Thread: 8.0 speculation

With regards to final fantasy 7 references, I don't believe we'll get anything as on the nose as the ffiv fan service in ew. I do believe we will get Jenova as a trial or raid and hear me out! It will be linked to Oizys from Cosmic exploration, The plague on the Grebuloff homeworld and/or perhaps as the prime mover of the omicron empire. In stigma dreamscape we can see not all omicron wanted to go forth with expansionism despite the fact that a robot network should work as a hive mind. What if as a subversion to Jenova using her cells to control biological lifeforms, she employs a digital virus to the omicron infecting most of the network to conqueror planets to mine their minerals for machinery while she saps the aether like she would the lifestream of planets she'd hop to in ff7?

Oizys's gravitational anomaly looks way to much like ff7's meteor after getting hit by a rocket! Not only that but it looks drained of it's aether much like the burn as if it was recently sucked dry by an alien monstrosity.

Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

I wouldn’t get your hopes up, Shadowbringers Fanfest items were a FFVII motorcycle and FFVII character minions and I don’t remember anything about it being FFVII-related.

Shadowbringers trial series was literally some the most iconic boss fights from ff7 the weapons?! We literally go to terncliff which is basically Junon with no cannon and an npc states we should have blow sapphire weapon's head off with a cannon.

can't wait for someone to do the eden raids and say shadowbringers had no ff8 references holy fork and shirtballs I'm losing my mind harder than cloud.

Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

I think it was unpopular because it was crystal tower specifically. we hated getting it in roulette and basically got told we'd get it a lot more please look forward to it! Eden is that best raid series story and fight wise imo and the ff8 remixes go hard. It's also level 80 so we actually have some buttons.

You're kinda right that the Crystal Tower is almost so easy that it loops back around and is just mind-numbingly tedious, but I don't think the solution is 'hardest raid series', because you've also missed that some people didn't like having to do raids at all. That the Crystal Tower, easy as it was in practice, was an extra chore between them and 'The Good Part' (be that 'good part' either Heavensward or Shadowbringers; both were true depending on where you were progress-wise), and a fairly intimidating one on top of it if you haven't done it before; running with twenty-four people in what's called a 'raid', which is a term MMOs usually reserve for 'end-game content', is kinda scary! Yes, factor in the people on the higher end when talking about something like this, but also factor in that, according to publicly available achievement stats, only about 65% of the playerbase have even finished Eden at all, and you have to assume that other 35% might well have some decent internal reasons and would balk if you asked them to. And frankly, I don't want to do more Eden than I have to either, some of those fights REALLY drag!

My thought, if you told me 'exactly one raid series MUST be made mandatory', I think the pick is Ivalice. Not only is it already the non-mandatory raid series with the highest completion rate anyway at 76%, and is an alliance raid series so you're only asking someone to commit to three queues/instances, but it's also got no huge peaks or valleys in difficulty. Mathbot memes aside, none of those fights are really 'turn your brain off and experience ego death' easy or 'look up a guide and practice strategies' hard. I still wouldn't recommend making that mandatory, but it's the least dangerous one to do it with.

EDIT: Also, while I was posting this, the 7.5 special site went up, so we have actual things to speculate on here. Looks like things might indeed be getting Voidular, but I'd suspect it also being Ilsabard-centric; we're still going to Garlemald, so logically the problem's at least partially based there, it'd be weird if Clyteum was the one place with this problem.

Originally Posted by Cleretic

The other comparison here is Alisaie turning up in the MSQ for Stormblood after Coils. And I bring that one up because it's actually a great example for why they can't do this with Gaia. With Alisaie all they had to do was 'yadda yadda' past Coils, which is largely because she is still the same character before and after; Coils didn't really affect her or the world around her, so all that needs to be addressed is her actual knowledge of the WoL; if you've done Coils she's a friend, if you haven't she's just a vague acquaintance. She can and does exist outside of Coils.

Gaia actually doesn't exist outside of Eden. Her state as a character changes radically over the events of that story, and crucially, she starts it basically inaccessible, as an amnesiac prisoner somewhere off in the Empty. You cannot 'yadda yadda' past Eden to bring Gaia in, because Eden is Gaia's entire story, she does not exist without it.

And again, why bother? This is going through great lengths and basically just rewriting the narrative rules the game's entirely stuck to until now, solely to... what? Bring in a character for fanservice purposes that the people you're doing this for, by definition, cannot be fans of, because they have not met her? That's ridiculous, especially given Gaia's already thrived quite well off in side content and conditional scenes that only play for people who actually do know who she is.

Has it really been that long that people forgotten how Estinien started out in FF14?

A literal character in a side content that people "cannot be fans of" because they have not met him or how he was before he became a Main Character in 3.0 Main Storyline (Estinien literally wanted WoL dead because he was still blinded by vengeance, attempted to kill WoL, and Players were ready for a round two with him whenever he decide to attack again because of how 2.0 Dragoon Quest ended). Yes it was not a Raid but the first Job quest storyline for Dragoon in 1.0/2.0. He did not become a fan favorite until becoming a Main Character in FF14 due to all the developments he went through and players getting to know him more in the Main Storyline. Not to mention certain parts of 3.0 to 3.X did felt players would have gotten better context if they done the Dragoon Quest first but they manage to make things work and not require Dragoon 2.0 job quests after since everything they needed was just through 3.0 for Estinien as a Main Character. They just worked from there for his character into what he is now in current storyline.

Either way seem like a decent point to stop discussing this here since we cannot really find common ground due to concerns about how will Gaia affect FF14 Main Story by making Eden raid manditory or Not manditory but having context issues with alternate dialogues.

Not to mention now the next patch content is up and now just waiting for maybe 7.55 stuff after for the expansion teasers.

Originally Posted by EdwinLi

Has it really been that long that people forgotten how Estinien started out in FF14?

Estinien was a bad idea.

Anyone who's leveled Dragoon after Heavensward (or hell, even during it) knows that it becomes an ugly continuity snarl where Estinien flickers between states at random and it's really sloppy and confusing. Sure, love Estinien as a character all you want, but he's also an example of why they've never done that a second time outside of brief cameos.

Originally Posted by Iscah

It has ahriman aspects to it, but it also seems plant-based.

My read is that it's actually an Ahriman trying, with... questionable success, to possess a machine that doesn't really know how to. So instead of doing a 'classical' possession and making some new kind of voidsent it's just sorta trying to leak into the gaps between machine parts and brute-force it.

Suggesting that perhaps a mass Thirteenth incursion into Ilsabard isn't just going to be Ilsabard facing horrors that it cannot fully comprehend, but also the Voidsent having the exact same problem.

With the Special Site up, I'm still not sure what to make of what's going on.

For starters, it's weird to do more Void stuff so soon after 6.x's Void Arc, even if it's been a background element for a long, long time, especially considering all of the Void-related content already in the game (Crystal Tower, Shadow of Mhach, background elements in Warring Triad and Shadowbringers, the aforementioned Void Arc). It's similarly weird to be doing more V fanservice when we got some in Dawntrail itself (Occult Crescent) and have gotten plenty more in the past (Krile, Galuf Baldesion, aspects of Shinryu, Deltascape, Forbidden Land Eureka). It does appear to be a Void incursion in Ilsabard (the Clyteum), but there's still the matter of what's happening on the Moon, in Mor Dhona, and how Halmarut and Enuo both factor into what's going on. (Oh and Calyx is still there as a Mica monochrome plush, I guess.)

"The Unmaking" could not be a more ominous trial name. The dungeon boss (if it is a boss and not just a mob) is clearly an Ahriman melting itself onto a Guard Scorpion to hijack it.

Anyway, while there is precedent for making side content necessary (or providing additional context) it's never been a popular thing to do. Personally I don't think Eden is that big of an ask, and they can make an abridged introduction for characters originating in side content, I don't think it's a thing they're really going to do. Gaia is not that popular of a character, even if she was selected (probably not by CBU III) to appear in a spinoff game. I do think she would have a unique perspective on the sundered Ascians that could be interesting to include, but as a side character that's a tough sell even if I don't agree Eden is that difficult of a raid series to complete. (Maybe the Fatebreaker is a little tricky, but the rest is... ehh, especially if you're backtracking post-Dawntrail out of necessity.)

Original stuff, perhaps? Eh.