Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
I'm increasingly interested in prioritizing the New World.

The idea that we haven't seen 50% of the planet is a great thing to lean into when trying to get your playerbase to buy into the idea that the 10-year-saga being over doesn't mean the rest of the game is "add-on" material. Who knows what the other entire half of the world's history has to offer, who knows what perspective we could gain there. It's a good way to re-ground the story and the marketing writes itself, a whole New World to explore. Anything we discover there can be plugged back into the lore about other planets and shards and one day lead up to a second larger-scale "finale" mood when the game does get closer to its end.
This is what I really liked about Treasures of Aht Urghan in FFXI.

Up to that point, our entire story revolved completely around the main 2 continents and 2 islands. After the main original story seemingly ended with Chains of Promathia that dealt with secrets of the divine and the ancient predecessors of the world (sound familiar?), we were whisked off to another continent to deal with their problems. But rather than being a completely unconnected story, it still gave us a villain behind the antagonist who was also behind the Shadow Lord from the original game as well as the antagonist from the next expansion.

Older characters from the 3 city-states still made little appearances from what I remember but the story was led by a brand new cast who, despite only existing for 1 expansion, gave (to me) a more emotional ending than most other parts of the game if (like me) you couldn't care less about Lion.

From what I remember, the story could also be accessed after finishing just the base game's story and didn't depend on the rest of it. We also got 3 mechanically interesting jobs. It would be neat if FFXIV did both of those things but unfortunately the gameplay and narrative structure is much stiffer than it was in FFXI. I would really like to see something like Besieged though.