What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[ApolloGenX]

It's not a new future. The past occurred in our past. We have always went to Elpis to discover what was causing the Final Days. Our travel to the past is what inevitably causes the Final Days in the first place. Hence, closed loop. It's like learning that you were going to be hit by a car that day, so you stay at home, and then a car crashes into your house and hits you. If you weren't at home, you wouldn't have been hit by the car. It's simple causality; You were influenced by the knowledge that you were going to be hit by a car that day and as such stayed at home, which in turn contributes to the car hitting you; The cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause.

You are right, I shouldn't have said "new" future... in fact, according to this story- this entire arc had already happened before players even started playing...because back in the past we said it would.

That still removes all agency from the characters and essentially means that we have been in a predetermined play that started I don't know over a thousand years ago. I don't love that. I especially don't love that it is being passed off as some kind of "You helped set this is motion". No we didn't. If we did, then all the rest of the circumstances they ignored would have been factored into the story, but they weren't. That's why I think we should have been passive learners in the past... we just left behind way too much evidence/opportunity for things to have gone differently to be shoehorned into the story the writers wrote. It was their story, not ours.

It's fine to say we are stuck on this course of history- I think it's a cheap trick to try to lay that at the feet of players and say "You were responsible for how we got here... because we said so". No, we weren't. You wrote a history and then stuck us into it, ignored the actual impact we had and said "Ta-da! Now you are responsible".

[Lauront]

You are right, I shouldn't have said "new" future... in fact, according to this story- this entire arc had already happened before players even started playing...because back in the past we said it would.

That still removes all agency from the characters and essentially means that we have been in a predetermined play that started I don't know over a thousand years ago. I don't love that. I especially don't love that it is being passed off as some kind of "You helped set this is motion". No we didn't. If we did, then all the rest of the circumstances they ignored would have been factored into the story, but they weren't. That's why I think we should have been passive learners in the past... we just left behind way too much evidence/opportunity for things to have gone differently to be shoehorned into the story the writers wrote. It was their story, not ours.

It's fine to say we are stuck on this course of history- I think it's a cheap trick to try to lay that at the feet of players and say "You were responsible for how we got here... because we said so". No, we weren't. You wrote a history and then stuck us into it, ignored the actual impact we had and said "Ta-da! Now you are responsible".

Heavily agree with this. It's what I find so entirely dissatisfactory with explanations like the one given. Plus they utilised time travel just an expansion prior, that time resulting in the formation of a branching world.