The Venat Cutscene

[kaynide]

Makes sense to me- could have been several mana drains here and there that kickstarted the launch. Maybe the tunnel beetles were all allagan related for “laying pipes” to siphon the aether.

Perhaps Azem Steppe also had the infrastructure needed to supply aether (crooked coin), it just wasn’t needed.


That said if The Burn was what was needed to initially launch Azys, I wonder if that spurred the concept of using summons/faith as mana batteries. Given that it only takes the 3 warring triad (and captives) to keep it aloft, it seems an obvious improvement albeit inhumane.

Or we might be working on WeIrD MaGiC rules where once aloft it doesn’t need that much to keep it aloft as initial enchantments handle that…

[Naraku_Diabolos]

What the majority of you users posting on here have forgotten is that we (our character) traveled to the past and had directly altered it by meeting Venat in Elpis. Prior to us traveling to Elpis (story 2.0 to pre-6.0) the past was already the way it was because Venat never knew ahead of time that Zodiark was going to be summoned due to the Final Days. But with us traveling to Elpis, we met Venat in the past and gave her a heads up about the Zodiark summoning. That is why we saw no clash of Hydaelyn versus Zodiark to create the Sundering. We gave Venat info ahead of time so she did the Sundering as herself right after Zodiark was summoned. She didn’t have to be a vessel for Hydaelyn’s summon to do the Sundering because we alerted her of the Final Days and Zodiark. That’s why when finished that long cutscene from exiting Elpis, Venat said that our timelines have now mixed.

When we defeated Zodiark, we get the dialogue with the darkened planet from the Endsinger herself (it’s her voice, not Meteion’s). Since we tampered in Elpis, the Endsinger didn’t exist right after that. It’s when we traveled to Ultima Thule that we THEN pushed Meteion to become the Endsinger.

[Necrotica]

FF14 time travel does not care about causality and paradoxical self creating loops.

Just gotta roll with it. It doesn't make sense. It is horrendous writing. But it is what they have decided they want their story to be.

[KageTokage]

The "logic" that the closed time loop theorem abides by is that all instances of time travel in a setting already happened, so there was technically never any version of Elpis we hadn't tampered with, and even if there was it's a distinct alternate reality/timeline we can't interact with..at least as far as we know.

We already saw some of the weirdness that can entail in more detail during the Alexander storyline, which ultimately culminates in a grandfather paradox where Mide and Dayan become the founders of the Hotgo tribe.

A causal loop has no defined starting point and is a ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey nonsense that just works.

That said, time travel as a whole being fictional can work however the heck the writers want it to. I've seen plots where the entire story revolved around breaking a causal loop as opposed to perpetuating it, for instance.

[Iscah]

...

You are mistaken about the basics of the time travel alteration, and from there reaching the wrong conclusion about thinking "Meteion only becomes the Endsinger later".

Multiple incidents from the beginning of Endwalker indicate that the world is already in a state affected by our trip to Elpis. If there ever theoretically was a timeline where the changes were yet to be applied, we are not in it, but more likely there never was such a timeline and it has always played out this way.

• At the beginning of the game when Hydaelyn speaks to us on the ship, she is already aware that we are approaching the point where the time loop resolves.

• Argos is willing to let us ride him when we first (to us) meet him on the moon because to him, we already met him in Elpis and earned his trust there. This is specified in the mount description as a quirk of time travel.

• As you note, the Endsinger – the collective Meteia as opposed to a single Meteion – already exists.

Also, even if there theoretically was a "pre-altered timeline" without our interference at Elpis, I don't agree that it could change the Endsinger from a pre-existing entity with its own history to being connected up to the Meteia.

And I don't believe there is any need for a pre-altered timeline to exist, particularly in this universe's time-travel rules. The ultimate example of this is when we travel back in time during the A12 fight to save our earlier self from Alexander's laser beam. There cannot be a pre-interference version of this timeline, because then we would be dead and unavailable to be sent back. Alternately, if something else saved us the first time, then there is no need to overwrite the event. Therefore logically no version of events occurred except the one we experienced, time travel and all.

[shadowclasper]

You are mistaken about the basics of the time travel alteration, and from there reaching the wrong conclusion about thinking "Meteion only becomes the Endsinger later".

Multiple incidents from the beginning of Endwalker indicate that the world is already in a state affected by our trip to Elpis. If there ever theoretically was a timeline where the changes were yet to be applied, we are not in it, but more likely there never was such a timeline and it has always played out this way.

• At the beginning of the game when Hydaelyn speaks to us on the ship, she is already aware that we are approaching the point where the time loop resolves.

• Argos is willing to let us ride him when we first (to us) meet him on the moon because to him, we already met him in Elpis and earned his trust there. This is specified in the mount description as a quirk of time travel.

• As you note, the Endsinger – the collective Meteia as opposed to a single Meteion – already exists.

Also, even if there theoretically was a "pre-altered timeline" without our interference at Elpis, I don't agree that it could change the Endsinger from a pre-existing entity with its own history to being connected up to the Meteia.

And I don't believe there is any need for a pre-altered timeline to exist, particularly in this universe's time-travel rules. The ultimate example of this is when we travel back in time during the A12 fight to save our earlier self from Alexander's laser beam. There cannot be a pre-interference version of this timeline, because then we would be dead and unavailable to be sent back. Alternately, if something else saved us the first time, then there is no need to overwrite the event. Therefore logically no version of events occurred except the one we experienced, time travel and all.

As much as I hate time travel plots I will admit that ffxiv's solution to the gordion knot of causality they represent us the narrativeky best option "it doesn't matter what you do if you go into the past because you've already done it, and if something from the future interfered with our present, we'll that too is just how it works"

As far as we can tell, it took the concentrated effort of three centuries, and the combined supertech of Alag, Alexander, and the Ironworks to actually 'change' the flow of time and it's unclear if it was creating a loop or if it broke things

[Necrotica]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

[shadowclasper]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

Except... it just hit me it already had happened that way, because otherwise we died before we went back in time, paradox is only averted by time travel already existing. You need the time travel stuff to exist to go back to the world unbundled in the first place

[Iscah]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

As I've said before, I think there is a rule that can be made to fit the circumstances, which is that a time traveller can break the timeline if they know the event that they are changing. (It is never automatic that travelling through time itself breaks the timeline; it can only be caused by the actions of a traveller visiting the past.)

They need to know the details of what originally happened in that time and place, and prevent it from playing out the same way.

Of the time travel instances we are aware of, G'raha's is the only example that fits those criteria. For all the others, either the traveller is blundering in with no knowledge of the precise events at their destination, or if they do know the details, their actions preserve the timeline as they know it should play out. They could have changed it if they performed the right actions, but they either didn't try or were thwarted.

[kaynide]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

I don’t see the problem.

Back to the Future more or less works with loops and changes in the timeline.
Chrono Trigger also does this.

In FFXIV it becomes more plausible in that it took 300ish years of Uber-tech for them to figure out how to even do it.

Not my favorite kind of writing, but in the story it works fine.