Personally I'd like FFXIV to emulate WoW's early style of writing, back when the game treated its various playable races as distinct and as having their own agendas and problems to address. Both games are suffering from similar issues in the end - it's just a matter of WoW going too far in one direction and FFXIV in another. I firmly believe that a healthy balance can be struck.

FFXIV in particular is becoming notorious for pandering to voices on social media. I think the game suffers as a consequence of that. Anything remotely 'gritty' seems to be slowly fading away in favour of something closer to a low stakes story with the bulk of characters fawning over the player character. Even looking at the single player Final Fantasy games, the dynamics between the various characters are a lot more engaging. Not every character even likes each other for some or even all of the duration of a particular game. Which makes for some interesting tension in itself.

A fair few of the characters I like in FFXIV have either been killed off or quietly shuffled into side content. The former are all antagonists, the latter...are the likes of Hien and Magnai who show up every now and then but not nearly as often as the Scions who in turn are forced down our throats at every possible opportunity. Even the 6.1 teaser site betrays that despite the hint of a break from them for a while we're going right back to dealing with them once again. So in other words, this 'new story' seems set to leave very little room for new faces.