Smudge and I are still going strong on FF XIV, and the last three months has been spent with various tasks, but we’re spending more and more time on the storyline, and are about ready to transition into Stormblood. Overall, there’s been a couple of distinct phases of the story, with the first one covering patches 3.1-3.3. That was a pretty nice end point for business left unfinished at the end of Heavensward.
As usual, there’s a number of different threads going on at once, but the dominant one was actually managing a stable peace (or even cease-fire) between Ishgard and the dragons. Nidhogg is still thirsting for revenge for a thousand-year-old betrayal… and trust does not come easy to a people who’ve been lied to for all that time. Despite the complications, this part remains reasonably straightforward, which works a lot better for SquareEnix than the more complex story they tried leading into Heavensward. It eventually centers around two things: a ceremony to celebrate the peace, and a final confrontation with Nidhogg, which also finishes off Estinien’s story (which started back in the level 30 Dragoon quest). The former involved a new iteration of a piece of art we’ve been seeing around to commemorate Shiva and Hraesvelgr.