Thread: How long has it been since the events of 2.0?

Some people claim they would get confused if while doing a current content quest it said it was 7 years since the Calamity but then they went back and did an ARR content quest and it said it was 5 years since the Calamity. I don't really see how people get confused on that when every other major MMO out there can effectively tell a story with the passage of time, but here we are. So, because of that, the official lore has us stuck in a time bubble (as mentioned) that's perpetually 5 years since the Calamity.

Right this usually comes up a lot in lore forums and the best we got is time bubbles, it really is best not to dwell too much on this point as can cause big lore headaches of trying to fit everything in.

I tend to go by the twins Alphanaud and Alasiae, until they have undergone the Elezen growth spurt, time cannot have progressed more than 4 years (they are 17 and Elezen growth spurts happen around 21 years old) so long as you abide by that timescale go nuts on your own interpretation, just beware the amount of time you give yourself left because the game is still on going and they still ain't looking to be having a growth spurt anytime soon.

This is a comic book where the character don't age unless PLOT says so. So no time has passed. We literally go day to day to day to day to day to day. In other words nothing ages. Because SE doesn't want to confuse the plot. The rebirth will always be 5 years ago. If anything I'll say the entire game takes place within 1 year. Your friends being on the first for x number of years don't count because YOU the player/WOL weren't there so for you they only been gone a few days at best. Or if you want what people are saying.. a -time bubble- :/

I thiiiink it's like supposed to be ~6 months of time passing at least? (i remember the boat ride to kugane having a definitive time stamped on the journey's duration)
(also time bubbles don't mean time hasn't passed, it just means that each patch is a self-contained pocket of events, and whenever you go back to a previous patch's content, you essentially go back in time to when the events of that expansion were unfolding and before any other development on related content has occured. Using that one infamous DoH quest paradox as an example.)

I just assume the end of the seventh umbral era and the beginning of the seventh astral era is hydaelyn's version of 2020, where too many things are happening all at once.

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

Originally Posted by ElazulHP

Try going into the Waking Sands while the Scions are stuck on the first and say hello to Urianger rocking his ARR clothes lol

Worth noting that it only happens if you haven't wrapped up all his ARR quests. You are personally creating a snarl in the timeline by not resolving things when they were supposed to happen.

Likewise, there's a point in the lead-up to Stormblood where Nero is in Mor Dhona... and if you didn't start the CT quests yet, so he's still standing outside the Rising Stones in a paper-thin disguise, you can actually find him in two places on the same map at once.

There is a variety of reasons as to why there's no definitive passage of time, starting from the fact they'll need to tweak all the NPCs (who mention Calamity events per se and maybe some others) dialogues along the way of you doing your MSQ (and this alone is a huge amount of work, which I think Yoshida or Koji Fox mentioned during one of the Fan Fasts or LLs); finishing with the fact that different players may have different thoughts on how much time passed since the beginning and developers may just not want to interfere with players' RP now that the game is 7 years old since 2.0 release. That said, there are still some mentions of passage of time in various quests both in MSQ and Side Quests (the travel to Kugane took more than month; almost all NPCs from Crafting/Gathering questlines mention few moons, which is few months, passing between quests of different levels; etc).

Logically guessing, there are most likely few years passed since the moment we enter first city, because there are a lot of events that physically cannot happen in a single light day (and they aren't mentioned as such in dialogues either). If we will also count some lore in that though, it would be less than 4 years, because twins still look like teenagers, and from lore we know that Elezens grow drastically in their 20s, and since there's no changes in their look, they're still under this age (but this is just placing the time passage into technical nuances of the game we have, not an actual truth). All in all, you're free to decide how much time passed by yourself. The most common options I saw among players is either 1 or 2 years for each expansion, so basically from 3 up to 6 years from beginning of ARR to the end of SB, and some additional months for ShB since it's not finished yet. But there are also players that just decide to go along with plot without defining the strict passage of time.