Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
That's nothing new. We didn't know most upcoming main-expansion villains by this point in previous patch cycles.
Not true; by 4.3 I believe we had seen 'Solus', and 5.3 was the expansion where we got both Fandaniel's face and name. By 2.3 Ishgard was... a bit of a factor but that's a weird case. 3.3 was the only time where we definitely hadn't seen anything of the next expansion's villains, but the events of 3.3 did directly lead to Stormblood's inciting incident.

What we really do need to recognize, though, is that this patch cycle is ALSO completely unlike any others. Every other patch cycle essentially treated the x.1-x.3 patches as the epilogue/final chapter of that expansion, and x.4 and x.5 as the leadup to the next. Endwalker's patches have been explicitly said by the devs as being done differently, as they specifically wanted Endwalker's finale to be the actual finale in a way that wasn't true for all previous expansions. They've also said that the hook for 7.0 is coming very late, so 6.x's MSQ is neither epilogue nor prologue; it's its own story.

So yes, Kesey's right that it's unusual that we don't have a future hook or villain, but is missing that this isn't part of some mystery; that's been stated by the developers as the intention of the story we're currently in. Golbez is most likely not some secret mystery hook for the next expansion; he's probably gonna get defeated in these patches because this is just where his story ends.

I wouldn't exactly say it's a daring guess to say that Golbez was somehow involved with the Contramemoria, though. The same is true of everyone else who's a character in the Thirteenth, and the fact that life is in a birthless and deathless stasis there means he can't exactly have turned up late. At this point it'd be a bigger swing to say he wasn't involved in the war, because... well, how the hell do you dodge that one?