The rift, the crystal tower, and the seat of sacrifice (Spoilers up to 6.0)

[Cleretic]

The whole time the WoL was being overwhelmed with Light power I was practically screaming at my screen to just put that power into the giant aether battery tower.

I am glad it was eventually used in a later patch, but it literally would have solved the WoL turning into a sin eater problem in 2 minutes.

That was literally the Exarch's plan. He put a bit more dramatics about it and had a plan for disposing of it afterwards, but yes, that was his plan. So, blame Emet-Selch for ruining it.

It was not possible for the WoL to do said plan themselves, because the Tower can only be used by people of Allagan royal bloodline, which these days is pretty much the Exarch and that's it. Elidibus could do some stuff with it because he swiped the Exarch's blood-crystal, but that didn't exist until 5.3.

[Iscah]

You have to note that Elpis time-loop is actually what gave rise to Hydaelyn and literally every single thing that came after [...]
Now with that in mind, Blackrose was about to happen before anything related to Endwalker did. This means the Elpis time-loop could not have happened at all

The thing you have to wrap your head around with a time loop is that no part of it comes first.

The events at Elpis cannot happen unless we travel back there from our present.

Our present cannot exist without the events at Elpis occurring first to set everything in motion.

Therefore you can't start from any one point and say that "this part needs to happen in isolation before the other parts of it can occur". They just, somehow, perfectly interlink and always have, with no version of events in which only one half of it happened without the other.


The other big thing is that the Black Rose timeline is not a roadblock to the Elpis loop, because the state of things partway through it ("before" the second timeline is created) is irrelevant, only the end result: that while there is a timeline in which the WoL dies, side-by-side with it is the timeline where the WoL survives and continues onwards to play their part in later events.

To put it simply, there is never a point in our timeline where we are dead.

The consequences of Elpis still exist in the Black Rose timeline (because we did that part of it in their past), but the time loop cannot and does not need to be resolved in that timeline. All that matters is that it was completed in our timeline.

The whole time the WoL was being overwhelmed with Light power I was practically screaming at my screen to just put that power into the giant aether battery tower.

I am glad it was eventually used in a later patch, but it literally would have solved the WoL turning into a sin eater problem in 2 minutes.

That is essentially what the Exarch's original plan was: to absorb all that Light power into himself (being an extension of the tower) and flee into the rift to destroy it or at least isolate it.

While we didn't explore the technicalities of the plan in detail, the fact that he couldn't simply absorb it and stay put suggests that there could have been some danger in that course of events. Perhaps the Light could only be contained for a short while and would leak out eventually, or perhaps the tower itself - and/or the Exarch as a living extension of it - would become a Lightwarden once filled with their power.

[Lyth]

You probably don't want to be pouring a deluge of umbrally-aspected aether into the Crystal Tower at a time when the Ascians are specifically trying to force a Light-aspected rejoining. You need a way to safely disperse it. Fortunately for us, we just so happened to have an astrally-aspected opponent to channel all that aether through. Just think of it as Chekhov's light power.

'One brings shadow, one brings the light.'

That's why both Y'shtola and Ryne can see that our aether is back to normal again afterwards. Same principle as when we rebalanced the aether in Eden one element at a time, really.

[Lyth]

The rules of time travel are always story dependent, but you certainly can have a 'Stable Time Loop' in which the effect precedes the cause. Early in-game examples of this are the Alexander storyline, in which Backrix's watchbook ends up becoming Quickthinx's futurebook, and the second loop in which Mide and Dayan end up travelling to the past to become the predecessors of the Hotgo tribe who create the Enigma Codex. Yet another example is the A12S timegate mechanic, in which you travel back in time to kill the four Generals and release your past self from temporal stasis in time to dodge Alexander's attack in the cutscene before the fight.

Granted, this doesn't strictly seem to imply predestination, because you can still fail the dps check during Timegates and let your 'past self' be killed, causing a raid wipe in the present.

I don't think there's much point in trying to decipher the exact layout of the current expansion's time loop just yet, because it's still currently unfolding and the writers always love slipping in surprise reveals in the final raid tier. I also find that it helps to revisit some of these raid stories after you've had a bit of additional perspective from elsewhere, as Alexander is much more interesting post-Twinning and Eden is likewise better enjoyed with the insights gained from Cylva's story.

[Necrotica]

Having the effect precede the cause is the whole problem. It does not work. In a fictional setting you can do whatever you want, but it is not good writing.

[Iscah]

Having the effect precede the cause is the whole problem. It does not work. In a fictional setting you can do whatever you want, but it is not good writing.

Yes, but this is a fictional setting we're talking about, and maybe it is bad writing, but that doesn't change the fact that they wrote it in a way that relies on a stable loop where the effect preceded the cause.

You can wish that they didn't make that choice, but for the sake of interpreting the storyline as it exists, you just have to accept that those are the rules it is following and it makes sense within those rules.

[Cleretic]

I don't understand people who don't understand Endwalker's time travel. But maybe that's because I grew up with Doctor Who, which is a perfect teacher of the golden rule of time travel stories:

Time travel works however the story needs time travel to work this week.

Once you learn that, all time travel stories work just fine. It works how it's put forward to work,the rules are as internally consistent as they need to be, and there is no prize for 'outsmarting' the story by claiming it's not. Hell, the time travel story that most people here apparently hold up as the gold standard of time travel stories in games is even less consistent than Endwalker; Chrono Trigger gives an explanation of time travel early on that's completely sound, except for the part where after that first little story arc, its time travel never works that way again. Chrono Trigger works so loosely with time travel that I'm not even sure I can quantify how many times it contradicts itself or how many time travel rulesets it sticks to, because it so thoroughly embraces the approach of having time travel work in the exact way that would be most effective at this very moment.

And nobody complains about Chrono Trigger's time travel being inconsistent, because consistency was never actually important. I think people complaining that Endwalker's time travel 'doesn't make sense' (which it actually does as long as you remember that it it only has to stand up to its own rules) actually just want an opportunity to try to tear down Endwalker, and have decided that 'proving it wrong' will be some kind of victory.

[Necrotica]

I don't understand people who don't understand Endwalker's time travel. But maybe that's because I grew up with Doctor Who, which is a perfect teacher of the golden rule of time travel stories:

Time travel works however the story needs time travel to work this week.

Once you learn that, all time travel stories work just fine. It works how it's put forward to work,the rules are as internally consistent as they need to be, and there is no prize for 'outsmarting' the story by claiming it's not. Hell, the time travel story that most people here apparently hold up as the gold standard of time travel stories in games is even less consistent than Endwalker; Chrono Trigger gives an explanation of time travel early on that's completely sound, except for the part where after that first little story arc, its time travel never works that way again. Chrono Trigger works so loosely with time travel that I'm not even sure I can quantify how many times it contradicts itself or how many time travel rulesets it sticks to, because it so thoroughly embraces the approach of having time travel work in the exact way that would be most effective at this very moment.

And nobody complains about Chrono Trigger's time travel being inconsistent, because consistency was never actually important. I think people complaining that Endwalker's time travel 'doesn't make sense' (which it actually does as long as you remember that it it only has to stand up to its own rules) actually just want an opportunity to try to tear down Endwalker, and have decided that 'proving it wrong' will be some kind of victory.

I have to admit I have not seen many topics on the final fantasy 14 forums talking about the problems with chrono triggers time travel.

And I was complaining about this games time travel the first time I played Alexander content. The lack of initial time line to then cause the time loop. Cause and effect is a must for me to enjoy something.

[TheMightyMollusk]

The way it seems to me, time travel within the same Shard doesn't work, because you can't change the past. This includes going back to the pre-Sundering era, because it's still technically the past of the same Shard. But jumping to another Shard changes the variables enough to break the time stream, or at least create an alternate one.

To use a (probably bad) metaphor; traveling back in your own past, like Alexander, is just riding the train back along the tracks. It can only go one way. Jumping across the Rift and traveling through time is diverting the train onto a new set of tracks.

[Iscah]

The way it seems to me, time travel within the same Shard doesn't work, because you can't change the past. This includes going back to the pre-Sundering era, because it's still technically the past of the same Shard. But jumping to another Shard changes the variables enough to break the time stream, or at least create an alternate one.

To use a (probably bad) metaphor; traveling back in your own past, like Alexander, is just riding the train back along the tracks. It can only go one way. Jumping across the Rift and traveling through time is diverting the train onto a new set of tracks.

That's not how it works, though. All the shards together are in a single stream of time, and their fates are entwined. You have the 8UE timeline where the First was rejoined and its aether wrecked the Source, and our timeline where they remain separate. There's a copy of all the shards (or what is left of them) in each stream.