Quote Originally Posted by Oizen View Post
The Final Days
The reason for this is that we played a protagonist centered morality game where no adversity can ever actually overcome our designated protagonist's ability to deal with it. It wasn't an issue in the past, because they were willing to have the protagonists lose or have major setbacks, like the ransacking of The Waking Sands and the execution of almost all minor Scions. Or the blood banquet at the end of 2.55 followed by most of the side cast of Heavensward dying or being held in jeopardy at a minimum.

These were events contained to single cities, and as such, were easier to show in an accurate manner.

XIV got too ambitious though, come Stormblood, and that's the first time that a major event in the story needed to be large scale, and it was proof that they don't do large scale events well. Stormblood rarely felt like a war, more like some plucky rebels winning a few major, albeit small, skirmishes for most of its story. With its post story turning towards mostly random adventure set mostly in and near Yanxia.

Shadowbringers was basically the writers realizing that they could never show the scale they'd need to with a proper war with Garlemald, so they ran away from it. That's why Shadowbringers was full of Ascian backstory and big big reveals surrounding the mysteries left in the setting. It was do that, or try to show a war in a very poor way again.

This gambit was really, in my opinion, done to give them time to actually craft a war setting for the Garlean expansion that we were supposed to have, but the unexpected popularity surrounding Emet-selch and the Ascians' backstory and ancient civilization caused them to change course again. They instead turned towards expounding and centering the story on that, leaving the assets they'd worked on for the Garlean expansion in Bozja, Zadnor, and Delubnum Reginae in the post SHB content. This is why it was SHB post game content. It was leavings leftover from the cancelled Garlean war expansion.

I think this was all a turn taken prior to the pandemic happening, and when it happened it was probably seen as a boon in some small way for offloading the narrative they didn't wanna try and tell that they had originally planned to tell.

And since the story entered the realm of the nonsensical with regards to relying on time travel again (done mainly for fan service), they really hoped people wouldn't doff their horse blinders and just focus on what was shown over what was not.

Unfortunately the cracks do show up quite well to a lot of people, because gameplay design cracks are starting to rear their ugly head as well. I believe the hope now is that Dawntrail papers over those cracks with a lot of flash over substance, because the design team seems to have fallen into the trap that as long as things are showy and cool, they will be well received.

And I guess they're not entirely wrong.