*Spoilers* Questions about Shadowbringers

[Iscah]

Because the main post is asking about TIMELINE and which one is the MSQ possibly using.

Read it again. It's not asking "which timeline we're in". It's asking whether the timeline we're not in still exists - and that's a question that can be answered with the assumption we are in a relatively simple "Y-shaped" timeline with one single sequence of events up until the events of Shadowbringers cause it to split into two paths.

That's is how the flow of time has been described to us in the game up to this point. One timeline with a single "crossroads" created to change the path of history away from the dark future.

Any other variable events are altered by external gameplay factors, not portrayed in-game as doing something that changes the past and affects the present. Our character is not time-traveling, just filling in gaps that should have been completed earlier - and any remarks about us not having met people yet are "temporary measures" until we've done the quests as intended.

There's no version of the story where doing CT post-Shadowbringers actually makes sense - but it's a good enough excuse to cover the gap until the player completes that story and puts it in the proper earlier position. And it's not just a matter of it being immediately replaced by the "happened in 2.X" version of events, because if the Exarch saying we haven't met his past self is a valid timeline, then CT has to have happened post-timeline-split in 5.0 for him - and that doesn't make sense, therefore that timeline shouldn't be possible, therefore it shouldn't be considered equally canon. It's just a temporary fill-in for the proper version of events.

And generally speaking, for the sake of discussing the story, my understanding is that we treat the single "all quests complete" version of the story as canon and ignore the variations. You can look at the variations and maybe learn something interesting from them, but they're not supposed to happen that way.