Six Year? A progression of events query

[Magis]

Well if I recall, FF11 also had a "Time travel arc" where you went back to when one of the past wars was going on and basically were the reason it was saved then via psychic telephone Paradox. The present was saved so you could go back and save the past that way you were guaranteed to arrive years later and save the future.

Yes, but the span between the past and present was fixed at 20 years, even when "20 years" was technically when vanilla XI started. The Shadow Lord missions says he rose 20 years ago and got the beastmen to start the Crystal War, yet the Wings of the Goddess missions also say that the Crystal War happened 20 years ago, even though there were 3 expansions in between. Time never moved.

I guess you could argue it as shorthand (rounding down) but ehhhh. Let's just says it's a wibbly wobbly timey wimey thing.

[Anonymoose]

To this day I still have trouble figuring out what was a flash back and what was "Present Day" in 1.0

Crank the volume and watch the screen, when an Echo begins and ends, there's a whoosh and a screen warble to show that you've entered a vision.

FFXI and Cataclysm both jumped from one bubble to another, but FFXI allowed you to do it temporarily. A lot happened in the past, a lot happened in the present, but time never moved for either. You were in one bubble before going through the maw, and in another bubble after going through the maw. Simply two bubbles separated by twenty years and Atomos' smug mug.

[Kaiser-Ace]

Crank the volume and watch the screen, when an Echo begins and ends, there's a whoosh and a screen warble to show that you've entered a vision.

Wait you mean when the CS starts and it sounds like the audio skips for half a second when it make that weird noise?

[Anonymoose]

Wait you mean when the CS starts and it sounds like the audio skips for half a second when it make that weird noise?

Whoosh!

/10char

[Kaiser-Ace]

Yea That Sound!!! Always happened right before THAT particular BGM replaced the Field BGM. I played the Ul'dah story though so I had different CSs, But that sound usually happened any time Thancred or Ascilla showed up in Ul'dah.

[Anonymoose]

But that sound usually happened any time Thancred or Ascilla showed up in Ul'dah.

Yep! Ascilia and Thancred only showed up in Ul'dah in visions of 1562 surrounding the death of Niellefresne. Thancred didn't show up in the present day until Future's Perfect, if I remember correctly, before joining the Seventh Umbral Era storyline.

[SilverObi]

In terms of RP, most players adhere to the ingame timeline as the most basic guide for lore events. But they also allow time to pass for their character specifically.
For example, in FFXI it was indeed perpetually "20 years after the Crystal War", but me and my RP group used real world time for our journeys. So while the game and NPCs constantly said "20 years ago", for us it was "20-coughmumblecough- years ago". RPing in a time bubble like this allows some fudging of time otherwise you'll have many events/character developments happening too clustered together.

[Volkai]

That makes sense, Silver...

The issue I was hoping to get clarification on is, I've been hearing that there was official acknowledgement/determination of that real-world-or-something-like-it passage of time, which would be far more reliable than people having to determine a rough passage of time that not all RPers might agree upon. But it looks like that is not the case after all.

[Anonymoose]

I've been hearing that there was official acknowledgement

Unless I missed one (can't fully discount that), my theory is that some people treat the Companies' announcement like it counts as Heavensturn.

[Kaiser-Ace]

Unless I missed one (can't fully discount that possibility), my theory is that some people are treating the Companies' announcement like it was made on New Years.

The way I saw it, the speeches say (If I remember correctly) "Five years ago today" in reference to the Battle of Cartenoue. So that means, as of the lvl 15 quests, that it has been exactly 5 years since the Calamity started. So even should 2.55 occur, lets say six months, after that quest it would still technically be the 5th year since the calamity. The only problem caused by "The Bubble" is that The 7th Astral Era was declared after the defeat of Ultima.

So since we don't know an exact date when Ultima was defeated in relation to the 5th anniversary of The Battle of Catrenoue aka the start of the calamity, we don't actually have a time reference in regards to the beginning of the 7th Astral Era. We knew the date of the battle of Cartenoue and we know that the lvl 15 quest's speeches start exactly 5 years from that day but we don't know how long after that Ultima was activated by Gaius nor how long it took for operation Arcon to start. Another variable is did operation Arcon happen in one day? Two? A week? thus muddying the time line further between it's start and the destruction if Ultima.