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

[MagiusNecros]

You don't need a "mechanical fresh start" (level 1) to have a "narrative fresh start". The latter just means that, since all previous plot threads are "resolved" (used loosely here... how resolved and how satisfactorily is not what I'm discussing here, although I know some people feel there's a lot left to be desired on that end), you go to a new place and meet new characters and explore new things and make new connections.
It's disingenuous to make this "start at level 1" point when it's evident what people are discussing in terms of the DT narrative.
Some people just wanted an actual new adventure, with new faces and in a new place. I agree that the moment you drag the scions along, they immediately become the centerpiece and a lot of potentially novelty that the DT story and areas could have is immediately sacrificed to the alter of marketable familiarity. Frankly, I've been playing for over a decade, I could do with a break from this same old (ARR and HW scions were quite different, but they've been the same since SB...).

Sadly I think for the entire life of XIV we will be stuck with the Scions. They are never going away.

[Vyrerus]

then I guess maybe they did a good job.

It's more that it's a nasty reminder that they don't actually give a crap about their own story. And more or less what ReynTime said in that they like to pretend like Endwalker was this great wrap up and conclusion for the past 10 years when it was essentially just, "SHB 2: Ancient Boogaloo."

Like, the place of contention isn't that it's a serial story that's ongoing and will change/be retconned as time goes by. It's that they don't really tie it all together, and they rely on new players honeymooning enjoyment to sell it, rather than quality writing or world building.

I'll try to illustrate further what I mean with the degradation around the narrative structure, and maybe you'll understand where I'm coming from at a minimum. It'll be kind of like an overarching story summary, and I'll point out where it gets loose and breaks.

2.0 into 2.1~2.55 - Our villains are established with the Garlean Empire and The Ascians. The total motivation of either is still mysterious, and the Scions want us to focus on The Ascians, since they are the ones giving the Summoning Rites to Beastmen and people and harming the world at large from the Scion's PoV. We'd been granted the Blade of Light by Hydaelyn, and so we looked for ways to form it again and actually kill an Ascian instead of merely ejecting them back to The Rift. With that as our main goal, we still go around stopping Primals and trying to keep peace in the land while the forces inimical to peace work towards nefarious ends. Everything culminates after we slay our first Ascian, Nabriales, sans The Blessing of Light, and then move to defend Ishgard at The Steps of Faith. 2.55 goes out with a bang at the Bloody Banquet where we're framed for murdering The Sultana by our own peacekeeping organization and Ul'dah's Monetarists. The transition across these patches lead us to be friendly with Ishgard, and so we move to what friends have there, calling back to Post-Titan 2.0 as well.

It's a logical, consistent progression, complete with callbacks from earlier within itself.

3.0 into 3.1~3.55 - We become guests/vassals of House Fortemps, and seek to solve Ishgard's problems because we're heroes and they've been in a war of attrition for 1000 years with no end in sight. In the first half of 3.0 we gain a footing in Ishgard with some oddly paced and strange incursions back into ARR to the first sign of narrative mishandling. The resurrection of Nanamo Ul Namo. It is a short blip just so the writers could stop caring about the WoL's felonious status that they were not doing a good job of showing from 2.55 until then, having already had us spring Raubahn from Crystal Brave captivity. Before long we're back to going after Nidhogg and then the Pope with the truth slaying Nidhogg provided. The Ascians are behind him, supplying him with the ritual for Thordan, though there is some mystery as to how long he and the Heavensward have been Primals. They force the Ascians to take a backseat, even killing Lahabrea, using the same technique established for the WoL in ARR. We upend the Dragonsong War killing Thordan and Nidhogg and bring Ishgard into the Eorzean Alliance's fold in earnest, once more. Along the way we recover the Scions, each bearing scars and new motivations, even higher callings. We have our first audience with Hydaelyn through Minfilia as, "The Word of The Mother." In the background, the Ascians are now intent on killing us for now having killed 3 Ascians. They bring in the Warriors of Darkness, which gets us another audience with the WoM. Shrewdly, this was just the first avenue for trying to eliminate us. Furthering their own goals, they had the WoDs recover Nidhogg's eyes and gift them to The Griffin, who turned out to be Ilberd from the leftover plot thread from The Crystal Braves. Giving him the ritual to summon Shinryu, Ilberd sacrifices himself and his rebel contingent to succeed and Papalymo sacrifices himself to seal Shinryu before it can manifest, a callback to Louisoix. The plot threads strand together from the Doman Refugees, Yugiri, the newly introduced Gosetsu, and the long ago mentioned Omega Weapon underneath Carteneau. Shinryu breaks out of Papalymo's seal, and we unleash Omega against him. Heavensward ends in a beautiful fashion, tying together almost every single plot thread up to that point with minor irritations here or there.

It's a logical, consistent progression, complete with callbacks from earlier within itself.

4.0 into 4.1 ~ 4.55 - Following behind Ilberd's act of war and Shinryu and Omega's battle, The Eorzean Alliance moves into the Garlean Occupied Ala Mhigo to meet with the Resistance with Lyse's auspices, as she had been connected to them since HW. We have a two pronged expansion for the first time, and go to the Far East as well. A war on two fronts, it's kind of a war story trope. We get a new-old villain in that we're facing off against another legion of The Empire. The newness is that it's Zenos, the Crown Prince. The WoL experiences defeat in battle for the first time. The defeat of the Crown Prince on two fronts causes the Empire to pause but also to lurch into action. At the same time, the Ascians come back into the picture having been almost entirely absent from the base expansion. New questions about The Echo arise, and the Resonance procedure is introduced into the setting to give the Empire a new leg to stand on (and Zenos a means to make Shinryu the final boss without losing Zenos). While the Empire is slow to react on two fronts in the post patches, the WoL has all sorts of adventures in both Ala Mhigo and in The Far East. Eventually things come to a head after the Empire moves against Ala Mhigo again at the Ghimlyt Dark. In the shadows the Ascians stir to the fore again, with the introduction of the pithy Emet-selch, a never before named or seen Ascian, who turns out to be the Grandfather of the Garlean Empire. He motions for the Empire to use Black Rose to set in motion finishing the Rejoining of The 1st Shard. Unfortunately for our narrative, Rejoinings haven't been fully explained yet, only hinted at, and this isn't the actual focus of his introductory scenes either. The "bombshell" that Ascians control/started The Empire is. On the heroes front, the narrative takes another unfortunate turn, wherein the Scions are one by one, "Called" and become comatose. The expansion ends with the WoL being Called, though the Call fails, and this almost got the WoL killed but for Estinien. The next call at the start of 5.0 would succeed in calling the WoL to The First and sealing the fate of the narrative's integrity.

Here is where it happened. The narrative took a leap to the left, and veered off road. The logic for the Scions being called would only be explained later, as the narrative was now relying on mystery for tension. Retroactively it will and does make sense, but this was a narrative sucker punch, more or less, and due to Shadowbringer's success it would drive the devs to want to do it again and again.

So 5.0 into 5.1 ~ 5.55 - We get a masterful story that was intended as a one off in order to give the Ascians a backstory and fully delve into their motivations as villains. It was also stated to be the point where FFXIV's developers reached a mastery state, and they desired to make zones that reflected the original ARR areas but with the new skillset they'd honed over the course of years that the game had been out, which was 6 years at that point. The story revolves around The First, a shard that was almost destroyed by a Flood of Light when its own heroes succeeded over the Ascians trying to Rejoin it to The Source. Here in this story, Rejoinings and the setting of FFXIV are brought into focus. We get not only The Ascians' backstory, but all old lore surrounding them and the planet rewritten. There's a bit of a meta commentary here from G'raha Tia himself due to the expansion also heavily featuring Time Travel as the foundation for why it was occurring. In the original sequence of events, The Ascians deployed Black Rose and caused an 8th Rejoining. For the first and so far only time, a sidequest and 24 man raid event is pulled into the Main Storyline, making the jump from Side Story to Main Story happen. G'raha Tia came from the future to save the past and possibly unwrite his own future. All of the minor villains are just machinations created by and influenced by the Ascians. We fight more beasts than men. Everything is transitory. The Ascians are revealed to be the original inhabitants of the world, and their original world is revealed to have been first beset by an apocalypse, and then once saved from that apocalypse, driven into civil war. The result of the civil war was that Hydaelyn split the planet and every life on it, molding it into its present predicament with Source and Shards, and everyone she ever knew was caught up in these events and no longer exists save for the 3 Convocation members she had to let go. Soul transmigration is explained and the WoL is revealed to be an Ascian as well, and the story starts to compartmentalize for clearer understanding that the Ancients are referred to as Amaurotine or Ancients rather than as Ascians, because Ascian is a spooky no-no word cause Ascians are bad mmmkay and we, as the glorious heroes, get to decide right and wrong. Emet-selch and Elidibus are killed. We search for and find a way to return the Scions to the Source. G'raha Tia gets to come too. There are no sacrifices from our heroes. We improve the lives of the people of The First. The experiences the Scions had in dilated time of The First causes them to solve Tempering upon their return to The Source. In short order, Fandaniel teams up with Zenos and unleashes the Lunar Primals and blips the Towers into existence all over Eorzea and The Far East. As the expansion comes to a close it's revealed that the Towers temper, they manifest the Lunar Primals, and they're prisons for locals and local beastmen. Sharlayan arrives on the scene in Gridania to announce that they won't help Eorzea against The Empire, refusing to believe The Telophoroi have taken it over, in spite of the very visible, very imposing towers. Personal stuff for some of our heroes is pedestaled in the Forum member being the Twins father, and he disowns them. We see a bright ghost woman with an Ancient Ascian mask in Mor Dhona.

This story progresses as the needs of our heroes do. It humanized the long time Saturday Morning cartoon villains in a way that's common for RPGs. Emet-selch stole the show every time he was on screen, and much like him, Shadowbringers has stolen the overarching plot and re-centralized the lore. Progressing into Endwalker the tension comes from how will we stop all these towers? What's going to happen? It's quizzical, and hype AF, the story was so well written and so entertaining it brought in more players than ever before... but where is the logical progression? Just what does happen next?

6.0 into 6.1 ~ 6.55 - We start off trying to stop the Telophoroi by... Going to Sharlayan! Cause they're being Sussy Bakas, and Krile confirms they are being super sussy bakas. So we go to Sharlayan. Our fair lady appears on the boat again, and that's the only time we get to say, "WTF Venat?" Once in Sharlayan it's revealed that Sharlayan has deep ties to the other location we need to be in, because ever since Stormblood we gotta have two pronged assaults eveywhere. No centralizing the focus, damn it! So we root around in Sharlayan and take their experimental aethereyte to Radz-at-han, and we meet with Vrtra there and confirm that Sharlayans are up to Sussy Baka behavior as suspected. We break a few library rules and get a slap on the wrist and a stern talking too. Then at Radz-at-han, a tower is there, and the alchemists there have been working day and night to make a talisman to be able to not get tempered when approaching it. And golly-jee because our heroes have arrived, they can now have their breakthrough and complete said talisman and mass produce it and we can take out a tower for the first time! And we do. And it's barely an inconvenience solved through having a talisman and having a strong lance arm (and a Deus Ex Machina mass levitation spell). So we got intel that the Imperial Capital is in disarray. Loads of infighting between the numerous legions that we still haven't even fought one third of and never more than one at a time. Then also a BEEG tower and tempered populace building it incessantly bigger. So we decide to form the Ilsebard Contingent and go straight up there to cut the head off the snake. This invariably leads to the real meat of the expansion in talking more about Shadowbringer's history lesson, and we go to the Moon as Fandaniel's real motive was to unseal Zodiark and then use him to kill himself and everyone else. He gets his death wish, we stop Zodiark, and the Ascian's calamity starts right where it left off. We get one taste test of the apocalypse, and it's super bad because it ultra kills people. This prompts us to look for the real cause, so we go back to The First to ask Hydaelyn the Third (Ryne) questions, but she informs us that her connection to Hydaelyn (Minfilia's soul) has been cut away from her, so she doesn't really have those powers much anymore. We instead get our answers from the soul of Elidibus, trapped in the time traveling machine Crystal Tower, and he burns himself up to open a time portal within the tower to Ascian's time period and The Elpis facility. There, through fan service chicanery, we eventually find out the source of all our woes is a depressed STEM kid who never took an intro to Philosophy course and proceeded to have a hivemind bird girl legion ask the entire universe (supposedly) a question about life that had a faulty premise. We fall back to the present and proceed to go menace Sussy Baka Sharlayans until they give us their spaceship. We also go into their God Meeting Bunker and meet a fake Goddess and bonk her to the death, sadly, because it's sad because you should feel sad because she's sad because she had to do a little ethnic cleansing for the greater good. There was no other way! Anyway, she gives us the coordinates crystal and we rocket off in the spaceship and wind up in Ultima Thule, but because we traveled only in one direction in three dimensional space, that means there's several other Ultima Thules in other directions. There the power of sacrifice carries us to Meteion's egg of the perfect world, but we got a multi-phoenix down spell in our SHB party summoning macguffin, and we revive two Unsundered Ascians and the Scions and give Meteion some flowers causing her to feel good vibes and cry, eventually allowing us aided by Zenos-Ryu to beat her to death.

Despair extinguished through extreme violence and flowers, we have fighter-sex with Zenos and then come back home with some broken ribs and savior exhaustion. We fake disband the Scions and then immediately start going on adventures with half of them near Thavnair, leading into the Void ark of the MSQ where we get discount Cecil in Zero arc with Zenobez. We save Azdaja and she gets the Midgardsormr treatment. Fresh off basically a Trial sidequest arc masquerading as MSQ, our Scion accomplices have us meet with Erenville who introduces us to Wuk Lamat who wants to use us as a weapon overseas cause she just can't wait to be king.

So we saved the world. Found out a lot about our greater Ascian heritage and the truth of the world in the process. Saved another shard / prevented an assault on The Source. Naturally we should follow a panther woman to Brazil.


-----------------------------

Yeah, you probably didn't read all of that, suffice it to say, the narrative structure departed a sensible progression in 2019. It rocketed off beyond the stratosphere. It wants to land now, but it's gonna do that about as well as I land a jet in Ace Combat 2. You can't land a rocket ship, after all. And much like a rocket, it left piece after piece of itself behind.

[MikkoAkure]

Yeah, you probably didn't read all of that, suffice it to say, the narrative structure departed a sensible progression in 2019. It rocketed off beyond the stratosphere. It wants to land now, but it's gonna do that about as well as I land a jet in Ace Combat 2. You can't land a rocket ship, after all. And much like a rocket, it left piece after piece of itself behind.

Yeah, I didn't read all of that.

I skimmed enough to see "sussy bakas" and "fighter-sex". You don't want to have a conversation, you just want to be angry and type into the void as a self-therapy session.

The devs never had this great over-arching plan for the story since its inception, partly because it wasn't completely their story they inherited. Everything since then has been by their own admission since the beginning to be making it up as they go along and just following their own threads they left behind or just doing whatever they wanted. It's always been bumpy so I don't know why you have some rosy vision that it's always been good until recently.

Heavensward was nearly the Cieldalaes and despite being famous for the elf camping trip, there was the times we had to awkwardly deal with Ul'dah fallout. Then in Stormblood we finally get to make an offensive on the Garleans that fizzles out in just 1 level of gameplay so that we can go to the opposite end of the world to Fantasy Japan and start over before coming all the way back to rush the end. And then when it looked like the story was going in one direction as we were about to reach a climax with Garlemald and teased an invasion of Ilsabard, we get thrown into a parallel dimension from a plot thread the writers themselves originally didn't think we'd actually physically visit and we put the whole main plot on hold unless you count all the "Meanwhile, in Garlemald"'s. Endwalker may not have been the ending everyone wanted, but the writers and the dev team wanted to end it and so they could do something new.

Now that the main original plot is over, we finally get to do other stuff that has nothing to do with everything else. The Unsundered are permanently dead now, the Garleans effectively wiped themselves out, and there's no more big plot continuation to be had anymore by design because they wanted to wrap it up. FFXI did the same thing (initially) by wrapping up the main story after just 2 more expansions, and then got over it and went to the other side of the world for a new (almost) completely unrelated plot that they could do things with without Zilart/Kuluu baggage. Then we had another twist on the original (yet still completed) storyline and then another journey west to the New World for another unrelated story. There was only so long they could drag on the Ascians and Garleans before people got tired of them and they lasted longer than the enemies in FFXI did. What different would you rather the writers did?

[MagiusNecros]

Better pacing, give the Scions a break and introduce new characters without their involvement, get better writers or have them communicate so story and subquests aren't thrown all over the place and better world building so everything isn't a one and done and you have something to go back to.

Endwalker's failing in going to Dawntrail is they didn't have framework to set us up for the next expansion in a manner like 1.0 into ARR into HW into SB into ShB into EW did.

Once they killed off Garleans there was nothing left to fight and the WoL is so strong at this point very little is going to pose a challenge.

Pandamonium and Hildibrand were probably the best parts of the expansion as far as pacing goes.

[Vyrerus]

You don't want to have a conversation

Your lack of a sense of humor is showing. If I didn't want to have a conversation, I wouldn't have responded with a 16k word salad. I'm actually not really very angry. It's more like cold resentment, and an aching feeling similar to a lost romance. You know, from being overly invested in XIV from 2013 til 2022. It's like a dragon that's teased out my deepest emotions.

We didn't put the main plot on hold in Shadowbringers. The entirety of Shadowbringers is the Throne Room scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, more or less. We got spirited away by our higher calling to stop the Ascians. It's like that, if you edited out all the Ewok bunker fights and the space battle against the Super Star Destroyer and Functional but Incomplete Death Star 2. And if Darth Vader was also The Emperor.

Now that the main original plot is over, we finally get to do other stuff that has nothing to do with everything else.

I suppose that's why Yoshi-P told people to get familiar with the Convocation of 14's roles, huh?

Also XI did it much differently. Its expansions weren't continuations of one another, ever. They could be done simultaneously or out of release order completely. RoTZ and CoP get lumped together because they combine and share an ending battlefield in Apocalypse Nigh. Which was more or less done as a way to uplift the weaker RoTZ expansion. It also seems you've somewhat forgotten the plot of Treasures of Aht Urhgan. Like, sure, it's a new place that even refers to Vana'diel as a different name, as Urghuum, and you do go there under your own desires completely when you hear that the Tenshodo have a way to go there. But then as you rise through the mercenary ranks, you encounter national leaders and get tapped to be a spy for the allied nations from The Middle Lands, because the Empire has long been unresponsive to their overtures. Like CoP reached back and uplifted RoTZ, ToAU reached back and uplifted the three nation's leaders. Several major NPCs introduced in ToAU are tied into The Middle Lands by their past. They're all involved, and a through thread for the entire expansion's theme is duality/duplicity.

The Adventurer is a Mercenary serving the Empire but they are also a Spy serving the Middle Lands. Aphmau is the Court Puppetmaster but she's also The Empress. Naja Salaheem is a greedy gil hound, but the gil isn't for her, it's for her home nation that's a vassal state to the empire. Waoud the fortune teller is actually Raubahn the Blue Mage general. The Empire needs Mercenaries to help defend itself from three huge Beastmen hoards, seemingly their victim, but in truth these factions were wronged or created by the Empire itself.

And it's also true that FFXI, unlike XIV, planned for its first 3 expansions. They drew up a road map for where they would take the game when it first released, the exact specifics not 100% there, but the plan for 3 expansions and their general themes were. Wings of the Goddess and beyond were all off the cuff. It wasn't that they didn't do a third Zilart related expansion because, "they wanted to wrap it up" it came to its planned and logical conclusion. "Hey we found out all the Zilart are dead, reduced to Quasilumins, or we killed them. We also killed the God they used to be, inside of their mysteriously wiped off the map capital city. We also revealed that the five races are Zilart, technically, mutated by the mothercrystals/after effects of The Meltdown. There are no more actual plot threads here. Time to move on."

Its non-serial nature continued into the future, unplanned expansions, and while they took great efforts to strand everything together tangentially and then more explicitly in Rhapsodies of Vana'diel, FFXI's greatest strength is that you can experience its stories in any order so long as you have the player power to do so (high levels or a carry).

XIV can't do that. Its narrative is sequential and has to be played in order by design. This means that it needs to progress consistently, and that plot threads given to us have to be relevant and kept relevant as the years go by. Clearly, they drop stuff. I would prefer that they didn't drop things. They seem to feel that way too, though they do a poor job at pulling them forward or taking care of them when they know they don't want them later. Prime example. They put a lot of Ascians on the table in ARR. We got to see a legion of them in the darkness. We got to see the Convocation at their stations in the Rift meeting in 2.3. From that point, Lore keepers have kept track of what has happened to every major Ascian, and the very dedicated have also noted every minor Ascian. As it stands, there are still 2~3 Convocation Ascians that aren't guaranteed dead.

The idea that Dawntrail will be something new is already debunked. It's just going to Tural to do what the Scions always do, meddle in national affairs and enforce The Sharlayan Way(Louisoix edition, not to be confused with Four-Chan Alt edition). And we're likely gonna run into another Convocation Ascian, and find out that the Ascians aren't wrapped up. And if it's only one, then where is the last? As I established, this isn't a logical story progression. It's like a stalling tactic while they try to come up with ideas they really want to work with, while giving us ones that they know work with fresh paint.

Endwalker was not a conclusion. It was just striking while the iron was hot and played up as one to generate more hype and highlight the importance of Hydaelyn/Zodiark.

[Bright-Flower]

Yeah, I didn't read all of that.

I skimmed enough to see "sussy bakas" and "fighter-sex". You don't want to have a conversation, you just want to be angry and type into the void as a self-therapy session.

The devs never had this great over-arching plan for the story since its inception, partly because it wasn't completely their story they inherited. Everything since then has been by their own admission since the beginning to be making it up as they go along and just following their own threads they left behind or just doing whatever they wanted. It's always been bumpy so I don't know why you have some rosy vision that it's always been good until recently.

Heavensward was nearly the Cieldalaes and despite being famous for the elf camping trip, there was the times we had to awkwardly deal with Ul'dah fallout. Then in Stormblood we finally get to make an offensive on the Garleans that fizzles out in just 1 level of gameplay so that we can go to the opposite end of the world to Fantasy Japan and start over before coming all the way back to rush the end. And then when it looked like the story was going in one direction as we were about to reach a climax with Garlemald and teased an invasion of Ilsabard, we get thrown into a parallel dimension from a plot thread the writers themselves originally didn't think we'd actually physically visit and we put the whole main plot on hold unless you count all the "Meanwhile, in Garlemald"'s. Endwalker may not have been the ending everyone wanted, but the writers and the dev team wanted to end it and so they could do something new.

Now that the main original plot is over, we finally get to do other stuff that has nothing to do with everything else. The Unsundered are permanently dead now, the Garleans effectively wiped themselves out, and there's no more big plot continuation to be had anymore by design because they wanted to wrap it up. FFXI did the same thing (initially) by wrapping up the main story after just 2 more expansions, and then got over it and went to the other side of the world for a new (almost) completely unrelated plot that they could do things with without Zilart/Kuluu baggage. Then we had another twist on the original (yet still completed) storyline and then another journey west to the New World for another unrelated story. There was only so long they could drag on the Ascians and Garleans before people got tired of them and they lasted longer than the enemies in FFXI did. What different would you rather the writers did?

Yeah there were always bumps in the road. People often mention how ARR leading into HW was great but neglect to mention how hard they backpedaled on it in HW proper.

For me personally, EW wasn't perfect but I thought it was pretty good overall and was surprised they were able to string all these seemingly disparate zones into a cohesive narrative, where as with SB I feel they handled it pretty poorly.

[MikkoAkure]

Also XI did it much differently. Its expansions weren't continuations of one another, ever. They could be done simultaneously or out of release order completely.

This is not true. While you could start the other expansions non-sequentially, CoP is meant to be a continuation of the story set in the vanilla game and continued with RotZ and as you said, they’re tied together at the end, requiring completion of both because they are part of the same story. I heard nothing at all about CoP being meant to “uplift a weaker expansion”. They’re all tied to the Crystal War, the Shadow Lord, and the Ancient conspiracy of the Zilart in relation to paradise and Altana/Promathia. Besides WotG, the other main expansions did their own thing completely separate from the others minus a revelation that Odin had a hand with the Shadow Lord.

It seems like you keep trying to establish your own conjectures as facts. Just like how Endwalker WAS a conclusion - to the Hydaelyn/Zodiark arc. The greater arc is over, the villains have been laid to rest. Rejoinings cannot happen anymore and the Garleans will not invade Eorzea. The devs themselves have said this was an ending.

ToAU and SoA were separate stories but had some ties to the old world just as DT does because they still exist in the same world. If it didn’t, then it may as well have been a separate game.

[fulminating]

It seems like you keep trying to establish your own conjectures as facts. Just like how Endwalker WAS a conclusion - to the Hydaelyn/Zodiark arc. The greater arc is over, the villains have been laid to rest. Rejoinings cannot happen anymore and the Garleans will not invade Eorzea. The devs themselves have said this was an ending.

Wasn't it implied that rejoinings would happen on their own without hydaelyn keeping everything separate?

[MikkoAkure]

Wasn't it implied that rejoinings would happen on their own without hydaelyn keeping everything separate?

I don’t remember anything like that being implied but you’re free to show it here if it was.

The Unsundered are gone, Zodiark’s body on the Source has had His aether dispersed and the souls devoted to His Creation sent back to the Lifestream. There’s no force left to prevent Rejoinings, but there’s no force to create them either. I’m not sure about the world-hopping abilities of the Sundered Ascians because they were all just normal people who got some manufactured memories back and Rejoinings require world-hopping. The Unsundered could have ferried them across the void between world like they did with Cylva, Unukalhai, and the WoDs, but I don’t know if they can do that on their own.

I don’t think Hydaelyn was holding the walls of the splintered world apart and everything will just keep going as-is.

[Rosenstrauch]

Wasn't it implied that rejoinings would happen on their own without hydaelyn keeping everything separate?

https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/T..._Moon#Dialogue

Y'shtola
A part is an understatement. None of this would have been possible without you and yours.

Our success has also served to solidify our understanding of cross-rift travel.

The Ascians rejoined reflections to the Source by instigating elemental imbalances. These imbalances weakened the barrier between realities, causing the aether of a reflection to flood the Source.
But why is it that reflections are predisposed to rejoin the Source? Why have they never merged with one another?

Urianger
Thou art suggesting there is a unique property inherent to the Source─one responsible for such an outcome?

Y'shtola
I am. 'Tis my conclusion that, as the point of origin for the reflections, the Source has an innate "pull" over them.

Hydaelyn, I believe, sought to suppress that pull, which is why She was created with the power of Light─of stasis.

Meanwhile, the power of Darkness─of activity─reigns in the void. Hydaelyn's influence would naturally be weaker, and this manifested in the form of planar fissures.

Hydaelyn's death leading to "natural" rejoinings is a logical deduction given what Y'shtola says about the 'pull' the Source has on the Reflections. But the story dances around confirming that, and the rest of the conversation is instead focused on opening a voidgate on the Moon and Y'shtola's desire to eventually travel to the other Reflections, particularly the First.

So it's a potential plot hook, albeit one that might never get used.