How much time has gone by...

Since our character first arrived in Eorzea at the beginning of ARR?

Have the devs ever said anything about the passing of time as measured by expansions or patches?

It's hard to tell in-game, as we exist in a sort of time-bubble at the moment, so that newer players don't experience the world differently from those of us who have been playing from 2.0 or earlier. If it were otherwise then we would need multiple Mor Dhonas and Idyllshires, and Northern Thanalans, among a few maps that should be very different following certain story events. That said, there are the occasional bits of dialogue that imply travel times, such as early in 3.0 when Cid mentiona that we had left Ishgard and been in the Sea of Clouds for a few days. The boat from Limsa to Kugane also took a couple months, if I'm not mistaken. I imagine that others could give you more specific instances, but I'm just going off of memory.

Nnnoooooo...!

It has been [0] days since we've been asked what year it is.

Jokes aside...

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Originally Posted by Fernehalwes

This is a dilemma faced by a lot of MMOs. To allow everyone that joins the game, regardless of when they do, to experience the full story, there simply has to be a stoppage of time. Okay, not really a stoppage, but more of a time bubble in which a span of about a year is contained. This is why that for the duration of 1.0, Eorzea was in a perpetual 1572. Think of it as the same thing that’s happening in the Simpsons. 23 seasons gone and Lisa’s still 8, Maggie’s still a baby, and the gummy Venus still tastes oh, so sacrelicious. Pushing time along would also mean changing 1000s of lines of NPC dialogue, updating quests, webpages, etc. with every patch. Meaning it would take more than double the time to release updates, and I’m sure most people wouldn’t want to wait. In a book, movie, offline game, a strict timeline can be set without too many complications. In an online title, there are just too many variables, so we ask that you bear with our bending of space-time. It’s for the greater good!

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Anwyll
Long ago, you mentioned that 1.0 took place in a “Simpsons Time Bubble.” Are we still in a bubble? Or does time move now that we know Patch = Canon?

Koji Fox (Fernehalwes)
It’s still a bubble; you have to have a bubble. There are players joining in Heavensward that are starting at the beginning. The bubble’s just gotten bigger.

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Time passes, but it does not move; it never adds up to anything. Even if you can prove that 5,000 days passed, the year does not change. It is, and will always be, 5 Seventh Umbral Era [into/also known as] 1 Seventh Astral Era. (Until they say it's not.)

You can find some lines in the game that make this confusing. Some NPCs will make meta-jokes about real-world time or deliberately say "How many moons has it been!? Oh, it doesn't matter!", but so long as the NPCs are still saying the Calamity was five years ago, the Calamity was five years ago. (Please look forward to the Rising!)

Even after spending months at sea, the Calamity? Still 5 years ago. Silvertear skies? Still 15 years ago. Ala Mhigo? Still 20 years ago. Doma? Still 25 years ago. (Aside from this one thing I don't even want to get into, lol.)

That said, feel free to make up your own timeline for yourself; no one's gonna stop you and no one can say you're wrong.

Long story short: there is a "time bubble" the game exists in that means no matter how much we do or how far the story progresses, the year doesn't advance, characters don't age, etc. Think about animated TV shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park; despite having been on the air for years and years, absolutely nobody has aged a day. Same concept.

Personally, I clock it in at about 2 years. But that's just me.

If you want to go by patch 2.0-2.1 (112 days interval or 1 story year = 1 major patch), it's been 15 years. At the end of 2.0, Minfillia still referred all events of 2.0 as '5 years ago', but it was just before 7th astral era started (at patch 2.1), so we can assume a new calendar year had started.

Until the Elezen twins starting ageing (or any of the Doman kids who arrived/left Mor Dhona), I think it's safe to assume a year hasn't even passed, yet. Maybe a month or so?

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Originally Posted by uvuvwevwevweonyetenyevweugwemu

If you want to go by patch 2.0-2.1 (112 days interval or 1 story year = 1 major patch), it's been 15 years. At the end of 2.0, Minfillia still referred all events of 2.0 as '5 years ago', but it was just before 7th astral era started (at patch 2.1), so we can assume a new calendar year had started.

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15 years seems WAY too long. I'd guess that game event time has been more or less following real time, and about five years worth of events have happened between 2.0 and now.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

15 years seems WAY too long. I'd guess that game event time has been more or less following real time, and about five years worth of events have happened between 2.0 and now.

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I like to think ingame-clock year as an episode. There's roughly 20 episodes (20 ingame eorzean year), per real year or season. So yeah it's roughly 5 tv seasons.

One of the beauties of FFXIV is that everyone can decide how fast or slow the game would take in real time for themselves. Want more time for character interaction to happen? Make events take longer! Want travel time to reflect real-life travel time? Space events out more if you know certain characters aren't teleporting! Want things to happen so fast the characters don't get time to think things though properly? Have some events happen all at once! FFXIV is a really fun game to RP in since there's a lot of details that are left up to the player.

Instead of trying to fit the game's events in a certain time frame, the game wants us to have an easy time fitting in events that happened before the game started. So instead of knowing that the events of 2.0 took place over six months, we know that "five years ago" will always be "five years before the game started" no matter what expansion reveals the events.

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Originally Posted by Nestama

Until the Elezen twins starting ageing (or any of the Doman kids who arrived/left Mor Dhona), I think it's safe to assume a year hasn't even passed, yet. Maybe a month or so?

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That's part of the time bubble - nobody ages. There's no way all the events of the three games (or even just HW/SB) could actually take place within the space of a month.


Also the lorebook says that Elezen don't mature until around age 20, so if you want to believe that time is passing, it's reasonable that Alphinaud and Alisaie (16 in the 'time bubble') still look young at this point, even if you assume something like a year per major expansion. (It's harder to explain the Doman kids, of course, so just don't think so hard about that.)


My main issue with the time bubble is that it gets a bit confusing when people talk about how long ago things happened - 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?

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.

It's not just Aliphinaud and Alissae that look "frozen" in time. All the Scions are like that. The game even has an in-joke with itself about their apparent lack of aging. In 1.0, there's a lot of Echo flashbacks back to when the Scions should logically look much, much younger then when we see them in both 1.0 and 2.0. And they still look the same age (Thancred is the worst; he looks like how he does in 2.0 as he does when Minfilia is a kid). This leads to even their Lore Book profiles joking about them looking younger then they are, "stopping" how time effects them, simply never mentioning their ages, etc.

It also runs into how long the game is is different for everyone. For some of us, Alphinaud and Alissae are still 16, for others of us they're 18, still others of us headcanon that they're 20. But the game is never going to change how they look since that would wreck with everyone's headcanon. And it would require more work for the dev team. And finding new voice actors, etc. It's just way, way easier from a development standpoint not to bother with how long everything takes.

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

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?

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It's hot harming anyone, but it does make the entire concept of the timeline more confusing.

And it is immersion breaking. Nobody thinks that everything so far has actually happened in the course of a single year. That's the main issue here.

If it was about everyone playing the game differently and not seeing events in the same order that would be one thing. It's not though. The MSQ forces us all to watch the same events in the same order. My MSQ experience is the same as your is the same as everyone else. We know time must be passing between story events. We all see it happening. Acting like everything is in stasis just makes it more weird the more time passes (or doesn't.)

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

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.

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Well, I don't fancy the twins XD But I am invested in them. Alphinaud is my favourite character - mostly because of his character growth.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

It's not just Aliphinaud and Alissae that look "frozen" in time. All the Scions are like that.

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I think I'm okay with all the other characters. They are either adults already, or they are not a big part of the game or story. Gaius is 56 according to my Lore book, but when he finally took off his helmet, he looks young and handsome. Adulthood is wide and encompassing. Puberty is not. My issue is these two characters are vital and central. It just shines a spotlight on time not flowing and that's jarring to me.

The timeline is more confusing? The order of events in the game does not change no matter how long the game supposedly takes. The only thing that changes is how close together some of the events are.

How similar people's MSQs are to other people's depends on how good they are at role playing things the game does not specify one way or the other. Some people RP that they're aren't even the WoL. That's someone else's job, they're just a normal person in the world that's along for the ride. Some people RP that their WoL is Garlean... the list goes on...

Personal Role Playing Example: In my character's version of the MSQ, she and Alphinaud are more friends of convenience then anything else. They both agree that Zodiark and the Ascians should be stopped, but have serious disagreements on how to go about it. Why? Well... my character is a SMN and Alphinaud (and Cid) have serious problems with how my WoL likes using Bahamut's power and keeps using more and more Allagan-based magic. They're really worried that she'll accidentally end up triggering something on the scale of activating the Lunar Transmitter. The only Scion my WoL really gets along with is Urianger because both of them get doing questionable things in an effort to mess with the Ascians. And everyone's concerned with how there's very little practical difference between my WoL and Nero's opinions on what Allagan tech should be used for. She and Nero get along way too well for most people's comfort...

And none of that is specified in the game. Some of that is even contradictory to the way the game portrays the WoLs relationships with certain people. But it feels in-character to me given what my WoLs character is like and how we see the other characters reacting to similar things.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

And it is immersion breaking. Nobody thinks that everything so far has actually happened in the course of a single year. That's the main issue here.

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To be sure, as far as my headcanon is concerned, it has been about four to five years since the events of A Realm Reborn. But that's just me. I'm not particularly bothered by details, so long as the broad gist of the story supports the larger themes of the world.

That said, I simply cannot agree that accepting the time bubble breaks immersion. In the 20-plus years that The Simpsons have been running, I've been wrinkled and crumpled by years of work and real-life commitments, but Lisa, Bart and Maggie Simpson still remain ever precocious kids. By virtue of it being trapped in an ever-present time bubble, Springfield remains a familiar place, despite having a different story every episode that stays generally in touch with contemporary events.

So the advantage is that it doesn't matter which point in the series I start watching the show. Every episode brings something different, and familiar, at the same time. This sense of familiarity, amid constant updating over time, is critical for immersion in the persistent game world of an MMORPG.

For those of us who are long-time players of this game, who started at the launch of 2.0, or even earlier, way back at the launch of 1.0, our sense of "time" will necessarily be different from those who just picked up the game last week.

I am willing to bet that, for those who are only now beginning to marathon the story, it would not be "immersion-breaking" for them to feel that everything that's transpired so far is happening within weeks and months of game-time, because that is indeed how they're actually experiencing it in real-life: A series of events that are flashing by, as they rush towards a conclusion that took the rest of us five years or more to reach in real-time.

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

If it was about everyone playing the game differently and not seeing events in the same order that would be one thing. It's not though. The MSQ forces us all to watch the same events in the same order.

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Again, I simply cannot agree with this, because the story of FFXIV is much more than just the MSQ. There are also the job and class quests, as well as the side-quests and optional raid and dungeon quest lines. Depending on how you mix-and-match the stories, and the order in which you've approached and started them, your experience of the overall story will uniquely be yours and yours alone.

For example, I started the Coils of Bahamut raids only in the last two months of A Realm Reborn, and after I had completed all three parts of Crystal Tower raids. As such, by the time I started the Coils, I was already armed with fore-knowledge of Allagan atrocities, and my experience of the various revelations within the Coils was likely very different from those players who began the Coil series as soon as it landed.

Ironically, the only consistent way for me to rationalise the way my character "experiences" the world through his eyes, is by taking a great deal of liberty with the timeline. That's why having a time bubble is not just convenient, but also critical for my personal immersion into the story.

Imagine if every single side quest is dated and slotted into fixed points in the main story. That would be one of the unintended effects of making clear the passsage of time in the game. It would, in fact, break immersion for me, the same way it annoys me when the story deliberately punts me to far-flung corners of the world in an instant, because this makes Hydaelyn feel like a much smaller place than it should be.

In the end, the argument comes down a fundamental difference in approach to role-playing. Some players want everything spelt out for them. Others, like me, prefer to have as many gaps as possible between the main plot points, so that there's freedom for imagination. Neither side is necessarily wrong or right, but I would strongly suggest that players let the details slide, because otherwise you'd just end up missing the forest for the trees.

There are a couple ways that we could see time advance, either for the whole world or for specific characters. Taking a page from FFIV, a character or characters could wind up in an area where time flows faster. We could chuck Alphi and Ali into the Land of Summoned Monsters and have them pop out as fully-grown adults. This would jive with the whole time-bubble thing, since their age would depend on progression through the Main Scenario; there's no permanently stationed NPCs that would confuse new players.

Another method would be out-and-out time travel. An expansion could introduce a set of zones set in the future, much like FFXI's Wings of the Goddess introduced a number of zones set in the past (and with fully-functional mog mail, to boot! Those moogles are sure talented!). NPCs occupying those zones could be "future" versions of existing NPCs.

It's not impossible that the main scenario could progress the timeline significantly enough to see some changes, further expanding the time bubble, but as has been noted, the amount of work involved would be prohibitive in order to ensure that everyone gets appropriate dialog and sees appropriate scenery depending on where they are in the storyline. Because of this difficulty, I doubt that we'll see this happen, but, again, it's not impossible.

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Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

Imagine if every single side quest is dated and slotted into fixed points in the main story. That would be one of the unintended effects of making clear the passsage of time in the game.

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While it's not forced on you, there are actually several clear indications that sidequests and job quests are intended to take place alongside MSQ of the same level (with the obvious exception of the Lv30-50 quests for Heavensward jobs). A few examples I can think of right now: a Lv15 sidequest chain around Sastasha concludes with dialogue indicating you're just about to go into the caves and confront the pirates. Lv28 quests around Fallgourd Float make reference to the recent sightings of the 'masked man' you're looking for when you go there in the lead-up to Haukke Manor. Lv49 quests in Northern Thanalan are taking place in the leadup to storming Castrum Meridianum. The ARR dragoon questline is undoubtably pre-Heavensward, and the monk questline is pre-Stormblood.

Obviously we take in the game's timeline in very different ways - I look at all these quests and see puzzle pieces that were intended to fit together in a certain way, even if I picked them up out of order, so I need to look at them all and understand the whole picture. If I complete things out of order, that's now "how it happened for me", it means I need to file those events into the point in the MSQ where they happened. eg. I haven't finished the Binding Coil yet - but when I do, it still will have taken place in ARR and not Stormblood.

Instead of hard dating quests, they can use patch number in journal or the MSQ/duty bar. It's win-win. Can still use time bubble but atleast give proper indication to what/when the quests context are. edit: or any sequential number will do really, as long it's clear this set of quests belong in this or that book.

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

Flip side, who is the time bubble harming?

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People who want to know when the Doman rebellion occurred?

But more seriously...

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

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?

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I think I'm the opposite of that: I can see that the story takes place spread out over some time, and to understand fully what the characters are going through, I want to know how much time that would be. What you call a 'cage' is alternately a framework to understand how much time has passed - and how much time characters have spent together even if we don't see it. More reminders that the world maps rightfully take hours or days to traverse, even though for the sake of gameplay it only takes a minute.

A "blank check" can be too blank. If there are fragments and clues, you can pick them up and piece them together so it makes sense. There can be gaps for a creative player to 'fill in', but leave it too wide open, and it's harder to decide what should go there.

As I write this, it occurs to me that another practical reason for disconnecting the story from a proper flow of time is to avoid showing different seasons in the game world, dictated by story progress. Which I guess is inevitable, but it means you lose out on the thematic storytelling that could have been used in some other, more fixed medium. Suppose post-ARR took place in the autumn, time of change, with winter setting in as we're forced to flee to Coerthas? Spring, season of hope and new beginnings, as we bring an end to the Dragonsong War? (And perhaps ARR began in the previous spring. A terribly inexact science for calculating story flow, but I guess it's the best I've got to work with...)

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All that said, having spent some time last night catching up on some early game sidequests around Camp Drybone, I can see the real problem with the time-bubble-vs-progress: it's not about character scripts that can be updated, but little physical things going on in the world. Time has passed for us, but not for the mourner in the church lichyard and the body still yet unburied.

Ideally I'd like to see those sort of things updated, perhaps at the start of the expansion? Then we can accept that whatever was happening in time at the start is still what we'll see happening at the end, but we'll move on to the "next bubble" eventually instead of them being frozen like that forever.

Though perhaps the ARR zones are a bit more 'set hard' in this aspect, while the HW/SB zones have been built with an intent from the start to have areas that can be swapped out for new elements as the story progresses. But going back and rebuilding ARR maps for this would be a lot more work.

Apparantly not even a year between ARR and HW in lore, but for RP I just go by real time. Yes that puts my RP out of sync with in game, but it just makes more sense to RP in real time and ignore the slight hiccup with the msq's timeline.

Same thing in FFXI. The official end of the Crystal War was in 864, and by this post, the current in-game year in FFXI is 1305. But, it's still always 20 years ago.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Same thing in FFXI. The official end of the Crystal War was in 864, and by this post, the current in-game year in FFXI is 1305. But, it's still always 20 years ago.

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Even more amusing, a great number of player characters and virtually all of the NPCs are, by the calendar, centuries old...

I mean there isn't any need for any of the characters to remain the same. The twins can age, they all could if enough time passed in the msq.

It's silly to think otherwise because that is exactly what happens now. A new player doesn't have the same cast of characters an up to date character has.

Barring world changing events there's no need to think time has stopped, it hasn't.

It's been at least a year, I'd think.

I remember there being some throwaway lines about Zenos having taken over the ruling of Ala Mhigo after Gaius's passing one year prior, which is obviously the end of ARR.

My personal headcanon is that each expansion is one year, unless directly stated otherwise (5 years from 1.x to 2.x). I'm not even sure there was any new dialogue post-Stormblood giving an exact timeline on events that transpired pre-Stormblood either (as in, saying the Calamity was still 5 years ago).

I vaguely remember some dialogue in this recent patch (or the previous) indicating that 4 months had passed since Doma had been liberated. Though my memory on that may be faulty.

(Also, does it really take entire months to sail from Eorzea to the Far East? That seems problematic from a logistics standpoint, from ship supplies all the way to exactly what the hell was the Alliance and the XIIth Legion doing in Gyr Abania while we were messing around in Othard? Besides the whole 'capturing Krile' thing.)

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Originally Posted by SaitoHikari

(Also, does it really take entire months to sail from Eorzea to the Far East? That seems problematic from a logistics standpoint, from ship supplies all the way to exactly what the hell was the Alliance and the XIIth Legion doing in Gyr Abania while we were messing around in Othard? Besides the whole 'capturing Krile' thing.)

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Well, sailing from Europe to East Asia when the the highest tech around was sailing vessels was something done often enough in real life. And it took longer to sail from Europe to East Asia then it takes to sail from Eorzea to the Far East (the bulk of Africa isn't in the way). It's also predictable enough that Limosan Pirates regularly raid Garlean ships that far out and for Lolorito to have a business office there. I'd say the logistics of getting to the Far East have been known for quite a while.

And now you know how the British felt about fighting wars in the Americas... The game does say what the Eorzean Alliance was doing during that time. The Resistance had just been decimated by Zenos so they need to recruit more soldiers to fight. Given the state Gyr Abania is in, I could see them needing months to persuade people that signing up with the Alliance/Resistance is a good idea. As for the XIIth Legion, for the first part of the time you're in the East, Zenos isn't in Gyr Abania. He's traveling to the East same as you are, although significantly faster most likely. After you and him fight in Doma, he goes back to Gyr Abania. Given that he doesn't seem to have the Resonance when he fights you in Doma, it seems like this is when he would have gotten it done. So that's a couple months of experimentation, surgery, recovery, and figuring out what the Resonance actually does. Also, Zenos himself admits what he wanted was for the Alliance/Resistance and you to get to Doma. He's not about to make that too difficult...

The Resistance and Alliance had a few skirmishes with the XIIth while the Warrior of Light was in Othard as well, but there were no major engagements.

Remember both that Carvallain has secret ceruleum engines on his boat (so the trip would be faster - around 1 month instead of 2 - 3) and the XIIth wasn't interested in actually winning (so a lack of engagement on the Ala Mhigan front makes sense).

Hm, that is logically sound, actually. I guess I was just always confused at how no major skirmishes had taken place while we were gone, but I didn't consider that Zenos really did not want to make any effort at all in crushing the Alliance in the meantime.

For the purposes of my headcanon, each expansion is around two years, so it's about a year since Stormblood began. This means that the twins are adults. I do sort of wish they'd grow up in canon, because it would be much easier to take Alphinaud seriously if he didn't come up to my lizardboy's navel.