Our passive characters and why the 2.55 story fails (BIG SPOILERS) (rant warning)

[Exodus-E]

This whole discussion reminds me of the ending of mass effect 3, and people trying to explain that ''really! the ending makes sense! it does!''. And they made up all these elaborate theories in an attempt to find some sense where there was none.

...Except in Mass Effect 3's case, it was meant to end the series (or at least, Shepard's story), thus, tying all the loose ends.
And it was a disaster, even from behind the scenes ("artistic integrity" as they say...yeah, right).

At least here the story's not supposed to be the end of the entire saga (and carries on into its "sequel", Heavensward).

[KisaiTenshi]

...Except in Mass Effect 3's case, it was meant to end the series (or at least, Shepard's story), thus, tying all the loose ends.
And it was a disaster, even from behind the scenes ("artistic integrity" as they say...yeah, right).

At least here the story's not supposed to be the end of the entire saga (and carries on into its "sequel", Heavensward).

Well... we really shouldn't draw comparisons with other games, especially single-player ones. If anyone wants to pipe in and spoil some other MMORPG's go right ahead, I'll spoil the ones I've played through more than one update.

Mabinogi - Korean Freemium game. Each "chapter" kinda throws away everything that happened in the previous one. This is because of the nature of Korean businesses that basically reward feature-creep, not quality. Seriously, the first 3 generations, and then they introduce new races... and completely fail to connect it to the games lore at all until Generation 8. Then they retcon these several generations later (G16). Like, as much as I enjoyed the first 3 generations, each subsequent storyline seems very forced. For example G9-12 goes back to the actual lore in G1-3, and then in G13 they try really hard to force Shakespere into it all... uh okay. I think the overall story was okay but it seems like the producer's at Nexon just stopped caring at G13 and the fanbase revolted from the attempt to turn it into yet-another-WoW. Every patch changes the land and glued-to-the-ground NPC's.

I played Wizardy Online and PSO2 but in hindesight, these hub-dungeon games have little actual overall storyline.

So in terms of if FFXIV:ARR's mainstream ending is any good, it's probably on par with other MMORPG's needing reasons for you to come back, but if FFXIV wants to be better than any other MMORPG, Yoshi-P needs to have the next three expansions in the writing stage already so we don't see retcons and backpeddling like what happened in V1.0, and what happens in freemium MMORPGS. Yoshi-P had to "solve" the problems with V1.0 first, a game that was essentially broken and aimless copypasta. With V3.0 if the companions never re-appear, I'll probably be disappointed, but I do want some closure. The game has already made a point of going "nobody is ever permanently dead", just look at Hildebrand.