Thoughts on how we might go from WoL to WoD

[Enkidoh]

If this is our Wings of the Goddess expansion how do you think it will get pulled off? In XI we went to the past via Atmos statues that sucked the player into them and spat them out into the past. Course that same expansion said the world you regularly played in was a fake and that the Shadow Lord won the huge war. The stuggle between us and the "real" time line's future made Atmos angry and he started eat both or something. I do hope this isn't what we don't go that route and end up finding out that the 1.0 Wol has been in a coma this whole time and everything has been a dream and that in reality Bahamut actualy won or something.

I sure hope it is not like WotG though, more for pragmatic reasons, as WotG's time travel idea became sadly just a go-to excuse plot for uninspired level and game design (instead of making new zones, here's xxx zone, but in the past! - never mind it's just the same zone with some palette changes!), and the retconning of the player's earlier actions in FFXI's story just put me right off the whole concept, which is a shame as I'm actually very interested in time travel as a literary idea.

[Draginhikari]

Frankly, what makes us the Warrior of Light comes down to the Crystals of light we gathered during the original span of Realm Reborn and restored from Midgardsormr's seal during Heavensward. I would have to assume it would required us to become deattached from the power of those crystals whether that would be a willing choice on our part or if the Crystals are forcefully removed as a factor somehow.

Though there are a number of questions of what being a Warrior of Darkness actually means in the long run. The Warriors of Darkness we encountered in the latter half of Heavensward were just Warriors of Light from another shard, down to the fact that they literally used their Crystal of Light as a means to transition from their shard to the source. What was shown in the Trailer though seemed like it was an entirely different kind of power all together. Yet we are still apparently fighting the Garleans and Ascians so it's not like we seem to be switch over to Zodiark's view in any particular way either. Nor do we know what the significance of these monsters of light from the trailer are either. There are too many questions and until 4.5 I don't think we can do anything other then make assumptions.

I sure hope it is not like WotG though, more for pragmatic reasons, as WotG's time travel idea became sadly just a go-to excuse plot for uninspired level and game design (instead of making new zones, here's xxx zone, but in the past! - never mind it's just the same zone with some palette changes!), and the retconning of the player's earlier actions in FFXI's story just put me right off the whole concept, which is a shame as I'm actually very interested in time travel as a literary idea.

Time Travel stories are very, very easy to screw up. I would honestly prefer if we avoided ever going down that route on FFXIV

[MetalSnakeXI1]

That wouldn't work - the Blessing and the Crystals of Light (as in, Hydaelyn's hotline to us) is not what makes us immune to tempering/negative influence from a higher power, but the Echo. The two concepts are interlinked, but also seperate ideas.

As far as Crystals of Darkness go, they are already what the Ascians use as their way of trapping mortals to their will (specifically, it's how they enthrall a host, like what happened with Thancred). It's not clear exactly how the Ascians create them, but it appears it's rather easy to reproduce, or at least, a synthetic replica - the Students of Baldesion did just that, creating a synthetic Crystal of Darkness for Minfilia as a means to free Thancred from Lahabrea's control (although it appears it was never used, becoming just a red herring).

Sadly I think I'm going to hold off trying to theorycraft exactly what leads us down the path of darkness in 5.0, in that we just don't know enough from the teaser, so I'm just going to wait and see where this new Path takes us and deal with the results as they happen - exactly how my character would probably deal with that, come to think of it.



That's a very good point which I think may be the key here to understanding this: the teaser just shows Derplander becoming a DRK to destroy a light-elemental Kuribu (after all his other Jobs failed), so his monologue about becoming the WoD therefore might be metaphorical rather than literal. Still Hydaelyn's Champion, still in fact literally the Warrior of Light, but needing to balance things by understanding that light and darkness are two sides of the same coin, and for Hydaelyn to be saved, that metaphorical coin now needs to be flipped side on, and DRK is the ultimate expression of that - a Job that uses emotion, both positive and negative, to power it, and learning to become, effectively lawful neutral (to use a DnD term). It's an interesting idea in any event.

Hmmmm, I think you're right

We're missing a lot of details from 4.5 that it's a bit hard to make a proper theory without enough details to back it up so I'll probably hold on until 4.5 comes in January and see what we'll be doing in part 1

[KageTokage]

I feel like we're only going to be the WoD in the sense that we'll be fighting to prevent an overflow of light from occurring.

I don't think it's actually going to require much of a change in our methodology in the long run.

[SannaR]

Hmm. Maybe we just snap I mean Fordola did ask us how do we keep on doing what we do while staying sane and whatnot without breaking down. Sure we have down time but the game paints it as though we don't really take much if any down time to really unwind. As it's been said in the side stories and in the msq that we always seem to be busy. That being doing the raids, helping the friendly beast tribes, crafting/gathering, or helping the enclave rebuild we're painted as work addicts. So, maybe after the events of 4.5 and I guess a little into 5.0 we just go after this crisis we're taking a vacation go bug Estinien or something.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

Hmm. Maybe we just snap I mean Fordola did ask us how do we keep on doing what we do while staying sane and whatnot without breaking down. Sure we have down time but the game paints it as though we don't really take much if any down time to really unwind. As it's been said in the side stories and in the msq that we always seem to be busy. That being doing the raids, helping the friendly beast tribes, crafting/gathering, or helping the enclave rebuild we're painted as work addicts. So, maybe after the events of 4.5 and I guess a little into 5.0 we just go after this crisis we're taking a vacation go bug Estinien or something.

Even with downtime the scions overly depends on us for literally everything and all 5 nations now request our services so personally the downtime for the Warrior of Light isn't quite enough to wash out out battle scars and trauma if the dark knight questline conclusion is anything to go by

[LineageRazor]

I sure hope it is not like WotG though, more for pragmatic reasons, as WotG's time travel idea became sadly just a go-to excuse plot for uninspired level and game design (instead of making new zones, here's xxx zone, but in the past! - never mind it's just the same zone with some palette changes!), and the retconning of the player's earlier actions in FFXI's story just put me right off the whole concept, which is a shame as I'm actually very interested in time travel as a literary idea.

I'm curious now - what retconning are you referring to? I don't recall any part of the WotG storyline as "undoing" or "retelling" anything the player character did. There was a bit of that in the intro to Rise of the Zilart ("Oh, did you forget what ACTUALLY happened at the end of the Shadowlord fight? Let me remind you!"), but not anywhere else in any of the expansions, that I can recall.

If I recall rightly, by the end of WotG, the timeline we were on wasn't EXACTLY the same as the original (such as the whole deal with Lilisette's parents not originally getting the Odin power-up), but by the end we were back on track for Shadowlord's unlikely (and Altana-assisted - she's such a cheater!) defeat, Lilisette's parents were depowered, and everything was set for the player to have handled things in vanilla/RotZ/CoP/ToAU without any changes whatsoever.

[Kallera]

Perhaps the gremlin's mockery is a hint, in that the world forgets who we are again via the magical amnesia from 2.0, and we are forced to literally act on our lonesome.

[FlutterYuu]

from the trailer it seems like we won a decisive battle with Zenos and the Garleans. Which in turn could start a huge revolution and freedom across the realm. But also in the trailer we see the WoL in an empty and barren landscape.

If I may speculate, we win the battle as I said but then Hydalyn decimates the battlefield killing everyone expect us. Pretty standard. The fact that we know what happened in the battlefield makes us question everything we did. Of course a fight with light (whether internal or external takes place.) Dark Knight makes more sense since in that Storyline (SPOILERS) you actually fight your inner darkness.

I believe the struggle is internal and we finally accept our inner darkness to combat the seemingly nondiscriminatory light which killed everyone on the battlefield.

Hopefully the story takes us on a journey back to Eorzea as the WoD and our character feels like they had forsaken the realm and must commit a dark act to save it from the "Flood of Light". In general we are rewritting history as this same fate happened on the original WoD shard and our new allies might be the WoD we fought in 3.x.

I believe that would honestly make for a better story and would fit in with the themes of Final Fantasy

[Akonyl]

The big thing with the trailer I think is that it implies backwards time travel, which can be really sloppy in games with shared worlds (even when it's just an alternate past like WoW, and not actively trying to change the past). I could see SE getting around this though with a jump forward in time to show us everything ruined, then a jump back to right before it was all ruined and we go on another path, keeping the overworld consistent and basically sequestering the time travel to a few cutscenes/solo duties.

If I had to guess, the timeline of events would go something like
-start shadowbringers quests
-eventually, defeat solus in a dungeon or something and defeat the empire
-start of the "solo content" portion (cutscenes/solo duties)
-fast forward in time, show everything destroyed by light after having gotten rid of the empire's darkness/chaos
-maybe a bit of an RP dungeon with thancred, he or someone else tells us "hey you ruined everything, you have to go back! You ruined the balance!"
-go back in time somehow to right after defeating the empire
-end of the "solo content" portion
-you tell the scions that future-thancred/whoever told you you ruined everything, and it's decided that you have to become the WoD to fill the spot you destroyed by getting rid of solus+the empire, in order to keep the now-burgeoning light in check. Maybe have us defeat some avatar of Hydaelyn as the 5.0 endboss, who knows.