Thread: "Time Skip" for 4.5 or 5.0?

Originally Posted by Fenral

Wait, the leaks are saying what now? *ears perk up*

It was posted on my FC Discord at the time when the blue mage / gunblade / dancer / Viera leaks came out, and I was quoting from memory, but now I've gone and dug back through the conversations to find it.

I have no idea of the source beyond that.

https://imgur.com/a/CWHVfir

On actual re-reading and with blue mage properly revealed now, the information doesn't seem so reliable. ("Blue mage will be melee support DPS"; "starts at Lv60")

But the lore-bits that had stuck in my mind and that do still seem potentially relevant:

• "The Crystal Tower will play a big part in the story, in which it will open a portal that will involve 5.0" (which, as I said, made sense as lining up with the mystery signal from Nero's magitek compass)
• "Minfilia comes back - she's the poster chick for 5.0, like for the box art and such"

(And who's on the Amano artwork apparently for the special edition? Mystery Girl. And who are we theorising she might be...?)



Still, even if the leak is no good, sooner or later something's got to come of whatever Nero's compass detected.

And it just clicked how G'raha could be incorporated back into MSQ without forcing completion of the Crystal Tower raids!

Assume we do have a "time travel to the future" plot incoming - and it essentially creates a second time bubble which we travel to, or perhaps freely back and forth between the two bubbles.

In our present time bubble, G'raha either is currently sealed in the tower, or will be when the player gets around to completing the quest.

Then we move to the future bubble. G'raha has at some time in the past been sealed in the tower, regardless of whether the player has seen it happen yet.

And that, of course, is where we pick up his story, only needing a variable introduction depending on whether you've met him or not.

(Though come to think of it, he would know you regardless of whether you know him, because he's been through the Crystal Tower arc with you, even if you haven't yet... the joys of time travel!)



So perhaps either he's been let out in the future, and makes arrangements to pull the Scions and then us into his time... or we arrive in the future by other means, release the seal on the tower, and then he arranges to pull the others / send mysterious messages / etc (because, further joys of time travel, it doesn't have to happen in the same order things happened at the other end).

Originally Posted by Iscah

snip

I just wanna say, it's really enjoyable having someone else around to post stuff like this so I don't have to.


I originally anticipated a new bubble being required for Alisaie to come back, and that wasn't needed after all, so they may just play fast and loose with patch continuity and sort out the bodies in 5.0 like they did with Estinien. They have been slowly but steadily making those raids more accessible, so it's possible they'll become a "you should know this" soft requirement like the Binding Coil. (Though CT technically already was one for Nero's return in 3.5.)

The whole timey wimey sutff has actually happened in FF14 already back in 1.0.

Don't forget the WoL in 1.0 was actually sent back into the past through the Echo and experienced the past events back in 1.0 during the moments before the Battle of Silver tear lake while switching between the past and present timeline.

They can keep the current quests with the time skip and have the Echo basically have the WoL experience these Quest within their timeframes without compromising the Lore since the Echo can send the WoL between Past and Present as we seen in 1.0 to a point that WoL may not even know he or she is in the Past or Present.

Originally Posted by EdwinLi

Don't forget the WoL in 1.0 was actually sent back into the past through the Echo and experienced the past events back in 1.0 during the moments before the Battle of Silver tear lake while switching between the past and present timeline.

If I may request elaboration on this part, you are aware that when using the Echo in 1.0, you couldn't actually change the past, right? You were in a localized copy of that moment in someone's memory, and you could affect it with your presence and make it play out in a different way in the vision, but you it didn't change the past. How could that be used here? The trailer says history must be unwritten, the very thing the 1.0 Echo couldn't do, right?

Or are you suggesting we were wrong about the Echo then and have been wrong about it ever since?

Was it always time shenanigans? Or is Zodiark's ability to bend time and space (as the King of Precepts) the key to this?

Originally Posted by Anonymoose

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Don't forget the 2nd key part of the teaser trailer is to change the past which means WoL is expected to have some ability to influence and change events of the past in 5.0 to prevent the Calamity we see in the teaser trailer which most likely may be the Echo evolving or gaining that ability.

We know the echo powers is given by Hydaelyn for the power over Soul but what will happen if the Echo has the power of both Hydaelyn for the power of Soul and Zodiark for the power of Time.

Originally Posted by EdwinLi

The whole timey wimey sutff has actually happened in FF14 already back in 1.0.

Don't forget the WoL in 1.0 was actually sent back into the past through the Echo and experienced the past events back in 1.0 during the moments before the Battle of Silver tear lake while switching between the past and present timeline.

They can keep the current quests with the time skip and have the Echo basically have the WoL experience these Quest within their timeframes without compromising the Lore since the Echo can send the WoL between Past and Present as we seen in 1.0 to a point that WoL may not even know he or she is in the Past or Present.

Not quite. Derplander's trip back to the Battle of Silvertear Skies in 1.0's opening movie was merely an exaggerated rendition of how the Echo was depicted in 1.0 (where it was interactive and virtually indistinguishable from 'reality'). The Echo's depiction was changed gameplay wise in ARR (to become an non-interactive grainy and washed out video feed), so what was shown in 1.0's opening movie has now been well and truly retconned I'm afraid. And even in 1.0, it was not the actual past you were visiting, but just another's memories of that event (that was the big twist that Ferne revealed on the old 1.0 forum, that the first part of 1.0's story had already happened - the player's character didn't realize it but they were just blundering about in other people's memories of events that had happened ten years before during the starting city storyline).

And remember, as HW's opening movie showed all too well, the full rendered trailers may have errornous information in them, given they're actually produced by a seperate team to the FFXIV team (Square Enix Visual Works), and who may not have the most accurate information that the lore and writing teams have.