Revelations from Keynote II

[Iscah]

I really hope it's not time travel. It always ends up convoluted and confusing, with forced arbitrary rules to excuse the plot from going to far back.

I agree that I don't want to see a convoluted time travel story that creates paradoxes or alters past events - but what does give me some hope, if they're going that path, is the Alexander questline: a stable time loop.

Time loops make for more clever writing, and a much neater conclusion. I also prefer it to the implication that there are multiple timelines splitting off from events, and somewhere out there is going to be an alternate version of every time we failed to save the world.

It's messy enough already that there are multiple planes of reality, let alone introducing multiple timelines for those multiple planes.

I'm iffy on time travel as a plot element because mechanically going to these places can't function any differently than changing zones currently does. And say we jump ahead in time, why is Rebuild Ishgard a thing? Shouldn't they have dealt with that themselves by then? It also rubs time bubble issues right in your face constantly because it can't take away any content and they've been careful to limit the points where we do cross it.

I highly expect that any time travel will come with a stable way of moving back and forth between the "standard" and "future" times. Yes, it will probably be, functionally, no different to moving between zones - although it might mean we can't freely teleport across time. (Or maybe we can due to either our special powers or just some previously unencountered mechanic of how aetherial travel functions. Say, if you attune to one aetheryte in Now and another one in The Future, it will transport you across time as well as space. It always worked that way, but nobody was ever able to attune to aetherytes anywhere other than Now to discover that.)

If we do have The Future as a destination, I expect it will essentially be a second time bubble, so we're moving between the two. I've said before (when it was only a theory based on the more dubious part of those leaks) that moving to a "later" time bubble would allow the writers to bring in elements from main-time-bubble sidequests and use them in the MSQ, because there's no longer a need to hold off in case an individual player hasn't completed that quest yet.

For the specific example of bringing G'raha Tia back into the storyline, his timeline looks something like this:

====
1. Start of main time bubble events
<---------------------------------------------- Player may be here
2. Player meets G'raha
<---------------------------------------------- Player may be here
3. G'raha is sealed in the tower
<---------------------------------------------- Player may be here
4. End of time bubble
====

====
5. Start of future time bubble events
6. Tower is unsealed
7. ???
8. Player pulled to future
<---------------------------------------------- Player is definitely here
9. Plot ensues.
====

Because we've moved to a different time bubble, there's no question that the events of the Crystal Tower raid have already occurred, whether the player has personally experienced them yet or not. That means they are entirely free to (re-)introduce Future G'raha to the player whether or not Past G'raha has been sealed in the tower yet, only needing a bit of variable dialogue depending on where the player is up to in the raid.

(Of course, due to the oddities of time travel, he will know you regardless of whether or not you've met him!)


By the same logic (and if they won't involve him in current-day MSQ) I'm really hoping Unukalhai will finally get to be involved in the plot as well.



Meanwhile, on the specific question of "why rebuild Ishgard if we're going to the future where it will be fixed anyway?"... well, present Ishgard is still in a mess, and someone has to do that fixing in the first place.

4. The mysterious figure in the right corner of the expansion image. G'raha Tia looks like a very good fit and he has a trait which would make him possibly very useful to an Ascian (Elidibus? Emet-Selch?) seeking to use the Crystal Tower in some way. The body is mutated in several ways and the robes are highly suggestive of an Ascian.

We haven't seen any other Ascian hosts looking "corrupted" like that though, so it's more likely to be unrelated and (if it is indeed G'raha) attributable to the Crystal Tower's influence.

And the robes are a tricky one. There are all sorts of reasons for him to be wearing a hooded robe, not least that they might simply want to be able to put him on the poster image without entirely giving the game away! But also perhaps within the story for the same reason - we see this strange hooded figure, and perhaps after several glimpses we finally come face-to-face with them, and realise that it's not a stranger after all.

Somewhere in the vast amount of reading I've been doing on the forums today, someone (perhaps you) also brought up the colour of the robes - black and white, and "red to match G'raha's old outfit" - but having checked back on screenshots, his original costume features all three of those colours. Red-and-black shirt, white pants, white necklace, black boots and gloves with white highlights.

The robes look like they could be Allagan - eg. compare the Dreadwyrm Hood and High Allagan Gloves of Healing. They're not the same, but it's that kind of idea.

Oh, yeah, and our oft-forgotten magitek armor "Maggie" arguably has a soul too.

That's apparently due to the "mammet core" we installed in her - however they're supposed to work.