How much time has gone by...

That line about the Doman Uprising in the Doman Enclave would be the one line Anonymoose doesn't want to get into.

Mainly because it's very murky as to when the Garlean Civil War takes place compared to ARR. We know the Eorzeans get word that it ended sometime around the time HW starts, but we don't know how long it lasted or when it began, other then that it started sometime after 1.0 ended. Partially because Eorzea's intelligence on what is happening in Garlemald isn't that good or current. For all we know, the Garlean Civil War ended before 2.0 even started, it's just that none of the Eorzeans knew it.

The Doman Uprising took place during the Garlean Civil War. When exactly, we don't know. We do know Zenos ended it, but again... kinda hard to know when that happened. It's also difficult to know whether it's been a year since the Doman Uprising started or the Doman Uprising ended. Further throwing a wrench in all this is that it takes 2-3 months to sail from Aldenard to Hingashi, so you're looking at that kind of time too.

Personally, I'm not going to try to figure out when any of those Wars/Uprisings happened in relation to ARR until the Garlean Expansion comes out. We'll probably finally get some definitive answers then to when a lot of Garlean related events happened once that happens. TBH, the fact that there's really only one glaring hiccup in the timeline so far is pretty impressive...

Personally I think that come 5.0 the writers should drop the time bubble and adjust the timeline accordingly. At this point it's causing way more lore issues than it's preventing. The time bubble was a bad idea at launch and is an even worse idea five years and two expansions later. It's obvious that time is passing and events are happening. The MSQ forces us to experience it all. Who benefits from a time bubble?

There's the occasional "but it would be weird seeing things out of order", but things are already weird and out of order even with the time bubble. (ARR DRG quests post HW, etc.)

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

TBH, the fact that there's really only one glaring hiccup in the timeline so far is pretty impressive...

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Two glaring hiccups by my count. (Yes I know I'm fixated on it, but I don't think my brain is going to let go of it until it's officially resolved.)

I think it's fairly reasonable for everything to have taken place within a year, even considering those references to the uprisings and whatnot. People round up all the time when referring to the passage of time; it may not have LITERALLY been a year ago, but close enough that it might referred to as such in casual conversation (say, 9 to 11 months).

I think the closest thing we have regarding the passing of time would be our first boat ride to Kugane, as the lore book mentions that it takes at least 2 months to sail from Limsa to Doma.
Also wasn't there some old, potential 1.0 leve text about the time it takes to sail from Limsa to Tavnair? Because that would give us a minimum amount of time between Hoary Boulder and whatshisnameagain fleeing to Tavnair after the Ul'dah banquet and us picking them up again in Limsa later

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Personally I think that come 5.0 the writers should drop the time bubble and adjust the timeline accordingly. At this point it's causing way more lore issues than it's preventing. The time bubble was a bad idea at launch and is an even worse idea five years and two expansions later. It's obvious that time is passing and events are happening. The MSQ forces us to experience it all. Who benefits from a time bubble?

There's the occasional "but it would be weird seeing things out of order", but things are already weird and out of order even with the time bubble. (ARR DRG quests post HW, etc.)

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I'd like to see this happen too. I'm not sure what's actually prevented by maintaining the bubble at this point - maybe having to review all the minor NPCs and update their standard dialogue if it refers to an event happening X time ago? But plenty of NPCs have different things to say over time, changing according to events in the MSQ, so even that shouldn't be a big deal.

There also seem to be more and more places where the state of things in the world changes according to an individual player's point-in-the-game, even though players are sharing the same space - the beast tribes for instance, or the recently rebuilt Saltery (which I assume is still in ruins for new players coming through), or Rhalgr's Reach when it is damaged in the course of the MSQ but other players are present and must be seeing it intact or repaired.

The advantage of maintaining the bubble is that everyone (in-game characters, the actual players, game creators, etc.) knows when past events happened in relation to the start of 2.0. Anything the prevents revisiting NPC dialog is a good thing as the more dialogue that has to be changed from patch to patch and expansion to expansion, the more chances there are for bits of dialogue to be missed, overlooked or errors introduced. Never mind all the voiced dialog that would have to be redone... It makes writing the game much, much easier to assume there is a time bubble.

Deciding to "end the time bubble" also puts an extra burden on new players to have more lore to keep up with. It would be like how there's a burden on everyone who didn't play 1.0 to go find out somehow what happened in 1.0 as that fills in more gaps in lore, characterization, etc. then it causes. It could also create a lot more things to keep track of along the lines of "oh, this character/quest is from 2.0 so the 'five years ago' is really '5 years plus the two years the devs decided 2.0-4.0 took'" while also keeping track of "this character/quest is from 5.0 so the "five years ago" is really "three years before 2.0 started'". Just... ack... for those of us who keep detailed timelines, it would be a colossal mess to keep track of. Current and new players do not need more convoluted lore to learn to feel like we have a handle on what's going on.

As it is, we are undoubtedly going to be getting more of "x years ago, y event happened" types of data, not less. Everything important to do with Garlamald happened in the past. Everyone (characters, players) is going to be wanting to know what happened to make Garlamald what it is currently. That means having a very good idea of when events happened in relation to each other. Upending the conventional way of referring to past events this far into the game would make conveying all that information to the player much, much more difficult.

Furthermore, it puts a constraint on Role Playing, which FFXIV hates doing. As much as the MSQ tells us what we are doing, it rarely tells us specificity why we are doing it, how long it takes for events to be concluded, how much down time we have between MSQ events, etc. FFXIV is our character's story and one of the ways it is our story is that we get to decide how long it takes. It's a very old-school RPG in that sense.

I think referring to the game's timeframe as a "time bubble" isn't really the right way to refer to it. It's more like a "time vector" where one end has a fixed point (Year 1 of the 7th Astral Era) and the other end just keeps going off into the future. How fast the "time vector" is going isn't specified (how fast time is passing). What is specified is where other points are in relation to the last known fixed point. Changing where the fixed point is wouldn't change the fact that the "time vector" is still moving forward.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

eg. one of the NPCs at the Doman Enclave saying it's been a year since the failed uprising (ie. what caused Yugiri and the other refugees to travel to Eorzea). Does that mean it's been a year since the post-ARR events when the refugees arrived there, making the rebellion concurrent with ARR? Or was Doma destroyed a year prior to that?

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

That line about the Doman Uprising in the Doman Enclave would be the one line Anonymoose doesn't want to get into.

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Bingo, lol.

There's no telling whether it's a slip-up, whether the Garlean War of Succession began earlier than we knew (the XIVth Legion was cut off, after all), or if it's a deliberate effort to move time (which, if it was, why didn't any other dates move *with it*?)

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

Who benefits from a time bubble?

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ObsidianFire did a better job than the list I was cobbling together but...

Flip side, who is the time bubble harming? As far as I've been able to gather, the damage is limited to one type of person: anyone who can't wrap their head around the idea that just because the open world year hasn't visibly changed doesn't necessarily mean that everything in the game must have happened in under 365 days. If you disentangle those two concepts, it's more of a blank check than a cage, isn't it?

Is anyone else suffering a drawback aside from, "If it all happened in 365 days or less, my immersion is just shattered!"

If the devs had anticipated a need for moving dates, they could have planned from day one to purge all references to "years ago" in favor of "in the year blah blah" in the open world while deliberately attaching dates to the MSQ, leaving side, job, etc. quests to say "Eh, it took place somewhere between the start and end of that patch's MSQ dates," but it seems a little too late, now.

The "It's been one hell of a year." so-called-hard-canon interpretations have typically been a tad tongue-in-cheek, like Homer Simpson's "What a week!".

Thanks to all who took the time to respond to my question, despite it apparently being asked regularly.

I asked because there was debate about the twins age. Some people thought they were as old as 25, some 21, and most 16-18. I believed they were 18 as the lorebook confirms delayed aging and that Alphinaud left home at 16. Then considering everything that happens a lot of time must have gone by. But this space bubble means he is Frozen at 16.

I confess I am disapppinted by it. It will be strange to me that who is arguably this game’s protagonist (Alphinaud) is stuck as a child when his position and everything him and his sister go through lends them so nicely to growing into a man or a woman. I find that difficult to wrap my head around. I had no issues with their child appearance up to this point because as I said, I know they have delayed aging and I thought we had two expansions before their growth spurt. But indefinitely stuck as children? That DOES break my immersion.

Thank you for thinking of coming to us to ask, and (going by the POSTS: 1 next to the OP) welcome! Feel free to come here with any questions you may have; we try to be a tad more cordial and welcoming on the curve (though perhaps a tad more snarky to make up for it).

The thing with the twins is a recurring topic, in and of itself. Admittedly, I usually see people debating it in a Are Leveilleur Lewds OK? context, which highlights certain factors of the debate and renders others all but moot - especially the one about how Elezen have extended puberty in the first place.

Damielliot, for example, didn't visibly age a day between the years 1562 and 1572 of the Sixth Astral Era, but is a grown man in Year 1 of the Seventh Astral Era. Arguably, Alphinaud and Alisaie could be 16 at the beginning of A Realm Reborn and still not visibly look like adults even if the game world had progressed several years.