Revelations from Patch 5.4

[Anonymoose]

How is it simultaneously "already 5.4" yet also "the 67th umbral moon of 2020"?

If this is your first time joining us for patch day, we have fallen into a strange tradition where instead of carpet-bombing other threads with spoilers of stuff that just happened, we discuss each patch's contributions in a vacuum here. What usually happens is that the first wave of people each make their own "OP" with the name of the arc and a spoiler box...

Like

This

...which has all of the things they noticed, the story as they understood it, and comments / feedback for the development team.

Then people usually start quoting each other with the header visible and the content they're replying to in a spoiler box, and a spoiler box below it.

Like

This

And that

This allows people to partake right from the get go without worrying they'll, say, spoil themselves on NieR by trying to talk about the MSQ.

──────────────────────────────────────With That Outta the Way...──────────────────────────────────────

MSQ (Complete)

Knee-Jerk First Impressions After Patch

What an odd patch. Everything we saw had meaning; it was important stuff. And yet, why are we doing it now? Why in this way? How did we get to wandering around for a few days ... skipping the Alliance hearings on the Second Garlean Civil War ... drag Hyllfyr out of bed, cure tempering, and make peace with the kobolds? If we need to throw around narrative weight and revision like this, either we were desperate for filler or 6.0 is gearing up to be wild...

Do you remember how serious and dark tempering was in 2010? In 2013? Could you ever have imagined we'd cure tempering, out of nowhere, as an afterthought errand ... using magical pixie pigs? Just ... droppin' by Matoya's Moving Castle and BAM, Deus Ex Bacon. WHAT? 6.0 is gearing up to be wild...

In all seriousness, I think the aetherometaphysics of are well thought out. I used the metaphor of magnetic tape to explain tempering to people after Egi lore was fleshed out and this jibes perfectly with that metaphor in terms of how to make sense of it and address it. Separate the "original" and "invading" waveforms and boost the original until the artifacts are drowned out. You can't just "record over it" unless you have a viable back-up.

Magical pixie pigs I did not see coming.

And then we drop by Limsa Lominsa and wrap up all the drama with the pirates factions. The last time we checked in on the Executioners, they were all schisms and terrorist attacks, but Hyllfyr getting screen-time for the first time since the Calamity has that effect on people. And cut from there to making peace with the suddenly untempered Patriarch of the Kobolds! What is Limsa about to get itself into? Where is the good ship Vylbrand headed that we did all that out of nowhere? 6.0 is gearing up to be wild.

And then ... towers and Lunar Bahamut and the second coming of the Final Days, in a quick ... Please Look Forward to It™ ... even though it was the majority of this patch's trailer drama. OK, see you then I guess. The towers feel a bit like the Maws in FFXI; ominous map objects that set up an expansion. But given that final scene did I somehow call this with a lucky guess?

Super convenient that we cured tempering at the same time the towers went up... Though what happened with being tempered being invisible and scary and it could be anyone? For the last few patches now we just look for the zombie-voiced NPCs with glowing eyes. This feels like a strange retcon to the approach but I assume it's functional...?

Anyway. Looking forward to Fandanny's death cult. Bring on the purple paroxysm. Hey since he's got Lunar Bahamut what are the chances he can get the remnants of the Lambs of Dalamud in on this? Zenos, though. This has dragged on so long and I'm still not sure why him surviving his pitch-perfect death was worth it. Our wild-card could have been any new character. Why him? I'm rooting for it to be amazing and feel like a complete story with a satisfying big picture, I really am. Maybe he just gets a really cathartic surprise death in 5.5 setting up our 6.0 story, Ilberd style. Idk.

Btw. Greek. Telo- (End) phor- (bringer) -oi (plural).

Archive of Live-Blog Notes

Right out of the gate we've got an interesting retcon reframe of tempering as having similarities to the sin eaters in having the soul of the tempered individual more stagnant/passive. (And an Allagan counterpart for the imprecise Eorzean term at that!) Well, that sure makes a solution slightly easier. My theory since we talked about how Egi work was that the solution would involve isolating the "invading waveform" and "drowning it out" by "boosting the original waveform of the individual over it" until it was drowned out. The magnetic tape metaphor worked well for this.

Anyroad, the Garlean Civil War meeting takes a back seat to checking in on our old friend Ga Bu...

The Bonanza was a shot of serotonin I didn't expect today.

Lmao. Confirmation that the "Archon's thesis" is a thing.
And apparently Allagan nodes sometimes have their own "startup jingle"...?
Password sequence was comedy gold; worth the fetch quest.

Jeez, I may have been pretty close with the tempering cause/cure. Mixing metaphors, of course; not like Hydaelyn has a lot of magnetic tape.

Wow, Aymeric just giving away ships and fuels without a vote. Nepotism ftw.
All this technological progress and we still transport ceruleum in wooden barrels...

Huh, reference to Mikoto and the crystal foci in the MSQ. Yoked-to-patch canon hard confirmed; no more half-juggling attempts?

So a conveniently-abandoned Allagan node has primal data which we can extrapolate with Serial Experiments Cid's supercomputer into a temper-curing magickal formula that G'raha instantly memorizes so we can make magical pigs which undo the second biggest problem we've had since the start of the game on an errand run while our friends are at important meetings. O-OK. Weird. But OK!



I love how there was all this uncertain drama about the Executioners that never really went anywhere and now Hyllfyr's just like, "May I remind you that I'm on Team Merlwyb?" after 7 years of silence. It was nice seeing this trio of elder pirate lords re-establish their commitment to Limsa's new direction, again, though. But where are they going...?

Merlwyb taking responsibility for the past admirals as the present face of Limsa was solid, though.


I kept hearing since 5.3, "What if the unsundered being dead means we can have a friendly Ascian now? We have no proof they're all tempered!"
Let's go live to Fandaniel.
"I JUST WANT TO DIE AND TAKE EVERYONE WITH ME IN A PAROXYSM OF PAIN AND SUFFERING!"



LOL

Eden
I haven't started this one, yet, but I hear on the grapevine we're continuing Greek names, eh?
Still time for the Originals to be confirmed Hades, Zeus, and Poseidon, then?