Quote Originally Posted by Treesus View Post
Stormblood? What was its purpose other than Zenos?
Ok, so, some perspective for you. ARR wasn't expected to do well. It did, so HW was greenlighted, and they had to scramble it together. Lo and behold, they dropped another deadringer of a success, so BAM make another expansion please. So the writer's had to just crap out another story.

With that in mind, Stormblood is actually pretty dang good. It's probably the expansion that was least appreciated at the time(I am guilty of yammering to all of my friends that the game is on the downhill and it only gets worse from here).

To the point though, Stormblood's purpose is to bridge the story. They were still fleshing out exactly what they wanted to do with the Ascians, and that's why we got Zenos/Omega etc. Basically it was a filler arc. A truth that would be attributed to Shadowbringers, but it's actually not true about Shadowbringers (though obviously all periphery characters in SHB are filler cast, for the most part).

We get a more real confrontation with The Empire, as opposed to what'ssupposed to be the moral/spiritual/Emperor's Throne Room sequence with the Ascians. We also get lots of Outer Eorzea/Outside of Eorzea world building.

Stormblood had a decent MSQ followed by fantastic side and .1 to .55 content. Its purpose was to be as entertaining as possible while trying new things, since they figured it would be received poorly anyway. Beyond that, just to give us stuff to chew while they fleshed out the grand story they really wanted to tell.

That's how I see it, anyway.