A MSQ timeline/calendar is needed.

[LeonKeyh]

I need the timeline to better enjoy the story.

I WANT to better enjoy the story. The timeline/clock is part of the necessary path to get that.

There's nothing official so make up the timeline yourself. Figure that between patches are a few weeks, that seems to fit most of the time. Actual expansions are probably a couple of weeks long;

So, Endwalker was about 3 weeks, and 6.1 happened a couple of weeks afterward.

Not sure how that possibly changes anything though.

[Iscah]

I need the timeline to better enjoy the story.

I WANT to better enjoy the story. The timeline/clock is part of the necessary path to get that.

Things just happen however far apart they seem to happen.

Patch quests generally do clearly have some amount of time between them, where you're told to wait for some unknown amount of time between events and to go pursue other activities in the meanwhile. You can easily assume it's taken the real-world waiting time of months until the next thing happens, unless the story contradicts it. Just figure it out as you go.

They're never going to put it in calendar format where a few expansions later you can start arguing "but it's clearly been six years since the start of the game now, why is nobody aging?"

[Jeeqbit]

No, there does not. Saying how much time has passed is a bad thing for an MMO to do because then all your max level friends are in the future.

For me personally, the story has unfolded over 7 years but for a newer player, it has unfolded over a year. Everyone has a different opinion of how much time it has taken their character to do things. One person's character did all the side quests and another person's didn't. One person's character did lots of RP or grinded relics and another person rushed to EW. The amount of time passed is different for all of us.

SE has told us that they can't give us a timeframe but that they want us to imagine it for ourselves. To help us imagine it, they put a beard and some scars in the trailers for the latest expansions.

[Wanzzo]

There needs to be some way of telling how much time has passed in game from first entering the starter cities to killing titan, to killing despair itself.

It would help the story make a lot more sense. Particularly when you get things like "the scions are pretendjng to disband and won't see eachother as often" to the next quest being "let's get the gang back together"

Been like 2 days dude. Gonna get a restraining order for Graha.

So right next to that Eorzea clock? Add a Eorzean calendar date that only advances with MSQ progression.

The concept is good, but not the working...

If we count all days that past like a cicle of day and night (like the real world), then all events will occur at different dates for each player, since everyone do quests at their own pace.

If we fix events to happen like: "passed 10 years since you arrived in one of the 3 cities until today, the day you are freeing Ala Mhigo"... then, the perception of the passing time will be fixed and after some expansions they will have to adjust ALL NPCs accordingly in visuals and in aging (perception, mind, behaviour...) and this must be fix. So, if you take 10 days (in real life) to advance just 2 quests in msqs, but one of those quests advance 5 years in the world time, this will feel like you jumped in time, like in back to the future xD If the NPCs got older from a quest to the next one, you will feel like you have missed a lot of time. If this is not well done, you will become curious to know what happened to you between these quests.

They kinda started something like that when they made the Seventh Umbral Era lasting for only 5 years. But after seeing the problems that this could give to them, they have stopped doing it for the rest of the story.

Instead, they advance "some time" at each expansion. And it's up to you to imagine how many years or days have passed. Judging by the change at each NPC (at least, on the Scion members) we can see that some time is passing at each expansion, but hardly is easy to guess how many. This allow them to keep their visuals something close in a more smooth aging.

So, I prefer what they chose to do about it instead of putting the time passing in a fixed and precise amount at each step of the story. This give us a feeling that our life is more useful as we go without "gaps" of lazyness or idle years while people around us ages abruptedly while they keep their same visuals.

[Ransu]

I need the timeline to better enjoy the story.

I WANT to better enjoy the story. The timeline/clock is part of the necessary path to get that.

Pure nonsense.

[MilkieTea]

I need the timeline to better enjoy the story.

I WANT to better enjoy the story. The timeline/clock is part of the necessary path to get that.

Create your own timeline.

I'm not being dismissive here, really! I mean it. Create your own.

Because the time might feel different for everyone, and providing a solid timeline removes a certain sense of RP from the RPG. The best part about not having a game/dev-sanctioned timeline is that you can play around with time yourself. For me, the events have happened over the course of 5 years for C'erise. If I got a timeline telling me "No, actually, it's been X years." That would definitely make me feel a bit disconnected from my character.

[Boblawblah]

I think it's best not to think more about these things than the writers themselves are, but that's just me.

[Jeeqbit]

If we fix events to happen like: "passed 10 years since you arrived in one of the 3 cities until today, the day you are freeing Ala Mhigo"... then, the perception of the passing time will be fixed and after some expansions they will have to adjust ALL NPCs accordingly in visuals and in aging (perception, mind, behaviour...) and this must be fix.

This is one of the biggest issues. An MMO has to change things about the environment if a lot of time has passed and if a bit of it is seen by someone earlier in the story then it ruins the story. Even if the environment looks very different to you earlier in the story, your friends talk about how much time has passed in the story and what events took so much of that time, especially when roleplaying and knowing these details ruins it for you as a new player.

[Wanzzo]

Oh, and another thing to add about what I said before, at some point, they made clear that the only ones that care about the precise amount in the passage of time is the Garleans. Eorzea kinda lack the necessity of count each second or mark exactly the dates for their milestone points in their History. Even when they chose you to be the envoy to invite the other countries to the ceremony about Carteneau "five years ago" they never said a specific date that mark the 5 years. It's all an aproximate thing.

At some point, I think in ARR, a garlean boy creates a "device to measure the passage of time" in a flashback. Do you know who is it? Our beloved young boy Cid (I think it's in the Praetorium netflix series cutscene).

So, clocks and precision in time is not a common thing for eorzeans anyways. If you want to play considering lore, just take this into consideration

[Brightamethyst]

10.0 will come out and they'll still be 17 because otherwise theyd have to redux the entire bahamut questline.
You can do Bahamut at any time but since it revolves around the twins they can never get growd unless they rewrite it, force it into msq despite it not being in raid roulette, or come up with a timetravel plot device, and since everyone DESPISES daily alliance because 6/7 times its Labyrinth or Syrcus, the first absolutely will never happen.

That's not how it works. Time is still flowing and events still happen in a linear order. It's just the calendar that's frozen.

Think about it like chapters in a book. If you read chapter 1 and then skip ahead to chapter 5, and then go back to chapter 3, it doesn't mean 3 takes place last chronologically. You just read the story out of order.