The Road to 5.0

[RicaRuin]

Might've been mentioned already, if so, I'm sorry, I tend to be a bit shy around you 'Lore-Pros'.

Anyway, ever since they said that the teaser we got for Shadowbringers is just a small part of a longer movie, and considering how Arbert and generic WoL/Derplander just look quite the same... What if the part in the Teaser we assumed to be with WoL was actually depicting Arbert and the First? Might explain why the landscape there seemed to be so barren while the 'new areas' we got a sneak peek of seemed to do pretty well...

[Fenral]

If the rumors about the Crystal Tower appearing in the next expansion are true, it's possible that we may use it to open a portal not through time, but to another shard. The World of Darkness raid already proved the lie in the whole "mortals cannot travel between shards without surrendering the flesh" rule, we just didn't realize we were doing it at the time.


"Throw open the gates that we may pass." Hmmm...

[ObsidianFire]

The 13th Shard aka the Void is broken on a fundamental level. And it's been broken for so long that Voidsent have always been a thing on the Source. Part of the brokenness seems to be that Voidsent can be portaled to the Source in their own flesh just fine. And vice versa.

In fact, I'd be hesitant to say that there's a 13th Shard left. It looks and feels more like there's a hole in reality where the 13th Shard was. And the Voidsent are living in the hole.

[Iscah]

Might've been mentioned already, if so, I'm sorry, I tend to be a bit shy around you 'Lore-Pros'.

Anyway, ever since they said that the teaser we got for Shadowbringers is just a small part of a longer movie, and considering how Arbert and generic WoL/Derplander just look quite the same... What if the part in the Teaser we assumed to be with WoL was actually depicting Arbert and the First? Might explain why the landscape there seemed to be so barren while the 'new areas' we got a sneak peek of seemed to do pretty well...

It's *possible*, but I feel like it would be unfair to the viewer.

Any time you see the generic WoL in a trailer, it means "insert your character here". If instead you have to untangle the times where you have to do that and the times when you're looking at an identical person who isn't "your character" and doesn't look like them... that gets messy, and I feel like it's bad for storytelling since it relies on a gimmick that only works in the trailer.

If this was a single-player RPG with a fixed main character, it would be fine.

If the 3.X Warrior of Darkness didn't have a set appearance, but changed to mirror your character, that would also be fine.

But as it is, when your character will vary and Arbert will not, it doesn't seem right to rely on the "who are you actually looking at here" trickery.


(I'm also not sure that Arbert is even coming back. it was implied at the end of 3.4 that the Warriors would likely die upon returning to the First Shard - if "die" is even the correct word, since their bodies were already dead before they travelled to the Source.)


Also I don't think you can judge the location on one barren area - and someone mentioned before that it looks like Mor Dhona.

[Jyera]

If the rumors about the Crystal Tower appearing in the next expansion are true, it's possible that we may use it to open a portal not through time, but to another shard. The World of Darkness raid already proved the lie in the whole "mortals cannot travel between shards without surrendering the flesh" rule, we just didn't realize we were doing it at the time.


"Throw open the gates that we may pass." Hmmm...

Where did that rumour come from? If you know of source/origin point for it, I'd like to see it.

[Fenral]

Where did that rumour come from? If you know of source/origin point for it, I'd like to see it.

My source is... Iscah! Her source is, well, an infamous Discord leak.

[Mholito]

Where did that rumour come from? If you know of source/origin point for it, I'd like to see it.

This is the image that sparked the rumors. It was posted on reddit with a title implying it was from the person that has been leaking lots of information over the last half a year(but no proof that it is the same person). Considering the amount of details that have already been disproven, I think it's fair to say it's all made up to fool people.

[Iscah]

Indeed - it could all be lucky guesses (and a few serious fails re. blue mage), and I wouldn't have brought it up as a leak/rumour if I'd actually re-read it to begin with rather than quoting from memory.

But even if it isn't a credible leak, it's still an interesting idea, and we *do* have that hanging plot thread of whatever Nero's compass was detecting.

[Fenral]

Correcting myself: Iscah's source was a Discord leak. I had been conflating it with another leak I had also seen on reddit, taken from GameFAQs, which is actually mostly credible (predicting things like roleplaying as Alphi, the Monster Hunter collab, Alphascape bosses, and pre-5.0 BLM) all of which nobody would have any reason to make up.


The Crystal Tower still seems like an odd thing to lie about, though, since only a handful of English-speaking players even considered that something in need of revisiting. The Minfilia on the box art part sticks out to me, too. You need only look at the date on the imgur page to know it predates the Shadowbringers announcement by a full month. Maybe they were just trying to parody BluFever's leaks with obviously bad info?

[Iscah]

I don't think "parody" is the right word. A parody is clearly not the real thing.

It included the main rumours that were being passed around - the three classes; Ronso as the second new race - and it was the only thing that got posted to my FC's Discord so I thought it *was* the reliable leak everyone was talking about. (Sorry for falling for it!)

If it was deliberately fake, they were out to trick people and use elements of the truth to strengthen the impression that it was genuine.

Crystal Tower seems like "something unresolved that will probably be important later". If you want to give vague predictions that well might come true even if you don't have inside information, it's not a bad one to use. Neither is "Minfilia comes back", which seemed probable anyway - to me at least.