We've known since the very beginning when ARR overwrote 1.0 lore that they've been writing each expansion mostly one at a time. How is this a surprise or a point of contention? It's been known for a decade.

They took a game that was released half-baked and threw out a lot of the original story they didn't like and penciled in new things. Back before Yoshi-P took over in 1.2, the Allagan Empire was just an ancient country known for funny hats, eating snails, and building roads. The Ascians were just doing random acts of evil until after 3.0 was already released and then they started getting a better idea for a bigger picture after that. There were no Ancients or Hythlodaeus. Elements like Nidhogg or the Garlean Empire existed but were greatly expanded upon. Other elements like Sthalmann/Rostensthal, Seal Rock, Travenchet, and wildlings were greatly diminished or thrown completely out. Even ARR elements like the black-masked Ascians have quietly disappeared over time.

Since then, they've just been concentrating on it one expansion at a time with a little bit of planning on where they would like to go next or remembering past dangling plot threads to get picked up on. The Warriors of Darkness arc wasn't necessarily made to establish the Shadowbringers expansion, they came to that after the fact. And the often discussed "cancelled" Garlean expansion wasn't something that was fully planned out and then cancelled. In the interview they said "we have room for one or two expansions and then decided on one" and then discussed what it would have been like if there were two instead, with parts of what we had already received in Endwalker being expanded upon.


It's a live game so being written as it goes along isn't unusual. Even original anime series are written while they're still airing. I don't know why people feel betrayed by this knowledge. Talking about how much you don't like the writers or how they're bad but considering a bunch of people care so much about the Ancients who didn't even exist at the story's inception and were written in as having been long dead, or the Ascians who originally had paper-thin personalities and did absolutely nothing except smirk and do evil laughs while talking about a plan the writers didn't even know about, then I guess maybe they did a good job.