Revelations from Keynote II

[Lauront]

It needs to happen for its own sake, as well as events that would change as a consequence of the time loop not happening. The Hotgo tribe, of which Mide is one of the few survivors, wouldn't exist if not for the time loop that Alexander's events take place within.

We can't observe what started the time loop or why, because we're part of it and it exists in perpetuity.

I see. That way it makes it sound like it's a bit of code gone wrong, and Alexander is the debugging tool. Particularly when you say the tribe wouldn't exist otherwise; my question would be, why would it need to? However, if there's some unobserv-ed/-able causal agent it begins to make sense.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that the trailer is deliberately misleading. As in, basically anything it appears to be communicating "clearly" will almost certainly change meaning drastically as we come to understand the surrounding context.


Unless Yoshida's comments on misdirection are the true misdirection... Hmmmm...

Indeed, I fully appreciate that. It's also incomplete in its present form.

I was writing about this the other day (link), but I think if there's time travel in play and this is "Future G'raha" that we're dealing with - whether we go to his time or he comes back to ours - then it's not necessary to have completed the Crystal Tower raids. He is from a point in time where those events have already taken place, whether you have personally experienced them yet or not.

If players haven't completed the questline yet, I think it could be easily sorted out with some variable dialogue at the start - he'll recognise and greet you, because he's been through that story with you, even if you-at-the-current-time have never met him. So your character would react in one of three ways: (for those who haven't started yet) no idea why this unfamiliar person knows you; (for those partway through) confusion because you do know him but not like this; and (for those who completed it) full recognition and wanting to know how he got out of the tower.

That would lead into a customised explanation of what's going on, possibly with some "you mustn't speak a word of this to my past self next time you see him!" warnings for those who haven't finished.

I think given the nature of time travel in the game, it does make sense that that might be how he becomes relevant to the plot... whatever his role might be.

[Cilia]

I see. That way it makes it sound like it's a bit of code gone wrong, and Alexander is the debugging tool. Particularly when you say the tribe wouldn't exist otherwise; my question would be, why would it need to? However, if there's some unobserv-ed/-able causal agent it begins to make sense.

The trick to understanding everything surrounding Alexander is to remember that it's a closed circle. It's all already happened countless times before you even begin to play your role within it, and countless more "yous" continue to play it out within the loop. The Hotgo tribe, for instance, has to exist because Mide and Dayan were sent into the past by Alexander after the final battle... because that not happening would create a temporal paradox, much like the DPS failing to save your past selves in A12 instantly kills you.

Remember Backrix' journal. He begins chronicling the events of Alexander, which continues up until A10. During the trip to the past his journal is knocked from his hands and picked up by Past Quickthinx, who uses it as a script to play out the events leading up to that precise moment. If Alexander isn't summoned, Backrix won't write his journal, and it won't be knocked out of his hands and picked up by Past Quickthinx - but those events all have to happen, because they already have.

There's not confirmed to be a "Zeroth Loop" outside of our ability to observe... but just like a hypothetical perpetual motion machine needs some energy input to start out, it's the only way this makes logical sense.

[LineageRazor]

The trick to understanding everything surrounding Alexander is to remember that it's a closed circle. It's all already happened countless times before you even begin to play your role within it, and countless more "yous" continue to play it out within the loop.

I don't think that the "countless yous" scenario really works in this case. That more applies to stuff like Groundhog's Day, where you're repeating the same segment of time over and over again until you get it "right". That's an entirely different sort of time travel than that implied by a stable time loop.

A closed time loop of this sort is more like a roller coaster. You're riding along like normal, then you come to this loop which takes you to another point in time. That loop was always there, and you only rode it the one time. Even if the time travel causes there to be more than one you at the same point in time, they aren't countless, they are limited by the number of times that you actually travel to that point in time. (The most Alexander ever supplied was two simultaneous WoLs - the point in A12 where you travel to the past to save your past self from Alexander's blast.)

It's also important to realize that this time loop was always a thing. There IS NO "original" timeline that was altered to create the time loop. This IS the original timeline. It just happens to be that the original timeline has a tangle in it.

[Cilia]

I don't think that the "countless yous" scenario really works in this case. That more applies to stuff like Groundhog's Day, where you're repeating the same segment of time over and over again until you get it "right". That's an entirely different sort of time travel than that implied by a stable time loop.

A closed time loop of this sort is more like a roller coaster. You're riding along like normal, then you come to this loop which takes you to another point in time. That loop was always there, and you only rode it the one time. Even if the time travel causes there to be more than one you at the same point in time, they aren't countless, they are limited by the number of times that you actually travel to that point in time. (The most Alexander ever supplied was two simultaneous WoLs - the point in A12 where you travel to the past to save your past self from Alexander's blast.)

It's also important to realize that this time loop was always a thing. There IS NO "original" timeline that was altered to create the time loop. This IS the original timeline. It just happens to be that the original timeline has a tangle in it.

That's a valid way to look at it... but since time travel is purely hypothetical, there's no "right" answer.

Regardless, what I supplied is something that has no paradoxes, i.e. is logically sound. Without a "Zeroth Loop" we can't observe where it all started, causality breaks down. To use the example of a hypothetical perpetual motion machine again, sure you could build one... but someone would have to set it in motion for it to start working.

To use the roller coaster example - yes, everything proceeds along the one track, a loop de loop causes you to spin for a moment, and then you continue onward to the exit. But what about characters like Mide, Dayan, and Quickthinx - who only exist within Alexander's looped time? Who only exist because of Alexander's looped time? Who's operating the roller coaster?

Your present self is saved by your future self before A12, who then has to save their own past self. But then your past self has to do the same things you did... and save their own past self, ad infinitum. Otherwise we end up with a time paradox, which lies beyond our observation (if only because we are dead in those possible "futures"). There are "potential yous" who deviated from the script... we just can't observe them (i.e. the "you" who died to Alexander's Holy Judgment because the "future you" failed to save them).

... time travel is complicated.

[Iscah]

The thing with Alexander is that while, from one viewpoint, things go around and around infinitely.... there is only one timeline, and there was only ever one timeline. It's a stable time loop, where everything plays out the same way every time (except there's only really one time).

From the perspective of each person involved in the story, they only experience their sequence of events once. That sequence may move strangely through time, and they may experience the same time period twice at different times in their personal timeline, but nobody is stuck "going around" the same actual sequence of events and carrying out the same actions over and over. They all have an entrance and exit point from the story.

There are loops and oddities, but no alternate outcomes. There are no "potential yous" that failed - there is one sequence of events where you did save yourself, and it's only an infinite loop if you stop tracing our single (slightly non-linear) path through the events, and start thinking of "past you" and "future you" as different people who might act differently the next time around.

But what about characters like Mide, Dayan, and Quickthinx - who only exist within Alexander's looped time? Who only exist because of Alexander's looped time?

Quickthinx isn't any more a product of the time loop than we are. He found Backrix's lost journal (three years 'before' it was written) that chronicled future events, giving him apparent omniscience, but his only actual time travel was the brief "detour" to three years ago that everyone experienced, before returning to our normal place in time.

And Mide and Dayan? Yes, their existence infinitely depends on time travel having happened in the first place - but there was never a timeline where it didn't happen, and they individually are not reliving the same time over and over.

Mide's timeline is fragmented from an external view of time moving from past to future, but she individually is still born, lives, and dies. Her personal timeline begins 26 years ago, plays out normally up to the events of Alexander, which ultimately lead to her being teleported back into the past - where she lives the rest of her life, has children and eventually dies at what is probably an earlier date than her birth.

Weird genetics ensue, and somehow one of her descendents ends up as a perfect genetic match. Perhaps it's chance she also got the same name, or perhaps her great-grandmother insisted.

We're all set for it to play out again - but young Mide has never experienced it before.

[Cilia]

The thing with Alexander is that while, from one viewpoint, things go around and around infinitely.... there is only one timeline, and there was only ever one timeline. It's a stable time loop, where everything plays out the same way every time (except there's only really one time).

Objection!

This requires an in-depth understanding of what an observer is.

An observer has a very special role in time, that is it determines which causal pathway happened.

To use an example, say we set up a flashlight in front of a piece of plastic with two slits. If you turn on the flashlight, photons stream through the two slots and into the background. However, given each photon can only travel through one of the two slots, we can't know which one because they simply move too fast for us to observe individual photons, so we have to assume it could have gone through both. However, say a device was created that could tell which of the two slots a photon went through. Now we have knowledge of which slot the photon traveled through, but only because something was created to determine that.

The "device" mentioned here is the observer; without it we'd have to assume that each given photon could have traveled through either of the two slots.

It's a lot like applying a save state to reality. If you save your game and choose option A, option B becomes impossible - you've observed option A, which is mutually exclusive with option B. You can choose to go back and reload the save state if you want to see the outcome of option B at a later date (for whatever reason), but the characters aren't aware of this - option A's characters are not the same as option B's characters. You are, in effect, the observer.

Apply this to time. Every action taken by everyone and everything creates infinitely tessellating possibilities, but because this "us" only exists in one timeline (option A), we can't observe the "us"es that exist in every other possibility.

In the context of Alexander, that means yes, there has to be a timeline that created Alexander - because there are infinite timelines where he never existed at all. Someone or something had to create him. The tricky part about Alexander is that due to his power over time he is essentially his own observer, but he can only observe timelines in which he exists. Of the infinitely tessellating possibilities stemming from everything that happens within his storyline, Alexander has to always make the same choices and observe only the timeline we play, because otherwise it creates a temporal paradox.

Do we remember each individual instance of the time loop? No, it's a quantum singularity - everything that happens in and around Alexander has to happen in our timeline, because from our perspective anything else creates a temporal paradox. But... even though we can't observe them, there are infinite other timelines where things played out differently. Something, at some point in some timeline has to be responsible for Alexander's creation and time loop, we just can't observe what because from our perspective Alexander has always existed as a part of the timeline.

It's why I've postulated Hydaelyn acts as our observer (She chooses only the timeline She wants, i.e. the one where we're successful even in the face of nigh-impossible odds; your PC's deaths are just possibilities She chooses to not observe).

TL;DR - time is really complicated, but to say there's only one timeline isn't accurate. There's just only one we can observe.

[YianKutku]

TL;DR - time is really complicated, but to say there's only one timeline isn't accurate. There's just only one we can observe.

I remember reading up on this sort of stuff back when I was looking into various terminology and jargon used by other speculative fiction, but I soon gave up because I have this instinctive urge to try to simplify and analogize everything, and I get the feeling this does not work with quantum concepts.

This discussion did remind me of the concept of quantum immortality, ie the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment from the viewpoint of the cat. Basically, the cat is always alive, because otherwise there would be no observer to observe the timeline, since there is no outside observer (at least for the sake of this thought experiment).

And then I got to wondering how far we can apply this to the way players keep wiping to raids and bosses, and yet the Warrior of Light continues to survive and win, from the viewpoint of everyone else.