domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
OliveTapenade
10m ago
About two months ago, I had a chat with @gattsuru about Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, which I had been struggling through at the time. I've since got on with it and finished Dawntrail's MSQ, and I promised to get back with some more thoughts then.
So, what do I think?
For a starting point, I'd have to grant that this is FFXIV's worst outing since 1.0, and I don't get the impression that this is particularly controversial? There's a clear decline in metascore (PC only, ARR is 83/7.0, HW is 86/8.0, SB is 87/7.5, SHB is 90/9.1, EW is 92/9.0, and DT is 79/5.3), and anecdotally my sense among fans has been that there's a sense that this is a slog. I occasionally chatted to people doing story dungeons, and never encountered pushback on the idea that this is a weaker outing. Fortunately, FFXIV is very good, so the worst FFXIV expansion is still potentially quite good relative to its competitors.
I found that the first 75% or so of Dawntrail's story really dragged. I think the primary issue for me was that neither the world nor the cast of characters I was exploring it with were particularly interesting, or revealed any compelling dramatic tensions. I'll talk about the characters a bit later, but Tural in general is not a very interesting place until you get to Mamook, because it's just a very peaceful place with no outstanding issues. The formula for most of the MSQ is that we visit a place, the locals are friendly and generous and tell us about their culture, Wuk Lamat appreciates that culture a bit, maybe one of our rivals does some Scooby Doo level prank to annoy us, we resolve it, and then we move on. Unfortunately the cultures we visit are all very superficial. The Pelupelu like trade and negotiation. The Hanuhanu have a harvest festival. The Moblins patronise craftsmen. The Xbr'aal like chili wrapped in banana leaves. It all feels like surface, and comes off badly compared to some of the cultures we met in previous expansions, almost all of which were complex, contained both sympathetic and unsympathetic traits, had their share of unresolved issues or tensions, and invited some level of engagement with them. Dawntrail improves a bit towards the end - I liked the Old West bit in Xak Tural, where for once there was an interesting domestic conflict, with crime springing up in the wake of a rapid economic and territorial expansion into the ceruleum fields of the north, and formal legal institutions clashing with the ad hoc codes of justice worked out by vigilantes on the frontier - but it doesn't measure up that well compared to the past.
The major exception for me was Mamook, which I did find interesting, but also tragically under-explored. I'd also like to add Mamook to the pile of evidence that FFXIV is secretly a quite conservative game, because to me at least the whole Mamook story felt like a blatant pro-life allegory. Even if it's not quite about abortion, it is very easy to read as being about IVF. The Mamool Ja are desperate for more blessed siblings to be born, mutant two-headed Mamool Ja of superior strength and power, and to accomplish this they've been mass-producing hybrid eggs, even though they know that the vast majority of these hybrids will die unborn, struggling in vain to break free of their own shells. Only one in a hundred of blessed eggs successfully hatches, and the survivors, like Bakool Ja Ja, carry the weight of this holocaust of the unborn. The Mamool Ja believe that they need blessed siblings to survive, but the guilt of this crime weighs on their entire community, a hidden torment that they cannot reveal to the rest of Tural. Naturally the heroic thing to do here is to convince them that they don't need to engage in this kind of eugenics, that it is not worth sacrificing so many lives for the sake of worldly, military power. A more blatant pro-life allegory I struggle to imagine!
Likewise when we get to the end of the expansion, well, it's a bit more subtle, and the script occasionally ventures that we shouldn't be too quick to judge another culture, but there's no disguising the fact that the narrative thrust of Dawntrail is strongly critical of Alexandria and the world of Living Memory. The soul-recycling of Alexandria and the unnatural immortality of the Endless are condemned. This too strikes me as remarkably amenable to a conservative interpretation - much like the world of the Ancients before it, Sphene's paradise is fundamentally flawed, and the right thing to do is to smash its memory banks, let these digital ghosts fade away, and encourage the living to return to the world.
But I've gotten ahead of myself. I do think the expansion picks up considerably once you reach Alexandria. I don't love Alexandria overall, and in particular its neon futuristic aesthetic is a pretty big clash with the rest of the setting, but since it's explicitly from another world, that helps a bit, and it seems likely to remain cordoned off to its own part of the setting. Still, I hope this isn't a sign that Eorzea may end up going the same way as Azeroth, with new, high-tech additions gradually building to the point where it becomes impossible to take the world seriously. Even so, Alexandria is better than most of Tural because it manages to be a portrayal of a society that's complicated. Alexandrians aren't bad people for the most part, and there may be much to admire in Alexandria, but even so, there are clearly deep issues in its society. The fact that we rapidly meet a group of Alexandrian dissidents who articulate some of their complaints helps with that as well.
Now let's talk about characters a bit as well...
This is probably the weakest part of Dawntrail, for me.
Some of the Scions are still around to help us, but for the most part they feel under-used or mis-used. Some of them are present but do almost nothing, and feel like they're just there to provide a familiar face or two. Alphinaud and Alisaie, Y'shtola, G'raha Tia, and Estinien all appear a few times, but none of them do anything in the story or contribute anything, and might as well not be in Dawntrail. Thancred and Urianger sort of have something interesting, and it's neat to see them mentoring Koana, but unfortunately most of that happens off-screen. Lastly Krile... should have had a chance to shine here, but unfortunately I feel she was screwed over a bit. She doesn't do much for most of the story, and then the discovery of Krile's parents and her discovery of her origins is rapidly shoehorned in at the very end of the story, in a way that honestly kind of ruins the pacing of the end as well. I feel Krile was done dirty here. For most of FFXIV before now, Krile has never really gotten a chance to shine, and she should have had it here, but she didn't. Perhaps some of the new characters got in the way?
Speaking of... well, I'll preface this by saying that I don't hate Wuk Lamat as a character, and I don't think the issue with her is the voice acting. Sometimes I switch the voices in FFXIV to Japanese and it doesn't substantially change how I feel about Wuk Lamat. The problem is that only a few local Tural characters, mostly Wuk Lamat but also Koana, need to carry most of the story, and it is too much for them. Wuk Lamat is not a particularly interesting or deep character and it means that the expansion spends way too long stretching out a character arc that just doesn't have much bite to it. Wuk Lamat is fundamentally an optimistic, cheerful, kind person who wants to be Dawnservant so she can protect her people's happiness, and her biggest character flaw is just that she's a bit naive and a bit prone to self-doubt, so her story is about gaining confidence. Koana is basically the same - he's a good guy, he wants to help, but he struggles with self-doubt. Add in that Wuk Lamat is basically the protagonist of this expansion, with the Warrior of Light primarily a helper, and a lot of the expansion comes off as just following around a not-massively-interesting person as she goes on a tour. I don't find Wuk Lamat particularly *dis-*likeable, but she's just not up to the task of carrying this story.
In a sense, it reminds me a bit of some of the criticisms of Dragon Age: The Veilguard for being far too positive - all the characters are friends, and rough edges are all sanded off. In this case, Wuk Lamat is nice to everyone, and the WoL and the Scions with her are also all very nice, and no significant conflicts ever emerge. Even the rivals end up quite friendly; Koana is also lovely, and Bakool Ja Ja is a jerk for five levels and then pulls an extremely rapid heel face turn and then he's our friend too. This just makes for a story that feels bland.
By comparison, let's look at some earlier expansions. One of my favourite parts of Heavensward was the Warrior of Light's trip into Dravania with Alphinaud, Estinien, and Ysayle. This was another small ensemble cast, and it worked really well because all of those characters have depth, and are full of complicated feelings and ambivalencies, and those feelings then bounce off each other and throw sparks, creating tensions. Alphinaud is a prodigy who had a brilliant scheme to create international peace, but has recently seen that whole scheme blow up in his face and end in disaster. He thought he could unite Eorzea through diplomacy, but treachery, greed, and violence have seemingly destroyed his dream. Estinien is a veteran warrior driven by a need for revenge against the dragons who slaughtered his family as a child, and stoically holds himself aloof from others. Ysayle is a heretic from the Ishgardian church, a dragon-sympathiser who believes that dialogue will make peace with the dragons possible, and a cult leader whose followers have been responsible for violence against innocents in the past. Together we are going to confront the leaders of the Dravanian Horde - Ysayle firmly believes that they will listen to us and be willing to make peace, and has agreed that, if this fails, we may have to use force; all while Estinien believes that Ysayle's hopes will fail and then we'll need to try it his way, and just kill the leader. You can see how Alphinaud is then in this interesting place between them, where he's been where Ysayle is now and seen it fail, but also doesn't want to embrace Estinien's bloody worldview. However, as the adventure progresses, evidence of a past age of human-dragon cooperation seems to validate Ysayle's view and Estinien perhaps has to re-evaluate his view of dragons, and meanwhile he's slowly developing a father- or older-brother-like relationship with Alphinaud, whom he's clearly taking a shine to. Ysayle's hopes grow, but are dashed when we do meet the dragons and they inform her that all her dreams are impossible, and she collapses in despair as we move on with Estinien's plan.
That's just a period of 2-3 levels in the middle of Heavensward, but I was drawn into it and fascinated because there's a huge amount of tension there - both internal tension, with three characters all of whom find their own beliefs challenged and need to undergo growth, and external tension, as the characters dispute what we must do with each other. And this was just one example. At FFXIV's best, we see these kinds of tensions again and again - think of Yugiri, Gosetsu, and Hien in Stormblood, or Fordola and Arenvald's growing friendship, or the way Shadowbringers built Emet-Selch into a beloved villain through a long period of travel like this, or the way we saw old characters challenged and recontextualised (like Alisaie's despair at seeing her friend become a monster, or G'raha struggling to bear the burden of an entire city's hopes, or Y'shtola becoming 'Master Matoya' and stepping into her old teacher's role). Ever since at least Final Fantasy IV back in 1991, Final Fantasy has been all about an ensemble cast of colourful characters interacting and growing.
That kind of cast is what I think is missing from Dawntrail.
But I'm not done with characters yet, because we need to talk about villains. Specifically, Zoraal Ja and Sphene, both of whom I think have a lot of potential, but both of whom I'm also ultimately a bit disappointed by.
Zoraal Ja has a lot of potential! There's a very obvious theme of fathers and sons going on with him, and measuring up to or exceeding his father, and I think it could work, except it has the one fatal flaw that we just don't see enough of Zoraal Ja. He is an extremely reserved character who almost never talks, and neither do we really meet or talk to people who know him well. Baby Gulool Ja is adorable and it would have been great to learn more about Zoraal Ja's time in Alexandria, how he came to have a son, and then how he came to abandon him, but we don't get to see any of that. Surely there must have been ways to write the MSQ to show us more of its central villain? (Sphene comes in too late, I think, to claim that role, even if she is the final boss.) This is a game in which the player character has the explicit superpower of seeing flashbacks of things that he/she did not witness personally! The Echo has been used quite hamfistedly at times, but surely if it's for anything, it's for this? It is an excuse to let the player just see visions of things that are narratively useful. Why not use it?
As for Sphene... I think Sphene is fine by herself, but is let down contextually for two reasons. The first is that we've already met Emet-Selch and he already did this story better. An ancient leader of god-like power who wants to sacrifice or doom our world in order to save/maintain/restore an ancient world that he/she believes is utopian and more worthy of existence. We've already seen that story, and Emet-Selch was built up for an entire expansion to try to give that story some emotional heft. Sphene comes in for the last 25% or so of Dawntrail to basically speedrun that story for a second time, and it just can't hit as hard as it did before.
The second is the relationship with the heroes. Good villains in FFXIV have often mirrored the heroes in some way. Nidhogg is compelling in large part because his feelings and motives are the same as Estinien's, to the extent that the two of them literally merge together for a bit. Heavensward is about vengeance and hatred and exacting retribution on the ones who dealt you an inconsolable loss, and both the heroes and the villains undergo that experience. Hopefully even the player does as well - that's why Haurchefant has to die, so that, like all the other major players in the story, we experience that need for vengeance. Zenos, meanwhile, has been presented as a superlative warrior yet one who suffers tremendous ennui, and only finds a purpose to life when fighting against the worthiest of foes, and Zenos explicitly draws a comparison between himself and the Warrior of Light, inviting you to see your own quest for martial excellence (because why are you playing an MMO anyway?) parallelled in his. It's then up to you to decide whether you accept or reject that comparison, and if so, why. Emet-Selch wants to doom your world to save his own - and of course you're in a position where you're going to let his world be lost forever in order to save your own. The blasphemies in Endwalker all played around in this space as well.
A disappointment I had with Dawntrail was that it didn't really explore this the way I hoped. Wuk Lamat talks a lot about understanding Sphene, and indeed this seems reasonable. Wuk Lamat and Sphere are both young queens with kind and compassionate dispositions who are fundamentally driven by the need to protect their people's happiness. Before we reach Alexandria, Wuk Lamat has spent the entire MSQ talking about how precious the people are to her and how she loves them and just wants them to be happy. Then we meet Sphene, who has the exact same motivation, but in Sphene's case, this leads her to ruthless and genocidal excess. You'd think that might be an excellent opportunity for Wuk Lamat to re-evaluate her ideals a little. Does a good leader need to have something more than love for her people? If so, what? Good judgement? Sense of justice? Meeting Sphene seems like it ought to provoke a bit of soul-searching, but alas, it never happens.
Ultimately, I think I come to the end of the MSQ not really sure what Dawntrail was trying to do or say. There were some interesting ideas in here, but they were often a bit rushed or incoherent, or just not explored as skilfully as FFXIV has handled similar issues in the past.
On the positive side, though, the environments and the music are still gorgeous as always, and the dungeon and trial designs are all great. So there is still material to like here, and I hope that with the next expansion FFXIV will be able to return to form.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
44m ago
Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.
Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.
If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.
zeke5123a
47m ago
Except there is a large group of women who don’t share the values of the strikers. So effectively you have probably at least 40% of the population already going to defect and they will heavily benefit which would encourage the not true true believers to defect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
51m ago
OK, the US military is not well-endowed with the cerebral sort. Many abstract tasks like strategy or military-political coordination elude them. They have produced some real masterpieces of silliness in past years: https://x.com/DefenseCharts/status/1321799395571097601
But the US military do have powerful radars and cameras pointed at the skies. They have lots of space assets, they are very interested in space. There's no way of getting to the bottom of this without their resources.
zeke5123a
52m ago
Have you seen the guys who are white dudes for Harris? I don’t blame women for not wanting to have sex with them.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
Fuck me HL2 is so good. I literally replay it once every 2 years or so.
MartianNight
1hr ago
If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.
MartianNight
1hr ago
Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.
So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.
Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
1hr ago
The main problem with the GPU market today is that you can't buy a 3080 equivalent new for 400 USD. That's what people have been wanting since the 4000-series came out, but what they actually got for that cash was... the fourth release of a card equivalent to the GTX 1070/1080.
The 3070 was always a dead-end product; it was just supposed to be a 2080Ti but for a significantly less asking price than the 2080Ti was at that time. The 3080 was/is quite literally twice the card.
If it makes you feel any better, know that because the 1070 is still a mid-range GPU today, anything faster than a 1070 will work reasonably well. Sure, you might need to drop to 1080p or not get the fullest out of your high refresh rate monitor, but it's still going to work.
ThisIsSin
The boob tube emits harmful XXX-rays
1hr ago
They are fanatically bad apologists for their understanding of the Christian approach to gender roles and even for their understanding of the Gospel.
I think people who are bad at relationships in certain ways are drawn to belief systems that can be used to not only justify, but reinforce, that deficiency. Christianity is just how the traditionalists/men do it, and that's mostly because until around 60 years ago there was no reason for women to have their own version.
Because of this, I think people who don't have that problem look at Christianity, see people doing that, come to the completely reasonable conclusion that they are the same, and shut down. Doesn't help that people who aren't Christians for those reasons look or act much different than your average good-quality human being, either (hence that famous Penn and Teller rant about morals), but maybe that isn't "real" Christianity either?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1hr ago
How did she find out? Did you tell her outright? I'm sorry either way.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
From Democracy in America:
The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.
See also: the psychoanalytical concept of the "narcissism of small differences".
& Tilde;test& Tilde; (without the spaces, case-sensitive) → ∼test∼
Also, & approx; → ≈
HTML named character references are supported by Markdown.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
It's somewhat relevant to the discussions about the federal government workforce. The federal government employs a lot of people, and those people aren't being spewed out by a magic high-IQ-only people factory; they're just regular people, from the regular population. Some are really smart and capable; others, less so. Different agencies have different dynamics that draw from different subsets of the population.
There is a legend in the research community of a new director taking charge of one of the national labs and saying in his first appearance in front of the workforce some form of, "We know that 50% of you don't want to do anything. That's fine. We're not going to make you; we won't fire you. Just don't get in the way of the other 50%."
The reason for this legend is not overly linked with any dynamic particular to the federal government, but it has a slightly special form in such places. There is a long, complicated story about the inherent difficulty of evaluating research efforts. In every industry, you'll have people who frankly do not have the skills or ability to contribute to the actual mission/bottom line, but they obviously don't want to have that figured out. They might lose their job! So, they try to make it kind of look like they're doing something, even if it's dumb/not productive. In industries where it's harder to evaluate whether something is actually contributing, there's a lot more room for this to flourish. Also in industries that are so bloody rich that they can sort of afford to scattershot all over the place a little and not worry too much about economy. See also the tech industry in some recent times. The federal government has a bit of both floating around. Depending on the agency, their mission may be more/less well-defined. Some pockets clearly think that their mission is approximately everything. Some defense orgs definitely think this, as it's extremely easy to slide down the slope of thinking that you have to account for literally every possible situation, every possible contingency, every idea that could be used against you or by you to gain an advantage.
Couple these two things (a workforce so large really isn't drawn from just the best and brightest) and such a broad mix of groups being more-or-less mission-focused and more-or-less clear on what contributes to that mission, and you inevitably get allllllllll sorts of pretty random crap. Some is really really good; some is, well.
I'm riffing on all this in part to say that there will definitely be some obvious low-hanging fruit for Elon/Vivek, but there is also just such a massive diversity of agencies that have such different missions, different needs, different levels-of-evaluability, that it will likely be a lot more difficult than Elon just rolling in to Twitter and saying, "Everybody bring the code you've written in the last year directly to Elon." Sure, if they have the time and inclination to scratch and sniff down to small groups like this, they'd find some set of people who say, "I take the Latin from the internet and put it in the goddamn logo!" But a lot of times, they'll get some mountain of hazy documentation about 'work' that is supposedly in line with a mission that may be extremely sprawling, unclear, and questionable in the first place. But it might actually be good-ish! Hard to tell without a deep dive and lots of expertise... multiplied over and over again in thousands of different domains that require all different sorts of expertise. Godspeed, Elon... godspeed.
raakaa
2hr ago
This discussion reminds me of another culture-war-adjacent meme referencing TF2 autobalancing (which I personally find a lot funnier)
That's not the same thing.
Yeah, that's why I said "not directly". Point remains if a parent makes a mistake they'll usually by wrecked with guilt, for the doctor it's tuesday.
But often they don't make the same decision their child would have if mature. Many parents attempt to override their child's decisions even after their child is mature.
If you mean something more than disagreeing with them and putting some social pressure, than I agree it crosses a line. Luckily the law is on the adult child's side in such cases.
No, I think that clears the higher bar.
Cool. So it just so happens that this blog post was talking about the exact same drug - down to the brand name - that gender clinics sell as "puberty blockers", the first line of medical intervention that they recommend, and claim is completely reversible. Funnily enough data from UK's Tavistok indicates that as many as 48% of kids referred to a gender clinic are autistic, so this is giving the exact same drug to a largely the same cohort. The only difference is the disorder they aim to cure, but both disorders are wishy-washy and not objectively verifiable (I guess autism might be, in the more extreme cases, but that's a point against gender affirming care).
If there's an argument for the government forbidding the doctor to administer it in one case but not the other, I'm not seeing it.
They said the same thing about kings once....
What can I say? If you want to live in platonic / marxist utopia where all children belong to the state, you're free to want it. I even wish that you get to live in the society you desire, as long as you don't go full Jihadi, and claim that this is the one true way for all of the world to live. This is why asked how are your ideas not based on your non-universal ideology.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights
If you actually believed that this means parents have no authority over their children, you'd be quoting Rousseau, not the American founding fathers.
But they aren't deciding for themselves! They are deciding for another person! In the purest form of libertarianism, the child would decide everything for themselves.
I am not advocating for pure libertarianism, but that is what I mean by 'your children aren't your property.' The base state isn't parents having absolute power over their children, it's them having no authority whatsoever.
Yes, that's my point. If you were advocating pure libertarianism, I could consider your idea of removing all authority from parents, and ensuring the child's autonomy. But since you don't, the idea is completely absurd to me. If parents have no authority over their children, than an adult has even less authority over another unrelated adult.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
3hr ago
Funnily enough, both are the Casino-world tax haven of a bigger polity.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
3hr ago
They're good memes brent
WhateverHappenedToNorman
3hr ago
This is common enough that right wing twitter/substack has already "invented" a term for it. They call them hicklibs.
some
3hr ago
I've heard this phenomenon called "Tocqueville effect/paradox". @MaiqTheTrue
TowardsPanna
3hr ago
Same reason why (sane) people don't start expressing rage at someone pointing a gun at them. Anger is used as a tool when you think it'll work in favor of your interests rather than against them.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
4hr ago
I don’t think it’s a valley, I think it’s a sort of truism of political life. Complaints and protests tend to happen in places where said problem is least apparent. Environmental protests happen where the environment is well cared for, marital protests happen where women are safe, screams of authoritarian regimes happen where arbitrary arrests don’t.
Bro, you're not even going to mention "Good Time" by Owl City? Perhaps it's just too easy.
I'm embarrassed I liked so many of these songs, though by 2011 I had started to get really sick of it and hated (for instance) "Give me Everything Tonight"
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