Revelations from the Shadowbringers E3 Trailer

[Cilia]

Hydaelyn's Blessing of Light is her equivalent to tempering. Ifrit immediately notes the oddity in his inability to temper you, then follows up by stating that mortal souls can only have one blessing - implying that Hydaelyn has already blessed (tempered) the Warrior of Light by that point. (However, do note that whatever you make of Solus stating Hydaelyn (and Zodiark) are primals, it's never been used to compel the Warrior of Light to do anything in the same way (other) primals compel slavish devotion with their tempering.)

Given Solus (Emet-Selch) told Varis he didn't think they'd see each other again in this lifetime and then walked off, before the parley... I think it's fairly safe to say the latter isn't being possessed or influenced by the former at this time. It looks like Emet-Selch is going to be an antagonistic force on the First, and whatever his grand master plan is I doubt he has the need or desire to bounce back and forth across the two worlds... as long as Varis uses Black Rose, as he says he would.

The governor of Eulmore mentions Sin Eaters are a part of their society, but... I doubt it's in much of a friendly way. On the contrary, it looks like they just feed "undesirables" to the Sin Eaters to appease them and keep the party going, rather than having them as integrated citizens. Can I stab that corpulent SOB at some point? Pretty please?

[ObsidianFire]

Err... The Blessing of Light is not what makes us temper immune. That would be the Echo. And it turns out the Ascians have the Echo as well. So either the Echo is both Zodiark and Hydaelyn's way of tempering or it's something else.

One of the things I don't see brought up a lot is that if Hydaelyn is tempering us with the Echo (and I don't think she is, btw) then the Ascians must be tempered by Zodiark as well. So if we're sort of in trouble working for a primal that wants the world to keep going, the Ascians are really in trouble for working for a primal that wants to destroy it.

[Nalien]

If I had to guess, the Echo has nothing to do with Primals. It's an "echo" of the pre-split Hydiark (Zodaelyn?) times. Hydaelyn and Zodiark are the eldest of Primals, meaning they're the first two. Ergo, the entity that came before them is not a Primal, it's merely something man saw, interpreted differently, thus creating duality in it, and ultimately created Hydaelyn and Zodiark from. Ysayle didn't summon actual Shiva, after all, she summoned her interpretation of Shiva. That's just how summoning work.

We already know what it was they interpreted differently, it's out right stated that they wanted to manifest the will of the star, star being planet in ye olde tongue. What do planets do? Rotate, give us night and day, Light and Dark... There's no actual duality involved there, not until we interpret it as such. One group prefers the day, the other night, thus two Primals are born from one. Given the state we find the First in (perpetual daylight) and what we're going there to ultimately do (restore night), I imagine the day/night theme is spot on.

Now, two Primals are born from the same summoning. Suddenly there is duality, there's division, the will of the star, the aether of the star, is split between Light and Dark. The Echo then, is just a memory, a vestige of how things were before that. If I had to guess, Varis is being manipulated by the Ascians (duh) and he has actually already succeeded in "returning man to how they were before" via the Resonant; Artificial Echo. Perhaps not a complete form of what once was, but I imagine close enough given we're already putting down Ascians left and right and Zenos is able to body-jack Primals to Thordanize Ascians at will, potentially. And as an aside, the very existence of an artificial Echo helpfully handwaves the whole "How do Ascians/Leviathan/etc. give people Echo then?" question.

What do Ascians want out of all this? My guess is for Zodiark to be the one true god. We're not tempered, but they certainly are. Due to their nature, Hydaelyn and Zodiark cannot exist at the same time, they embody division. Hydaelyns solution? What we have now, split reality up. Both continue to exist in fractured realities, and thus technically they're not interfering with each other. Zodiarks solution? Well, the Ascians at least, seems to be a Highlander solution; There can only be one. Have Zodiark absorb Hydaelyn to create one Twilight God, I guess... Return things to how they once were, Light and Dark in one being... Except, that's not how things once were, is it? A Zodaelyn Primal is still a Primal. If I had to guess, Hydaelyns plan is actually the same as Alexanders, a "I cannot exist" plan, problem being so long as Zodiark exists, she has to as well. Balance is requires so both need to exist for now, so she stalls for time instead, until someone who can put them both down comes along. Problem being she can only nurture a Blessing of Light, and I imagine a Blessing of Darkness is also a requirement in this plan...

[Cybylt]

I'm of the mind that this revelation won't actually change us to being against Hydaelyn, and I think it has to do with something learned in 4.5.

Since Ascians tend to give half-truth rather than totally outright lie, I wonder if Varis is actually correct in that there IS an origin race, but that race is Ascians and that is why the Ascians view life now as an abomination.

The Ascians want things back and will rationalize their being primals to try to turn us against Hydaelyn. To what we know so far She is the planet we're on, and the aether She's using is the life stream which flows back to us. We can't kill them without undoing all of existence as we know it, which incidentally the Ascians are all about doing.

[EdwinLi]

I'm of the mind that this revelation won't actually change us to being against Hydaelyn, and I think it has to do with something learned in 4.5.

Since Ascians tend to give half-truth rather than totally outright lie, I wonder if Varis is actually correct in that there IS an origin race, but that race is Ascians and that is why the Ascians view life now as an abomination.

The Ascians want things back and will rationalize their being primals to try to turn us against Hydaelyn. To what we know so far She is the planet we're on, and the aether She's using is the life stream which flows back to us. We can't kill them without undoing all of existence as we know it, which incidentally the Ascians are all about doing.

I have a feeling we may later discover history about the world before Hydaelyn and Zodiark arriving in 5.0 and/or 5.X storyline to set the foundation for 6.0 plot that may involve creating a world where Hydaelyn and Zodiark are no longer needed.

lore wise people assume Hydaelyn and Zodiark are required for life to exist but if there is a time before their creation where life continue to exist then the world does not need Hydaelyn nor Zodiark and all this time they have been just pushing the ideal we need them to exists because that is the only way people will choose freely to worship them.

[Cybylt]

But nobody knows about them, much less worships them. There's a whopping twenty or less believers on each side of that equation unless the Ascians don't actually support Zodiark.

The people who "assume" they're needed can be counted on fingers, it is a deep secret.

And what I'm saying is the time before their creation was just the Aetherial Sea, and Ascians. The Ascians want it returned to that, but we kind of like how the world is right now.

[EdwinLi]

But nobody knows about them, much less worships them. There's a whopping twenty or less believers on each side of that equation unless the Ascians don't actually support Zodiark.

The people who "assume" they're needed can be counted on fingers, it is a deep secret.

And what I'm saying is the time before their creation was just the Aetherial Sea, and Ascians. The Ascians want it returned to that, but we kind of like how the world is right now.

We are taking history but what is recorded and common knowledge.

However, there is a saying in GW2 from the Priory being "History never lies but Historians do."

The knowledge about what the world is like before Hydaelyn and Zodiark is greatly limited to what is recorded by Historians and the Ascians are Historians themselves being the ones who know a bit more about the origins of Hydaelyn and Zodiark but beyond that they have little knowledge.

The Aetherial Sea could have been anything or nothing. For all we know the Aetherial Sea may have been created by the mass collection of souls of living beings from the era before Hydaelyn and Zodiark collected by the being that Hydaelyn and Zodiark will form since we know Life energy is the purest form of Aether and to create the world we know in FF14 the purest form of Aether was used to create everything.

[RopeDrink]

I still can't fathom how so many people came to the idea that Varis was being controlled, other than one brief smile. As said in another thread, Solus plainly told Varis that they would not meet again in his timeline (which in itself could mean a few different things now that the First is likely going to contain some wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey issues), but at face value it means Solus is heading off to be his meddling self and will not be on the Source, leaving Varis to his own devices, after plenty of cutscenes showing Varis' venomous discontent at the concept of the empire being a puppeteered tool for the Ascians. Varis will no doubt throw some curveballs to wrest control of the empire back to the 'normies', even if it will in the end be for his grand scheme of one-true-master-race despite it.

I took nothing from that 'smile' other than a reaffirmation of the fact that despite any hints given that we 'might' have some common ground with Varis re. hate of Ascians, that no, Varis is indeed a big-bad unto himself as well. By the time we sort out the First, there will no doubt be Black-Rose-Empire shenanigans running rampant on the Source, with Estinien and Gaius serving as our cutscene 'eyes' on those matters while we're off eating Sin Eaters for breakfast, with a side dose of Solus.

[EdwinLi]

Another topic:

It seems the 5.0 Storyline may have major dialogue changes based on if the player has unlocked their Dark Knight Job or not similar to 3.0 with the Dragoon Job unlock or not.

We see a Dark knight Job exclusive dialogue in the trailer with the First version of our Starting Merchant commenting about not seen a Dark Knight Job user for over 100 years.

[Cilia]

I still can't fathom how so many people came to the idea that Varis was being controlled, other than one brief smile.

It relies heavily on speculation, but the key points are that Varis is typically very stoic, there's nothing stopping the Ascians from possessing him to assume direct control if they need to, and the possibility that he's just playing along with their goals to ultimately backstab them. (The last is technically true, but the juncture at which he intends to enact that plan is so late in the game it's anyone's guess as to whether it would work or not.)

However as you said Emet-Selch (Solus) said he probably wouldn't ever see Varis again before the parley scenes and walked offscreen (implicitly to the First), and post-4.56 Elidibus is still possessing Zenos.

Ultimately it's just speculative wish fulfillment on the part of people who want the Garlean Empire, and Varis in particular, to not be evil... even though they've begun following the mold of Na... ahem, 1940s Germany even more closely in the last patch.

Another topic:

It seems the 5.0 Storyline may have major dialogue changes based on if the player has unlocked their Dark Knight Job or not similar to 3.0 with the Dragoon Job unlock or not.

We see a Dark knight Job exclusive dialogue in the trailer with the First version of our Starting Merchant commenting about not seen a Dark Knight Job user for over 100 years.

That's either a double meaning, or more of a reference to how night has not fallen on the First in a century. It's always daytime there, until something we accomplish in 5.0 finally brings back the night (probably slaying Innocence, if the opening cinematic is anything to go by).