The expansion on the horizon

[fay2]

It's really worth outlining that for the most part any previous things that seemed to be 'hints' at what would happen in the future are actually the other way around from what that would imply: as outright admitted by the writers,

And this changes how we consume it how? we still play the game the way we play it.
the hints/clues are there even if unintended are still hints/clues of things to come.

how it usually works is that they leave a bunch of random lingering plot threads without intended solutions--usually intentionally, sometimes by mistake--and then later on they decide where they actually want to go and tie things back to those leftover threads to flesh it out and give it legitimacy.

usually intentionally
so basically counteracting your own 1st point.
those loose story threads are the future plans and not done without rhyme or reason if done intentionally.

some are expanded upon

Warriors of Darkness. They weren't some far-flung called shot for where the devs would send us six years afterwards; they were just a Cool Thing that they wrote without any distinct future plans to use them, that they later realized they could do something with..

They where another piece to the reflections 10 and 3 background puzzle at the time
I think that's rather disingenuous to say "that they wrote without any distinct future plans to use them"
the reflections 10 and 3 later expanded into the knowledge we call the 13 shards now

i think better to point out could be a cool thing turned into something is

this is Ochson


At the time people thought it was Emet's familiar
more recently people think its Watcher's animal avatar {silly that is the opo opo}

However It makes most sense it is Ochson's animal avatar
he watched us save the 1st following the hole way back to the source and on to save Etheirys. Not without helping on the way -Zodiarc's moon prison wind aspect didn't brake and held out I suspect Oschon’s {who is wind espected} intervention involved. this would also lead to Oschon taking the watcher or unnamed opo opo under his wing. now the watchers charged watch had come to an end with zodiarc's death.

While we are on that the alliance raid for Endwalker has increased the shards we have visited at this point we have visited 6 shards



The 1st , 2nd , 3rd , 6th , 12th and 13th
Or story wise atm in order of entering 13th 1st 12th 2nd 3rd 6th

the 10th and 5th still to come if they just do 2 more in the next part
the 7th seems like to be given to the watcher to watch over as a new purpose now Zodiarc is gone.

This all seems long term to me as a way to get us to intervene in things happening in the remaining shards for the 12 as their proxy. there are silly likely black mask ascians still tolling away on the remaining aether rich shards.
The 8th or 9th are the most likely candidates as they seem to skip straight over the 4th and it would surprise me there are interdimensional allagans there that put it into the to hard basket so bit like the 1st abundance of light,
seems more liking hey will pop up when they pull the deep space allagans return and we get them fighting against control of the star now the threat of the Endsinger is gone.

Re-joining could still happen without a plan from the ascians in the 12's eyes and they caused the 1st calamity/re-joining the calamity of wind. It all happened with the best of intentions the 12 guarded the source the ascians destroyed the 13th, the 12 opened gates to the shards to try to intervene only to cause the wind calamity, rather a dampener on their original goals. The ascians would chalk it up as their on doing the finding the gates the 12 made as the link between source and shard they didn’t have when they did what they did with the 13th.

the 3rds gate when the calamity of earth was likely where the new world is now and the cause of tis creation.
The 1st gate is has helped in causing the burn and we have likely already used


the 10ths gate was most likely the whorl present 12 mythos has the god pop out of.
but maybe more

This alliance raid in endwalker has turn on its head a lot of commonly held lore.
What if this wasn’t just an ordinary ark of the source during the 6th calamity but really an ark to save lives from the 10th shard re-joining. That the magic called “flow” and Y’stola’s get out of danger card was really made for, most likely Thaliak intervened here.

The descendants of the ark would go on to revere Thaliak. Not Llymlaen.

But that 'the next expansion will be on this planet' isn't exactly a bet with long odds.

Actually I said

sailing adventure here we come lol

Do the odds really matter to you?
I'm guessing you missed my clarification and initial expanding on the opening comment too,
found there

My personal take away was we'll be circumnavigating Etheirys.

As for the reasons I think that will be a number of stars aligning most like due to the whispers of 12 steering things to help meet their goals that I touched one earlier in this post.

The best example of it probably isn't Ishgard (which we know was planned to be a future location for the 1.0 devs who planted those seeds, so it's rather a different case),.

Ok there has been a ship being build in Moraby drydocks for 5 expantions now that needs to finish now the factors of the garlean war threat are off the table they can get on getting on and finish it.