Thread: 3.4 speculation

Originally Posted by Cilia

Your alternative is that Hydaelyn is incompetent? Yeah, real reassuring... the Goddess doesn't know how to do her job or gauge her abilities...

Eh, I guess it's less incompetence and more exhaustion? She's suffered numerous Calamities at this point, countless Primals have been summoned and drained her aether, at least one Ultima to the face, and who know what else the Ascians have done throughout history... Calling her incompetent is more of a joke I have which stems from either a plot hole or a plot point; Hydaelyn spoke directly to us when we regained the Blessing of Light. Prior to that, and after, it is implied Hydaelyn has been too weak to communicate effectively since Praetorium... Given Word of the Mother ran out of power before telling us what exactly we're meant to seek, Hydaelyn talking to us directly just before our showdown with Thordan, to say pretty much nothing, strikes me as an oddity... Rather than incompetence though, I'm more incline to view it as a plot point, one which indicates that our Blessing is Hydaelyn... The Mother Crystal may have grown dim, but all the torch bearer references we had in 2.55 have me thinking that, rather than sacrificing waifus to revive Hydaelyn, we'll be sacrificing our Blessing... Her flame may have gone out, but we still carry the torch... 10g Word of the Mother was saying "Seek the Crystals of Light", or something similar... It would be a nice set up for 4.0 I think... Hydaelyn would be restored, the Ascians dealt with for the foreseeable future, and we'd be down one piece of plot armor... That allows 4.0 to be somewhat more interesting IMO...

That's really the only seemingly solid piece of speculation I have on what WotM was telling us to seek... The Lunar Whale is a half-serious possibility I guess, given we know the moon is a thing and is related to the current big bad... Could even have a Lunar Subterrane as the new dungeon for 3.5, given there is a statue of Zodiark up there, so presumably other structure too... I just think that's too much of an on-the-nose reference to IV (and that's coming from me...), plus traveling the the moon just strikes me as fairly ridiculous currently... I know Dalamud was in space, so the Allag certainly could have built a Lunar Whale... Heck, I seem to recall 1.0 originally planned for us to go to Dalamud while it was in orbit or something? So it's been on the table for a while for us to go to space... I guess that's the logical terminus of "Heavensward", too... Ugh, it just strikes me as such an odd shift for the story... Suddenly we're astronauts? No, it doesn't work IMO... It was odd in IV and it'd be odd here... I think VII did a much better job of building up its brief trip to the stars, but XIV hasn't had any such buildup and I'd hate to see it crammed into two patches worth of story... Heck, even VIII did a better job that IV IMO, though maybe that's just because bizarre events became the norm with that game...