Well I finally made it up to the Meteion arc, and completed that. And I admit this doesn't really feel like the story they originally intended. While it certainly has its cool points too, it just doesn't feel like what the story was originally supposed to turn out like.

You know what I think happened here. They intended to go into the ascians, but entire Shadowbringers arc was so good it made you actually start to care about them and think they weren't such bad guys after all. That they were fighting for a world they'd lost and it was more of a case of two parties, you and them... fighting to preserve your own worlds. You couldn't think of them as the bad guys anymore.

SO they changed what the original story was supposed to be.

When I look back on ARR and Heavensward, especially the Alliance Raids which is where a lot of this stuff was filled out, we always knew about the Voidsent which were more like Demons, and that was what they Ascians were supposed to be. Some kind of corrupted ancients that had become demons. More that they shattered their own world and became the void, ie the real demons, the empty shells consuming life. The Void was the darkness and the shattered world. The Alliance Raids of Heavensward and ARR both bear this out. This was the Darkness they were talking about that was consuming the world.

So they came up with the Meteion arc to distance it from the Ascians being actual bad guys.

It doesn't suck... but it also feels... well... like it doesn't really belong. At least not if you were there in the beginning.

I wonder if this is what contributes to the general malaise of people just not really caring anymore. That they didn't get the story they thought they were playing.