Thread: 8.0 speculation

Originally Posted by Iscah

You say that like it was a mistake, but it was a perfectly correct assessment that the then "mystery voice" must be from a time beyond our own, which leaves only two options: we time-travel or he time-travels.

Yeah, to clarify the 'time travel' assumption wasn't an out-there moonshot of a prediction, that was the result of people taking what little info they had and trying to shape anything out of it. You had the narration, you had figures that we'd only otherwise seen in Amdapor, and you even had Thancred saying that a place that looked an awful lot like Ul'dah had 'changed'. And hell, given the Alexander raids, time travel certainly seemed more theoretically plausible than shard travel. If I were the predicting type and actively following new info at the time, I probably would've reached for 'time travel' too.

People were wrong, but they were making best-faith guesses given a teaser that was kind of deliberately confusing that didn't really fit anything we were expecting at the time. Bringing it up here largely as perspective; we are not uniquely in the dark and uncertain about the upcoming expansion at this point, we have been WAY more confused than this.

EDIT: Also, I think it's genuinely very helpful and extremely funny to bring up the pre-Shadowbringers leadup, which feels like it's from a totally different planet. Cilia's right, people were not picking up what Shadowbringers was putting down at first, they were rightly skeptical.

Originally Posted by Yuella

When the Shadowbringers teaser was released, some people thought it was Amdapor related.

For 8.0, we know that Enuo is the 7.5 trial. He's from FF5, a game about merging a world that had been split into 2. We could be starting to merge the reflections back into the source safely without calamities.

The only method for merging the reflections back onto the Source we have right now is Interdimensional Fusion, which is hugely damaging to the Source (based on the fact even after Dawntrail concluded the lightning bubble around Yyasulani is still present, it may never recover or take so long it exceeds the lifetime of a Viera; I am honestly surprised, I assumed completing the arc would bring natural weather back). Assuming we did not do something like that and simply did a non-cataclysmic rejoining, it would wipe out the reflection and it's people in the process.

Barring some major thing out of left field, it's not happening because the worlds exist in the same space but different dimensions, and we currently have no way to bridge that (outside of small scale things like Halmarut's portals and the gate beneath the Skydeep Cenote, the latter of which currently only connects to Living Memory on the Ninth) that isn't damaging to one or both. They could introduce a way to do so and have it happen, but then we're just getting a repeat of Dawntrail's second act. We just got some Void action in 6.x; doing more so soon on such a big scale would be weird. I have a hunch it's more to do with the Rift (the interstitial dimension between the Source + reflections we traverse when traipsing from one to the other) but at that point it becomes even more of an unknown, since we have absolutely no clue how that place works. At least with the reflections we've settled on "elementally devastated variant of a legacy title's world, usually with some bizarro things for spice." (Well, aside from the First.)

And that's even assuming Enuo is actually the MSQ trial boss, which is more likely than not but we've gotten curveballs before (unadvertised Varis EX in Bozja, both the Magus Sisters and Anima advertised as trial bosses but being early game dungeon bosses). Given the Occult Crescent is already a V fanservice vehicle it could be tied to that instead. Unlikely, but not implausible.

Plus we've got oodles of V fanservice already; it's probably got the bronze medal overall, behind the Ivalice setting and III. Not impossible, just unlikely by my measure (and not something I'm all that interested in regardless).

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Yeah, to clarify the 'time travel' assumption wasn't an out-there moonshot of a prediction, that was the result of people taking what little info they had and trying to shape anything out of it. You had the narration, you had figures that we'd only otherwise seen in Amdapor, and you even had Thancred saying that a place that looked an awful lot like Ul'dah had 'changed'. And hell, given the Alexander raids, time travel certainly seemed more theoretically plausible than shard travel. If I were the predicting type and actively following new info at the time, I probably would've reached for 'time travel' too.

People were wrong, but they were making best-faith guesses given a teaser that was kind of deliberately confusing that didn't really fit anything we were expecting at the time. Bringing it up here largely as perspective; we are not uniquely in the dark and uncertain about the upcoming expansion at this point, we have been WAY more confused than this.

EDIT: Also, I think it's genuinely very helpful and extremely funny to bring up the pre-Shadowbringers leadup, which feels like it's from a totally different planet. Cilia's right, people were not picking up what Shadowbringers was putting down at first, they were rightly skeptical.

A lot of the confusion came from the fact 3.x's "Warriors of Darkness" subplot established that travel across the reflections necessarily required physical death ("shedding of the flesh" or somesuch), so travelling across them seemed impossible. Indeed, Alexander established time travel (and time loops!) as a possible thing but Shadowbringers' plot broke that rule (for the WoL alone and out of Doylist necessity, but still). How were we to expect an adventure on a parallel world we had no way to get to and the metaphysics of the setting prevented travelling there?

All we have right now is Halmarut's dialogue with Mica Doll Calyx, which tells us nothing other than "badness is coming." 4.4 really did have more hints, what with the localized deployment of Black Rose, the deaspected crystals Y'shtola found mirroring others from before the Calamity, and the Scions' souls being spirited away by a mysterious voice that left their bodies comatose. We just didn't know how all that led forward until 4.5.5, and it didn't fit together until very early in Shadowbringers itself.