Just to give the crowd a new target person to pile onto and continue this shouting past each other on our subjective opinions of what characters we like and parts of the story we wish focus on, I'll be the actual person and not a vague strawman to state once more that I am that fan beyond delighted and grateful that the Ancients and their world is utterly gone. All Hail the Sundering, non-facetiously. Good riddance.

I found the worldbuilding of the Unsundered World under-baked and underwhelming when not outright unsettling and skin-crawlingly awful. Just as several posters have made it clear over and over that they prefer the Unsundered to the Scions (and 95% of the rest of the game's cast and setting), to me they are about the last characters and zone setting that I'd want ANYTHING to do with. Visual design of the NPCs limiting and ugly, majority of NPCs unlikeable and repetitive, the story opportunities like Pandaemonium's raid only furthering to contradict the 'paradise' that it utterly failed to convince me it was- that in particular Emet's ableism and fascism made him revolting and unpleasant to interact with and that I saw a direct line from his creation of the horrific empires of Garlemald and Allag to the attitudes of the Ancients that so unsettled and upset Hermes.

That the Ancients provide to XIV little beyond the Doylist answer to where certain mobs and concepts originated and the other tropes and character archetypes else could be provided by the Sharlayans, Loporrits, Ea and the Omnicrons, or other present-day or more recent groups (the nation of scholarly pacifistic debaters confronting their neutrality and arrogance of deeming who/what worthy of survival, naïve creation magic wielders who all look exactly the same and are removed from the rest of the world, powerful emotion-suppressed aliens seeking perfection). And the creation magic element to them means that any gameplay as Azem would not work for this MMO but would need to be a simulation game.

I understand fans with the polar opposite feelings to me want that possibility that in some branching timeline the Sundering didn't happen. Hey, even though I doubt that said timeline had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving or defeating Meteion, I agree with the desire to have it exist. In-game our timelines converged, but it doesn't completely eliminate the possibility that some unplayable version where the timelines didn't converge happened. My interest in that timeline? Negative. Do I think it playable as part of XIV's MMO? Not until it reaches what Ishikawa strongly implies that it would be ..aka the final third of the Dead Ends dungeon. Other fans HC that it exists? Doesn't matter to me, it's not part of the game, go ahead.

I'm not going to argue you into agreeing with any more than you I. But now you can yell at me in addition to others.

My problems with Venat are what magnified a hundredfold I find disgusting in the Ancients and Ascians.