Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[Karkarov]

The "endless" are just AI recreations of people based on what a computer thinks was their happiest moment after analyzing their memory data. They are already dead, they are not people, everything they experience is artificial, fake, programmed by a computer, and you are blatantly told they have no souls. Even Sphene (if you listen to what you are being told and pay attention) is just a AI copy of a dead person who has had her "prime directive" hard coded into her. Even she has no choice in anything she does, her programming forces her to prioritize keeping the endless online.

You didn't "genocide" anyone, you turned off a server.

[Arzalis]

The "endless" are just AI recreations of people based on what a computer thinks was their happiest moment after analyzing their memory data. They are already dead, they are not people, everything they experience is artificial, fake, programmed by a computer, and you are blatantly told they have no souls. Even Sphene (if you listen to what you are being told and pay attention) is just a AI copy of a dead person who has had her "prime directive" hard coded into her. Even she has no choice in anything she does, her programming forces her to prioritize keeping the endless online.

You didn't "genocide" anyone, you turned off a server.

This is what the game wants us to believe and we're told, yes. People here are paying attention. The way everything is written and what you actually do in the final zone presents the opposite of what we're being told, though. That's ultimately the issue.

I do understand what the writers intended, but they failed at actually, well... writing it that way. Ex: If the writers tell us the sky is red and I look up and see blue, something has clearly gone wrong somewhere. The same way they write a character to say the Endless aren't really people, then spend an entire zone showing they are, in fact, people and are very much sentient/alive.

I agree with what's been said about it just being very very poor writing. It's just crazy to me that they basically gloss over this despite beating you over the head with what they want you to think for most of the expansion before this.

[Karkarov]

This is what the game wants us to believe and we're told, yes. People here are paying attention. The way everything is written and what you actually do in the final zone presents the opposite of what we're being told, though. That's ultimately the issue.

I do understand what the writers intended, but they failed at actually, well... writing it that way. ...

...I agree with what's been said about it just being very very poor writing. It's just crazy to me that they basically gloss over this despite beating you over the head with what they want you to think for most of the expansion before this.

I get what you are saying, and yes, this was a massive writing failure.

After making it clear they are just simulacrum based on the memories of dead people, making it clear they literally have no souls and most likely their soul has been inserted into someones pez dispenser and long since eaten, and even having the endless themselves tell you Sphene has a hard coded SOP she can't defy and they want to be turned off.... The writers still stupidly try to make me feel an emotional connection with them and think of them as people. The problem is I just went through an entire zone story and a dungeon that made it blatantly clear... they aren't people, they have no souls, they are just simulations powered by ether stolen from actual living people. So as much as they were written to act like people and pull my heart strings, to me, they were no more genuine than a ChatGPT based conversation bot.

The only thing I like about the final zone is the mirror it serves as for Ultima Thule. You are returning both places to their natural state. One was just a natural state of "weird, but actually does have life" and was being "forced" dead by the end singer. The other was "looks alive, but no, it's dead Jim" and being forced to look alive by ChatGPT.