Where is [Spoiler]?

[Crushnight]

So given there was the (not)subtle return of Gaius van Bealsar and his plot dump of a new ascian/what he has been doing/what happened to Alphinaud that came with 4.5 he seems suspiciously absent from anything related to Shadowbringers even Varis is absent from it all but at least with him the writers have hinted he may die soon with Gaius it feels like he's there and they have no clue on him for now.
What are your thoughts on Gaius whereabouts?

[Kalise]

I guess it depends a lot on your take about the location of the next expansion.

Given that some prominent theories are time travel and/or visiting another shard... Then it would mean that Varis and Shadowhunter would both be somewhere (Somewhen?) on the Source while we're off doing Shadowbringers stuff.

Though, it is slightly odd that Garlemald was given such a short overlook, after seemingly hyping up the fact that we'd have to go there (Though, I suppose now that Alphinaud has returned, that seems less likely)

So yeah... At a guess, after we beat up Zenos again and likely shut down the encroaching army (Since, I don't think morale would be too high after we beat Zenos a second time...) we go off to do ShB content. With Varis having a hissy fit that even an Ascian in his son's body failed to beat the WoL and that his army isn't able to take back Gyr Abania while Shadowhunter goes back to hunting Ascians while we're gone.

Possibly some arc occurs where Varis starts to see the Ascians failing as a sign that maybe his grand plan of "The One True Race" is kind of silly (But then again, illusions of grandeur are a thing when the Emperor's get literally worshipped...)

[QT_Melon]

I really would like to see the next xpac cover the other shards, because it really does make more of an impact imo. I mean is it better to rejoin all the worlds, what effect does our issues have on other shards? I mean time travel does too, but since HW actually had visitors from another shard, what are those other worlds like? It was really a teaser to what those Shards were, and I think it would be great if ShB goes into more depth.

"Killing" Gaius twice seems cheap imo.

[Anonymoose]

What are your thoughts on Gaius whereabouts?

I haven't been thinking too hard about it because the stingers throughout Stormblood all seem to have a very delayed payoff. They seem to be following the Griffin formula; rather than hyping us for what's coming soon(ish), they've been giving us brief snippets of context from "the other side" as we went about our year-and-a-half march towards where it all comes together.

Elidibus is on his way to us, Solus is on his way to the First, Varis is trying to pull a Thordan, Zenos is coming at Ghimlyt sideways, and I just tell myself "Gaius is exactly where he thinks he needs to be."

I guess it depends a lot on your take about the location of the next expansion.

And what a ride trying to figure that out has been. "It's time to take down the Garlean Empire!" ... but there have been zero hints pointing towards Ilsabard ... but they won't tell us where any of the areas are ... but Solus is clearly going to the First ... and then there's the Voice. So I go into the Keynote thinking, "Okay, I hope this helps us narrow it down. Is Ilsabard just getting Light-scourged into the 'messed up world'? Or are we going to the First? Or is Dalmasca involved? Is it a Before/After time travel thing?" and what do I get? What looks to be Mesoamerican and Old West architecture supplemented by an armadillo. So add the New World to the possibility mix.

I feel like somewhere around 3.5 we went from being spoon-fed foreshadowing you couldn't miss to being hit with foreshadow buckshot and addition retcons new revelations. "Who is going to accidentally guess correctly?"

I really would like to see the next xpac cover the other shards, because it really does make more of an impact imo.

I waffle on this one a lot.

Final Fantasy is a franchise about saving the world you know and love against all odds and challengers. I think that's why it tends to feel cheap when they bring in alternate dimensions and timelines that make your world smaller and less significant with (cosmologically speaking) less at stake.

FFXIV seems to have tried to mitigate this a bit. They admitted up front that "the (one) universe" was broken and now there are (fourteen) dimensional planes. Alexander seemed to show us that time long before us and time long after us was set in stone unless manipulated from the outside, changing the past, present, and future all at once depending on your individual chronological locale.

Changing or adding to these already-extant things rather than making use of them in a novel way risks cheapening the world or further convoluting the setting - something every Final Fantasy game is wont to do (to its own detriment at times), especially in the final few chapters, lol.

"Killing" Gaius twice seems cheap imo.

I could live with it, if he died in consistency with his own character in a way that completed his story. As organic as the world is, the story and its people definitely follow traditional dramatic arcs. Gaius's first "death" didn't jibe very well with the big picture. You could make it fit with 1.0, or 1.23, or 2.0 alone. But all three together felt weird, and unbecoming of what he was supposed to represent. With those affairs in order, I wouldn't be totally against a good death.

Ironically, SE could have - without bringing him back - used addition-retcons to retroactively explain his behavior in context of the more recently written lore about the Populares / Optimates polarization, looming death of the Emperor, and larger Ascian machination. (No matter who won, Gaius as we knew him was going to lose.)

But this is more fun.

[Bright-Flower]

I'm mostly wondering where Elf Zenos is at. You teased him like three patches ago SE, where is he? Hope he shows up in part 2 of 4.5 msq.

[fay2]

Personally think Black Rose is used at the Ghimlyt dark really early in the expansion (thinking WW1) the alliance weathers it. However I don't see them pushing into empire lands yet. During Stromblood they didnt push into Gyr Abania straight away at the as it would be seen as invasion.

Instead I see "our character" is sent on a MSQ quest of a clandestine mission to destroy the new factory of Black Rose which we do with Gaius and Shinobi that takes you to see a little of the new Othard zones. In the usual splitting of MSQ in the early expansion MSQ (ARR/HW/StB all have a little split in the start)

Gaius its problaby states that the empire made Black Rose as a response to thinking the effect of the Green Wraith in Black Shroud was a aetherchemical attack by Gridania, he quickly learned otherwise and had the work on Black Rose stopped.

After that Gaius is put back in the box till MSQ 5.X

[Kalise]

I waffle on this one a lot.

Final Fantasy is a franchise about saving the world you know and love against all odds and challengers. I think that's why it tends to feel cheap when they bring in alternate dimensions and timelines that make your world smaller and less significant with (cosmologically speaking) less at stake.

FFXIV seems to have tried to mitigate this a bit. They admitted up front that "the (one) universe" was broken and now there are (fourteen) dimensional planes. Alexander seemed to show us that time long before us and time long after us was set in stone unless manipulated from the outside, changing the past, present, and future all at once depending on your individual chronological locale.

Changing or adding to these already-extant things rather than making use of them in a novel way risks cheapening the world or further convoluting the setting - something every Final Fantasy game is wont to do (to its own detriment at times), especially in the final few chapters, lol.

To be fair, the entire Ascian plot has kept bringing in other shards on the regular. Due to their master plan being to rejoin enough of the other shards to awaken Papa Zody. So whenever we hear about another shard being lost and so get closer to the Ascians goal, it keeps us interested in what's happening to them.

In addition to this, it also sets up convenient places where we can get tons of new content while fighting against the odds to do the impossible - I.e. Reversing a flood of light/darkness to save a world. Or even going to the Thirteenth and 'Saving' the Voidsent from their mutation (Or at the very least, helping to create a civilisation by allowing some Voidsent to regain their higher functioning minds back, so while some would continue to be mindless monsters travelling the shards to nom on some Aether, there would also be those that would become allies to other races)

Of course, it can be hard to justify too much content on other shards, because at the end of the day, the Source is the primary world we know, which has eons of lore attached to it that is meaningful to us (Since calamities have shaped the world, often literally) but having some arcs take place on other shards could easily be done and could link back to the Source (Such as how it seems that the First's situation is having an effect on the Aether of the Source, thinning it out)

The main issue would be to not overuse the means of travelling to other shards/through time. Since that's when you start to complicate things and create a ton of plotholes such as "Why don't we just go back in time and beat up Solus before he creates the Imperial Empire?"

[ObsidianFire]

The problem with including other Shards is that so far all methods of traveling between shards stem back to having the Echo and using it to keep your soul together past your first bodily death and then use it to posses other people's bodies (dead or alive) on the Shard you are traveling too. It's not some nice convent thing you can just do on a whim for the heck of it (like to do random open world content like we do in the current zones). I'm not saying that SE can't come up with different ways to travel between Shards that don't involved essentially commuting suicide. But so far, all travel between Shards has been presented as something that involves going against the natural order of the world and at the moment, that's not something I'd want to be doing. The world is broken enough as it is; I don't want to break it even more. If we do travel between Shards (or back in Time) there had better be one hell of a good explanation as to why we are doing it.

Even we could go to different Shards though, nothing in the new zones we have seen looks like anything we couldn't find on Hydaelyn. Ilsabard is as big as Othard is. And we know even less about what exactly is in Ilsabard then we knew about what was in Othard. The only thing I'd say we know for sure about Ilsabard is that Garlemald is in the far north of it and we've yet to even make it into southern Ilsabard. The entire continent is essentially one giant question mark. And that goes for the New World as well.

[Kuroka]

The problem with including other Shards is that so far all methods of traveling between shards stem back to having the Echo and using it to keep your soul together past your first bodily death and then use it to posses other people's bodies (dead or alive) on the Shard you are traveling too.

Thats not fully true... we could enter the World of Darkness, the former 13th shard. There might be ways.

[Kalise]

Thats not fully true... we could enter the World of Darkness, the former 13th shard. There might be ways.

Voidsent travel between shards all the time.

Heck, when we defeat them, they go back to the 13th.

Otherwise, they portal their way from the 13th to our world when they sense tasty aether to nom on.