try to end on a pretty epic high and pit us against some very powerful adversaries, and that’s exactly what Endwalker does. However, as anyone who’s watched or read any shonen anime or manga can tell you, that kind of stake ratcheting will eventually run into a major power scaling problem: when you’ve already dealt with the most powerful threats you’ve canonically ever seen before, where do you go next?

There’s that question again, and that’s also where we see the root of the problem that the doomsayers are trying to hit on. Now, I want to say this quite clearly, skepticism and worry about an upcoming expansion isn’t strange or new. I’ve seen it in literally every MMO I’ve ever played whether it was World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Rifts, or FFXIV. What makes it stand out in the case of Dawntrail is how suddenly pervasive the negativity about it is. I’m sure no small part of that is simply due to a vocal minority doing what vocal minorities always do, complaining until they’re blue in the face. I’m also sure that’s in part due to the lukewarm reception certain elements of Endwalker’s endgame story also received. It’s an issue that’s compounded onto itself, a domino effect of naysaying born of various elements that ultimately boil down to people feeling bored and disappointed that things didn’t go the way they’d envisioned. Now they’re looking at what’s to come and that specter of negativity is casting a shadow over their eyes.

But I have a different perspective on what’s to come, and that’s based both on what we’ve seen in the trailer and the little taste of it that we got in the final story patch of Endwalker. I think, and indeed I hope, that Dawntrail is setting up to give us a classic pulp adventure story wrapped up in the skin and style of Final Fantasy. The trailer already shows us a lot of what we need to know to draw this connection. The Warrior of Light and his long time companions are traveling across the sea to an exotic and wild land. There’s an air of excitement to the whole thing, a sense of daring as they travel to the nation of Tural, which is explicitly stated to be known to as The New World in the lands the Warrior and his companions hail from. We’re promised new sights and sounds far different from what we’ve already experienced in the game already, including all new cultures and numerous biomes to explore. In short, Dawntrail is promising heaps upon heaps of adventure, trying to bring us back in some ways to the wide-eyed sense of excitement many of us felt when we played this game for the first time.

Now, I personally don’t think it’s going to fully succeed in bringing back that feeling for anyone but new players. Veterans like myself aren’t going to have a lot in the way of new mechanics to learn, but I do think we’re going to be in for a much better time than the naysayers are allowing themselves to believe, and here’s why. Over the course of this game’s four expansions, there’s a pretty clear dividing line in terms of which two are largely considered the best, and which two missed the mark. Funny enough, it kind of follows the inverse rule of the original Star Trek movies, with every odd numbered entry being considered one of the greats and the even ones not landing as well as many had hoped. In this case, the expansions in question that were considered to be amazing were the first expansion, Heavensward, and the third expansion, Shadowbringers, with Endwalker and especially Stormblood considered to be mixed bags. Again, I reiterate, this isn’t to say any of them are bad, because they’re really not. The issue is more that Endwalker and Stormblood weren’t thought to quite reach the same peaks of Heavensward and Shadowbringers.

Well, here’s the thing about Dawntrail - when we take what we’ve been shown in the trailer and couple it with what we experience in that final story patch, a pattern starts to emerge. A pattern that matches with some of the broader story choices that were made in both Heavensward and Shadowbringers. You see, the argument about whether or not Dawntrail is going to live up to what came before it or end up being the “boring beach episode” of expansions hinges largely on the earlier mentioned discussion of stakes within the story. However, what many of the naysayers have failed to realize is that they’re only looking at those stakes from a single angle. Specifically, they’re only looking at it from the global angle.

Dawntrail’s stakes are going to be lesser than Endwalker’s. Some iteration of this statement is generally the argument I tend to see when it comes to the attempts to paint Dawntrail’s story as being likely to be boring. However, this is only true in the realm of global stakes. Dawntrail’s story presumably won’t be dealing with the same sort of vast and otherworldly powers that we experienced in Endwalker, and that’s a good thing! Endwalker brought our Warriors of Light and our friends to the absolute brink because it’s the culmination of a much larger and grander story. Dawntrail is the start of something completely new, which means it has to establish its own global stakes. However, what Dawntrail’s story has already begun to establish are the second, and I would argue the more important variety of stakes: personal stakes.

When fans of FFXIV look back fondly on major moments within the stories of Heavensward and Shadowbringers, those moments almost always come with names attached. Haurchefant. Nidhogg. Ysale. Hraesvelgr. Elidibus. Ryne. Vauthry. Gaia. Ardbert. The Exarch. Emet-Selch. For players of the game, these names and many others are enough to elicit powerful memories of major characters and major story moments within these expansions. The reason for this is because of the personal stakes the story establishes between you, the player character, and these various named NPCs. These are characters that you will interact with and sometimes battle against throughout the course of the expansion’s story, and just like any story that establishes a strong sense of personal stakes, you begin to feel attached to them in various ways. Sometimes you’re sympathetic and want to help them. Other times, you find them despicable and want to stop their wicked ways. Many times it’s more complicated than either of these.

This is the core of what Dawntrail is promising to provide us - a story focused on a new cast of what will hopefully be endearing characters. Sure it doesn’t have the same high global stakes as Endwalker, or even Shadowbringers or Stormblood before it. But neither does it need those high stakes, because the story it wants to tell is a personal one. We see this clearly in the interactions we get in the latest story patch when we meet and briefly adventure with Wuk Lamat, the new hrothgar woman from the Dawntrail trailer. (She’s the one that actually looks like a cat, as opposed to just having cat ears and a tail like the miqo’te characters Y’shtola [the silver haired and silver eyed female] and G’raha Tia [the red haired and red eyed male].) In just the couple hours we spend with her during that brief introduction to our upcoming adventure, we end up learning quite a lot about who she is, what she is to the people of Tural, and why she sought us out specifically. Most importantly, we get a number of very strong glimpses at the kind of person she really is deep down, to the point where we already have very strong hints as to the type of growth we can expect to see in her across the course of Dawntrail’s story. On top of that, every element of the story is suffused with the promise of adventure in a large and new land, which is something else that the much beloved Shadowbringers did.

In short, I don’t buy into the doom and gloom of the naysayers because I recognize the early signs of the exact same elements present in Dawntrail that made Heavensward excellent and Shadowbringers legendary. I recognize the promise of an endearing cast of new characters and a new land brimming with color and style and just a touch of optimistic whimsy. And perhaps most exciting of all for someone like myself, I recognize the makings of a fun and pulpy adventure all wrapped up in the style and substance of Final Fantasy XIV.

Thank you for reading.

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