Idyllshire: Expanded

I think FF14 should do what WoW started doing and have a "time travel" (or some other way) thing so that we can actually have Idyllshire expand into the whole of the Hinterlands while still allowing people to "time travel" and do the previous content there. (I'm probably not making sense, I'm sorry)

I love the idea but I also would like to have time travel.. at least in a general sense of "if I kill my grandfather what will happen" be out of it as much as possible. For example, imo, using Echo you might get away from that- a player who has progressed say Ishgard restoration may activate their echo memories to see previous stages (but they did not travel in time per say, and if they did any quests they missed or whatever it would be suggested that you had always done those quests and were just remember doing them- there was no altering of the timeline).

Idea bred a bit from having fun with the idea we were a primal's primal lol but why our time is all messy (basically there is a time bubble), I ran with the idea that there is not simply one of us (you) and that you appear in multiple places (and times) at once but as a player (in real life) you witness these events linearly (but to your character is a jumble). We don't age, we simply exist through time at multiple points, but we don't "travel" in time like you might think of in Chrono Trigger either. They all happen "now" for you but each character you interact with time flows normally. (Also I'm not suggesting the primal nonsense is absolutely a thing / needed, it's just fun to go conspiracy / wild wacky theories sometimes as a "what if / could be" game - my point on relying on echo stands though).

Anyway I just really want to avoid "why not go back in time and strangle Zenos with a phenoix down" sort of stuff. Or like if we're winning why doesn't X bad guy do that to us. Etc. Etc. until suddenly it's a massive mess of why nots.

So anyway, would love to see zones continue to make huge shifts (and even larger) and I feel utilizing echo and other concepts to allow players to visit phases would be nice (like I feel Ishgard restoration maximal progress should be driven by the community but the actual current state should be driven by each specific player, echo then would help distinguish different states and how you might interact with them based on circumstance). Just hopefully be very careful with Chrono Trigger like 'time travel'. (I mean I still liked that game but for me time travel is something to accept from the onset, or to be done AMAZINGLY well, or just attempted to be avoided all together- like the Harry Potter time travel was just "......but y though?").

More on a content thought of it, I liked the FATE system added in ShB and thought it could turn into a more zone based system (married to some other concepts at the same time) to create a zone tier like master system. You'd have after X MSQ, side quest, and or beast tribe these evolutions to the zone that might add new paths, npcs, buildings, areas, etc. Naturally that'd use some phasing similar to beast tribes. Have to be careful to use so much phasing that you have to actually phase players of whole zones... (although given some sort of echo shifting concept you might get away with more, so long as the base 'state' of the zone is the one everyone shares for easy group play, hunts, and such).

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Originally Posted by Shougun

I love the idea but I also would like to have time travel.. at least in a general sense of "if I kill my grandfather what will happen" be out of it as much as possible. For example, imo, using Echo you might get away from that- a player who has progressed say Ishgard restoration may activate their echo memories to see previous stages (but they did not travel in time per say, and if they did any quests they missed or whatever it would be suggested that you had always done those quests and were just remember doing them- there was no altering of the timeline).

Idea bred a bit from having fun with the idea we were a primal's primal lol but basically why our time is all messy (basically there is a time bubble), I ran with the idea that there is not simply one of us (you) and that you appear in multiple places at once but as a player (in real life) you witness these events linearly (but to your character is a jumble). We don't age, we simply exist through time at multiple points, but we don't "travel" in time like you might think of in Chrono Trigger either. They all happen "now" for you but each character you interact with time flows normally. (Also I'm not suggesting the primal nonsense is absolutely a thing / needed, it's just fun to go conspiracy / wild wacky theories sometimes as a "what if / could be" game - my point on relying on echo stands though).

Anyway I just really want to avoid "why not go back in time and strangle Zenos with a phenoix down" sort of stuff. Or like if we're winning why doesn't X bad guy do that to us. Etc. Etc. until suddenly it's a massive mess of why nots.

So anyway, would love to see zones continue to make huge shifts (and even larger) and I feel utilizing echo and other concepts to allow players to visit phases would be nice (like I feel Ishgard restoration maximal progress should be driven by the community but the actual current state should be driven by each specific player, echo then would help distinguish different states and how you might interact with them based on circumstance). Just hopefully be very careful with Chrono Trigger like 'time travel'. (I mean I still liked that game but for me time travel is something to accept from the onset, or to be done AMAZINGLY well, or just attempted to be avoided all together- like the Harry Potter time travel was just "......but y though?").

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Yeah, just so people can still do things like FATEs, Leves, Quests, and other stuff that involves the current version of Idyllshire and the Hinterlands.

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Originally Posted by Styrmwyda

Yeah, just so people can still do things like FATEs, Leves, Quests, and other stuff that involves the current version of Idyllshire and the Hinterlands.

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Absolutely an important consideration! I don't really like content dying myself, and of course I do like big changes / remixes to environments. Would be very neat to see the past (memories) or future (evolution) of environments.

From the way time travel works in the game so far, it's not something we can just do lightly. It requires a massive input of aether and if you go to the past there's a risk of irreversibly changing something and splitting the timeline - in which case, at least as far as I can picture it, you're never going to be able to get back to your own time again. (You could travel forward an equivalent amount of time, but at best you'd find yourself in a mostly familiar situation but face-to-face with your other self who is native to this new timeline.)

If you travel to the past and don't break anything, you end up with a stable time loop like in Alexander.

Travelling to the future might be safer, as theres no risk of breaking the timeline by preventing something you know should have happened, but there's still the issue of powering it. It's not something you do on a whim, at least as far as we know it in the game.

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Originally Posted by Shougun

like the Harry Potter time travel was just "......but y though?"

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Harry Potter was one of my favourite uses of time travel for Fun With Stable Time Loops. I like how the second time around fitted into the first while totally changing their understanding of what happened.

I'd love for npcs and maybe some structures be phased with those in the msq coming back. To get away from having to change an entire pve area, they could add another exit towards the back. In the same way we enter gyr abania through the shroud.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Harry Potter was one of my favourite uses of time travel for Fun With Stable Time Loops. I like how the second time around fitted into the first while totally changing their understanding of what happened.

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All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.


Maybe how that specific section might work well for you but to me it just opened up way too many cans of sand worms. Way too easy, vague warning, given to kids, at first for a pretty LOL reason (here kid a super dangerous tool, go take some extra classes), etc.. big nope from me lol. Although I generally am not impressed with the use of time mechanics in stories, as they seemed they didn't need it and most usually just create more questions and problems that have no interesting solutions.



Not that I haven't been impressed or just went with it because because... But I've no eagerness to see someone leap into that :p. To me it usually just reads as a gimmick to make things superficially more convoluted or 'deeper' (but without actually obtaining value from that over just being extra to be extra). So it isn't a sin I guess (sometimes it's funny to see how wacky the rabbit hole can get), but as I said, I don't often cheer for the usage or find it added much value (I could have done without that whole bit in harry potter, giving children time turners... Yikes, to me. Just hand them the complete deathly hallows while we are at it, lol.)

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Originally Posted by Shougun

All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.

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True; it's been years since I read it but I don't recall giving the wider picture any thought.

I guess you could rationalise it with the time-turners being very carefully kept and perhaps exceedingly hard to make, but... still.

Okay, revise my previous statement: despite the surrounding logic of why they were allowed to do it, the immediate sequence of events while time-travelling is clever and well-constructed. Dont make me look closer at it.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

From the way time travel works in the game so far, it's not something we can just do lightly. It requires a massive input of aether and if you go to the past there's a risk of irreversibly changing something and splitting the timeline - in which case, at least as far as I can picture it, you're never going to be able to get back to your own time again. (You could travel forward an equivalent amount of time, but at best you'd find yourself in a mostly familiar situation but face-to-face with your other self who is native to this new timeline.)

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Also note that in WoW, you can't actually change anything in the areas you can go back in time in, it is just there so you can experience certain zones before their major changes and do content that would otherwise no longer be available to your character once they went past the event in the story.

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Originally Posted by Styrmwyda

Also note that in WoW, you can't actually change anything in the areas you can go back in time in, it is just there so you can experience certain zones before their major changes and do content that would otherwise no longer be available to your character once they went past the event in the story.

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Question is how would we go back and forth? WoW has the easy, lore compliant answer in the form of the adorable Chromie.

But...what content would that be?
I mean, I'd like to be able to see the old Iddylshire, for sure.
I just don't understand which piece of content you are referring to.
The Ishgard restoration fates would be the only thing I can think about, but even if you go back to time, this is not a thing you'd be able to easily re-clear solo. And there is no way that a massive amount of people would join you to rebuild something that would not reward them with anything...

And if you are just speaking about a theoretical world where Iddyl map will be merged into the hinterlands, that won't happen unless they do a calamity/apocalypse followed by A Realm Re-Reborn, which I doubt they will do anytime soon. If they do that it's not Iddylshire that would need to be reconsidered, but the whole game. Considering how they "complained" about the work that was needed to enable flying in ARR, I don't think they would ever want to remake the whole world...
And if there is no such calamity happening, there are probably too many things in Iddylshire for them to simply merge it with the Hinterlands just to get rid of a loading screen IMO. (Khloe, the two weekly delivery NPCs, all the relic quests, all those merchants, all the actual quests happening in Iddyl that would need to be "relocated").
Honestly, I'd rather just have a quest to build an Aetheryte in the hinterlands than merging those two maps...

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Originally Posted by Garnix

But...what content would that be?
I mean, I'd like to be able to see the old Iddylshire, for sure.
I just don't understand which piece of content you are referring to.
The Ishgard restoration fates would be the only thing I can think about, but even if you go back to time, this is not a thing you'd be able to easily re-clear solo. And there is no way that a massive amount of people would join you to rebuild something that would not reward them with anything...

And if you are just speaking about a theoretical world where Iddyl map will be merged into the hinterlands, that won't happen unless they do a calamity/apocalypse followed by A Realm Re-Reborn, which I doubt they will do anytime soon. If they do that it's not Iddylshire that would need to be reconsidered, but the whole game. Considering how they "complained" about the work that was needed to enable flying in ARR, I don't think they would ever want to remake the whole world...
And if there is no such calamity happening, there are probably too many things in Iddylshire for them to simply merge it with the Hinterlands just to get rid of a loading screen IMO. (Khloe, the two weekly delivery NPCs, all the relic quests, all those merchants, all the actual quests happening in Iddyl that would need to be "relocated").
Honestly, I'd rather just have a quest to build an Aetheryte in the hinterlands than merging those two maps...

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There are multiple quests in Idyllshire and the Hinterlands about wanting to expand Idyllshire to the rest of the Hinterlands.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

Question is how would we go back and forth? WoW has the easy, lore compliant answer in the form of the adorable Chromie.

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Echo. echo.. echo... :D

You can see the past with Echo and some users of Echo have seen the future.

If you wanted to give it a very strong cave of time vibe, not sure why but just to say we can lol, rather here it would be Cid's cave of time (feat. Mikoto perhaps). Through magitek and echo you're able to interface with the future or past in a limited simulation capacity. You can bring things back as the magitek devices scan the items aether and then recreate them (you're not literally taking items back or forward in time, just recreating them). Interactions are limited and simulated (and obviously not actually going to affect the timeline, 'as much' lol).

Although like I said in the first page I would be more for the player doesn't travel through time but just technically views / recalls time non-linearly. So you might be in Ishgard at the year 2031, meanwhile in Gridania everything is on fire in the year 2020, but actions done in Gridania's don't ripple through like a time traveler (to Ishgard's view whatever was in 2020 was in 2020). If you wanted to take that one step further (rather than just funky memory + echo)- then maybe a visualization of that would be the WoL is a sun with their rays beaming down onto the timeline (the rays don't move up and down the timeline as they all radiate out from the sun, there is no time travel - you touch down onto the timeline from the point outside of the timeline and no ray returns and then bounces back down again to interact with another, the WoL exists as one blip of great radiance - the echo facilitating a sense of recollection for each ray), of course that begins to call forth some god like imagery (outside of time, etc), or at least some sort of interdimensional/outerdimensional being, but I'm okay with that- we're already basically on that path to be a god killer as is the ancient tradition of jRPGs lol. Extra Nomura points if you're the thing that caused Ascians to lose control :p (by entering the dimension/sudden introduction of your existence caused creation magic to fracture, the great terrible sound, the echo source, all you baby ;)).

Coming back down to a bit less out there thoughts- Without actual time travel they could have shattered / false memories too if SE wanted to play with the idea of time travel without making it 'time travel', like in Chrono Trigger if you do something in the past it can affect the future - here perhaps they keep that fun part of time but it's represented rather through your mind trying to make sense of this madness (and there is /technically/ only one solution but you may have difficultly seeing straight until you recall everything properly). Divergent timelines 'could' be represented through mental stress, with only one truth (so no actual time travel) lol. Especially could create interesting story if we keep somehow getting stronger and stronger, might suggest 'actual' changes occur but again are not technically through time travel but just the enormous amount of energy your character contains and it leaking out making thoughts reality and perhaps with a bit of community faith / thoughts (just like a.... a certain.. something something.... lol, "the tree was always red... wasn't it....? You think, and the towns folk think it would be cool too" no it wasn't red before, but it is now! :p).

In terms of in game example there is a cooking quest that can happen that relates to a MSQ that may have happened already. But the suggestion isn't that you changed time, but simply viewed it non-linearly. Making the player sort of a being outside of time (I like to take that a bit further and say it's why we don't age either, just sprinkling the time bubble with cannon xD), while still avoiding like "yo WoL since you can manipulate time why don't you just go back and hug Zenos as a kid so he's not so bad".

(Yes I will go through lengths to avoid actual regular time travel, that most 'timeline' affecting, "what if I kill my grandfather" / "why hasn't the superior technological enemy ripped the rug from underneath me", mechanics! lol). Not that I'd riot if they did exist (I still watch/read/play stuff that sometimes uses it, obviously lol), just a preference to treat that whole concept with greater than dalamud levels of massive caution.

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Originally Posted by Styrmwyda

There are multiple quests in Idyllshire and the Hinterlands about wanting to expand Idyllshire to the rest of the Hinterlands.

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I'd love to see some sort of natural change, like if you had a cute stream in the 'present' but in the far future that's a giant canyon. Mountains are a desert, etc. OF course for Idyllshire it's more about seeing that expansion of civilization, so that'd be the focus for that- was just thinking for other areas.

Or you know seeing Silvertear lake back when it was not a giant crystal garden lol.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

Question is how would we go back and forth? WoW has the easy, lore compliant answer in the form of the adorable Chromie.

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I could see a special "echo empowering" item that we could use to trigger all applicable areas between "present" and "echo".

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Originally Posted by Shougun

All I thought was if children can do it, so easily... And for freaking "classes" lol, why not Voldemort, and with the might of the magic someone would have clearly used it to be on top.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

True; it's been years since I read it but I don't recall giving the wider picture any thought.

I guess you could rationalise it with the time-turners being very carefully kept and perhaps exceedingly hard to make, but... still.

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I seem to recall Dumbledore warning them about catastrophic consequences if they messed up. But since everything went according to plan, we never found out what those consequences would be. Maybe you'd end up a ghost or something.

I've seen time travel ruin franchises as the story get's hopelessly convoluted and the stakes destroyed since the question arises on why they don't time travel for every problem or death. Better to keep things as flashbacks and remain in the present.

This whole thread is Alexander Raid Tier in a nutshell. Can we just not do it? If anything, it causes a GIANT hassle for the people who write the story. We already had Shadowbringers involve Time enough as is with *insert name here* interfering with our timeline from the future, and that's literally stretching it since our asses were dragged to the First because of him. We really don't need another time-related storyline in our story at this current juncture.

The only reason WoW did it was because their lore had a lot of "why not this" as someone said compared to XIV's story structure. XIV is continuous whereas WoW is chopped up into pieces by taking the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey route.

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Originally Posted by tdb

I seem to recall Dumbledore warning them about catastrophic consequences if they messed up. But since everything went according to plan, we never found out what those consequences would be. Maybe you'd end up a ghost or something.

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I've still got the book so I checked. No specified consequences, just "you know what is at stake - you must not be seen". (With the implication that Hermione had some kind of longer explanation of the rules in the past, but we don't get it.)

Of course it's more like "you must not be seen and recognised as being where you shouldn't be" because simply being seen - as it happens in the end - doesn't cause anything to happen at all. It's more about not creating a paradox by letting their past selves see something they didn't see the first time.

There are two different takes on that. One is that it's simply a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing and as long as you try to hide and go unseen, you'll be successful because these events already happened and you weren't seen. If you deliberately tried to break things, the universe might conspire against you and send some unexpected event to prevent you from successfully contacting your past self.

More likely, you simply do have to be careful and if you do create a paradox, the consequences could range from "we don't know but we don't want to take the risk" to "total collapse of the space-time continuum" or, as in FFXIV (or at least my take on it), causing a second timeline to split off the original and take you with it, never to return to the point you departed from. To an observer in the first timeline you would use your time-turner and that would be the last time they ever see you.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

This whole thread is Alexander Raid Tier in a nutshell. Can we just not do it? If anything, it causes a GIANT hassle for the people who write the story. We already had Shadowbringers involve Time enough as is with *insert name here* interfering with our timeline from the future, and that's literally stretching it since our asses were dragged to the First because of him. We really don't need another time-related storyline in our story at this current juncture.

The only reason WoW did it was because their lore had a lot of "why not this" as someone said compared to XIV's story structure. XIV is continuous whereas WoW is chopped up into pieces by taking the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey route.

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I am not talking about time travel storyline, just some sort of way for people to continue to access an old content so it can evolve instead of staying mostly stagnant. Time travel, echo flashbacks, some way for people to continue accessing the content in current Idyllshire and the Hinterlands while allowing Idyllshire to evolve and expand.