What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Vyrerus]

You don't want to have a conversation

Your lack of a sense of humor is showing. If I didn't want to have a conversation, I wouldn't have responded with a 16k word salad. I'm actually not really very angry. It's more like cold resentment, and an aching feeling similar to a lost romance. You know, from being overly invested in XIV from 2013 til 2022. It's like a dragon that's teased out my deepest emotions.

We didn't put the main plot on hold in Shadowbringers. The entirety of Shadowbringers is the Throne Room scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, more or less. We got spirited away by our higher calling to stop the Ascians. It's like that, if you edited out all the Ewok bunker fights and the space battle against the Super Star Destroyer and Functional but Incomplete Death Star 2. And if Darth Vader was also The Emperor.

Now that the main original plot is over, we finally get to do other stuff that has nothing to do with everything else.

I suppose that's why Yoshi-P told people to get familiar with the Convocation of 14's roles, huh?

Also XI did it much differently. Its expansions weren't continuations of one another, ever. They could be done simultaneously or out of release order completely. RoTZ and CoP get lumped together because they combine and share an ending battlefield in Apocalypse Nigh. Which was more or less done as a way to uplift the weaker RoTZ expansion. It also seems you've somewhat forgotten the plot of Treasures of Aht Urhgan. Like, sure, it's a new place that even refers to Vana'diel as a different name, as Urghuum, and you do go there under your own desires completely when you hear that the Tenshodo have a way to go there. But then as you rise through the mercenary ranks, you encounter national leaders and get tapped to be a spy for the allied nations from The Middle Lands, because the Empire has long been unresponsive to their overtures. Like CoP reached back and uplifted RoTZ, ToAU reached back and uplifted the three nation's leaders. Several major NPCs introduced in ToAU are tied into The Middle Lands by their past. They're all involved, and a through thread for the entire expansion's theme is duality/duplicity.

The Adventurer is a Mercenary serving the Empire but they are also a Spy serving the Middle Lands. Aphmau is the Court Puppetmaster but she's also The Empress. Naja Salaheem is a greedy gil hound, but the gil isn't for her, it's for her home nation that's a vassal state to the empire. Waoud the fortune teller is actually Raubahn the Blue Mage general. The Empire needs Mercenaries to help defend itself from three huge Beastmen hoards, seemingly their victim, but in truth these factions were wronged or created by the Empire itself.

And it's also true that FFXI, unlike XIV, planned for its first 3 expansions. They drew up a road map for where they would take the game when it first released, the exact specifics not 100% there, but the plan for 3 expansions and their general themes were. Wings of the Goddess and beyond were all off the cuff. It wasn't that they didn't do a third Zilart related expansion because, "they wanted to wrap it up" it came to its planned and logical conclusion. "Hey we found out all the Zilart are dead, reduced to Quasilumins, or we killed them. We also killed the God they used to be, inside of their mysteriously wiped off the map capital city. We also revealed that the five races are Zilart, technically, mutated by the mothercrystals/after effects of The Meltdown. There are no more actual plot threads here. Time to move on."

Its non-serial nature continued into the future, unplanned expansions, and while they took great efforts to strand everything together tangentially and then more explicitly in Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, FFXI's greatest strength is that you can experience its stories in any order so long as you have the player power to do so (high levels or a carry).

XIV can't do that. Its narrative is sequential and has to be played in order by design. This means that it needs to progress consistently, and that plot threads given to us have to be relevant and kept relevant as the years go by. Clearly, they drop stuff. I would prefer that they didn't drop things. They seem to feel that way too, though they do a poor job at pulling them forward or taking care of them when they know they don't want them later. Prime example. They put a lot of Ascians on the table in ARR. We got to see a legion of them in the darkness. We got to see the Convocation at their stations in the Rift meeting in 2.3. From that point, Lore keepers have kept track of what has happened to every major Ascian, and the very dedicated have also noted every minor Ascian. As it stands, there are still 2~3 Convocation Ascians that aren't guaranteed dead.

The idea that Dawntrail will be something new is already debunked. It's just going to Tural to do what the Scions always do, meddle in national affairs and enforce The Sharlayan Way(Louisoix edition, not to be confused with Four-Chan Alt edition). And we're likely gonna run into another Convocation Ascian, and find out that the Ascians aren't wrapped up. And if it's only one, then where is the last? As I established, this isn't a logical story progression. It's like a stalling tactic while they try to come up with ideas they really want to work with, while giving us ones that they know work with fresh paint.

Endwalker was not a conclusion. It was just striking while the iron was hot and played up as one to generate more hype and highlight the importance of Hydaelyn/Zodiark.