What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[SaitoHikari]

Man, Zot Tower was a pretty sweet dungeon that set the stage for eldritch horrors. Shame they decided to drop that motif after said dungeon. :/

I dunno about you, but Tower of Babil and Vanaspati seemed pretty eldritch horror-y too.

I've been thinking about exactly where the story might go, after the current 13th shard arc is over. Garlemald as an antagonistic nation seemingly getting off-screened wouldn't actually be that bad if it got fixed by us actually going to Corvos to see what all of the remaining Garleans with any actual power actually plan to do with their future (along with how everyone else plans to respond to that). Garlemald being off-screened doesn't mean any resolution regarding the actual survivors has to be off-screened too. But a proper resolution like that (as in, Corvos better be a region we actually visit, and not just a one-off dungeon) most likely means we aren't going across the seas immediately come next expansion, which would probably disappoint a lot of people who think new story arc means we have to abandon the Three Great Continents entirely for the sake of a fresh slate - but it'd be just as disappointing to immediately run off to the other side of the world while pretending that there aren't unresolved plot threads back home. Namedropping Corvos this much and then simply not going there would just become the latest example of a plot thread in limbo, the latest of several that didn't lead anywhere or were ultimately dropped (like literally all of the Garlemald political setup that happened throughout the post-Stormblood quests, that were ultimately kneecapped by Garlemald being abruptly off-screened).

On the other hand, even the handling of the Garlemald arc during EW itself had one particularly concerning issue: A fair number of major NPCs from Garlemald that should have come with us during the main story simply didn't. Particularly Gaius, Nero, and Cid, and Gaius especially had a VERY asspull reason for not going from a narrative standpoint. But the real reason was that all three were involved in major sidequest arcs, and the writers can't account for player progress in those sidequests possibly conflicting with their potential involvement in the main quest.

So maybe we shouldn't go to Corvos at all, at least not within FFXIV itself. Maybe the WoL has too much plot baggage and the game's narrative itself is clearly being bogged down by its own self-imposed design limitations. So maybe the devs could sidestep all of that by... Let's say, after the FFXVI team is done finishing up development on that game, they could make a spinoff game about Corvos and other regions that clearly can't be adequately explored within FFXIV itself at this point, with a new protagonist. Such a thing would have room to start elsewhere in FFXIV's timeline too - if we go there within FFXIV itself, we would only get to see it in a post-EW state. A spinoff game could begin, say, during Stormblood in the timeline of the events in FFXIV, and then go all the way to post-EW.