Thread: Revelations from Patch 7.4: Into the Mist

Originally Posted by Shadotterdan

Skimmed through this after catching up. One thing that's kind of bugging me is the remark about the world ending. I had a thought regarding that, now that Hydaelyn is gone, what is keeping the realms seperate?

According to Y'shtola's hypothesis in the 6.x patches: nothing. Hydaelyn being a primal of light, or stasis, meant that her existence slowed the, like... interdimensional aetheric equivalent of gravity to either a complete or near stop. The Thirteenth, being a world of darkness, was the one most able to resist that stalling effect, which is what led to voidgates between the Source and Thirteenth. Without Hydaelyn there, then logically, that process has been allowed to speed up again. I didn't, however, get the feeling that this was an imminent concern. Y'shtola would definitely be the type to bring that up, and she didn't. I feel like it's on the same level as the fact that our real-life moon is drifting away from Earth... but at a rate of centimeters per year; by the time that's in any way relevant, human life will not be.

It's entirely possible that things are changing faster than we're aware of with the shards, but knowing what little we do about the two people who are currently raising this issue, I think it's a bit more likely that, if that's what they're worrying about, they are going hyper-long-term overreactionary. It does seem like exactly their type of flaw.


Incidentally, thinking about it: While we know that ice is the element closest to light on the whole 'stasis' thing, I wonder if lightning is the closest to darkness on the whole 'change and motion' thing, which might explain why, of all places, the lightning-tilted shard was the one that the key opened up to.

Thank goodness for that.

Originally Posted by Mansion

Thank you for your reply! I can understand better your point of view
On the topic of Fray...

No problem, it's always nice to engage in a genuine discussion.

I suppose could you could posit that, but I think it underestimates just how many people responded to that particular questline and the esteem (hah) its held in amongst the playerbase - to the point that players otherwise not inclined to play the class do so purely to experience the story. It examines the reality of the WoL's deeds and the subsequent mental and emotional impact in a way that I think most characters can relate to, regardless of their chosen personality. And more than that, it also marked the first time the game really allowed the WoL to respond and resonate with what was going on around them and brought them into the story as their own character, as opposed to a faceless yes-man used to facilitate the plot - and as it turns out, players really, really like that. It was recognising and applying this, and emphasising the focus on our character, that made Shadowbringers the homerun that it was (and conversely, Dawntrail much less so.)

This is why "players prefer a blank template to project their character on to" is fundamentally such a non-argument, as is "oh, characterising Azem too much will never work" because it's doing the exact opposite that has actually been crucial to the game's success. We were given a backstory, a history, a name (in essence), relationships, an active connection with the villain - and the players went crazy for it. And they still are - it's really only here that certain, extremely vocal individuals greet the idea of Azem as something innately offensive. In most other places, interest in that part of the story is still very high, as is the intrigue surrounding who exactly they were and what they were doing behind the scenes.

I enjoyed it too for instance, although I don't care much about roleplay or what job my charecter uses. And while Azem's identity..

I think this is a pretty common sentiment, and one like to happen to most players on at least one occasion. The side effect of a narrative for our character is that not every single person will be pleased all at the same time, particularly at times when fan majority rule takes effect, such as with Emet or G'raha, who they do have a tendency to push based on their popularity. But I think it's a reasonable trade-off for a much more engaging story and sense of depth for our character, and in fairness to them, they never take it to much excess - the barebones of it is the WoL is a good guy who tries to connect with and at least understand the people they meet, be they friend or foe, while helping where they can, and so long as they continue to operate within that outline, as with Azem, the prospect of alienating the playerbase is unlikely. And even if it hadn't been before, I think Wuk Lumat taught them the dangers of pushing something a little too hard.

Originally Posted by Mansion

I don't get the point of the key if it were created by Azem too. In the large scope of things, what would be the final goal for them to have that key? Because from my remembering of what we heard of Azem, they are more of a "problem-solver" more than a big planner.
Besides, Azem presumably knew they would be sundered and thus lose memory of their Ancient identity. What would be the point of creating the key if there was no guarantee one of their sundered identity would find it, know how to use it and have the same mindset than the original Azem? Because as far as we know, sundered people from an original ancient can have very distinct endgames (see Ardbert and the WoL for instance, there was a time when we were almost enemies).

Yeah, you're putting this extremely well. You try to spell out what Azem's plan if they made the key actually might have been, and it comes off like complete nonsense, that only gets justified by increasingly more nonsense circuitous logic. The more that a theory like this relies on 'Azem has future sight' to cover the fact that it would be a worthless tool to Azem themselves, the more it relies on that future sight becoming more and more perfect, to account for how much they would need to know; for example, they'd need to know the transdimensional location of 'a shard', which is a concept that doesn't exist at the time. But in doing that, the plan becomes more and more absurd in turn, subject to more and more niche details that, for this theory to function, requires Azem to also have seen.


But in all honesty, I'm quite tired of feeding this derail. Which is what this is, none of this is from the patch, and at best it should all be going on in a different thread. So instead, I'm gonna talk up an angle on the Doomtrain that I've gotten on board with over the last couple weeks, and hopefully we can talk about that, instead:

The Ninth is a shard that fell into apocalypse roughly around their equivalent of the Industrial Revolution, hitting an interesting sort of 'period sci-fi' angle that we rarely see: their world fell in much the same way that sci-fi often depicts Earth failing if they go to hard with whatever new technology the author is afraid of (justifiably or not)... but the Ninth is a historically-rooted fantasy; they basically fell to their equivalent of the steam engine, or coal-fired power stations.

That itself is both interesting and a little funny, but following it makes the Doomtrain go from a non-sequitir 'boss for the sake of it' to, maybe, the most appropriate monster we ever could have fought: Of course the horrifying boogeyman of a world that died to their equivalent of the steam engine is an unstoppable demon train carrying nothing but pain and death! Slow enough to know it's coming... but much too fast to do anything about.