8.0 speculation

[Cleretic]

You say that like it was a mistake, but it was a perfectly correct assessment that the then "mystery voice" must be from a time beyond our own, which leaves only two options: we time-travel or he time-travels.

Yeah, to clarify the 'time travel' assumption wasn't an out-there moonshot of a prediction, that was the result of people taking what little info they had and trying to shape anything out of it. You had the narration, you had figures that we'd only otherwise seen in Amdapor, and you even had Thancred saying that a place that looked an awful lot like Ul'dah had 'changed'. And hell, given the Alexander raids, time travel certainly seemed more theoretically plausible than shard travel. If I were the predicting type and actively following new info at the time, I probably would've reached for 'time travel' too.

People were wrong, but they were making best-faith guesses given a teaser that was kind of deliberately confusing that didn't really fit anything we were expecting at the time. Bringing it up here largely as perspective; we are not uniquely in the dark and uncertain about the upcoming expansion at this point, we have been WAY more confused than this.

EDIT: Also, I think it's genuinely very helpful and extremely funny to bring up the pre-Shadowbringers leadup, which feels like it's from a totally different planet. Cilia's right, people were not picking up what Shadowbringers was putting down at first, they were rightly skeptical.