Quote Originally Posted by Rymi64 View Post
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.
I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one, I fundamentally do not like the idea of a fantasy world left bereft of the forces that once dominated it. I do not think using religion as a plot point moving forward is worth the player’s time because at this point the player is aware of most in-game mysteries – except for whatever is going on with the Twelve.

All I know is that despite a large number of logically sound voices calling for a grounded, fresh new start to Season 2, this was not accomplished in patch 6.1. I have very little confidence in an arc that begins in the Void or worse yet with the scions – whose status as untouchable comfort characters is actively hindering how emotionally involved they can make this story.

The hard pivot away from the more mature style of writing this game enjoyed prior to Endwalker is something that I significantly struggle with. To repeat what I have expressed in other threads, it wasn’t slice of life and fluff that’s sold me this game and got me to fall in love with it long term, it was a combination of gameplay factors and more effective and cohesive storytelling. Endwalker at times felt more like a Persona game than a Final Fantasy game, and not even FFVIII with its Garden schools felt as bad as some of what I endured in Endwalker’s story.

I will address other comments in my next post to mark the start of a new page.