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

[CrownySuccubus]

While not scary, I found the ancient culture too decadent and self aggrandizing.

I didn't. I don't remember who said it in this thread, but I agree with their sentiment that Elpis left me convinced that Emet-Selch was right and their society was overall better than what we've got on The Source. Even the things we were supposed to find questionable (how callously they disregard the lives of non-Ancients and how willing they are to die once their purpose is fulfilled) didn't strike me as all that terrible by comparison. The former just needed one good progressive movement and the latter was mostly a personal choice. Hell, for all we know, someone like Venat could have inspired other people to find new purposes.

I mean, you're entitled to your opinion, but I sure didn't leave The World Unsundered thinking their civilization was better as a memory and that modern people dodged a bullet. Just the opposite, in fact.

[Iscah]

It's not even just ShB, the artwork for 3.2 with Minfilia chained to the Mothercrystal certainly wasn't portraying Hydaelyn positively either and that was after they started rewriting the lore for the Ascians.

The big problem with that artwork of Minfilia is that it isn't something you will ever come across naturally in the process of playing the game. If they wanted it to be an ominous warning of Hydaelyn's true nature then it (or something close to it) needed to appear within the game itself for everyone to see in the course of the story. Instead we only get the impression that Minfilia went to Hydaelyn as a willing servant, loyal even once freed back to her own consciousness in 3.4.

Elpis being a time loop following an expansion with an AU was also an odd choice and confusing to players like myself who were not familiar with Alexander.

Meanwhile, as someone who did play Alexander and subsequently spent some time hammering out a time travel theory that made sense of it and Shadowbringers existing in the same narrative, I was pleased to see that time travel here seemed consistent with my previous theory: that time naturally forms a loop unless the traveller does something to contradict their own future, at which point a new timeline branches off to contain the new events. At the end of this, the traveller would (for better or worse) likely be trapped in the new timeline with no way back to their own.

By doing so we would doom our own world to destruction, while not technically saving the ancients from any of the suffering to come. At best we could make a second copy of time where they survive, but that will not save them in the timeline we come from.

More on that below, but back in the topic of Alexander: I think it is simply the nature of the game, at this point, that the writers will incorporate plot points from side quests in ways that the main plot makes more sense if you've played the others. You're clearly expected to play them as you go. The important ones probably need to be a bit more signposted, if not made mandatory – CT now has a couple of "you really should do this" comments from the MSQ, so they could add the same heavy hinting for Alexander and Omega and anything else that gets raised in future.

Pretty sure they said that creating a new timeline is a possibility. So, worst case scenario, the WOL could save that timeline's Elpis but her own world would still be fighting the Final Days.

While we potentially can create a new timeline if we stay there long enough to avert any chance of a Sundering – not just the scenario we ultimately saw but any deliberate or accidental process that could cause it – anything short of achieving that would likely end up being part of the known timeline one way or another because we have basically no idea of what we are trying to avert.

And if we succeeded, we would have no way back to the original world that we are trying to save by acquiring information about how the original Final Days started.

Whether you like the ancient world or not, narratively that would be a terribly poor thing to just abandon everything the player has ever done and seen and worked so hard to save up to this point. Abandon all their friends to a likely doom, or almost certainly exile from their home planet if they survive.

The feeling Elpis is clearly intended to evoke, to me, is that we are ultimately viewing events that happened in the distant past and cannot interfere or we risk dooming our present and our friends.

Someone above said they'd rather it were treated as a series of Echo visions, but I feel like that's already what it was – we were warned from the start by Elidibus that we must not try to change things. We are there as an observer, trying to learn what already happened. We were not intended to go there with the mindset of changing things.

[CrownySuccubus]

While we potentially can create a new timeline if we stay there long enough to avert any chance of a Sundering – not just the scenario we ultimately saw but any deliberate or accidental process that could cause it – anything short of achieving that would likely end up being part of the known timeline one way or another because we have basically no idea of what we are trying to avert.

I was talking about a worst case scenario. The premise that I was responding to was the assumption that the WOL could change the timeline enough to undo their own existence or that of the world they knew. If that's the case, then whether or not they were aware of what changes to make or how is irrelevant, because we're starting the thought exercise at the point where they'd already done it.

And if we succeeded, we would have no way back to the original world that we are trying to save by acquiring information about how the original Final Days started.

Yes we would. The portal in the Ocular connects back to the world the WOL left, regardless of whether or not the future changes. We wouldn't, say, wind up in the new Elpis's future. I think one character raises that as a possibility, but they were theorizing, since time travel was an unfamiliar concept.

And, even if we did, the WOL sure didn't care. Despite being warned not the change the past by Elidibus, the WOL made every effort to do just that. They clearly didn't give a single crap about whether they would have a home to get back to.

[Lauront]

Huh? You mean because of time travel?

Pretty sure they said that creating a new timeline is a possibility. So, worst case scenario, the WOL could save that timeline's Elpis but her own world would still be fighting the Final Days.

Even if not, I personally wouldn't care. I'm the kind of person who wouldn't hesitate to go back in time and erase slavery and/or the Holocaust even if it erased me from existence.

Yep, the possibility of AUs pretty much nullifies that whole issue as a concern.