Yup, that's indeed the case - it was ironic in 1.0 that effectively apart from small talk in the Adventurer's Guild of each city the player was basically wandering around in the Echo for much of the original starting city storylines - most of those events happened about ten years before when the Archons first arrived in Eorzea just prior to the Battle of Silvertear Skies. I'm really hoping that future patches in ARR will tie up these hanging plot threads and reveal what happened to other important 1.0 story characters like Khrimm, Fye, Dunstan and the Hermit in the Gridania storyline (I presume Dunstan went on to have some important part in Gridania's history as he has a lookout tower in the Central Shroud named after him in ARR ).