Quote Originally Posted by ShinyChariot View Post
I don't believe it, I don't believe they had everything planned from the start.
It's okay, because neither do they. They've been quite open in interviews that the experience of writing FFXIV is much less 'writing a long cohesive story and deliberately planning for the future' and more 'desperately digging through the archives until they find an unused plot thread that works to justify the turn they need'. The Ascians are perhaps the most extreme example, because what we have now is more or less the result of them having to throw out the entire original plan for them constructed in 1.0, but while still having to keep every single plot thread about them that was actually exposed across 1.0 through 2.x. (It's unclear when exactly the 'new plan' fully came into existence, but my best guess is somewhere around the Antitower.)

That's hardly a bad thing or a smear against them, it is a genuine skill to have an eye for how to do that and the deftness in writing to make it look like you didn't pull that plot thread out from behind the couch cushions. The ability to pull that off has created pretty much every modern comic book superhero you can name. But yes, what it does mean is that whatever you thought was the plan probably wasn't the plan for as long as you thought it was.

Add to that the fact that we know the original plan for Endwalker was two expansions (but that by the time actual writing or development work was put on it, that plan was gone), and yeah, they probably did have a little more planned for the stretch that became Elpis. But it's folly to assume that what they threw out was the plot of your dreams. Honestly, my reading of Elpis was that no, they were probably never going to fully explore the politics around the End of Days; more likely, the plan was 'the same as what we got, but more', and while you might've liked to see some tense political drama abut that stuff, that probably wasn't planned and I don't think was ever really the intention. The entire rest of the game gets HEFTY on political stuff, but Elpis was ultimately 'the story of Atlantis but with more character beats'. Hell, if they wanted to write more stuff like what you're asking for but couldn't fit it, I'd assume they would've shunted it into Pandaemonium, and Pandaemonium... well, isn't that.