Suggestion: cut scenes with friends/party members in them

[Vstarstruck]

The Praetorium scenes all show your party members with you in them, such as the dialogue scenes between Cid and Gaius (in fact, if you look closely your party members actually have little gestures they make to each other!), but because players used to usually skip them, most were unaware of this - because when those same scenes were replayed in the Undending Journey, as the game isreloading the scene into memory naturally only you are there and thus it only has your character's data to load into it.

This is the reason why when you view scenes in the Undending Journey your character is wearing whatever they currently are wearing, not whatever they were equipped with the first time you played through that part).

Sadly this is also why the Ceremony of Eternal Bonding scenes are not viewable in the Unending Journey - because the scenes specifically require your partner and your character to work, it's simply not feasible to only have it load your character's data into the scene.

Unfortunately given the whole whoha over SE making the Praetorium cutscenes unskippable and the resulting fallout from that, I don't think SE will include your party in story cutscenes again.



This is where it gets confusing. Officially both SE meta wise and the story zigzag exactly how many Warriors of Light there are or have been - propaganda for the game has always mentioned 'Warriors of Light' (note the plural), and even the Duty Finder will usually mention you to along the lines of "gather a group of your most trusted Echo-blessed adventuring comrades and take down this Primal!" The aforementioned story-lead-up to the Praetorium specifically states you're leading an 'elite adventurer unit' into the Praetorium to destroy the Ultima Weapon, outright stating it's not just you going into battle, but a group.

On the other hand though, the game does indeed make it quite clear that only you are the Warrior of Light based on your actions in the Praetorium. Although there are (in-universe) countless of other adventurers around also undertaking quests to make Eorzea a better place, (and many of them are also awoken to the Echo, some may even have their own Crystals of Light), from the point of view of the narrative, your character is the only actual 'Warrior of Light' (this was also confirmed by Michael Christopher Koji-Fox at the FanFest when asked this very question).

So basically, only your character is the Warrior of the Light from your point of view, but there are many other adventurers around who adventure and explore with you, many of whom have the Echo (which is how they're able to take down Primals with you).

Hopefully that has not been too confusing.

I think references to plural has to do with the past one (i/e there was a team in the past, but you are the only one in the present) rest ya I agree with, they def imply the people that you go with have echo.

[Iscah]

I think they actually used your party members in a story cutscene immediately *after* exiting the Steps of Faith instance for the first time. (Just a shot of them sitting around looking exhausted if I remember correctly.)

Of course, the risk with including other players in story cutscenes is that you’ll get someone in a novelty costume for what should be a serious scene...

[Enkidoh]

I think they actually used your party members in a story cutscene immediately *after* exiting the Steps of Faith instance for the first time. (Just a shot of them sitting around looking exhausted if I remember correctly.)

Of course, the risk with including other players in story cutscenes is that you’ll get someone in a novelty costume for what should be a serious scene...

Oh, those weren't your party members, those were actually npcs, but they were based on player characters who were winners of a competition SE ran a few years ago where you could have your character added as a background npc in a story cutscene (another one was during a cutscene in the Colosseum during the ARR Hildibrand quests which featured a male hyur PLD in hoplite tabard and darklight gear who was made to tank the floor by Typhon, I kind of felt sorry for that character's original player - be careful what you wish for indeed ).

Either way they were sort of player characters... once... but now they're story npcs with no names who were just in the background.

[Iscah]

Ah, that makes sense. I wouldn’t have paid attention to what my party members looked like at the time, but then it went into the cutscene and they were clearly player-characters and not normal NPCs!