8.0 speculation

[EdwinLi]

I'm not inclined to believe a spinoff featuring Gaia is any hint as to this game's plotline.

If you go look in Garland Tools and/or Gamer Escape though, there is a certain minion and certain mount that have been datamined that may or may not be Fan Fest rewards and may or may not hint at the direction things are headed. I will refrain from posting these things both because I want to keep the surprises for people and to avoid maybe getting banned; but even these things do not properly clarify much of anything, and they may be red (heh) herrings unrelated to the plot or maybe even Crystalline Conflict feelies.

I'm not surprised if that is the direction they're going, and just a little disappointed if it is.

It is not about what 8.0 main story maybe about directly but that they have assets for her being built up now to be used in FF14 beyond just her role in Eden for whatever they may have planned in any expansion main story. If she becomes a main character for any expansion, 8.0, 9.0, and etc, they now can use her for party role as well being a Time Mage Job.

This can also lead to introducing Time Mage Job later for a future expansion or 8.0 if they want to.

As for why Gaia can become a Main Character to the new Shard story arc we are in now, it is most likely her role as a surviving Ascian and how the antagonist's current plans will affect the Source and all Shards. We already know the surviving Ascians basically just decided to join the new Antagonists though we do not know how many did and how many did not choose to join him (or her). We are maybe going to explore a split between Ascians between those who side with the new antagonists and those who have always been just happy with their life they have. The Zodiark Arc (aka our first story arc that ended with Endwalker) was always focused only on Ascians who wanted the original world back but never focus on the Ascians who accept the current world and are happy with their current life or Ascians who are against the plan to restore the old world because they never agree with it.

This will obviously lead to us exploring all the surviving Shards since the current patch Main story set this up. It will be interesting to see and meet Ascians who rejected joining the Restore the original world Plan and those who are doing what they can to restore their now damaged Shard world. Not to mention visit shards that are not badly affected since their elemental alignment were not messed up.

As for the Winterer's plans, well we will just have to wait and see since he or she manage to recruit surviving Ascains to whatever the plan is.

Duellum has some buck-wild picks in general, between Iroha for XI, Krile for V and Balthier for XII. I don't think it shows anything but the developers wanting to get diverse with their roster and making deep cut picks that allow for the cast to be things other than 'Here's Another Sword Boy'. Gaia's packing a hammer and time magic, she's great for that! (Being a desperate attempt to reuse that canned Kingdom Hearts game's assets might've helped too; they might've already had some hammer or time magic assets ready to go and were shopping for a user.)

Which, incidentally, is probably why previous crossover games picked Y'shtola; she's a woman, non-human and primarily a spellcaster, which is a great splash of variety in a lineup of FF protags.

EDIT: Also, within the context of FFXIV itself, Gaia's not turning up in any non-optional MSQ context because it'd require them to make Eden mandatory, and that is a TERRIBLE idea.

That did not stop them from making Crystal Tower manditory.

Players may not like it but if Gaia does become more important to a point she becomes a Main character for future expansions, Eden may become manditory like Crystal Tower UNLESS they make adjustments to the story where players will not need to play through Eden raid.

They can just add a system to provide a quick rundown of what happened in Eden Raid and default the the Expansion story to always assume our character did the Eden Raid. So doing Eden raid will just be going through the full story about what happened in Eden Raid recap but they already got all the important details from the Recap system from the beginning of the X.0 expansion storyline.

However, they can always keep it to current system and adjust the story to being IF players did Eden Raid or not like they did with Shadowbringer before they did the whole "Crystal Tower is now mandatory due to patch Main story plot reasons".

[Cleretic]

That did not stop them from making Crystal Tower manditory.

Yeah, that's WHY they wouldn't do it for Eden. Crystal Tower being made mandatory was ridiculously unpopular, and Crystal Tower is maybe the single easiest side-content ask you can make; it's just three instances and they're all such cakewalks that you're more likely to die to someone getting bored and deciding to wipe the team for fun than actual difficulty.

Meanwhile, with twelve instances and fights that really don't hold back, Eden is plausibly the hardest ask you could make. (The Arcadion might be harder, but I think that's got one or two really hard fights while Eden's just reliably heavy hitters.) And all for what? Fanservice for a character those people only might have heard of if they play an entirely unrelated game?

The developers of this game are not that stupid. That would genuinely damage the game.


And as for the Fanfest rewards: Yeah, we got FFVII rewards for Shadowbringers, and FFX outfits for Stormblood. Sometimes those are just an excuse to vomit out some fanservice and it isn't actually foreshadowing. I would absolutely write them off as nostalgia bait items, because there's a decent chance that they're just that, and you won't find out that they are until you have better evidence to talk about anyway.

[EdwinLi]

Yeah, that's WHY they wouldn't do it for Eden. Crystal Tower being made mandatory was ridiculously unpopular, and Crystal Tower is maybe the single easiest side-content ask you can make; it's just three instances and they're all such cakewalks that you're more likely to die to someone getting bored and deciding to wipe the team for fun than actual difficulty.

Meanwhile, with twelve instances and fights that really don't hold back, Eden is plausibly the hardest ask you could make. (The Arcadion might be harder, but I think that's got one or two really hard fights while Eden's just reliably heavy hitters.) And all for what? Fanservice for a character those people only might have heard of if they play an entirely unrelated game?

The developers of this game are not that stupid. That would genuinely damage the game.


And as for the Fanfest rewards: Yeah, we got FFVII rewards for Shadowbringers, and FFX outfits for Stormblood. Sometimes those are just an excuse to vomit out some fanservice and it isn't actually foreshadowing. I would absolutely write them off as nostalgia bait items, because there's a decent chance that they're just that, and you won't find out that they are until you have better evidence to talk about anyway.

As I said, if they are not going to make Eden manditory but still make Gaia important for main storyline later as a Main Character, they can stick to the system they have now and adjust dialogue based on if players finish Eden Raid or not OR they add a Recap system that allows players to get a simple summary of all important parts of Eden Raid story without needing to do it so that the Main storyline will always assume Eden raid was done by the Player and players can choose to play Eden Raid or not just to get the direct experience with what happened beyond the short recap.

They do not need to make Eden Raid required if they decide to make Gaia a main character for this new Main Story arc since they won't need to reference Eden Raid often during and after the base X.0 expansion Main Story unless it is for important lore topics involving the Main story. Just fill in the gaps with dialogue referencing what happened IF WoL never got involved in the side content as they always do.

[StriderShinryu]

As I said, if they are not going to make Eden manditory but still make Gaia important for main storyline later as a Main Character, they can stick to the system they have now and adjust dialogue based on if players finish Eden Raid or not OR they add a Recap system that allows players to get a simple summary of all important parts of Eden Raid story without needing to do it so that the Main storyline will always assume Eden raid was done by the Player and players can choose to play Eden Raid or not just to get the direct experience with what happened beyond the short recap.

They do not need to make Eden Raid required if they decide to make Gaia a main character for this new Main Story arc since they won't need to reference Eden Raid often during and after the base X.0 expansion Main Story unless it is for important lore topics involving the Main story. Just fill in the gaps with dialogue referencing what happened IF WoL never got involved in the side content as they always do.

That's largely been my take on this problem as well. They don't actually NEED to make the content involving Gaia (or Unukalhai including all of the ShB role quests) required at all. They actually don't even need to create alternate dialogue trees based on what content the player has done. They just need to use the Unending Codex that we already have. Have one version of the relevant character page give a basic overview of who the character or what the context is (and maybe where to "find" more info if desired) and then have a "full" version of the relevant page appear once you've completed the relevant content. Sure it's not as good as actually requiring a play of the content in question but it frees them from the handcuffs of "We can't include that because it's from optional content!"

[Reginald_Cain]

Yeah, that's WHY they wouldn't do it for Eden. Crystal Tower being made mandatory was ridiculously unpopular, and Crystal Tower is maybe the single easiest side-content ask you can make; it's just three instances and they're all such cakewalks that you're more likely to die to someone getting bored and deciding to wipe the team for fun than actual difficulty.

Meanwhile, with twelve instances and fights that really don't hold back, Eden is plausibly the hardest ask you could make. (The Arcadion might be harder, but I think that's got one or two really hard fights while Eden's just reliably heavy hitters.) And all for what? Fanservice for a character those people only might have heard of if they play an entirely unrelated game?

The developers of this game are not that stupid. That would genuinely damage the game.


And as for the Fanfest rewards: Yeah, we got FFVII rewards for Shadowbringers, and FFX outfits for Stormblood. Sometimes those are just an excuse to vomit out some fanservice and it isn't actually foreshadowing. I would absolutely write them off as nostalgia bait items, because there's a decent chance that they're just that, and you won't find out that they are until you have better evidence to talk about anyway.

I think it was unpopular because it was crystal tower specifically. we hated getting it in roulette and basically got told we'd get it a lot more please look forward to it! Eden is that best raid series story and fight wise imo and the ff8 remixes go hard. It's also level 80 so we actually have some buttons.

[Cleretic]

I think it was unpopular because it was crystal tower specifically. we hated getting it in roulette and basically got told we'd get it a lot more please look forward to it! Eden is that best raid series story and fight wise imo and the ff8 remixes go hard. It's also level 80 so we actually have some buttons.

You're kinda right that the Crystal Tower is almost so easy that it loops back around and is just mind-numbingly tedious, but I don't think the solution is 'hardest raid series', because you've also missed that some people didn't like having to do raids at all. That the Crystal Tower, easy as it was in practice, was an extra chore between them and 'The Good Part' (be that 'good part' either Heavensward or Shadowbringers; both were true depending on where you were progress-wise), and a fairly intimidating one on top of it if you haven't done it before; running with twenty-four people in what's called a 'raid', which is a term MMOs usually reserve for 'end-game content', is kinda scary! Yes, factor in the people on the higher end when talking about something like this, but also factor in that, according to publicly available achievement stats, only about 65% of the playerbase have even finished Eden at all, and you have to assume that other 35% might well have some decent internal reasons and would balk if you asked them to. And frankly, I don't want to do more Eden than I have to either, some of those fights REALLY drag!

My thought, if you told me 'exactly one raid series MUST be made mandatory', I think the pick is Ivalice. Not only is it already the non-mandatory raid series with the highest completion rate anyway at 76%, and is an alliance raid series so you're only asking someone to commit to three queues/instances, but it's also got no huge peaks or valleys in difficulty. Mathbot memes aside, none of those fights are really 'turn your brain off and experience ego death' easy or 'look up a guide and practice strategies' hard. I still wouldn't recommend making that mandatory, but it's the least dangerous one to do it with.

EDIT: Also, while I was posting this, the 7.5 special site went up, so we have actual things to speculate on here. Looks like things might indeed be getting Voidular, but I'd suspect it also being Ilsabard-centric; we're still going to Garlemald, so logically the problem's at least partially based there, it'd be weird if Clyteum was the one place with this problem.

[Mixawaves]

Yeah, that's WHY they wouldn't do it for Eden. Crystal Tower being made mandatory was ridiculously unpopular, and Crystal Tower is maybe the single easiest side-content ask you can make; it's just three instances and they're all such cakewalks that you're more likely to die to someone getting bored and deciding to wipe the team for fun than actual difficulty.

Meanwhile, with twelve instances and fights that really don't hold back, Eden is plausibly the hardest ask you could make. (The Arcadion might be harder, but I think that's got one or two really hard fights while Eden's just reliably heavy hitters.) And all for what? Fanservice for a character those people only might have heard of if they play an entirely unrelated game?

The developers of this game are not that stupid. That would genuinely damage the game.

Going to play Devil's Advocate for a second. To my knowledge, 7.5 is going to complete the team's work on going back and adding Duty Support to all of the old dungeons. They could very easily expand this system out to some older 8-man content as the next goal, now that the dungeons are all caught up. We already have some modern 8-man story trials that allow for Duty Support within the last two expansions. It would not be impossible for them to make an older storyline like Eden a required part of the story while mitigating the group anxiety or difficulty issues with Duty Support. Eden being a raid and a step up from the existing support trials might require some more balancing work, but it's easily something they could do. And some level of this integration for old content does seem like a logical next step in their stated goal of making as much of the story of the game accessible to solo players. Actually, now that I've typed this all out, I expect it to happen on some level, perhaps targeting older, existing story trials first.

In spite of all that, I don't see them ever actually making a side story a required stop for MSQ progression again. But if they did want to, the above would mitigate the main issues CT had.

(And FWIW, I'd personally rather they choose the Weapons line and integrate Gaius with the main cast over Eden/Gaia)