Why is FFXIV using rubber bullets in the wild west?

[Hallarem]

It has been a weird jump on the world taking itself seriously and understandably, in a complex adult manner.

To rubber bullets and tribes solving long wars over a dish of as one forum member aptly said "Skibidi pibil". Imagine the dragons and Ishgard doing that, or Garlemald and the nations they conquered.
My tinfoil hat theory is that's also why nearly all humanoid fate mobs run away now instead of being killed on the spot like all other mobs. Maybe it's just multiple writers smacking things on the wall, because suddenly we had dead mamool ja cenote babies, and happy choir music while we were building a train bomb? The script was all over the place and oddly rushed, which is odd because I thought they were rushing Endwalker into one instead of two expansions because of this? I have no idea why they didn't take their time with the script and polish.

Don't get me wrong, a world of happy happy joy joy is good and all, but the worldbuilding wasn't like that at all from ARR until now. Something to look at in the oncoming patches if the theme continues, and oh, just in case look if Square Enix publishes anything or markets a big release out of nowhere that isnt FFXIV, and might or might not have Yoshi P's name tagged onto it. *Tinfoil hat on*

[Serilyn]

It has been a weird jump on the world taking itself seriously and understandably, in a complex adult manner.

To rubber bullets and tribes solving long wars over a dish of as one forum member aptly said "Skibidi pibil". Imagine the dragons and Ishgard doing that, or Garlemald and the nations they conquered.

I mean... Technically the dragons and Ishgard did do that just in a slightly different way. The founding Ishgardians ate dragon eyes and in turn the dragons ate Ishgardians (at least Hraesvelgr, I assume in combat others may have eaten people too). Then some of the Ishgardians also drank dragon blood.