What difference did the Twelve tangibly make?

[Lium]

Like I said, it was in one of the previous expansions when one of the Ascians said the Twelve were real. I just can’t remember who said it. But it was vague.

And in any event, people’s speculation before EW that the Twelve were probably just misremembered Ancients turned out to be essentially correct. Because that is exactly what they were.

I think you and some others are getting hung up on the deity aspect of all of this. They weren’t actually gods. Mortals just started worshipping them as such and they were re-formed in to the image of gods BY THE HOPES AND PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE.

That is the entire point of the raid series. Hydaelyn created them to be more like stewards to the sundered people, but people reshaped them over the millennia.

So in other words, the people of Eorzea created the actual gods. Not Hydaelyn. Take Halone for example. She didn’t actually look like that at first, but became more imposing and militaristic as the prayers morphed her into that.

They share very similar aspects to primals in that regard. But the main difference is, they were actually people at one time who were deified by the populace. They didn’t come out of left field.

They were always there.

[Lyth]

I think the speculation around the Twelve having an Amaurotine origin dates back to patch 5.3, and Urianger's theory around the connections between Azeyma (the Warden), Azim (the Dawn Father), and Azem (the Traveler). Coincidentally, the symbol for Azem's Convocation Crystal, introduced in the same patch, is the circumpunct (the astronomical symbol for the sun and the alchemical symbol of gold, the latter which makes sense when you realize that Au on the periodic table stands for Aurum, or 'shining dawn').

To make matters a bit more complicated, during patch 3.2, people noticed that the Cathedral to Sephirot in Azys Lla (which was uprooted from its original site in Meracydia by the Allagans - see Vista Record 062 in Heavensward) had a motif of holes that had a very crude association with Azeyma's symbol. Naturally, the question came up in a Q+A, and the answer suggested that there may be a common origin between Sephirot's symbol, Azeyma's symbol, and runes found in Qarn. This was posed as an 'Allagan theory' at the time. Either way, the 'common origin' theory has been floating around for a while, and Shadowbringers likely started them thinking more about a framework to anchor it to.

In Endwalker, the people of Thavnair also make reference to 'the old gods', and the prayer that Matsya recites sounds very much like something Venat would have said. So it does seem like there is a parallel influence across multiple cultures, even if they weren't always envisioned along the same lines.

I'm not sure about the significance of prayer as it relates to the lifestream. That being said, my gut feeling is that the lore around the lifestream itself will probably become clearer going into Dawntrail, especially given the ceruleum harvesting in Tural.

[Cleretic]

I think the thing Mikko is focused on is the fact the storyline didn't need to happen on, like, a story perspective. Before it, the story never directly touched the Twelve, and never really implied they were anything more than just abstract--or at least, never implied it very loudly. (I can't confirm if Lium's memory of 'the Ascians implied the Twelve were real in Shadowbringers' is true, Emet implied a lot of things so we're gonna need to narrow down the search a bit.)

And yeah that's true, but it's also true about most of the game. Side content especially; a lot of that storytelling is about inventing problems and then solving them. Off the top of my head and just looking at raid storylines: Mhach, Alexander, Ivalice, obviously Nier, Eden and Pandaemonium all focused on problems, and usually entire regions/places/concepts that didn't exist before their storyline introduced them. Most of the time, a storyline invents its own problem to solve, and we just hope that the problem and solution are cool. And usually they are, because you can just give a one-sentence pitch that's pretty hype; there's more to take into account for a story than the actual in-story justification.

Yes, in terms of the game's core story, an origin story and sendoff for the Twelve wasn't necessary; they could've just existed as an abstract god that we never see anything more about, just like The Big One. But this is a game that knows people like fireworks, want to fight cool bosses, want to learn about pointless nooks and crannies (if they weren't, we wouldn't have 900 pages worth of Encyclopedia Eorzea by now). If the Twelve were real gods, they're the most powerful things we'd never fought post-Endwalker; and if the Twelve weren't real, they were still really conceptually interesting figures that would be interesting to fight some derivation of.

People wanted to learn more about the Twelve; they've been part of the game's setting since 1.0, and yet some have so little about them that they have one single known follower. And if we were ever going to learn about the Twelve, they were too interesting in aesthetics and powersets to be anything but a twelve-round Royal Rumble.

And personally, I think they did pretty well at solving the problems that they invented for the purposes of having a story.