Is there any lore justification for being able to do previous expansion's sidequests?

I'm on EW, and I'm wondering if the WOL could conceivably time travel at will. I'm asking because I'm doing side quests from previous expansions and trying to justify the headcanon for immersion purposes. Basically, I'm looking for a way to explain why characters still talk to me as if I'm in ARR, HW, SB, or ShB, as the case may be.

I know that there's a time bubble thingy, but I'm hoping for something more satisfying than that. Perhaps a function of the Echo could justify me "being" and feeling as if I'm in that moment in the past, as opposed to just seeing or remembering it.

First of all: the direct answer is no. We can play in the space of making up a justification, but we must first admit that there isn't one on an official, written-down level. That's just how the game is, and you just have to accept it. 90% of Ala Mhigo will always be frozen at the assumption that Stormblood is either still going on or just wrapped up.

Now, as for making up a solution, that's gonna depend on why you want this, and in many cases, also on what quest we're talking about. You're on Balmung, so I'm gonna assume this is for roleplaying purposes, and as a roleplayer myself I think I can speak to a few ways to look at it.

• First of all, in a roleplaying context it's actually a little rude and overbearing to declare in open roleplaying that you were involved in a canon event in the first place; this is sort of an extension of the general community etiquette of 'don't RP as the Warrior of Light', because there's only one of that guy and we can't all be him. This is very 'inside baseball', though.
• Consider that, perhaps, you didn't do it: depending on what you need of that scenario, maybe your character played a different role, or studied it afterwards, or were around for a coincidentally similar thing. It lets you incorporate the story without explicitly taking credit for it, and can give you a bit more control over your character's relationship with it. Again, this is very dependent on what you need.
• Alternatively: what if you ALREADY did it? Screw linear time; if it makes sense for your character to do a questline, then they did it back when it was roughly taking place. You want to say your character was studying to be a monk back before the liberation of Ala Mhigo, like in the ARR story? They already did, you can just say that! You're the character's writer, what you say goes.
• And on an entirely different level of 'screw it': who says the events of the quest actually did happen when the game sets them? Sure, some amount of sidequests reasonably have to happen at that time--Eden can only happen immediately after Shadowbringers, for example--but smaller ones especially can be very easily shifted, kinda by design to permit people to play whatever part of the game they want, whenever they want. Who says Machinist has to take place during/near Heavensward? It could've happened last week.
• If you really want to dig, technically the Echo was a weird time jump like what you first described back in 1.0, but... well, there's a reason it's not written like that anymore: it was really frustrating and very confusing. Nobody's gonna stop you from just using that, but I suspect the main thing that'll happen is that you'll learn why they don't do that anymore.

Those are all very general suggestions, though; more specifics on why you want this, and what quest you're looking at, can probably help shape out an angle better suited for your needs.

During ARR, there was a lot of effort to make every quest make sense whenever you did it (often using flags for changing text depending on what you had or had not done), but somewhere approximately around what I call the Zombie Nanamo Incident - wherein you could do a Culinarian quest in which Nanamo appeared despite her being dead (in retrospect, "dead") at the time - that effort kinda dropped off in favor of an implicit suggestion that players see quests as "happening" whenever they were released, even if it took you a while to get around to them, and now you mainly see the conditional text when it would be explicitly wonky to not do it.

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Originally Posted by JohnLakeside

I'm on EW, and I'm wondering if the WOL could conceivably time travel at will. I'm asking because I'm doing side quests from previous expansions and trying to justify the headcanon for immersion purposes. Basically, I'm looking for a way to explain why characters still talk to me as if I'm in ARR, HW, SB, or ShB, as the case may be.

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It's not time travel. It's reading a book out of order.

Imagine you have a book. You read chapters 1 and 2, skip ahead to chapter 7, and then go back to chapter 5. That doesn't mean that chapter 5 happens last chronologically, or that chapters 3, 4, and 6 don't exist. Events happen in sequence regardless of what quests you do or don't do. The WoL isn't time traveling if you go back and do a HW quest at level 100. You the player are just flipping the book back to a chapter you skipped over earlier.

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Originally Posted by JohnLakeside

I'm on EW, and I'm wondering if the WOL could conceivably time travel at will. I'm asking because I'm doing side quests from previous expansions and trying to justify the headcanon for immersion purposes. Basically, I'm looking for a way to explain why characters still talk to me as if I'm in ARR, HW, SB, or ShB, as the case may be.

I know that there's a time bubble thingy, but I'm hoping for something more satisfying than that. Perhaps a function of the Echo could justify me "being" and feeling as if I'm in that moment in the past, as opposed to just seeing or remembering it.

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Do you also need a lore justification for why players pop off into thin air regardless of the location where they have logged out? Or maybe a lore justification for why you can continue normally without feeling exhausted despite not eating or drinking for days/weeks?

Remember that this is a game. Not every little thing has to have a lore justification.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

[*]Alternatively: what if you ALREADY did it? Screw linear time; if it makes sense for your character to do a questline, then they did it back when it was roughly taking place. You want to say your character was studying to be a monk back before the liberation of Ala Mhigo, like in the ARR story? They already did, you can just say that! You're the character's writer, what you say goes.

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I've always liked this way of thinking about it, especially as you can then (broadly) sequence things either by release patch or by the quest's level (or the level within the patch; Island Sanctuary are Lv 1 quests post Lv90 EW gwhaha)

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Originally Posted by crowwww

I've always liked this way of thinking about it, especially as you can then (broadly) sequence things either by release patch or by the quest's level (or the level within the patch; Island Sanctuary are Lv 1 quests post Lv90 EW gwhaha)

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It's a really good idea, but might not work if you're a really heavy roleplayer. If your character's story has been pretty thoroughly detailed across like three years in a fairly solid community and you don't necessarily have full control over it, it's gonna be hard to sell 'I've had this part of my backstory/skillset the whole time and just never mentioned it'.

But then you just pick one of the other options.

Quests just take place during their release patch.
Like others have said, you always did those quests, you just hadn't read about them yet.