Me too. One of the biggest joys in an MMORPG for me is that the world is ever expanding and you get new stories along the way. Content like battle systems is good i guess, but the appeal to me had always been these systems contextualized within the story. It's for this reason the HTBs never really appealed to me. They're entirely non-canon battles. Theres no motivation in it for me. Even the RoEs weren't so bad in that they added a minor story to it. But its mostly fluff afaict. So for people like me, the prospect of no future story is quite the doomsday statement to make, and kills any reason for me to continue once its done.
But I am happy that they are continuing small updates nonetheless. I'd probably not be playing but I can appreciate that they're still doing this for those who are. The balance changes will be nice to observe. I've been pleasantly surprised by their treatment of pet jobs this past year.
Everything considered, from the statements Matsui has been making it seems clear that the decision to kill support and shift away from the PC version of the game was a call from higher ups. I'd imagine the devs would be happy to make new content for XI if they were given the choice. Even though they weren't given much time to work on RoV, their portrayal of the Far East through Reisenjima certainly did not disappoint. The bamboo trees, stone walls and structures.. and even the visual effects when you zone into the Shrine were all meticulously crafted.
What I'm most interested in knowing now is how much of the mobile app version is in the hands of Nexon. It seems like the game itself will be run by Nexon, but the FFXI dev team, or whats left of it by the time it comes out, still supervises on "planning, how the game works, lore, and editorial supervision." (quote from
here). Not to be overly optimistic, but if
that version of FFXI picks up well, we might be able to see additional new expansion content there. But that will also depend on how faithful it is to this game, and whether existing gamers will enjoy that experience. Sadly theres still so little info about it.. and based on the recent GamerEscape interview, it'd seem to suggest the mobile version is still quite far away