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).

I just figured Nero was able to get a fix on Omega's location with the compass, which is where he next popped into the story at the end of Heavensward. As for the possibility of a time skip, I'm inclined to agree that we just haven't seen enough to be sure of that happening or not. I'm not sure about the feasibility of constant time travel being an overlaying plot point given the nature of the game itself from a gameplay stance, but I could see Echo shenanigans having a part in perhaps connecting the (for now) WoL with whoever the voice is, if it isn't Arbert but instead someone from the future. After all, if the Echo allows us to look into memories, who's to say it can't allow us to look the other way to a degree? The Ascians have already made a point that there's still much about the true nature of the Echo's powers that we don't yet understand. I think (calamities, Garleans, Ascians, and the balance of Light and Darkness aside) that 5.0 will also be about learning some more secrets of the Echo.

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.)

Originally Posted by Mieck

Taken in English alone, the form of words suggest the speaker is a being with what we would recognise as a normal concept of time.

It does mention time, but I don't think that it's referring to the player character as the Warrior of Light.

In the trailer, we are witnessing memories in what seems to be an Echo vision. Whose memories are these? Personally, I think the one experiencing the vision is Arbert. That would certainly explain why we hear his VA in the trailer.

The Warriors of Darkness are from the First, a world which progressed parallel to ours, with small but significant historical divergences. Looking at the trailer, we see something similar to Kuribu featured. For us, that's simply a dungeon boss and nothing too big to overcome, but who's to say that it wasn't a larger problem for them as Light overcame their world?

Remember, they also were once Warriors of Light like us, and I suspect we're going to have to help them bring darkness to their world. They asked to return to their world to restore it, but it could be a larger undertaking: one that could affect all worlds.

Originally Posted by Warrior of Darkness

Light, Dark, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you choose to use them.

This illustration, shown at the end of the keynote, is what has people talking about someone who might be Minfilia.