Where is [Spoiler]?

So given there was the (not)subtle return of Gaius van Bealsar and his plot dump of a new ascian/what he has been doing/what happened to Alphinaud that came with 4.5 he seems suspiciously absent from anything related to Shadowbringers even Varis is absent from it all but at least with him the writers have hinted he may die soon with Gaius it feels like he's there and they have no clue on him for now.
What are your thoughts on Gaius whereabouts?

I guess it depends a lot on your take about the location of the next expansion.

Given that some prominent theories are time travel and/or visiting another shard... Then it would mean that Varis and Shadowhunter would both be somewhere (Somewhen?) on the Source while we're off doing Shadowbringers stuff.

Though, it is slightly odd that Garlemald was given such a short overlook, after seemingly hyping up the fact that we'd have to go there (Though, I suppose now that Alphinaud has returned, that seems less likely)

So yeah... At a guess, after we beat up Zenos again and likely shut down the encroaching army (Since, I don't think morale would be too high after we beat Zenos a second time...) we go off to do ShB content. With Varis having a hissy fit that even an Ascian in his son's body failed to beat the WoL and that his army isn't able to take back Gyr Abania while Shadowhunter goes back to hunting Ascians while we're gone.

Possibly some arc occurs where Varis starts to see the Ascians failing as a sign that maybe his grand plan of "The One True Race" is kind of silly (But then again, illusions of grandeur are a thing when the Emperor's get literally worshipped...)

I really would like to see the next xpac cover the other shards, because it really does make more of an impact imo. I mean is it better to rejoin all the worlds, what effect does our issues have on other shards? I mean time travel does too, but since HW actually had visitors from another shard, what are those other worlds like? It was really a teaser to what those Shards were, and I think it would be great if ShB goes into more depth.

"Killing" Gaius twice seems cheap imo.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

What are your thoughts on Gaius whereabouts?

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I haven't been thinking too hard about it because the stingers throughout Stormblood all seem to have a very delayed payoff. They seem to be following the Griffin formula; rather than hyping us for what's coming soon(ish), they've been giving us brief snippets of context from "the other side" as we went about our year-and-a-half march towards where it all comes together.

Elidibus is on his way to us, Solus is on his way to the First, Varis is trying to pull a Thordan, Zenos is coming at Ghimlyt sideways, and I just tell myself "Gaius is exactly where he thinks he needs to be."

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Originally Posted by Kalise

I guess it depends a lot on your take about the location of the next expansion.

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And what a ride trying to figure that out has been. "It's time to take down the Garlean Empire!" ... but there have been zero hints pointing towards Ilsabard ... but they won't tell us where any of the areas are ... but Solus is clearly going to the First ... and then there's the Voice. So I go into the Keynote thinking, "Okay, I hope this helps us narrow it down. Is Ilsabard just getting Light-scourged into the 'messed up world'? Or are we going to the First? Or is Dalmasca involved? Is it a Before/After time travel thing?" and what do I get? What looks to be Mesoamerican and Old West architecture supplemented by an armadillo. So add the New World to the possibility mix.

I feel like somewhere around 3.5 we went from being spoon-fed foreshadowing you couldn't miss to being hit with foreshadow buckshot and addition retcons new revelations. "Who is going to accidentally guess correctly?"

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

I really would like to see the next xpac cover the other shards, because it really does make more of an impact imo.

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I waffle on this one a lot.

Final Fantasy is a franchise about saving the world you know and love against all odds and challengers. I think that's why it tends to feel cheap when they bring in alternate dimensions and timelines that make your world smaller and less significant with (cosmologically speaking) less at stake.

FFXIV seems to have tried to mitigate this a bit. They admitted up front that "the (one) universe" was broken and now there are (fourteen) dimensional planes. Alexander seemed to show us that time long before us and time long after us was set in stone unless manipulated from the outside, changing the past, present, and future all at once depending on your individual chronological locale.

Changing or adding to these already-extant things rather than making use of them in a novel way risks cheapening the world or further convoluting the setting - something every Final Fantasy game is wont to do (to its own detriment at times), especially in the final few chapters, lol.

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Originally Posted by QT_Melon

"Killing" Gaius twice seems cheap imo.

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I could live with it, if he died in consistency with his own character in a way that completed his story. As organic as the world is, the story and its people definitely follow traditional dramatic arcs. Gaius's first "death" didn't jibe very well with the big picture. You could make it fit with 1.0, or 1.23, or 2.0 alone. But all three together felt weird, and unbecoming of what he was supposed to represent. With those affairs in order, I wouldn't be totally against a good death.

Ironically, SE could have - without bringing him back - used addition-retcons to retroactively explain his behavior in context of the more recently written lore about the Populares / Optimates polarization, looming death of the Emperor, and larger Ascian machination. (No matter who won, Gaius as we knew him was going to lose.)

But this is more fun.

I'm mostly wondering where Elf Zenos is at. You teased him like three patches ago SE, where is he? Hope he shows up in part 2 of 4.5 msq.

Personally think Black Rose is used at the Ghimlyt dark really early in the expansion (thinking WW1) the alliance weathers it. However I don't see them pushing into empire lands yet. During Stromblood they didnt push into Gyr Abania straight away at the as it would be seen as invasion.

Instead I see "our character" is sent on a MSQ quest of a clandestine mission to destroy the new factory of Black Rose which we do with Gaius and Shinobi that takes you to see a little of the new Othard zones. In the usual splitting of MSQ in the early expansion MSQ (ARR/HW/StB all have a little split in the start)

Gaius its problaby states that the empire made Black Rose as a response to thinking the effect of the Green Wraith in Black Shroud was a aetherchemical attack by Gridania, he quickly learned otherwise and had the work on Black Rose stopped.

After that Gaius is put back in the box till MSQ 5.X

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

I waffle on this one a lot.

Final Fantasy is a franchise about saving the world you know and love against all odds and challengers. I think that's why it tends to feel cheap when they bring in alternate dimensions and timelines that make your world smaller and less significant with (cosmologically speaking) less at stake.

FFXIV seems to have tried to mitigate this a bit. They admitted up front that "the (one) universe" was broken and now there are (fourteen) dimensional planes. Alexander seemed to show us that time long before us and time long after us was set in stone unless manipulated from the outside, changing the past, present, and future all at once depending on your individual chronological locale.

Changing or adding to these already-extant things rather than making use of them in a novel way risks cheapening the world or further convoluting the setting - something every Final Fantasy game is wont to do (to its own detriment at times), especially in the final few chapters, lol.

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To be fair, the entire Ascian plot has kept bringing in other shards on the regular. Due to their master plan being to rejoin enough of the other shards to awaken Papa Zody. So whenever we hear about another shard being lost and so get closer to the Ascians goal, it keeps us interested in what's happening to them.

In addition to this, it also sets up convenient places where we can get tons of new content while fighting against the odds to do the impossible - I.e. Reversing a flood of light/darkness to save a world. Or even going to the Thirteenth and 'Saving' the Voidsent from their mutation (Or at the very least, helping to create a civilisation by allowing some Voidsent to regain their higher functioning minds back, so while some would continue to be mindless monsters travelling the shards to nom on some Aether, there would also be those that would become allies to other races)

Of course, it can be hard to justify too much content on other shards, because at the end of the day, the Source is the primary world we know, which has eons of lore attached to it that is meaningful to us (Since calamities have shaped the world, often literally) but having some arcs take place on other shards could easily be done and could link back to the Source (Such as how it seems that the First's situation is having an effect on the Aether of the Source, thinning it out)

The main issue would be to not overuse the means of travelling to other shards/through time. Since that's when you start to complicate things and create a ton of plotholes such as "Why don't we just go back in time and beat up Solus before he creates the Imperial Empire?"

The problem with including other Shards is that so far all methods of traveling between shards stem back to having the Echo and using it to keep your soul together past your first bodily death and then use it to posses other people's bodies (dead or alive) on the Shard you are traveling too. It's not some nice convent thing you can just do on a whim for the heck of it (like to do random open world content like we do in the current zones). I'm not saying that SE can't come up with different ways to travel between Shards that don't involved essentially commuting suicide. But so far, all travel between Shards has been presented as something that involves going against the natural order of the world and at the moment, that's not something I'd want to be doing. The world is broken enough as it is; I don't want to break it even more. If we do travel between Shards (or back in Time) there had better be one hell of a good explanation as to why we are doing it.

Even we could go to different Shards though, nothing in the new zones we have seen looks like anything we couldn't find on Hydaelyn. Ilsabard is as big as Othard is. And we know even less about what exactly is in Ilsabard then we knew about what was in Othard. The only thing I'd say we know for sure about Ilsabard is that Garlemald is in the far north of it and we've yet to even make it into southern Ilsabard. The entire continent is essentially one giant question mark. And that goes for the New World as well.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

The problem with including other Shards is that so far all methods of traveling between shards stem back to having the Echo and using it to keep your soul together past your first bodily death and then use it to posses other people's bodies (dead or alive) on the Shard you are traveling too.

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Thats not fully true... we could enter the World of Darkness, the former 13th shard. There might be ways.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Thats not fully true... we could enter the World of Darkness, the former 13th shard. There might be ways.

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Voidsent travel between shards all the time.

Heck, when we defeat them, they go back to the 13th.

Otherwise, they portal their way from the 13th to our world when they sense tasty aether to nom on.

The 13th Shard is broken on a fundamental level. So how the 13 Shard works probably isn't how the rest of the Shards work. However, even Voidsent follow a very similar process to the Ascians when they come to the Source.

Voidsent can't make a portal to the Source without someone on the Source summoning them. They don't just travel to the Source randomly. Once they are on the Source, all Voidsent have to posses some kind of physical form from the Source so they can interact with it. Different kinds of Voidsent like different kinds of bodies. So you'll get everything from Voidsent possessing eyeballs to Voidsent possessing sculptures to Voidsent possessing humans. "Killing Voidsent" isn't actually killing Voidsent; instead, we kill the physical form they are possessing which sends the voidsent back to the Void.

The "portal" we used to get into the 13th Shard is a result of Xande making a pact and trying to summon the Cloud of Darkness. Only the portal for a Voidsent that powerful required so much energy from Dalamud that the Crystal Tower couldn't contain it and caused the 4th Umbral Calamity in the process. And the goal of that was for the Cloud of Darkness to absorb all the aether from the Source to destroy it. At the end of the Crystal Tower raid, Xande's pact with the Cloud of Darkness is undone and the portal is finally shut.

In order to get to the Void, we'd probably have to re-summon a Voidsent on par with the Cloud of Darkness again and then somehow find enough energy to open a portal to the 13 Shard. Only... the last time that was done... we got an Umbral Calamity in the process...

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

The problem with including other Shards is that so far all methods of traveling between shards stem back to having the Echo and using it to keep your soul together past your first bodily death and then use it to posses other people's bodies (dead or alive) on the Shard you are traveling too. It's not some nice convent thing you can just do on a whim for the heck of it (like to do random open world content like we do in the current zones). I'm not saying that SE can't come up with different ways to travel between Shards that don't involved essentially commuting suicide. But so far, all travel between Shards has been presented as something that involves going against the natural order of the world and at the moment, that's not something I'd want to be doing. The world is broken enough as it is; I don't want to break it even more. If we do travel between Shards (or back in Time) there had better be one hell of a good explanation as to why we are doing it.

Even we could go to different Shards though, nothing in the new zones we have seen looks like anything we couldn't find on Hydaelyn. Ilsabard is as big as Othard is. And we know even less about what exactly is in Ilsabard then we knew about what was in Othard. The only thing I'd say we know for sure about Ilsabard is that Garlemald is in the far north of it and we've yet to even make it into southern Ilsabard. The entire continent is essentially one giant question mark. And that goes for the New World as well.

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While I agree with the sentiment about not wanting to break the world further, once you had CG party WoD come over to greet a now 1 WoL (what the heck happened to CG party on our realm??? - which has me irritated story wise but that's besides the point) it already gave viewers an idea of wanting to see more of this.

That said, it shouldn't become a regular part of the plot where you can just willy nilly your way through shards.

I'm not sure about the second part of the argument, just because you can find it on the source, we shouldn't visit another world? Isn't the shard just reflections anyways? Either or is neither here nor there for an argument one way or the other. I mean should the WoD come in with dayglo subligars, 8 arms and hammer pants because they were just another shard world and we shouldn't see the same kind of thing we could find on Source world?

It being extremely difficult is one thing, saying that we shouldn't go because we can find it on the Source is another thing.

Also as far as Gaius goes, yes sure if it comes to a good arc, but I think people were still upset about a little leader that took some weird turn from the end of 2.0 into HW.

Right now this invasion of the body snatchers plotline is a bit much as well.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

I'm mostly wondering where Elf Zenos is at. You teased him like three patches ago SE, where is he? Hope he shows up in part 2 of 4.5 msq.

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The trailer more or less confirmed he's going to show up when we go to confront Elidibus in part 2...though considering that he's on the floor in one of the scenes things probably aren't going to go too swimmingly for him.

I hope he goes out with a bang instead of a whimper in any case.

I'm not sure the void counts as inter-shard travel. The shard that was there is now not; that's the point. Usually, the dimensional planes have a membrane between them that's reinforced from both sides by two separate aether-rich worlds. Breaking through that barrier is nigh impossible, and (as far as we know), the instant you actually manage to break through, the distinction between the worlds is undone, the membrane collapses, and the "reflection" is "deleted".

The way we've seen this circumvented thus far is to die, transcend the flesh, and somehow ride through the crystals outside of the Source, into a transitional something and then into another shard.

With the Thirteenth, you only need to cut through the Source-side membrane and swagger directly into the empty, and even that takes a profound amount of energy.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I hope he goes out with a bang instead of a whimper in any case.

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I think he has to go out with a bang, or there wasn't a point to having him "survive" in the first place.

I feel like transcending the flesh might be the only actual requirement for inter-shard travel considering what happened to the Scions and that the "having to die" part was just something the Ascians made up because getting rid of more WoLs is always a plus if it's not going to throw off the balance.

I'm curious about what exactly happened to the Scions after they arrived at their destination considering their disembodied state, though...

"Transcending the flesh" is a euphemism for dying. Or at least, the first requirement of death in the FFXIV world; that is, a souls becoming separate from its material body. The second part of death is when the soul goes back to the Aetheria Sea/the Lifestream. The Ascians and the WoD (and anyone else who would travel between Shards) would not do the second part. Preventing the second part is probably impossible if the soul in question does not have the Echo.

The Scions have not "transcended the flesh" as their bodies are still attached to their souls and are sill properly alive. Their souls just aren't in their bodies at the moment. Which suggests they are still on the Source. What is very weird is that their souls are not anywhere souls usually are (lost in the Aetherial Sea like when Y'shtola used Flow, or something of that nature). There's also the fact that the Scions do not have the Echo, so even if they were to "transcend the flesh" their souls would probably do what everyone else's souls do when they die and just go back to the Aetherial Sea and be turned back into raw aether. That is what Krile was looking for with Matoya's Crystal Eye in 4.5 Part 1 and found that the Scions souls had not dissipated into aether; they'd "simply" somehow left the Aetherial Sea.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

"Transcending the flesh" is a euphemism for dying. Or at least, the first requirement of death in the FFXIV world; that is, a souls becoming separate from its material body.

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It seems to be used as a euphemism, but I'm not sure that death is actually required.

The lorebook (vol.1, p.15) uses the term "transcend" to describe the powers of the Echo.

"The Power to Transcend Words" and understand all languages.

"The Power to Transcend Time" and witness visions from the past.

"The Power to Transcend Worlds" - "Though rare, there have also been cases reported of individuals who, through the manifestation of Hydaelyn's very Light, can walk the aetherial plane and communicate directly with the planet Herself."

So it seems that our visions of the Mothercrystal may be at least part of the way towards inter-shard travel, with our spirit moving out of our body. It seems that we remain physically in place during these visions, according to other characters who witness them.

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Originally Posted by ObsidianFire

Voidsent can't make a portal to the Source without someone on the Source summoning them. They don't just travel to the Source randomly.

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While many Voidsent are summoned to the Source, not all of them are.

There's things such as during the SB WHM quests where Voidsent portal themselves in to try and feed of the Padjal's uncontrolled Aether. There's places like Haukke Manor which become infested with Voidsent without anyone actively summoning them (Unlike, say, Tam-Tara hard), you have open world areas such as Northern Thanalan where Voidsent appear and gather seemingly at random.

This suggests that Voidsent CAN come to the Source of their own volition, though, I suspect there's some limitations to it, such as them being unable to CHOOSE to come to specifically the Source and instead just sense high levels of Aether and go to it completely oblivious to what shard it is on. Meanwhile summoning would be more direct travel, allowing specific entities to be brought to specific shards (As seen by the many times people summon big bad demons to fight against us)

As far as the "needing to possess a body" thing goes, I'm a little confused on that. Since, for example, in BLM and RDM quests, there are times when enemies open up portals and giant Chimera's come through. With no evidence of having any bodies around (Certainly not giant Chimera ones). I mean, these instances of summoning suggest that these Voidsent are coming through the portals body and all (Though, I suppose it could be a case of artistic licence where devs didn't feel the need to keep putting various bodies around the place for Voidsent to inhabit)

The lorebook section on voidsent explains how the "needing a body" thing works. There are basically two ways that a voidsent can leave the void: coming through a voidgate (whether naturally formed or deliberately created to summon a voidsent) in its own body, or just its soul can pass through and possess "a 'vessel' provided by the summoner". The "soul method" requires a smaller hole than an entire body, so larger voidsent are easier to summon this way.

Natural aetherial tears are rarely large enough to let major voidsent through, although "in the years leading up to and following the Calamity, the barrier between the two planes has grown weak, resulting in larger and more frequent tears".

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

I'm not sure the void counts as inter-shard travel. The shard that was there is now not; that's the point. Usually, the dimensional planes have a membrane between them that's reinforced from both sides by two separate aether-rich worlds. Breaking through that barrier is nigh impossible, and (as far as we know), the instant you actually manage to break through, the distinction between the worlds is undone, the membrane collapses, and the "reflection" is "deleted".

The way we've seen this circumvented thus far is to die, transcend the flesh, and somehow ride through the crystals outside of the Source, into a transitional something and then into another shard.

With the Thirteenth, you only need to cut through the Source-side membrane and swagger directly into the empty, and even that takes a profound amount of energy.

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If it is possible to travel bodily to the Void, perhaps that would be a way to travel bodily to a Shard - VIA the Void? While the door is now closed (the Crystal Tower), it was apparently possible to travel bodily to the Void, as we did in the World of Darkness raid. Might it then be possible to travel bodily from there to one of the other shards?

I guess it depends in part on whether there even IS a connection between the Void and the other Shards. It's entirely possible that the Thirteen Shards share a border with the Source, but NOT with one another. Have we at any point heard whether Voidsent can travel to anywhere ASIDE from the Source?

It's possible the Source is special, in that regard. Perhaps even Ascians cannot travel directly from Shard to Shard, but need to pass through the Source on the way...