New story writer for 7.0

[Cleretic]

I can understand them not wanting to make war the focus of a story again, but it would feel pretty anti-climactic if the whole situation in Ilsabard blew over with no conflict whatsoever.

The Garlean legions seem to intend to break off their respective provinces into their own independently governed states, but whether that will be for weal or woe remains to be seen. Having to deal with the political turmoil on top of some larger-scale threat be it supernatural or otherwise would make for a compelling story, IMO.

I'd certainly really enjoy that story, but I think we're in a weird place to approach it. The angle for post-6.0 seems to be that to do whole new stories that aren't tied too heavily to everything that came before (with the Thirteenth being a uniquely strong position for transitioning there, since it's technically an old loose end but one that's never really gotten explored), which is completely fair and probably smart, but it leaves certain parts of the story in weird states, and the Empire and their previously-occupied territories is probably the biggest. Yeah, they're in a position where an epilogue would probably be interesting, but it kinda can't be the main story if they want to do a clean break that people don't have to worry too much about pre-existing info for.

Which honestly I think is probably better, because there's not much that story could do that wasn't already done by 4.x and Bozja, especially if it's a 'main' story that therefore has to somehow incorporate a large amount of combat; Bozja was already retreading a lot of the same notes as Stormblood. Garlean stuff is best suited for the sideline right now, the sort of content that actually is completely fine with centering stuff that isn't combat or broad audience appeal. We've wrung 'Garlemald and occupied territories as a core for combat content' dry, but we haven't really tapped into it for crafting and gathering content, nor for 100% story-driven content like Hildibrand or The Paths We Walk; the closest we got to the latter was Omega's 6.1 questline, but that didn't dwell on them long.