Quote Originally Posted by aveyond-dreams View Post
“Killing magic,” in my view, is when the major magical forces or entities of a game are eliminated by the story’s end. Depending on the game, the protagonist may or may not lose their powers and abilities as a result, but more often that not it comes along with not only that but also the disappearance of creatures like Espers/Aeons too. I feel that this quite literally saps the magic out of a game world, especially if it’s an MMORPG that is meant to continue onward. I think that eliminating both Hydaelyn and Zodiark without any entities to “inherit their will” was a poor choice that led to the Void being pushed on us so rapidly, instead of taking the time to ground Season’s 2 story with a Heavensward-type expansion. It also eliminates the possibility of using religion as an intriguing plotline in the MSQ, because we already know that the entities who were in charge are no more so there’s no mystery to that.

With two new entities slowly building up their strength over time, the WoL/Adventurer would be free to spend an expansion or two resolving local conflicts in a given region. Heavensward is the most brought up example of this because it is a lot more concise and less spread out in scope compared to Stormblood or Shadowbringers. People have expressed wanting to see places like former Imperial territories, Meracydia, etc. but there are also people who are understandably concerned that we’ll be shipped off to the Void as early as 7.0. A comparison is often drawn between that possibility and WoW because of that game’s trend in sending the player character into more and more alternate worlds and realities/dimensions, culminating in way too much cosmic-level storytelling to make any sense.
With the death of Hydaelyn and Zodiark we literally lose nothing. We still have the travelers ward, people will still summon primals in desperate times, nothing really changes with their death other than the remaining ascians can do whatever they want to do but thats more from the death of the unsundered. The void wasn't really pushed on us rapidly since we've been dealing with it and it's denizens for years on the back burner in every expansion. We've only had 1 patch and we dont know if we're going to go into the void or somewhere else, could be we deal with the void by 6.5 (as side content or msq) or could be we completely go in 7.0 but one patch is not enough to even make such a guess. You can still use religion as a plot point since you don't have to narrow it down to just hydaelyn or zodiark. I wouldn't even consider hydaelyn central to any religion since she's not really worshiped, the twelve are but not her.

We don't need to have two new entities that are on the scale of H&Z to take their place to just go adventuring and its better not to since if you need a new overarching villain you can just make them fit anywhere in the world and be in the background and can stop using them at anytime without going to the same scale as endwalker. Shadowbringers isn't that spread out in scope compared to HW and ARR since its basically the arr map anyways, SB and EW are the most spread out expansions we have unless they're saying SHB is spread out because its on the first instead of the source which in that case still doesn't make it spread out. And unlike WoW the ff14 writing team is actually good at what they do.