Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
They had a lot they could’ve drew upon though. Nerva, 2nd legion, Anima, etc. They literally just killed the entire second legion off screen and also killed Nerva off screen. Two things built up throughout the entirety of ShB gone in a flash. Sorry but that’s horrible writing and i fail to see how an extra expansion giving actual depth and closure to these things would’ve been worse than what we got with Endwalker. A horribly paced expansion that despite supposedly tying up past plot points instead left us with more questions than answers to the point it was so bad the devs had to answer huge lore points in an out of game QnA. I’m pretty sure EW was rock bottom and anything else would be better.
That all was still hardly enough to fill an expansion. Despite the massive revolution that happened in Stormblood, they still had to throw in three extra zones to fill up all the space, and we all know how poorly paced that was. Garlemald, meanwhile, was mostly empty and destroyed by the end of ShB. All we were left with were story beats that nobody really cared about until EW made them think about what could've been.

Now, maybe if Garlemald weren't reduced to a shell of its former self by the end of ShB, you'd have a point. But I know for a fact that if we took a detour to Garlemald- empty and desolate or not- after all that was set up in ShB, people would be just as if not more upset at EW because it wouldn't have flowed logically from what the story was focusing on at the time. That's why I think 5.0 was the time for a Garlemald expansion. The idea of going to the First frankly came out of nowhere and nobody would've liked the expac were it not for the Exarch, Emet-Selch, and the Ancient lore drops that happened. And the latter two didn't make much sense to be so prominently featured on the First to begin with.