Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Cleretic]

I feel like it may not be worthwhile to dwell too deeply on the implications of the name, given that it came from a limit break name and has the ring of "using English because it's cool" and not because it really makes sense.

The only fair guess I have around the name is that, at some point, we will find one of the other eight.

[MikkoAkure]

Is it possible Solution Nine will have some link to the Ancients / Ascians? Yes, but I don't want it to on account of their story arc having concluded and going back to them (or their proxies) for MSQ content would kind of defeat the purpose of having done so.

There already is a connection since it’s been determined very early on that Solution Nine utilizes the Ancient alphabet.

How strong of a connection that is to the Ancients remains to be seen though. It could just be a coincidence that they’re using it, or they could have uncovered it and switched to it to emulate them, or they could’ve been a surviving pocket this whole time.

[Iscah]

it's a bit silly to assume past plot points and the known history of the world aren't going to factor in to anything at all ever again.

Sure, but at the same time it's reasonable to hope that we're not going to cycle back to the same few sources every time the plot needs something mysterious.

[Iscah]

I just personally think it's setting yourself up for disappointment. Expecting FFXIV to give up Allag and Ascians is like expecting Warcraft to give up Titans and the Burning Legion and Old Gods.

But people have a right to hope for what they want.

Well, I think the people setting themselves up for disappointment are the ones who insist the city must be the work of surviving Ancients who found a way to escape from the shard that fell to the Calamity of Lightning, or whatever the most far-flung theories currently are. Mundanity is possible.

I don't trust any trailer significance implications since they hyped up "Master Matoya" in the Shadowbringers trailer.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Well, I think the people setting themselves up for disappointment are the ones who insist the city must be the work of surviving Ancients who found a way to escape from the shard that fell to the Calamity of Lightning, or whatever the most far-flung theories currently are. Mundanity is possible.

I don't trust any trailer significance implications since they hyped up "Master Matoya" in the Shadowbringers trailer.

I don't think those people will be disappointed if it's something else. They are just used to it being Ancients, the text being used is Ancients, so they assume it's Ancients. I don't think managing to surprise people with something beside the default answer for every mystery in the game will upset them. I may end up eating my words and people rage over whatever Solution 9 is, myself included, but that'll be six months from now and I'm banking on no one remembering this conversation by then.

[Iscah]

I'd argue that everything but mundanity is possible. Regardless of whether it's Ancients or lightning shard folk or just some Turali people who built a crazy cyberpunk city. It's not mundane by any stretch of the imagination.

There are degrees of mundanity. "Built by people in this world utilising an unusual natural resource" is more mundane than "spacetime manipulation".

[Lyth]

You can eventually link everything back to Amaurot by virtue of it being a world government over 12000 years ago, but not everything has to be a direct consequence of it.

I think one of the weaknesses of the writing around the Garlemald and Allag storylines was the revelation that they were both directly micromanaged by the Ascians. They're just subsidiaries. Why would you waste your time with them when you've already taken out their overlord?

That doesn't necessarily need to be the case going forward. For example, it's theoretically possible that the rise and fall of the Ronkan empire was directly manipulated by the Ascians. But they have much more potential if they were just out doing their own thing, because you can actually build them into a unique lore entity. Tural has much the same potential. You need to build in parallel rather than in series. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of serial puppetmasters all tied back to a villain whom we wiped the floor with ages ago in 5.0.