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

[Brinne]

Finally, some good food.

Hilariously, I'm pretty sure I would agree with every single one of your points here and the general line throughout of the tendency to put the cart before the horse for several aspects of the writing.

Problem number 4 is Shadowbringers. Yoshi-P admitted that too much was revealed to keep milking the plot a few more years and that they had to end it in 1 expansion. The other problem from Shadowbringers is its success and the need to follow ShB. Emet-Selch ended up becoming a fan favorite due to reasons covered in another thread and I feel like the writers felt that since Venat had been here since ARR and was more important to the story, she also had to be a very complex character with moral dilemmas to copy his success.

Lunaxia has also raised the idea of "Shadowbringers sort of ruined FFXIV as a whole by being so brilliant", and I think it's a really interesting one - it's also been discussed here by a few people how the writing with Hermes ended up falling flat for many because of a sense they tried to copy Emet-Selch's success with him, too, with mixed results at best. I'm rapidly running out of brainpower to keep actively replying at the moment, but I kind of wanted to put a bookmark on this, as the ideas of "the devs weren't prepared to handle the acclaim of Shadowbringers and the elements that allowed Shadowbringers to be to successful got sort of corrupted going into Endwalker" is kind of a particularly interesting thought to me. The idea of the MMO format necessitating a structure, to the detriment of the story, to accommodate X number of zones, X number of dungeons at certain points, and the by-the-seat-of-our-pants plotting and writing is also interesting.

I think my feelings on being forgiving of the story's intent are obviously a bit less generous than yours to the team, though - I think the messaging that unintentionally came out of the Hydaelyn mess, obviously, was deeply uncomfortable and, yeah, pretty grossly unethical to a degree while so fundamental to the entire lore and worldbuilding that I can't really be at peace with it and just roll with the vibes of the intent. For all the limitations and presumed crunch, I still think the missteps there were incredibly avoidable. So as far as the writing process goes, I recognize the hurdles, but I think they made a fundamentally incorrect decision in trying to stick to their guns on the wrong point with what "original intent" was there (Hydaelyn=Good) instead of taking a more fully organic approach (recognizing Shadowbringers changed the landscape and accepting it and working with what it did, and how it affected prior scenes like HW's bit with Hydaelyn's retconned-via-ShB-to-be-a-lie account of her conflict of Zodiark. Even if you didn't mean for it to be a terrible lie at the time you wrote it, you gotta confront and work with that idea that it is now instead of trying to awkwardly brush it off, guys.)

Thanks for the post! If only the Sundering had remained a tragic accident, indeed--although I do remember Yoshida indicating early on in the post-5.0 landscape that even then "we hadn't heard Hydaelyn's side of the story," (in defense of her, and while expressing surprise people were so sympathetic to the Ancients) which... feels kinda weird given what "Hydaelyn's side of the story" wound up being...