Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
Tbf, they easily could’ve done a “oh yeah he’s dead….totally.” And then have him come back in some other form whether it be Anima or whatnot. it seems pretty obvious to me one was cut and it seems fairly last minute. Never forget the slideshow for ShB where on of the slides said we’d be taking the fight to garlemald and then…it just never happened lmao. People seem to think the devs plan everything in advance though and they’ve basically confirmed they don’t, and they do change things pretty last minute it seems. This is an excerpt from an interview done around 5.4,5.5 in regards to Endwalker and…it didn’t age well let’s just say that.

“We don’t like adlib in terms of like, ‘Oh, this character is going to go or this character is going to die.’ It’s not random, either. At the same time, yes, people might notice that those in the core cast may not have died over the course of the story,” he explains. Since Final Fantasy XIV constantly depicts wars, conflicts, and battles, he says it’s “unrealistic to not have any sort of sacrifices even on the ally side. So I mean, I don’t mean to scare you… this is not, by any means a threat of any sort, but don’t get too comfortable knowing that, ‘Oh, these characters are safe’ because you might be in for quite a shock.”
I am well aware they don't have everything planned out in advance, they say as much all the time. The same interview where they talk about how they wrote the Ascians over the years is the one people keep saying mentioned a Garlemald expansion being cut, when it never said that.

Having a good idea about what they would do if they decided to do two is not the same as cutting an expansion.