What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Lauront]

My own view is they should focus on making the setting interesting whatever they draw upon and avoid any preachy lecturing, particularly if they're shifting the focus to conflicts of "values" - I still want to see what they mean by that. I too will not be sitting around to endure more Alphirants or similar, particularly if they end up pushing values conflicting with my own, especially in terms of character responses. If EW is presaging what that's going to be like? Hard pass.

A proper rendition of Egypt could be interesting, because what we've seen so far is limited to a couple of dungeons. There's also other ancient cultures, like Persia, Babylon, Assyria and Phoenicia that they could draw on - I wouldn't say no to something based off the Aztecs or Maya. The expansions (other than SB) tend to be a mix of zones after all, so there's scope to cater to a variety of tastes. As Theodric mentioned, although most fantasy games draw on Europe, it tends to be medieval western Europe, so there's other regions and time periods (Rennaissance in particular) of the continent they could explore as well, and Ilsabard would be a good place to do so. As Rulakir said, it is a fantasy game at the end of the day, so focus should also go into making the locales somewhat otherworldly, and really try to visually differentiate it from existing zones - something both SHB and EW didn't always succeed at. My hope is that the graphics upgrade will allow for more detailed zones that can more closely match their concept art.

People seem to be under a weird misconception that primals are suddenly going to be absent from the story and/or are no longer a threat simply because means to counteract and cure tempering exist now.

At the core, they are still extremely powerful entities that were noted as taking entire regiments of trained soldiers to keep in check even in the case of the lunar primals that were undeniably weaker then their willfully-produced counterparts.

Foreign lands are not at the leisure of having access to those countermeasures, either, so I think it's a given we're still going to be running into them on the overseas continents and likely even in Ilsabard despite the strong Garlean presence.

Agreed - tempering just made the costs of fighting them all the more pyrrhic, but given enough aether, they're still capable of posing an immense threat. Aetheric WMDs.

Forgive me if I am more interested in the story of a rugged knight/forsaken prince like Clive or Hien than I am about Alphinaud and meme-status G'raha Tia.

Indeed, I think more variety in the Scions in that direction would help. Part of why I was hoping for a fresh cast + Estinien.