Final Fantasy 14: Evercold’s story will have a faster tempo, with worldbuilding in side quests, says Yoshi-P—but I’m not sure that was the problem with Dawntrail

As PC Gamer’s premier ‘I think too much about the story Dawntrail could’ve been’ person (which is a proper, official title, don’t look it up), I have some thoughts about this.

Now to be clear, this is a translated quote from a group interview, and while Yoshi-P is certainly involved in the process of writing any expansion, he’s a game director, so he’s got an overarching view rather than a handle on the nitty-gritty of a given storyline. However, I don’t think the issue in Dawntrail was its over-emphasis on worldbuilding, it was a lack of interest in how that worldbuilding connected to character.

Sure, the whole ‘talk to three people’ questlines get deservedly dunked on as a clumsy vehicle for how this stuff gets conveyed, but I don’t really have any problem with how Dawntrail sets up the continent of Tural itself. As a matter of fact, I think the baseline is all very interesting—a fledgling nation under a first king at the end of his life, forced to reckon with how succession will work? That’s a fun setup.

The stumbling of Dawntrail is in how none of these worldbuilding details had knock-on effects for the characters in any real, meaningful way. We learn about these cultures, and they either barely come up again or they add little to the core emotional conflicts that the characters are going through, with the exception of the Mamool Ja and the Skydeep Cenote.

Gulool Ja Ja, the warrior-king soon to abdicate the throne, basically does no wrong throughout all the stories we learn of him (aside from his raising of Zoraal Ja, which isn’t really explored anyway) giving absolutely nothing for the main cast to reflect on. Wuk Lamat’s relationship with her siblings is never meaningfully or memorably explored in the context of the societies she’s learning about.

Even the rite of succession messes up clean opportunities—there’s a whole segment where contestants are randomly assigned to partners, and rather than use this as an opportunity to have Wuk Lamat, say, paired with someone she doesn’t like, she just gets put with Koana and nothing really happens as a result.

Textured worldbuilding isn’t the issue—the issue is that worldbuilding should generally feed back into the overarching themes and narrative. I’m not sure simply offloading all of it into the story’s sidequests is the answer, rather than having a considered effort to make it interesting and relevant to the characters at hand.

But again, I’m not expecting Yoshi-P to sate my hunger for nitty-gritty nuance through the filter of translation in a group interview—and the current Evercold introductory patch story does give me hope, given there’s already been some effective show-not-tell worldbuilding in it. The fact Visna freaks out about us approaching without stating our brand is great, it immediately sets the stakes for life in this ice-covered world without beating us over the head with it. So there is genuine hope that FF14’s story really is returning to form.