How much time have passed since ARR?

[Dualblade]

Same here on making a headcanon version of it, though I'd put HW at not being quite a year for my own headcanon. Closer to 6-9 months.

[MaethusXion]

I'm personally in the camp headcanon-ing each expansion to take around a year. I THINK a dev said between the final cutscene of 2.55 and the beginning of 3.0's MSQ was a few months, but until we get a concrete (ie, Encyclopaedia) source saying times then it's all up in the air

[Jennah]

It has been 2100 Earth days since ARR released, or just over 3million Earth minutes.
Every Eorzean day is 70 Earth minutes long.
Therefore, it has been 43200 Eorzean days since ARR released.
Or with 12 months of 32 days each, exactly 112.5 Eorzean years.
...
The WoL looks good for being well over 130, huh?

[Rannie]

I'm personally in the camp headcanon-ing each expansion to take around a year. I THINK a dev said between the final cutscene of 2.55 and the beginning of 3.0's MSQ was a few months, but until we get a concrete (ie, Encyclopaedia) source saying times then it's all up in the air

The time between 2.55 and 3.0 was a few days to a few weeks. Per a live letter.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...804-23-2015%29

0:05:06
Q: Story-wise how much time has passed since the end of Patch 2.55 and the beginning of Heavensward?

A: While there is no specific mention of how much time has passed in-game, it’s about a few days to a few weeks after the events that took place during Patch 2.55. You can think of this time as the time that passed while Haurchefant was speaking with the people of House Fortemps, and the expansion begins when the Warrior of Light’s entry to Ishgard has been approved, so it’s not like months have passed.

[Abigorium]

In my opinion, the reason why this question comes up so often is because the bubble itself ISNT static. Sure the models don’t always update, but flavor text, some areas, and even the placement of some NPCs absolutely DO update as you progress. And even if they don’t directly specify exactly how MUCH time has passed, the game does reference time enough for you to be actively conscious of it and curious. Time bubbles are fine, but if you are going to move me from one to another I’d like to know how much time has passed between them. I think that’s reasonable.

On the subject of updated models, I honestly haven’t seen a demand for SE to do that for NPCs. If anything, they take that initiative themselves with each expansion now.

[RopeDrink]

To those using WoW as an example, bear in mind that we're never really in any scenes and typically not in the spotlight, and those who start anew will often find events in a complete jumble, so time isn't much better there. If anything, it's worse. Vol'jin is still casually standing inside my WoD Garrison, yet he died an expansion ago and was replaced by Sylvanas, yet I can also go and start MoP content when I like and the first cutscene will be of Garrosh as Warchief telling you what to do. There's a LOT of examples of this sort of conflict due to how WoW is pieced together in the present after the levelling system was streamlined and scaled.

An old-school player playing from vanilla would have went from Vanilla > Burning Crusade > Wrath > Cataclysm > Mists > Draenor > Legion > BFA, and we'd be right to consider this the natural course of events, yet if I started levelling a new toon right now, that order is pretty irrelevant outside of my own level. Once you hit X, Y or Z level you can completely skip content entirely and do, say, Wrath rather than Crusade, Draenor instead of Mists etc, and if you do either with any sort of previous story conflict (like above mentioned Vol'Jin/Sylvanas Warchief debacle) then you're in for a lore-based headache if you care for that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, FFXIV has some minor examples of the same thing, but far, far, far less so and none of which exists is too overly impactful unless you're a stinger for accurate lore. Example, I had gotten about halfway through Heavensward on my WHM before I decided to off-level a Dragoon, which caused some... Curiosities in terms of Estinien's place in the MSQ vs how he was in the DRG quest-line. While we can debate over its usefulness, just having the game be more centric from its own A to B and be time-contained is just a way of trying to protect the game, even if it itself also isn't exactly perfect.