The Venat Cutscene

[shadowclasper]

You are mistaken about the basics of the time travel alteration, and from there reaching the wrong conclusion about thinking "Meteion only becomes the Endsinger later".

Multiple incidents from the beginning of Endwalker indicate that the world is already in a state affected by our trip to Elpis. If there ever theoretically was a timeline where the changes were yet to be applied, we are not in it, but more likely there never was such a timeline and it has always played out this way.

• At the beginning of the game when Hydaelyn speaks to us on the ship, she is already aware that we are approaching the point where the time loop resolves.

• Argos is willing to let us ride him when we first (to us) meet him on the moon because to him, we already met him in Elpis and earned his trust there. This is specified in the mount description as a quirk of time travel.

• As you note, the Endsinger – the collective Meteia as opposed to a single Meteion – already exists.

Also, even if there theoretically was a "pre-altered timeline" without our interference at Elpis, I don't agree that it could change the Endsinger from a pre-existing entity with its own history to being connected up to the Meteia.

And I don't believe there is any need for a pre-altered timeline to exist, particularly in this universe's time-travel rules. The ultimate example of this is when we travel back in time during the A12 fight to save our earlier self from Alexander's laser beam. There cannot be a pre-interference version of this timeline, because then we would be dead and unavailable to be sent back. Alternately, if something else saved us the first time, then there is no need to overwrite the event. Therefore logically no version of events occurred except the one we experienced, time travel and all.

As much as I hate time travel plots I will admit that ffxiv's solution to the gordion knot of causality they represent us the narrativeky best option "it doesn't matter what you do if you go into the past because you've already done it, and if something from the future interfered with our present, we'll that too is just how it works"

As far as we can tell, it took the concentrated effort of three centuries, and the combined supertech of Alag, Alexander, and the Ironworks to actually 'change' the flow of time and it's unclear if it was creating a loop or if it broke things

[Naraku_Diabolos]

You are mistaken about the basics of the time travel alteration, and from there reaching the wrong conclusion about thinking "Meteion only becomes the Endsinger later".

Multiple incidents from the beginning of Endwalker indicate that the world is already in a state affected by our trip to Elpis. If there ever theoretically was a timeline where the changes were yet to be applied, we are not in it, but more likely there never was such a timeline and it has always played out this way.

• At the beginning of the game when Hydaelyn speaks to us on the ship, she is already aware that we are approaching the point where the time loop resolves.

• Argos is willing to let us ride him when we first (to us) meet him on the moon because to him, we already met him in Elpis and earned his trust there. This is specified in the mount description as a quirk of time travel.

• As you note, the Endsinger – the collective Meteia as opposed to a single Meteion – already exists.

Also, even if there theoretically was a "pre-altered timeline" without our interference at Elpis, I don't agree that it could change the Endsinger from a pre-existing entity with its own history to being connected up to the Meteia.

And I don't believe there is any need for a pre-altered timeline to exist, particularly in this universe's time-travel rules. The ultimate example of this is when we travel back in time during the A12 fight to save our earlier self from Alexander's laser beam. There cannot be a pre-interference version of this timeline, because then we would be dead and unavailable to be sent back. Alternately, if something else saved us the first time, then there is no need to overwrite the event. Therefore logically no version of events occurred except the one we experienced, time travel and all.

Oh! I see what you mean. I was looking at the pieces in a different way so it made me think that our playable character had changed the timeline somehow because of what Venat had said once we arrived back on the First from Elpis.

[Necrotica]

FF14 time travel does not care about causality and paradoxical self creating loops.

Just gotta roll with it. It doesn't make sense. It is horrendous writing. But it is what they have decided they want their story to be.

[KageTokage]

The "logic" that the closed time loop theorem abides by is that all instances of time travel in a setting already happened, so there was technically never any version of Elpis we hadn't tampered with, and even if there was it's a distinct alternate reality/timeline we can't interact with..at least as far as we know.

We already saw some of the weirdness that can entail in more detail during the Alexander storyline, which ultimately culminates in a grandfather paradox where Mide and Dayan become the founders of the Hotgo tribe.

A causal loop has no defined starting point and is a ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey nonsense that just works.

That said, time travel as a whole being fictional can work however the heck the writers want it to. I've seen plots where the entire story revolved around breaking a causal loop as opposed to perpetuating it, for instance.

[Necrotica]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

[shadowclasper]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

Except... it just hit me it already had happened that way, because otherwise we died before we went back in time, paradox is only averted by time travel already existing. You need the time travel stuff to exist to go back to the world unbundled in the first place

[Iscah]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

As I've said before, I think there is a rule that can be made to fit the circumstances, which is that a time traveller can break the timeline if they know the event that they are changing. (It is never automatic that travelling through time itself breaks the timeline; it can only be caused by the actions of a traveller visiting the past.)

They need to know the details of what originally happened in that time and place, and prevent it from playing out the same way.

Of the time travel instances we are aware of, G'raha's is the only example that fits those criteria. For all the others, either the traveller is blundering in with no knowledge of the precise events at their destination, or if they do know the details, their actions preserve the timeline as they know it should play out. They could have changed it if they performed the right actions, but they either didn't try or were thwarted.

[kaynide]

All time travel has already happened and does not change anything. Except for the one time it did.

Game can't even follow its own rules.

I don’t see the problem.

Back to the Future more or less works with loops and changes in the timeline.
Chrono Trigger also does this.

In FFXIV it becomes more plausible in that it took 300ish years of Uber-tech for them to figure out how to even do it.

Not my favorite kind of writing, but in the story it works fine.

[Necrotica]

I don’t see the problem.

Back to the Future more or less works with loops and changes in the timeline.
Chrono Trigger also does this.

In FFXIV it becomes more plausible in that it took 300ish years of Uber-tech for them to figure out how to even do it.

Not my favorite kind of writing, but in the story it works fine.

Not sure if I saw a video on it or read it somewhere here, but the idea that all time travel Azem does has already happened because they are tied with fate somehow could make it all work. I still don't like it, but at least it is a rule that seems to apply.

[Iscah]

Not sure if I saw a video on it or read it somewhere here, but the idea that all time travel Azem does has already happened because they are tied with fate somehow could make it all work. I still don't like it, but at least it is a rule that seems to apply.

It doesn't need to be about Azem; it's just the physics of how time travel works in this system. If you move from a later point in time to an earlier point in time, you aren't creating a duplicate of that earlier time with/without your presence but already were present at your "destination" time and place, even before you personally reached your "departure" time.

It isn't poor writing but – certainly to me – the logical way that time travel would have to work, especially if it doesn't inherently create split timelines, which we know it doesn't in this story.

It doesn't matter that your departure time hasn't happened yet, so long as it will happen in the future.