As a game, Heavensward is one of the best experiences you can have in MMORPGs. The strength of that experience comes from its narrative. Not that the narrative itself is something truly unique or amazing, but rather how it is used.
Below I'll review those ludonarrative techniques, but here I'll remind you of the following: there is no spoiler protection for anything older than six months.
Narrative Structure
The story itself has a basic narrative structure. The protagonist comes into the plot as an outsider, vulnerable, and needing succor. He finds a patron with one of the ruling families of the setting, whose hospitality and generosity he repays by assisting in setting their affairs. These affairs include waging a slowly-losing Forever War with a pissed off dragon, all of its brood, and the heretical cults that serve them.
Through the course of these early chapters, the protagonist gets a full view of the physical and moral battleground at stake. Both the dragons and the defenders claim moral authority to wage a war of extinction upon the other party, but soon this is challenged when an antagonist from A Realm Reborn returns with new information: the cult leader Lady Iceheart.
Now we get the real conflict of the story: resolving the reality of the Forever War versus the propaganda that both sides push about it to justify their own positions. At first it is the defenders and their totally-not-Christian church that get skewered. Then when the peace mission gets to the elder dragons, they cough up their side of the story and reveal that they too were utter bastards. Therefore the conflict is Truth vs. Narrative, framed against ending the Forever War by putting down both sides' bad actors.
The narrative's climax ends the defenders' side of things by removing both the master villains manipuating the whole thing as well as the not-Church's corrupt--but utopian--leadership. From there the decending action leads to the final attempt by the dragons' bad actor to push the Forever war, which the protagonist puts down by both banishining the bad actor as well as rescuing the man said actor possessed to make this attempt possible.
After that it's tying up loose ends and introducing the following expansion's narrative; call this the denoument.
Ludonarrative Structure
Heavensward communicates this narrative by making its consumption necessary to access gameplay options. This includes side-stories such as those specific to the new Jobs introduced in the expansion. This is not just making the player sit through (sometimes voice-acted) cutscenes; actually playing out critical moments in the narrative, what would be a plot advancement point where a narrative beat is it, is how the biggest moments--the ones everyone loves--are put forth.
What results here is using narrative to frame gameplay and gameplay to frame narrative, forming an alternating of both passive observation and active participation with the narrative that creates a synergistic psychological effect that takes advantage of both forms of narrative engagement to create a stronger experience with it.
The structure goes like this: narrative frame, ludo experience, narrative beat, reframe. Repeat this structure until you finish your outline. Some ludo experiences are small solo instances, some are actual dungeons or raids, with plot advancement and narrative development being had at the conclusion via a cutscene.
This means that the ludo experience is very much one where the player, as the protagonist, creates the illusion of having a direct and real hand in events that greatly enhances suspension of disbelief and acceptance of the narrative's premises through a form of Sunk Cost Fallacy psychology. As we saw with A Realm Reborn, this is very effective and is the secret sauce behind the game's very fierce following among its audience as well as the source for the affection said audience has for both its lead developer as well as the writers.
In short, this is a ludonarrative model that works, and the development team has refined it to a very sharp edge indeed; the experiences in later expansions demonstrate that refinement.
A Premise Unsettling
The narrative does have troubling elements, but most don't notice them because they have no context for concern.
The one most people miss is the one that drives the entire game's narrative to date--the Hydaelyn-v-Zodiark conflict of Light-v-Dark--that was first introduced in A Realm Reborn via the active agents of the latter: the Ascians.
In Heavensward, we see that not only can one be formally taught how to summon the false godforms called "Primals", but the full nature of how that summoning works. This actually does not require formal ceremony at all; any strong emotion will do, by any number of people, so long as there is either living souls or crystalized magic power (either crystals) in sufficient quantity to power the summoning-cum-creation of the godform into material space.
We also learn that one can use living people as vessels for such godforms, and that one can create godforms out of nothing more than whim and fancy; two examples are Lady Iceheart's "Shiva" being really nothing more than her own self-insert fanfic made flesh (the realization of which breaks her morale as she loses her moral authority), and the aforementioned not-Church deliberately using the mythical versions of their historical forefathers as godform templates to invoke.
The other aspect of Primals--the enthrallment, "tempering", of their invokers and followers--remains evident. While most new players won't know of this unless they went out of their way to find it, A Realm Reborn reveals that even the powers of the purported True Gods of the Twelve are themselves Primals and the behavior of the Ascians is no less fanastical than any other Tempered thrall.
The conclusion then is obvious: this narrative is maltheist and antitheist, not merely atheist, as it implies (and is later confirmed in Shadowbringers) that both Hydaelyn and Zodiark are themselves Primals summoned into being to do specific things. There are no True Gods.
This is a problem because all of the races are Mankind, and Man in hardwired to worship and feel. Therefore it is unavoidable that Primals be summoned time and again, with all of the baleful effects upon the minds of men and the lands they inhabit, because the fundamental nature of Man makes it so.
And, as this remains the case through Shadowbringers, there is no solution offered to this problem by the narrative in any way. That may change with Endwalker, as it purports to resolve the Light-v-Dark conflict, but until then the only viable solution is a refinement on what the purportedly-evil Garlean Empire (which is unable to use magic) offers: extermination of all religion and all cultures of worship, in favor of a technocratic imperial antitheist state.
I will point out that replacing the State for God merely perverts worship into that of the State, and any form of worship will inevitably result in a Primal forming from the shared expectations of the worshippers- the very thing openly weaponized by the not-Church in Heavensward because they too saw this as the only way out of the problem.
To my knowledge, I am unaware that this is even on the development team's radar as being an issue at all. We'll see by this time next year if I'm right or not.
But Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln
This is not to take away from the experience of play. It's a 10/10 experience and I won't say otherwise.
There are also other things I find irksome, such as the Modernist assumption that Democracy/Republican government of a more-or-less secular nature is always the best form of government and that "nation" is synonymous with "state" and "country" (both assumptions being utterly untrue), nevermind the totally-not-Christian church that gets undermined in Heavensward. Japanese games are Japanese, and that means baggage will be in tow whether we like it or not.
The narrative is a fantastic experience, flaws and all, and should be experienced to comprehend how well they merged storycraft with game design to make it so. At the very least, find a livestreamer going through the expansion or a Let's Play series covering it and see how it's done. Folks love this for good reason, and you ought to learn from it.
