Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
ShB is widely viewed among players as the "best" expansion. The thing is - it was only able to be a real 10/10 because of the expansions that came before it. Two out of those three books of lore you could write were written in ARR, HW, and SB. The villains that became multi-faceted were introduced as one-dimensional back in ARR.

There's not really much "thought to evoke" in SE. It's already there. You just can't realistically expect the new equivalent of ARR (starting a new narrative) to reach as high as an expansion that had 3 prior installments to build on. Years from now, FFXIV will probably put out another 10/10 expansion - the only question will be whether those "hating" on DT will be willing to acknowledge that the new top-tier installment was able to reach those heights because of the foundation DT laid.

Me? I'm still having a ton of fun with the new stories and lore in DT. *shrugs*
You can say that ARR released one dimensional villains that were expanded later but that specifically because they actually left open ends

DT didn’t, DT is such an enclosed story they had to rezz its main antagonist literally a patch after it finished just to have some kind of conflict

DT isn’t another “build up” expansion like ARR was because it closed off all its plot lines at the end of itself. I don’t get why people still pretend like it was a “prep” expansion