On Azem's role in the story

[Cleretic]

Cleretic I think you'd enjoy XI a lot as the MC is just an adventure who's soul and body just seem for no reason be able to take the at times literal beatings it receives.

It's an angle I like in a lot of places, but you have to be careful with it, especially if it runs in the long term. From what you're telling me, it sounds like FFXI (which I'd love to play sometime, I'm a fan of old MMOs, but not enough to pay for a second subscription) has sort of the opposite problem to WoW with the same approach, both of which strain disbelief; FFXI gives you credit for saving the world but not enough to have characters respect that as an accomplishment, while WoW just keeps having named NPCs poach the final kill and steal the credit.

It's an approach you see in a lot of MMOs, too; I used to play The Secret World, there yes your character was chosen by Gaia (to justify things like 'coming back from the dead'), but Gaia picks scads of people effectively at random, so while this gives you an edge it doesn't make you special, and most operations you're involved in are top-secret anyway so nobody knows you did crap. And in the old classic City of Heroes... I mean sure, you're a superhero, but superpowers are so common that superheroes have government-issued IDs; sure, it's great that you saved the world, but so did four other people that day.

I think that framing is actually important for an MMO (and a few other genres; I think open-world RPGs like the Elder Scrolls function a lot better when your character starts as a blank-slate nothing-special rando), because the very nature of the game declares you to be one in a crowd. Sure, you can say that technically the WoL soloed Ifrit if you wanted to, but ideally the only thing that makes them special around that is that they were the one who happened to actually do it. We weren't the one that beat Rhitatyn because destiny declared only one person could have beaten Rhitatyn, we're that person because there's one Rhitatyn and someone had to.

I'm absolutely fine with an MMO character being a special hero by chance and deed, which is what we were before the Azem reveal; I'm not okay with an MMO character being a special hero by birthrite, which is what we are after it. Which means that, yes, I can say exactly what the story would be like without the Azem angle: mostly the same. After all, we know Azem wasn't the plan from the start, because they're tied to the current Ascian plan, which we know wasn't figured out until at least sometime in Heavensward.