How long has it been since the events of 2.0?

[Barraind]

In my head canon, everything up to now has been at least 3 years, one month. If had to break it up:

All of ARR: six months

All of HW: 1 year

All of Stormblood: A year and a half

-Shb (up to 5.3): 1 month.

Some of that is pretty close.

They do a really stupid thing and tell us how long certain actions take (the boat rides we take in Stormblood being a huge one) and then say 'no time has passed'.

Like, we know many, many months happened in the fade to black in that cutscene because YOU WROTE THE LORE THAT SAYS IT DID.

Theres also things like the crystal braves getting formed, trained, accepted by the rest of the continent, then being infiltrated, the time in exile being a substantial amount, the post-stormblood time period being 6+ months between a couple patches (Those Azim'ites took a boat, ect).

Its been a few years.

[Controller]

This is a comic book where the character don't age unless PLOT says so. So no time has passed. We literally go day to day to day to day to day to day. In other words nothing ages. Because SE doesn't want to confuse the plot. The rebirth will always be 5 years ago. If anything I'll say the entire game takes place within 1 year. Your friends being on the first for x number of years don't count because YOU the player/WOL weren't there so for you they only been gone a few days at best. Or if you want what people are saying.. a -time bubble- :/

[Roda]

I thiiiink it's like supposed to be ~6 months of time passing at least? (i remember the boat ride to kugane having a definitive time stamped on the journey's duration)
(also time bubbles don't mean time hasn't passed, it just means that each patch is a self-contained pocket of events, and whenever you go back to a previous patch's content, you essentially go back in time to when the events of that expansion were unfolding and before any other development on related content has occured. Using that one infamous DoH quest paradox as an example.)

I just assume the end of the seventh umbral era and the beginning of the seventh astral era is hydaelyn's version of 2020, where too many things are happening all at once.

[ElazulHP]

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

[Iscah]

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

Worth noting that it only happens if you haven't wrapped up all his ARR quests. You are personally creating a snarl in the timeline by not resolving things when they were supposed to happen.

Likewise, there's a point in the lead-up to Stormblood where Nero is in Mor Dhona... and if you didn't start the CT quests yet, so he's still standing outside the Rising Stones in a paper-thin disguise, you can actually find him in two places on the same map at once.

[Enla]

Some of that is pretty close.

They do a really stupid thing and tell us how long certain actions take (the boat rides we take in Stormblood being a huge one) and then say 'no time has passed'.

Like, we know many, many months happened in the fade to black in that cutscene because YOU WROTE THE LORE THAT SAYS IT DID.

Theres also things like the crystal braves getting formed, trained, accepted by the rest of the continent, then being infiltrated, the time in exile being a substantial amount, the post-stormblood time period being 6+ months between a couple patches (Those Azim'ites took a boat, ect).

Its been a few years.

We also know the ride from Gridania to Horizon takes one full day on chocobo, if said chocobo is going full tilt and has no breaks according to one NPC in Horizon who made the journey. Eventually the time bubble shenanigans just aren't going to hold much water anymore since like you said they keep giving us distance measurements, but then are very glib about how they actually apply.

[Halivel]

There is a variety of reasons as to why there's no definitive passage of time, starting from the fact they'll need to tweak all the NPCs (who mention Calamity events per se and maybe some others) dialogues along the way of you doing your MSQ (and this alone is a huge amount of work, which I think Yoshida or Koji Fox mentioned during one of the Fan Fasts or LLs); finishing with the fact that different players may have different thoughts on how much time passed since the beginning and developers may just not want to interfere with players' RP now that the game is 7 years old since 2.0 release. That said, there are still some mentions of passage of time in various quests both in MSQ and Side Quests (the travel to Kugane took more than month; almost all NPCs from Crafting/Gathering questlines mention few moons, which is few months, passing between quests of different levels; etc).

Logically guessing, there are most likely few years passed since the moment we enter first city, because there are a lot of events that physically cannot happen in a single light day (and they aren't mentioned as such in dialogues either). If we will also count some lore in that though, it would be less than 4 years, because twins still look like teenagers, and from lore we know that Elezens grow drastically in their 20s, and since there's no changes in their look, they're still under this age (but this is just placing the time passage into technical nuances of the game we have, not an actual truth). All in all, you're free to decide how much time passed by yourself. The most common options I saw among players is either 1 or 2 years for each expansion, so basically from 3 up to 6 years from beginning of ARR to the end of SB, and some additional months for ShB since it's not finished yet. But there are also players that just decide to go along with plot without defining the strict passage of time.

[Vyrerus]

For me, I personally adhere to eat x.1 patch being roughly 2~3 months of time passing. Reason I think this is that they always refer to you as if lots of time has passed since last seeing you. Cid calls you old friend when you show up to do Crystal Tower, even though nowadays you can do it immediately after Praetorium events within the same in-game day lol.

As for 2~3 months specfically, it's because in Heavensward when you are invited to dinner with Aymeric, the Fortemps man who passes along the message for you do so exclaims that it has been, "Several moons!" which as others have said is months.

Of course, if we wanted to get literal we could calculate it based on how long it takes in real time to complete the MSQ without skipping cutscenes. This of course, still depends on queue times for duties, but why we can still calculate it is because the in game time doesn't top ticking. One hour of real time is one day within the game, I think. Surely, someone has the exact time ratio, but we will go with that for now.

If you only do MSQs, last I heard before the 5.3 skimming of ARR, it took roughly 250 hours real time to get to the start of Shadowbringers for a newbie. That's 250 days in game time, which is about 8.5 months. Of course, if you do all side content, as encouraged by the time it takes them to develop patches, then it's easy to add another 100 or so hours, depending on a lot of stuff like queue times, PF start to fill times, and actual duty completions. Actually add in Shadowbringers, and we're likely sitting happily at about 1.5 years. Honestly, still doesn't feel like enough time passing to me, but then again, I don't even know what moons passing or years passing in game actually means for the planet we're on, since they celebrate seasonal festivals in the identical seasons to our own, despite time being massively condensed.

There's really no hard answer until they give us one, and they will not give us one, because that means they will have to change character appearances, answer more than one question about it ad nauseum, and all that jazz. I definitely agree with the waiting for the twins to age marker. Though I simultaneously find it weird that there's no sex differences between time intervals for Elezen growth spurts. You'd think Alisaie would get tall first and we'd get to see her rub it in on poor Alphi-boy.