Quote Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams View Post

A Garlemald expansion would have indeed provided the sort of continued conflicts you express interest in, especially from military leaders who are uncompromising in their ideals and beliefs. I imagine that they would still humanize the Garlean people in different ways but in the end I did enjoy how they went about handling that specific aspect of Garlemald in Endwalker – it was still flawed in my view however because of the ridiculous decision to write Gaius out of the plot instead of trying to tie it together to the Weapons storyline. I think they did a good job of showing how not everyone in the Empire subscribes to the same mindset and the characters we did see were worthy of the screentime they took up.

(Ideally, such content like the trial series etc. should be made mandatory for not only story continuity issues but to enforce a skill check that this playerbase needs in endgame content. Especially if it would act as a filter for players whose aversion to more challenging battle content and Heavensward and Ivalice-style storytelling seems to overlap.)
I do enjoy the shades of gray in that regard, especially in that not every Garlean is the same. More of that would be fun to work with. But arriving in Garlemald and trying to figure out how to not kill the poor, poor tempered Garlean soldiers that would happily fight us to the death even if they weren't tempered? They were laying on the concepts of 'if you kill your enemy you're as bad as them' a little too thick. Sometimes I'd rather the people in the story be a little more emotional and human than just... the good guys. I think that's the biggest issue with FFXIV's story as a whole though, especially in Endwalker. The protagonist has no emotional agency (or agency in general) and everyone acts like robots that have a fleeting emotion and then are immediately over it, regardless of what's happening.