I haven’t played Dawntrail yet, but I have to admit that I felt something was troubling the game even in earlier expansions: as I finished both ShB and EW I couldn’t help but be left with a state of “oh, tome grinding… again… in the same exact way as all the other expansions”. No one seemed to care, however, so I thought it was my problem. And it’s a big shame, because I expected differently from Dawntrail: from what I heard, it feels more like the character going on a vacation than anything, with really just the same gameplay loop.

Another thing I was expecting from Dawntrail, apart from big gameplay changes, is to redefine the story more significantly: FFXIV up to Endwalker was a great story, but sometimes I couldn’t help it but feel like I didn’t want to be so central to everything: it’s great when MMOs make you feel like “a hero from the sidelines” because there’s less immersion breaking (and FFXI did this succesfully, if I recall). I think writers really dug themselves in too deep of a hole:

spoiler

how the hell do you write a threat that feels significant after you’ve talked about universes, ancestral gods from previous eras trying to destroy everything, etcetera? I understand that resetting everything to the point of no one having any recollection of the Hero of Light would have required a lot of writing, but maybe it would’ve been better - having EW’s ending trigger a sort of memory-wipe similar to that of FFXIV 1.0’s story.

From what I hear - reason I haven’t played it yet - is that Dawntrail is fram from such expectations. I agree that once you try FFXIV’s legacy controls you can’t go back. Same thing goes for gamepad optimization.