Quote Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur View Post
its also because this whole arc has ended anyway. We're back to ARR levels of build up so of course to a lot of people the story will be boring. You cant have rising action against rising action all the time, thats not how good storytelling works.
Even then, I really fail to see what the main plot is shaping up to be. An ARR build-up served to introduce the wider world to you, often overwhelming you with different plot points and storylines that would often interject eachother. You went from the City States and their drama, the Void, the Ascians, Goblins, Rogue Factions, Beast Tribes, why we can't access other city states, what's the deal with dragons, what Ala Mhigo is, mentioning the Bozja Incident like it was just a thing that happened, barely acknowledging the existance of other continents, everything Allag related, even Eureka at one point...
Then HSW elaborated further on the Ascian bit while focusing heavily on Ishgard.
Stormblood showed us Ala Mhigo, Doma and gave a bit of focus to Garlemald.
Shadowbringers focused on the other shards, most notably the First and a bit of the Thirteenth, and the side quests were mostly focusing on the revolting conquered provinces.
6.0 resolved almost everything and opened Sharlayan and Thavnair, as well as Emet dropping hints of further content that we knew existed since ARR such as Meracydia.
Most everything else got resolved in sidequests.

Currently the MSQ is focusing on elaborating on the Void. Little else is being opened up as relevant to the main plot in the side quests. Island Sanctuary is an isolated thing. Myths of the Realm is self-contained. Eureka Orthros doesn't seem to have any connecting ties to the MSQ. Variant Dungeons are also self-contained...

We're not getting ARR levels of build up, even though that's what we're supposedly meant to be doing. We're in a similar phase, but the focus is totally different. Rather than focusing on showing us several different things, they're hard-focusing on one story. On one hand, that's great, because the overwhelming and "all over the place" nature of ARR didn't garner it any favours and it can help keep the devs focused and not make stories that lead nowhere. But on the other hand it's kind of making it awkward for future content. Because we're not setting anything major up other than the Void and possibly Meracydia. That really is no different than the average X.4 and X.5 storylines, which serve to introduce the next expansion and hint toward it. From that, it feels like we're just playing a long X.4-5 bit rather than anything being established and introduced at an ARR scale.