How long has it been since the events of 2.0?

We’ve gone through 3 expansions and the writers haven’t given us any indication of time passing. I would have hard time believing that all of these events happened within a year.

Has time passed?

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Originally Posted by gman1311

We’ve gone through 3 expansions and the writers haven’t given us any indication of time passing. I would have hard time believing that all of these events happened within a year.
Has time passed?

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Don't ask me to find the source of it, but i recall during some fan event (or something similar), Yoshida mentioned something to the effect of the story doesn't operate with a timescale and even though there's seven years of game time, the events just happen back to back after each other and there's no down time in-world between patch and expansion events unless they explicitly say that X time has passed via a narrative drop.
So basically, the whole game simply moves at the speed of plot.

We're currently in a time bubble, so it's anywhere from a month to several years but SE will not acknowledge the passage of time either way. The only time we got definitive proof of time passing was with how long some of the Scion's had been on the First, and with them going back to the Source all those years have basically been reset to zero.

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Originally Posted by gman1311

Has time passed?

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Yes and no. The game exists in a time bubble. Time is still flowing and events are still happening, but the calendar is frozen. That's why the twins are still 16 and the calamity was still "5 years ago" even though 6-7 years worth of events have happened since 2.0.

In my head canon, everything up to now has been at least 3 years, one month. If had to break it up:

All of ARR: six months

All of HW: 1 year

All of Stormblood: A year and a half

-Shb (up to 5.3): 1 month.

I just want to see the twins get their long overdue growth spurt. Please.

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Originally Posted by gman1311

We’ve gone through 3 expansions and the writers haven’t given us any indication of time passing. I would have hard time believing that all of these events happened within a year.

Has time passed?

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Some time has of course passed, but the developers have intentionally been very vague about just how much time has passed.

Best guess is that 2-3 years has passed since the start of ARR, but that is a very rough estimate. Could be less. Probably not much more.

Use the /playtime command.
That much time!

Some people claim they would get confused if while doing a current content quest it said it was 7 years since the Calamity but then they went back and did an ARR content quest and it said it was 5 years since the Calamity. I don't really see how people get confused on that when every other major MMO out there can effectively tell a story with the passage of time, but here we are. So, because of that, the official lore has us stuck in a time bubble (as mentioned) that's perpetually 5 years since the Calamity.

Right this usually comes up a lot in lore forums and the best we got is time bubbles, it really is best not to dwell too much on this point as can cause big lore headaches of trying to fit everything in.

I tend to go by the twins Alphanaud and Alasiae, until they have undergone the Elezen growth spurt, time cannot have progressed more than 4 years (they are 17 and Elezen growth spurts happen around 21 years old) so long as you abide by that timescale go nuts on your own interpretation, just beware the amount of time you give yourself left because the game is still on going and they still ain't looking to be having a growth spurt anytime soon.

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Originally Posted by SenorPatty

In my head canon, everything up to now has been at least 3 years, one month. If had to break it up:

All of ARR: six months

All of HW: 1 year

All of Stormblood: A year and a half

-Shb (up to 5.3): 1 month.

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Some of that is pretty close.

They do a really stupid thing and tell us how long certain actions take (the boat rides we take in Stormblood being a huge one) and then say 'no time has passed'.

Like, we know many, many months happened in the fade to black in that cutscene because YOU WROTE THE LORE THAT SAYS IT DID.

Theres also things like the crystal braves getting formed, trained, accepted by the rest of the continent, then being infiltrated, the time in exile being a substantial amount, the post-stormblood time period being 6+ months between a couple patches (Those Azim'ites took a boat, ect).

Its been a few years.

This is a comic book where the character don't age unless PLOT says so. So no time has passed. We literally go day to day to day to day to day to day. In other words nothing ages. Because SE doesn't want to confuse the plot. The rebirth will always be 5 years ago. If anything I'll say the entire game takes place within 1 year. Your friends being on the first for x number of years don't count because YOU the player/WOL weren't there so for you they only been gone a few days at best. Or if you want what people are saying.. a -time bubble- :/

I thiiiink it's like supposed to be ~6 months of time passing at least? (i remember the boat ride to kugane having a definitive time stamped on the journey's duration)
(also time bubbles don't mean time hasn't passed, it just means that each patch is a self-contained pocket of events, and whenever you go back to a previous patch's content, you essentially go back in time to when the events of that expansion were unfolding and before any other development on related content has occured. Using that one infamous DoH quest paradox as an example.)

I just assume the end of the seventh umbral era and the beginning of the seventh astral era is hydaelyn's version of 2020, where too many things are happening all at once.

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

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Originally Posted by ElazulHP

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

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Worth noting that it only happens if you haven't wrapped up all his ARR quests. You are personally creating a snarl in the timeline by not resolving things when they were supposed to happen.

Likewise, there's a point in the lead-up to Stormblood where Nero is in Mor Dhona... and if you didn't start the CT quests yet, so he's still standing outside the Rising Stones in a paper-thin disguise, you can actually find him in two places on the same map at once.

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Originally Posted by Barraind

Some of that is pretty close.

They do a really stupid thing and tell us how long certain actions take (the boat rides we take in Stormblood being a huge one) and then say 'no time has passed'.

Like, we know many, many months happened in the fade to black in that cutscene because YOU WROTE THE LORE THAT SAYS IT DID.

Theres also things like the crystal braves getting formed, trained, accepted by the rest of the continent, then being infiltrated, the time in exile being a substantial amount, the post-stormblood time period being 6+ months between a couple patches (Those Azim'ites took a boat, ect).

Its been a few years.

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We also know the ride from Gridania to Horizon takes one full day on chocobo, if said chocobo is going full tilt and has no breaks according to one NPC in Horizon who made the journey. Eventually the time bubble shenanigans just aren't going to hold much water anymore since like you said they keep giving us distance measurements, but then are very glib about how they actually apply.

There is a variety of reasons as to why there's no definitive passage of time, starting from the fact they'll need to tweak all the NPCs (who mention Calamity events per se and maybe some others) dialogues along the way of you doing your MSQ (and this alone is a huge amount of work, which I think Yoshida or Koji Fox mentioned during one of the Fan Fasts or LLs); finishing with the fact that different players may have different thoughts on how much time passed since the beginning and developers may just not want to interfere with players' RP now that the game is 7 years old since 2.0 release. That said, there are still some mentions of passage of time in various quests both in MSQ and Side Quests (the travel to Kugane took more than month; almost all NPCs from Crafting/Gathering questlines mention few moons, which is few months, passing between quests of different levels; etc).

Logically guessing, there are most likely few years passed since the moment we enter first city, because there are a lot of events that physically cannot happen in a single light day (and they aren't mentioned as such in dialogues either). If we will also count some lore in that though, it would be less than 4 years, because twins still look like teenagers, and from lore we know that Elezens grow drastically in their 20s, and since there's no changes in their look, they're still under this age (but this is just placing the time passage into technical nuances of the game we have, not an actual truth). All in all, you're free to decide how much time passed by yourself. The most common options I saw among players is either 1 or 2 years for each expansion, so basically from 3 up to 6 years from beginning of ARR to the end of SB, and some additional months for ShB since it's not finished yet. But there are also players that just decide to go along with plot without defining the strict passage of time.

For me, I personally adhere to eat x.1 patch being roughly 2~3 months of time passing. Reason I think this is that they always refer to you as if lots of time has passed since last seeing you. Cid calls you old friend when you show up to do Crystal Tower, even though nowadays you can do it immediately after Praetorium events within the same in-game day lol.

As for 2~3 months specfically, it's because in Heavensward when you are invited to dinner with Aymeric, the Fortemps man who passes along the message for you do so exclaims that it has been, "Several moons!" which as others have said is months.

Of course, if we wanted to get literal we could calculate it based on how long it takes in real time to complete the MSQ without skipping cutscenes. This of course, still depends on queue times for duties, but why we can still calculate it is because the in game time doesn't top ticking. One hour of real time is one day within the game, I think. Surely, someone has the exact time ratio, but we will go with that for now.

If you only do MSQs, last I heard before the 5.3 skimming of ARR, it took roughly 250 hours real time to get to the start of Shadowbringers for a newbie. That's 250 days in game time, which is about 8.5 months. Of course, if you do all side content, as encouraged by the time it takes them to develop patches, then it's easy to add another 100 or so hours, depending on a lot of stuff like queue times, PF start to fill times, and actual duty completions. Actually add in Shadowbringers, and we're likely sitting happily at about 1.5 years. Honestly, still doesn't feel like enough time passing to me, but then again, I don't even know what moons passing or years passing in game actually means for the planet we're on, since they celebrate seasonal festivals in the identical seasons to our own, despite time being massively condensed.

There's really no hard answer until they give us one, and they will not give us one, because that means they will have to change character appearances, answer more than one question about it ad nauseum, and all that jazz. I definitely agree with the waiting for the twins to age marker. Though I simultaneously find it weird that there's no sex differences between time intervals for Elezen growth spurts. You'd think Alisaie would get tall first and we'd get to see her rub it in on poor Alphi-boy.