MAJOR SPOILERS 3.4 MSQ - Warriors of Light

[Culfinrandir]

SPOILERS!

During the scenes at the end of the MSQ it was suggested that the only way to hold the Power of the Crystal, & therefore be a Warrior of Light, was to surrender your flesh to it.

My question is - As I'm a WoL, am I dead?

Is this something that was already known but I had overlooked? I have a few storyline things that are slightly blurred due to FibroFog.

[Naria]

No. What was said was the only way to travel between worlds using the Crystals of Light was to "surrender your flesh" and die. It is the same way that the Ascians travel between worlds and bodies using their crystals. "Crystals of Darkness", I suppose. Possessing the crystals doesn't kill you.

[Lulu89]

Uh no? What was said was the only way to travel between worlds using the Crystals of Light was to "surrender your flesh" and die. It is the same way that the Ascians travel between worlds and bodies using their crystals. "Crystals of Darkness", I suppose. Possessing the crystals doesn't kill you.

This is right.

[Naria]

What I want to know is who were the WoD possessing. Even ascians on Lahabrea's level need to use someone else's body to interact with the world.

[ADVSS]

What I want to know is who were the WoD possessing. Even ascians on Lahabrea's level need to use someone else's body to interact with the world.

dug up the corpse of derplander after the calamity, i guess? I mean wasnt his name meteor or something originally?

[Culfinrandir]

No. What was said was the only way to travel between worlds using the Crystals of Light was to "surrender your flesh" and die. It is the same way that the Ascians travel between worlds and bodies using their crystals. "Crystals of Darkness", I suppose. Possessing the crystals doesn't kill you.

Phew, thank goodness for that. I was concerned that I had been sent to "this world" from another & that was why I has the missing crystal. I feel better now, thanks. XD

[Alleo]

dug up the corpse of derplander after the calamity, i guess? I mean wasnt his name meteor or something originally?

Problem is that depending on how you look at it we are the derplander. He is just a placeholder in trailers since we all look different. At the same time the party at the end of the calamity are somehow their own persons but also the 1.0 WoL players..its kinda confusing. @_@ And the 1.0 WoL never died, they were saved and transported through time. Maybe the WoD went to the graveyard and dug up some corpses. We know thanks to the Sahagin that if the soul takes over another body, it changes to the look of the new soul, so maybe they just regained their own looks thanks to that.

[TinyRedLeaf]

Problem is that depending on how you look at it we are the derplander. He is just a placeholder in trailers since we all look different.

Are we?

The dev team had been asked many times whether derplander and company were actual people we could meet. Well, now we've met them. So, for what it's worth, I'll assume from now on that the derplander we see in trailers and the intro movies is in fact the First World derplander.

This would certainly make it a lot easier to explain why some of the details we see in the trailers and movies are subtly different from the Eorzea we have been experiencing (yes, I'm looking at you, Hraesvelgr; why were you attacking the derplander in the Heavensward intro?). It's because they aren't actual depictions of our world, the Source.

The 1.0 WoL never died, they were saved and transported through time.

Well... you could regard Patch 3.4 — what with its planar-travelling and temporal-shifting shenanigans — as the fantasy actualisation of the Many-Worlds intepretation of quantum mechanics:

The intepretation implies that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world". In layman's terms, the hypothesis states there is a very large—perhaps infinite—number of universes, and everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other world or worlds.

Which is to say: How do we really know that the derplander we see in the trailer actually survived, especially if the trailers were based on events in the First?

For that matter, how do we know if the derplander actually originated from the First? Maybe he was from the Second, and the Louisoix of that world transported him through space-time, into the First, where he and his buddies relied on their prior experience to beat back the Darkness, only to ironically doom the First.

Ah, paradoxes on top of paradoxes. That's what you get for messing around with space-time. ^^;

[Alleo]

No the dragoon derplander in the trailers is 100% us. He is always in the situation we end up like being caught by the WoD in this patch. The wrong dragon was a mistake by Yoshida. He sent the wrong model to the studio that did the trailer so they used him instead of Nidhogg.(you can see that the other dragons are also all like Hraesvelgr in the trailer) There was a post/interview about it somewhere, so it should have been Nidhogg. Also all the other patch trailers showed the derplander in our place. And unlike the warrior WoD he even switched class. And why would they show us trailers about the WoL from another source, that does not make much sense to me.

The players who played in 1.0 also had a different cutscene at the beginning and landed outside of the city instead of being brought there. This is exactly the same what happened with the WoL and his party at the end of an era video. The only thing that always bugs me is, that the rest of the party is missing, but maybe they went their own way?

Maybe the WoD did have the same adventures we had, but we can at least say that the derplander in all the trailers is us, especially since 2.0.

[Naria]

I would like to preface I have no real understanding of quantum physics. What little I do know comes from Sci Fi and Schrodinger's jokes and has as much resemblance to actual quantum physics as gluten free bread does to actual bread.

For that matter, how do we know if the derplander actually originated from the First? Maybe he was from the Second, and the Louisoix of that world transported him through space-time, into the First, where he and his buddies relied on their prior experience to beat back the Darkness, only to ironically doom the First.

Ah, paradoxes on top of paradoxes. That's what you get for messing around with space-time. ^^;

The thing that a lot of people are assuming--that I'm not so sold on it this idea the fourteen world shards have more or less the same history except for a few choices, i.e. on this world here we turned left, on the other we turned right. There isn't an infinite number of universes, there are only fourteen, nine of which have had very different fates than ours. These universes have been separated since at least prior to the First Umbral calamity on our world. While I'm willing to buy some "convergent evolution" or more likely meddling from the Ascians, but just because in our world Louisoix was at the forefront of preventing the latest Umbral calamity, that does not mean he was on any other, or that he even existed.

Given Arbert's lines when we first meet him, and the artifact armor, party naming etc, there probably is a similar Eorzea on his world. Eorzea itself might have been designed by the Ascians, since warring civilizations on top of the most concentrated area of aether on the planet makes it easier to set off Calamities. Causing massive wars seems to be the preferred method of doing so, and the Ascians have probably refined the technique over the millennia. The Ascians are immortals with the ability to posses both living people and the dead. Social engineering would be a cakewalk for them. (This brings up another fun question: if, for example, Amalj'aa on Shard 1 summon Ifrit does the Ifrit they summon share the same soul/source/whatever as Source-Ifrit?. . . probably not)

If the world of the first shard was basically ours but diverged with the Seventh Umbral, the WoD would have recognized and have worked with Y'shotla, Thrancred and Uriangier and probably would have been better able to counteract them. They showed no recognition when confronted with Y'shotla and Thrancred. They completely fail to predict Uriangier. Pretending to be on the opposing side isn't a new trick for him.

We don't even know if Calamities take place on all shards every time one happens on ours. I think it is likely that a Calamity only takes place on two worlds--the Source and the one the Ascians are trying to rejoin. Under this idea the Acians could keep a presence on other worlds in order to maintain balance and keep it viable for the rejoining, which they failed on the 1st shard. When Elidilus returned in 2.1 he could have brought the WoD with him as part of some sort of salvage operation.

I'm wondering who the WoD were possessing for a number of reasons 1) were they like the Sahghin priest and are rewriting their appearance over the body they were possessing (this is most likely) 2) If they weren't like the priest and are possessing their "counterparts" then that means my above theory is probably wrong and the worlds are closer to being true mirrors than simply parallel 3) If they were possessing living people then they are both a potential source of information and someone the Scions have an obligation to help 4) As basically the light's version of Ascians do they have another now "true" form.

Anyways, I've thoroughly derailed this thread at this point, and probably need to find where I left my darksteelfoil hat.