Ability to see the future: Loose plot thread?

[Luizgazen]

They at least had a simple explanation for why Fordola's ability worked, which was that the incorporeal aether mobilizes before the physical body which provided a very short term precognition in a logical manner.

XIV is very fond of trying to explain how magicks and other supernatural phenomena work at least on a surface level, so them just coming in saying absolute future sight is a thing without any explanation whatsoever about the "how" of it was really awkward.

That, and Fordola's "precognition" was just that she became able to see cast bars and aoes with the echo just like us

[Alleo]

They at least had a simple explanation for why Fordola's ability worked, which was that the incorporeal aether mobilizes before the physical body which provided a very short term precognition in a logical manner.

XIV is very fond of trying to explain how magicks and other supernatural phenomena work at least on a surface level, so them just coming in saying absolute future sight is a thing without any explanation whatsoever about the "how" of it was really awkward.

That is true. I am not a fan of the bozja storyline (too many moments where we stood around and let things happen) so that is just one part that I was like "really?".

[Cleretic]

You know, Xenoblade Chronicles exists, you can play it. We don't need to cram it into FFXIV.

And then to color-code it to remove all tension for some reason, except when we throw away the ruleset for the sake of adding tension, for... reasons?

[RyuDragnier]

You know, Xenoblade Chronicles exists, you can play it. We don't need to cram it into FFXIV.

And then to color-code it to remove all tension for some reason, except when we throw away the ruleset for the sake of adding tension, for... reasons?

Well when the hell do you want them to do with it? Just drop it so people complain about it being underused?

[Cleretic]

Well when the hell do you want them to do with it? Just drop it so people complain about it being underused?

I've literally never seen a single person 'complain' about it being underused. Even the OP was basically just asking 'hey, how prevalent is this as a potential thing they could do something with'. I don't think there is this pressing need for them to use it if they don't want to, and for the most part, they don't want to use it in any major ways.

If I were forced to sit down and go 'okay write in future sight in a major way that isn't just Mikoto Again', I would actually capitalize on the difference not just between future sight and most other extrasensory things in FFXIV's setting, but also future sight as depicted in other stories: that we don't have it. There's been plenty of stories of 'we've seen assured disaster, how do we make that not happen', including in FFXIV itself, but there's markedly less stories about someone who's audience to someone else who has a vision of the future. Are they trustworthy, given we've been lied to about a vision of the future and other extrasensory abilities before? Are they reliable, since we've also had important information not divulged by previous future-sight instances? Is it even useful? What do we do with this information when we're given it? How do you know you're not just setting up to ensure this alleged future happens, rather than avoiding it? Given the various uncertainties about second-hand future sight, is it even useful information or is it just a distraction?

Why not write a story that asks and grapples with those questions, instead of just doing the same thing we've seen before but adding arbitrary extra rules?

[KageTokage]

I absolutely hated how they handled that plot point in Bozja and I hope it never comes back..

I'd rather be surprised by things as they come then know some vague badness is going to happen in the future, but in fuller context it ends up being a non-issue.

[Iscah]

I absolutely hated how they handled that plot point in Bozja and I hope it never comes back..

The drama over Mikoto's vision was silly. That's exactly where you should be looking at what you did see and asking what you can do around the edges of that event to make sure that when she does inevitably fall, somebody is there to catch her.

[Cleretic]

The drama over Mikoto's vision was silly. That's exactly where you should be looking at what you did see and asking what you can do around the edges of that event to make sure that when she does inevitably fall, somebody is there to catch her.

And yet that's kind of all you can do with future sight as it was used in that story. Either what we see is true but not the whole story, or what we see can be changed so that it doesn't happen as we saw it at all. And either way, you just end up questioning what the vision added, because... well, if you saw someone falling off a cliff and that's the thing to avert, surely you would've had much the same crisis from seeing them in danger while perilously close to a cliff, right?

That doesn't make it unworkable, but it's something you need an interesting answer for, and Mikoto's visions just didn't. Again, I'd point to Xenoblade Chronicles as an example of that approach done well, but that's also a story where that concept is its Main Thing, even down to being a central gameplay mechanic (and if I'm honest, not an especially interesting one). But Xenoblade also does the latter approach, where it's possible to entirely avert the vision. That actually has some advantages storytelling-wise, because it can actually pull the trigger and show people outright dying in the visions rather than cutting away at a conspicuous point.

but even Xenoblade's approach I wouldn't be interested in seeing FFXIV do, because there's not actually that much interesting about it; Xenoblade kinda did it all. But even if they did just do all that, it still took a direction I know a lot of people who play this game would hate: that sometimes they can't change what they see not because it's some arbitrary fixed point, but because they're only human and there's only so much they can do. There's no supernatural element meaning it was impossible to save that person; they just couldn't do it even with the advance warning.

[SannaR]

I don't have a problem with Mikoto's future sight in itself. My problem was that it came from out of nowhere and how it was handled in the story. It wasn't written as good as it probably should have been.

[KageTokage]

I don't have a problem with Mikoto's future sight in itself. My problem was that it came from out of nowhere and how it was handled in the story. It wasn't written as good as it probably should have been.

That's the other beef I had with it.

The Echo has been firmly established to work by reading the "memory" aether of either souls or the environment, so being able to predict the future is decidedly not something that falls within the scope of what it's previously been shown to be capable of doing and they didn't even bother trying to handwave it by saying it's predicting the flows of aether or some such (Which is how Xenoblade did it).

Prediction of the future in general has been shown to be questionable at best, and the whole founding principle of Sharlayan astrology was turning it into a more...practical art by manipulating celestial aether in order to better work for/against the futures they believe to have foreseen.