Future direction of FFXIV

[KageTokage]

If you invest yourself into going down a rabbit hole of speculation and theory crafting about how YOU think the story will go, you're always going to be disappointed when the result is inevitably different from your personal head-canon. I find it's best to not even bother coming up with your own theories sometimes because more often than not, you will be wrong because hey, you're not in charge of this thing lol.

It's not being wrong that bothers me so much as the potential for things straight up just being red herrings.

A great example being Zenos' visions of the Final Days, which ended up being so insignificant they were willing to just dismiss it outright in the live letter Q&A with an extremely hand-waved explanation that very much made it feel like one of those mentioned points they thought they could go somewhere with initially but just gave up on it.

Yoshi basically going "Wait, people actually care about that?" in response to the mentions of things like the remaining Paragons and whatever the heck Azem was up to after first Final Days was rather disheartening. He might not be the writer, but he's ultimately the one who approves the final story drafts so if he's out of touch with what the playerbase is interested in, he can potentially influence it in ways that won't sit well with many, which I find all the more concerning when he also mentioned being surprised how deeply people think about the plot in general.

It leaves me curious about how the initial drafts for Endwalker posed by Ishikawa differ from the one he ended up approving.