Live letter is almost here

[Gridanian]

Random things I'm hoping to see (down the line):

1) Team up with Cylva Shadowkeeper on the 13th;
2) Rescue Unei and Doga;
3) Stop Meteion on the alternate timelines:
- Elpis in the past;
- G'raha's future;
*Unless I'm mistaken, according to Elidibus we *can* alter the future without creating a new timeline, so the First is probably on our WoL's timeline, if 100 years ahead, so no need to stop Meteion there;
3) Attend a memorial service for Papalymo and the real Yda, and maybe get a new painting of the pair that's not locked inside FC stores;
4) Find out why Lyse is avoiding the WoL for the last 2 expansions;
5) Resolve the Coerlclaw and Red Bellies' storyline - maybe something like the Bloody Executioners' plotline with Merlwyb in Shadowbringers;
6) Class/Job quests making a return, but reflecting our WoL's power this time, so impossibly fantastic:
- Regrow Raubhan's arm (White mage);
- Restore Shamani's sight (Scholar);
- Regenerate Arenvald's spine (Sage);
- Fish Thancred/Y'shtola's missing soul pieces from the lifestream (Fisher);
- Grow a field of Elpis flowers and show them to Meteion (Herbalist);
- Help Lyse finally earn her Archon rank in Sharlayan (Monk);
- Complete Ascilia/Minfilia's research on bringing back the dead and revive her (Alchemist);
7) More starting city stuff:
- Join the Syndicate in Ul'dah;
- Captain your own ship in Limsa;
- Become a seedseer in Gridania;
8) See the Leveilleur twins all grown up ;
9) Meet and spar with the real Azem in the past;
10) Travel back in time to 1.0 and come full circle on the game, remaking 1.0 as a new expansion - from our WoL's perspective it'd be happening in his future.

None of these things are likely to happen, but hey, the thought counts!

Have fun, heroes!

[Iscah]

3) Stop Meteion on the alternate timelines:
- Elpis in the past;
- G'raha's future;
*Unless I'm mistaken, according to Elidibus we *can* alter the future without creating a new timeline, so the First is probably on our WoL's timeline, if 100 years ahead, so no need to stop Meteion there

Elpis is not a separate timeline; it is the past of our own timeline. We did not create a split there.

And no, Elidibus never said that. He warned us against altering things in the past because we needed to return to our present as it currently is, but that could be about not creating a split timeline rather than altering things within our single timeline. Ultimately, anything the characters say about meddling with time travel involves some layer of guesswork on their part, as they don't have the entire picture.

The First is not at all a separate timeline; all of the shards together - being the fourteen pieces of the original Etheirys - exist within a single timeline running from the ancient world to here to the future. (The branched timeline leading to "G'raha's future" contains a copy of each of the shards, and the calamity occurred when its First was rejoined to its Source.) The shards' basic nature as copies of the same original world means they behave somewhat like alternate timelines of each other, but it's a different phenomenon and a lower tier of separation to the actual branching of timelines.

We can cross between shards, staying within a single timeline, but we have no known technology to cross actual timelines. G'raha's future is inaccessible to us.

And the "100 years difference" that G'raha spent in the First isn't anything to do with us travelling through time, but due to him overshooting his intended destination when he travelled back from his original future, combined with time flowing at a different rate there. We only travelled from "now" in the Source to "now" in the First.


TL;DR: There is only one known alternate timeline - the Eighth Umbral Calamity future, where G'raha first awoke - and we cannot go there with our current technology. Zodiark is still protecting the planet from Meteion there, and Hydaelyn will simply have to find a new champion (perhaps our reincarnated self) to deal with whatever happens in that timeline.

[Tsiron]

Holding out hope we get more side content with the Void Quests crew (and Ryne and Gaia too, considering Unukalhai's updated 6.2 dialogue)... though the original Void Quests released in 5.4, so it might be a while yet if there's a pattern they're planning to adhere to...?

[Gridanian]

Agreed. NPCs aren't gospel. That said, we players have a slightly clearer picture at this point, as there's alot we can infer from what we've seen. I definitely got the impression we did create a split. Several NPCs suggested it, most importantly:
- Elidibus, claims to both remember and not remember us being in Elbis, an impossibility, suggesting there are two timelines in place;
- Y'shtola, says something along the lines of "Our Hydaelyn must have some means to find out what Venat knew in the past";
- Hydaelyn, she didn't seem to know we had been to Elpis, paraphrasing "You know about Elpis? Then you must have been there!" Elpis Venat didn't have her memories erased, though, so if she were her, she'd have remembered;

Besides, the Venat we left in Elpis was hopeful, and more importantly, reasonable, not that dreadful pre-Hydaelin monster that had fallen to despair, the one that split the world in 14 shards over some nonsense about creating pain and struggle. Again, IMO, and an emotional argument, but I definitely believe we made an impression on her, for the better. She wouldn't have made the same choice after our encounter.

As to logical arguments, there's also the fact that only Alexander's time travel has been shown to create stable loops. The Crystal Tower's already altered the past at least once, when G'raha used it to travel back 100 years (it stopped the spread of the Black Rose), so we can infer that if it travels backwards, it effectively locks the time traveler in a new timeline. Yet for some reason, the events from Elpis didn't alter the WoL's timeline as far as we know it.

I have my own theory on why this is. Facts:
1) The Crystal Tower first went into timestasis around the time the Allagan civilization fell (5000 years ago), so from its perspective, any point in time after the end of the Third Astral Era is considered "the future";
2) Elpis takes place *before* the Crystal Tower went into stasis, so from the Tower's perspective, it's considered the past;
3) From a traveler's perspective, the future's fair game.

If we add this to what we already know, it'd mean that any Crystal Tower time traveler would conceivably be able to alter its own timeline from the 4th Era onwards, but nothing before that.

From the WoL's perspective, the events surrounding Minfilia and Warriors of Darkness had just happened a few months ago. When we travel to the First, it's 100 years into the future, nothing the WoL does there would reflect on our past. Elpis is the opposite, we can't alter its events because it already happened for us, so if we do - time splits.

Pandemonium shenanigans seem to reinforce this, as someone *other* than the WoL is altering out timeline. Though a good question would be why exactly is the WoL aware of changes to the timeline that we didn't cause.

Anyway, thank you for your reply. I enjoy talking about these things, it was fun

[CheshCa7]

Besides, the Venat we left in Elpis was hopeful, and more importantly, reasonable, not that dreadful pre-Hydaelin monster that had fallen to despair, the one that split the world in 14 shards over some nonsense about creating pain and struggle. Again, IMO, and an emotional argument, but I definitely believe we made an impression on her, for the better. She wouldn't have made the same choice after our encounter.

She was hopeful. For us. And she retained that hope till the end. And reasonable, of course, that is why she made the only reasonable choice.
It's really simple, she saw the others were blinded dumbasses and probably said "f*ck that noise" and sundered them. Understandable.

[SannaR]

From the LLP

Well looks like Zero gets to meet the twins.

[JeanneOrnitier]

The MSQ preview screenshot is the twins in Garlemald, and the dungeon seems to be there too. I'm glad we're finally getting more Garlean content.

[Iscah]

(sorry for dumping into the middle of the live letter discussion, but that should probably be in a different thread to "live letter soon" anyway.)

I definitely got the impression we did create a split. Several NPCs suggested it, most importantly:
- Elidibus, claims to both remember and not remember us being in Elbis, an impossibility, suggesting there are two timelines in place;
- Y'shtola, says something along the lines of "Our Hydaelyn must have some means to find out what Venat knew in the past";
- Hydaelyn, she didn't seem to know we had been to Elpis, paraphrasing "You know about Elpis? Then you must have been there!" Elpis Venat didn't have her memories erased, though, so if she were her, she'd have remembered

None of those are proof of a split, and I would say that there is proof in the opposite direction.

We can't read well into Elidibus's shifting memory because his mind is already established to be a complete mess - frayed almost to nothing and then patched up with the amalgamated memories of himself, Emet and Lahabrea as stored in the constellation stones. He might be recalling his own memories as Themis, or perhaps he has stumbled on Emet's memories of our time in Elpis - maybe even both the subconscious truth and the implanted false version.

If you've quoted Y'shtola right, that can just be a matter of clarifying that she is talking about Hydaelyn as she is in the present day, and not as she was back all that time ago when we met her in Elpis. It can still be two points in time on a single timeline.

And as for Hydaelyn herself, she *does* indicate that she remembers us and is aware of the time loop already - from the ship at the beginning when she talks about reaching the point where our paths converge again.

Additionally, Argos trusts us when (from our perspective) we first meet him on the moon, because from his perspective we already gained his trust back in Elpis. This is not simply speculation but is explicitly stated in his mount description.

Therefore the events at Elpis are already in place before this story begins. The effects of our actions there don't suddenly snap into place and replace an earlier state of the present-day world, but can only possibly be a time loop already in progress.

I think the conversation you are referencing occurs at the Mothercrystal? That might just be along the lines of "now that you've been there, that means the time loop is complete and I can stop withholding information that you didn't know when I met you in Elpis".

Besides, the Venat we left in Elpis was hopeful, and more importantly, reasonable, not that dreadful pre-Hydaelin monster that had fallen to despair, the one that split the world in 14 shards over some nonsense about creating pain and struggle. Again, IMO, and an emotional argument, but I definitely believe we made an impression on her, for the better. She wouldn't have made the same choice after our encounter.

On the contrary, I think the fact that we described so much to her - the Sundering and what would come after it - gave her confidence to carry that plan through, knowing that the world would be okay afterwards.

As to logical arguments, there's also the fact that only Alexander's time travel has been shown to create stable loops.

You're overlooking something here, which is that the Crystal Tower also runs on "Alexander's time travel". That's the revelation laid out in the Twinning - that the Ironworks reverse-engineered both Alexander's time magic and Omega's dimensional traversal abilities, and constructed an artificial Alexander in the heart of the tower to carry it through time.

By my take on the mechanics of time travel, at least, the act itself of moving through time will never cause a split. It is entirely dependent on what the traveller does in their destination, and whether they create a situation that is incompatible with the future they came from. G'raha caused a split by preventing the specific historical details of how the calamity occurred in the past of that timeline; by contrast, we don't know any historical details of what happened at Elpis, so anything we do there can still become part of the single timeline of "how it always happened, but you didn't know it yet".

Pandemonium shenanigans seem to reinforce this, as someone *other* than the WoL is altering out timeline. Though a good question would be why exactly is the WoL aware of changes to the timeline that we didn't cause.

We don't yet know what is going on with Pandaemonium, and at this point it can still be explained without relying on a "changes in the past shifting the state of the present" approach to time travel.

If someone had their own time-travel device in Elpis, they could transport the facility itself from "then" to "now" - meaning that it has simply arrived at the Aitiascope rather than being altered from not-there to there.

Or it could have been hidden in a pocket dimension all this time, or lurking in the depths of the aetherial sea, much like the crystal that started all of this.

[JeanneOrnitier]

The new deep dungeon is in Eureka??

OH! I bet it's the Eureka under Crystal Tower mentioned in ARR.

[Iscah]

The new deep dungeon is in Eureka??

OH! I bet it's the Eureka under Crystal Tower mentioned in ARR.

Yeah, I think so.

Called Eureka Orthos, definitely looks Allagan. The original Eureka in FF3 is effectively a boss rush in the basement of the Crystal Tower while the dungeon Syrcus Tower is climbing the spire, and FFXIV's Syrcus Tower is an amalgamation of those two dungeons.

I don't think it was mentioned as being under the tower in ARR but was definitely brought up in Eureka (along with, at the time, the first reference to G'raha since ARR) when Krile was talking about the story they were referencing when they gave the island that name.

I would guess that we'll be in the Source tower opening up the equivalent to the door we go through in the Twinning to enter the basement levels.