8.0 speculation

[MikkoAkure]

the Fanfest has FF7 theme stuff for FF14 with the Red XIII minion and new Bike mount. Why do I feel as if the next expansion Shard location maybe FF7 themed?

I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Shadowbringers Fanfest items were a FFVII motorcycle and FFVII character minions and I don’t remember anything about it being FFVII-related.

[EdwinLi]

I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Shadowbringers Fanfest items were a FFVII motorcycle and FFVII character minions and I don’t remember anything about it being FFVII-related.

It depends where it leads in upcoming patch which looks like we are going back Garlemald for whatever is leading into the next expansion. If we are getting something Garlean related and themed content leading to the expansion's theme with a shard that has a similar civilization to the Garlean Empire, FF7 will fit into the theme for Garlemald and a Shard that has a Counterpart for Garlemald.

Not to mention the whole Garlean "enhanced Soldiers" part that will also fit into a FF7 theme expansion for a 1st Class SOLDIER Job.

[LillyWandsworth]

Okay so here's my two pennies

Something has gone very wrong with the lifestream since we left a power vacuum and "something" has gotten loose mayhap a serpent of some sort hinted back in Endwalker and we need to go down there and sort it.

[Cilia]

I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Shadowbringers Fanfest items were a FFVII motorcycle and FFVII character minions and I don’t remember anything about it being FFVII-related.

I think we need to wait to see what the preorder / premium edition items are, because those are usually more thematically resonant with the expack. While it's true before Endwalker Fan Fest items were not all that resonant with the expack, Endwalker and Dawntrail both went extremely hard with that given how much influence IV and IX had on them, respectively. I would have written them off as just nostalgia bait items beforehand, but given the heavy influence of legacy titles on recent plotlines I don't think that's a prudent conclusion - whether you like whatever legacy title it's drawing from or not.

[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.

[Iscah]

Regarding Gaia, while it is not impossible for the devs to establish some kind of bypass system to "explain the basics of Eden without playing it", there is absolutely no precedent for it in the game so far, and doing so would mark a major shift in how they handle the canon nature of side content. At this point we have no indication they would do such a thing, and instead have seen them take it in the opposite direction: giving Gaia an MSQ appearance that is still thoroughly locked behind completion of the questline.

Until we are told they are changing their well-established system, there is no reason to have any expectation that Gaia will become a full MSQ-participating character.

To be fair, we've been here somewhat before with G'raha, but we've seen how they resolved that. They made Crystal Tower mandatory to allow it to be continued and built upon, which fits in with their overall approach that things are treated as only having happened if the individual player has done them.

[Cleretic]

The other comparison here is Alisaie turning up in the MSQ for Stormblood after Coils. And I bring that one up because it's actually a great example for why they can't do this with Gaia. With Alisaie all they had to do was 'yadda yadda' past Coils, which is largely because she is still the same character before and after; Coils didn't really affect her or the world around her, so all that needs to be addressed is her actual knowledge of the WoL; if you've done Coils she's a friend, if you haven't she's just a vague acquaintance. She can and does exist outside of Coils.

Gaia actually doesn't exist outside of Eden. Her state as a character changes radically over the events of that story, and crucially, she starts it basically inaccessible, as an amnesiac prisoner somewhere off in the Empty. You cannot 'yadda yadda' past Eden to bring Gaia in, because Eden is Gaia's entire story, she does not exist without it.

And again, why bother? This is going through great lengths and basically just rewriting the narrative rules the game's entirely stuck to until now, solely to... what? Bring in a character for fanservice purposes that the people you're doing this for, by definition, cannot be fans of, because they have not met her? That's ridiculous, especially given Gaia's already thrived quite well off in side content and conditional scenes that only play for people who actually do know who she is.

[mallleable]

Merchant's Tale has had me thinking about fiction in the world of XIV a lot, and so I started poking around in the Omega raids because of how it drew upon in-universe stories for the fights. The only story characters that the characters had the most knowledge of was of Halicarnassus.

From Nero

"Halicarnassus, you say? The Queen of Dimension Castle?"

...

"Literary historians have speculated that the tale could be loosely based on events which took place in the Fourth Astral Era, but little remains of that age, and there is no way to verify the claim. Indeed, most now assume the story to be a work of pure fiction."

If there is a possibility it was based off 'true events' then it makes me think The Key could be involved. Halicarnassus was the Queen of Dimension Castle. The nods to FFV in Occult Crescent, and Enuo appearing as an MSQ trial makes me wonder if the truth of the tale of Halicarnassus could pop up in 8.0.

[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.