@delroth mmm... I definitely not a high point in the story. I guess I didn't mind as much since it felt.. okay? and I think it had some interesting worldbuilding/lore bits

I guess we'll see where they take us from here..

@firefly there were so many plot points that made no sense imo, and where characters just didn't behave the way I'd expect them to.

Like, one example... the way Bakool Ja Ja is handled. Frees up a calamity-level monster for the lulz, no consequences from anyone, barely spoken about. (Said monster is dealt with 2 quests later. Way to show its power.) Then one zone later Wuk Lamat somehow powers up enough to duel him, even though we saw no power progression otherwise.

@firefly (cont.) and then he becomes best friends with the crew somehow, another one zone later? Where did that come from? He's suddenly a nice guy who wants to save people? 2 dialogue boxes ago he was attempting to genocide the giants. We're not going to talk about that? Aaaaaaa. I'm ranting again.

@delroth yeah, that... irked me too

That first arc feels somewhat too.. compressed? and character development kind of forced/rushed, pacing off. Kinda forgot about that, but I remember it annoying me at the time too

@firefly yeah and it's weird because on the other hand the whole Alexandria thing is... stretched out? or not well built? not sure.

Like, omgz the queen has started the process to merge the reflections and destroy our world! Let's step into the portal and save everyone! But not before we spend a whole zone eating ice cream and answering a quiz on who knows what, because Wuk Lamat says so. How did they think that was reasonable pacing...

@firefly I entirely gave up on the last zone when they did the (kinda predictable) reveal that Erenville's mom was there... and the cutscene wasn't even voiced. Let's have the first real appearance of that character we've been hearing about since minute 0 of the expansion be in an unvoiced cutscene, sure, makes perfect sense.

Completely lost me at that point and I just started skipping...

@delroth @firefly The unvoiced thing always bothered me in ffxiv - seemed that any cutscene in which the written dialog says your character name isn't voiced. Plenty of games are capable of doing that in a way that the voice actor just doesn't read out your character name (Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous that I played yesterday does exactly this) and it isn't "immersion breaking" in the slightest to me. Certainly no more immersion breaking than doing MSQ in an MMO with so many players around the NPCs that you need a keybind to interact with them!

@conor @delroth pretty sure it's more a matter of resources/budget

they're certainly good at working around that in cases where it'd matter anyway (with titles like "adventurer", "our hero", etc) when they really value voicing a scene

@conor @firefly I think you might be inverting cause/effect here - they probably work around the problem in the script when the cutscene will be voice acted, and don't bother and just use the character's name otherwise.

And yeah, as @firefly says, it's budget and production constraints. They're cheaping out, and they don't have the script ready early enough to VA everything by release time.

@delroth @firefly Oh, I think I did a bad job of my comment.. I wasn't trying to say that they didn't voice it because they written dialog says your name, I was trying to say that it bothered me how only unvoiced cutscenes had your name. I found it to be a double whammy of the cutscene not being voiced and "all of a sudden" people knowing your name.

@delroth @firefly

> And yeah, as @firefly says, it's budget and production constraints. They're cheaping out, and they don't have the script ready early enough to VA everything by release time.

"Cheaping out" was my impression too. I know nothing about the costs of running a massive MMO, but it feels like they should be able to afford voicing the MSQ when the expac costs 40 quid on top of the 15 quid a month...