Thread: 3.5/4.0 Speculation & Discussion (Spoilers)

It's possible that the trigger may, in fact, be Ilberd. I think that'd actually be pretty interesting - for the current status quo to be shaken up and for the Warrior of Light/Scions to have to do damage control to prevent a heavy handed retaliation on the part of Garlemald itself. If Zenos is a bad apple - which is pretty much confirmed at this point - then he'll likely be causing all sorts of problems too, not only for Eorzeans but his own people given that he presumably doesn't indulge in the core ideals that Garlemald was founded on.

So just a little under two months until the first part of 3.5 - I can live with that. Between FFXV releasing in a handful of days and the Christmas/New Year period a lot of people - myself included - will be pretty busy. By the time stuff starts to calm down again the patch will release.

I assume this is simply the preview for the first part - the next Live Letter will detail the stuff coming in March, right?

At the very least the second part will have more story quests and lead directly into 4.0.

I saw that too but with the angle of the head in the art work and the fact it might be just accidently left out or something. Still, it adds to the speculation fire. I really wont be surprised if they are false tattoos. Yda never really seemed to be someone you would find Sage tattoos on.

We really are lacking a Call to Action for Ala Mhigo, aren't we? While that was the case in 2.4 vis-a-vis Ishgard, I'm honestly a little worried about what kind of buildup we'll actually get, considering:

(1) The 3.x series has less quests to work with than the padded nature of 2.x.
(2) 2.5 used both its parts to build up to Ishgard, but we'll apparently be raiding the Wall in 3.5 Part 1, unless they plan to hold off one of the dungeons an extra two months.
(3) On TOP of all that, the general pattern has been for them to shove the new Story Dungeon into the second quest of the MSQ, so that people don't have to play through the entire story to unlock their new Roulette.

If all of those prove to be true, then we'll be thrust in the direction of Ala Mhigo within one or two more quests (!!). Now, naturally, there's still a lot we don't know, and the storytelling has only been improving as this game goes on, so I really hope they realize that there needs to be more buildup than there is and adjust their patterns accordingly. The most likely thing is for somebody - Ilberd, Nero, Zenos, whoever - to cause an emergency right out the gate, but after the nicely-paced story of 3.4, I was hoping things wouldn't go back to feeling as rushed as 3.1-3 sometimes did. Fingers crossed!

That aside, did anybody else catch how they drew attention to Dun Scaith being the THIRD, not FINAL part of "Shadows of Mhach"? It makes me thing we're gonna get a Trial or something in Part 2. Very curious about that. Tokyo FanFest can't come soon enough.

Yeah, that caused me a double take. A follow up to the 24 man raid is a surprise. A trial perhaps though it seems strange to have after a 24 man.