Quote Originally Posted by SannaR View Post
To that last part. I'm not sure that group is as big....
It's not, it's just pretending that feel-good-fluff was always FFXIV's MO and anyone who presumed that more of the nuanced stories we got in in the prior three games would make a return was somehow wishing for Ascian supremacy and Venat's portrayal as a genocidal maniac. It's very boring, but there it is.

Then there is the what I feel is the easier to exaggerate if not to just meme on part that it the Scions disbanding. As some if you were to take the exaggeration and memes seriously would want you to believe that the entire group were constantly there the whole time. And yes the complaint about not showing an amount of time having passed since 6.0 to 6.1 is a problem. A problem that I don't think anyone really disagrees with as it's been a problem since the start. Yet I still feel that even if we hadn't seen anyone else but Estinien this entire time until just now some people would still claim there wasn't any real break.
Probably not, but it's worth remembering we have been stuck with these characters for nearly a decade. And initially, that was actually fine, when they were off doing their own thing and we met up with them occasionally and took them here and there, but after four years of having them constantly pinned to our sides on top of that, I think a lot of players are really, really beyond fatigued with them, to the point a minor break wouldn't change much. They don't even offer anything to the scenes they're in anymore beyond exposition, and in some cases have effectively become flanderised versions of their former selves.

I'm not going to get into the "they said they were disbanding" debate because [incoherent noises], but I think there's a case to be made that it is very weird to not only put that out there (officially, unofficially, whatever) and have the Scions seemingly doing their own thing, then make a big song and dance of ending the previous arc they have always been innately part of and pushing the whole "you're an adventurer again!" schtick and implying you're going to be off on your own journey like we did when we started out... only to drag them back into the MSQ and have them follow us around again when they're not necessary, they don't even have a story to tell anymore and there's nothing tying them to the plot. Even if you didn't pay attention to whether they were actually disbanding or not, it just seemed like a natural course of events to break away from them, at least for a time, but then... surprise, I guess. And not a pleasant one, hence the response.