Did you not also pay attention to the fact they were in a “sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice” death spiral of culling 1/2 their population to fix every problem that existed?
If she hadn’t sundered the world, they would have kept doing this, because they were never happy with what they had.
That’s what caused the entire thing in the first place.
They were never going to be happy, and they were going to keep sacrificing people to Zodiark until there were none left.
Except if that had happened, then the WoL would have never existed at all. And then, where would the game be?
The WoL exists purely after the sundering, but if the sundering never happened, then what?
The Black Rose incident is a bit different, we never SEE the timeline that happened in the future after the Black Rose (except in a cutscene or two), therefore it’s easy to just discard that timeline and continue along the new one that was created.
EDIT: Adding another timeline with no Sundering is possible within the narrative universe of the game, but doing so would remove the player character from existence, and everything the player ever did or saw, so it obviously wouldn’t work from a gameplay perspective.
My guy, do you not know what ALTERNATIVE means? The timeline we’re in still exists and will continue to do so, that’s how it works in the ffxiv universe. It’s just that in the alternative (adjective: (of one or more things) available as another possibility.) The wol wouldnt and instead would still be Azem
Edit: Just like how there’s a timeline where YOU’RE LITERALLY DEAD
You seem to be trying to force both versions of time-travel presented to the player in FFXIV to be consistent, when they don’t have to be.
The one which happened in ShB is not a stable time-loop, as undoing the root cause of the issue would negate the attempt to do so. As such, the little story posted on the FFXIV website showed a branching timeline being created. They didn’t need to show this, but it does give some closure to that story arc.
The one which happened in EW is a stable time-loop, despite a clear attempt to prevent the issue from happening at it’s source. In essence, it was possible to stop Meteion before she left Ethyris… but it didn’t happen. So we don’t get to see the branching timeline; and for all that we know, there was such a branch where Meteion was actually stopped. But seeing that would make for a boring story.
If you want to take it another way, you can view branching timelines as the default way for time-travel to work… but the benefit of a stable time-loop in a story is that you don’t have to SHOW those branching timelines.
Because a lot of stories would be boring if the hero died after being stomped on by a Fel Reaver which snuck up on them.
That’s the whole definition of a stable time loop…
Something happens.
You go back in time to try to stop the thing from happening.
Your attempt to stop the thing from happening is the very thing that causes the thing to happen the way it did which results in future you going back in time to attempt to stop it.
We could argue that there is another branched timeline, that is, the “original” timeline where the WoL was not present during the events of Elpis.
Do me a favor and check the cutscene out where venat sees you off. You might notice a lack of a time paradox in her explanation. She doesn’t ever mention that, at all. It’s only mentioned once and that is when you first meet her.
It’s been established, multiple times, that changing the past leads to alternative timelines. There is no logical reason why we couldnt do the same in elpis. The only reason is that the devs wanted the ancients dead. It’s just that simple
This means, that we had already been to Elpis before, an infinite number of times.
The branch was created the first time we had gone to Elpis, which was before this time we play as (because this had already happened and we are seeing it for the first time as the audience outside the story).
Oh boy, where do i even begin with this? Let’s see…
First of all, a stable time loop isn’t possible in this context. See, a stable time loop requires all events to lead into each other without introducing contradictions. However, several elements introduced in elips outright contradict a stable time loop. For example: venat only becomes hydaelyn because she meets us. If we hadn’t time traveled, then she wouldn’t have had the inspiration to oppose the convocation. This means that the sundering is dependent upon your presence in the past, which creats a casual loop, which a paradox and not a stable loop.
Second, the whole “branching timeline” thing is how the game frames the whole time travel mechanics. By simply going to elpis, we’ve shown that we have directly influenced the events we play in, meaning that our trip has created a new branch and isn’t “always already” happening. If the loop were stable, then other characters like venat wouldn’t need to take deliberate action to change things after meeting us. Her choice to become hydaelyn is directly inspired by what we tell her.
Third, the whole elpis section introduces contradictions that preclude a stable time loop. Infinite loops break causality and don’t align with the way the game shows time travelbas creating changes. The game itself very clearly leans on a branching timeline model, not a stable loop, meaning that your argument that it “already happened” falls right apart
That being said, i have an essay due tomorrow so i think writing that is a better use of my time since I’m still kinda far from finishing it. You can have the last word and I’ll have the stress of deadlines.
Maybe on the first iteration, she came up with the idea on her own, and meeting you just reinforces it in future iterations?
Yeah, as I stated, we already created that branch, on a past iteration.
Again, there’s nothing stating this, whatsoever.
Obviously, for us to have existed before the time looping began, the FIRST time we went to Elpis, Hydaelyn had to have existed without our influence otherwise we would never have existed to go there and do that.
So we go back there, tell her this stuff, and it only reinforces what she would have done anyhow.
Just because it leans on something doesn’t mean it can’t do the other thing at the same time, and again, we already branched a long time ago. A branch and a loop can coexist.
AKA, “I ran out of stuff and am going to duck out”.
It’s ok, we get it. You couldn’t think of anything else. That’s fine.
That’s the most common way a stable time-loop is shown in stories, but I think it’d go down as “not necessarily”. The only thing needed for a time-loop to be stable is for it to not significantly alter the general course of events going forward.
Sometimes it’s gets exaggerated/twisted in the sense that the overall timeline is immutable, and any attempt to change it is futile (sometimes to the point the universe starts aggressively maintaining the “true timeline”)… and I think that’s what’s becoming the hang-up here, ShB is a clear case of a branching timeline. The irony is that - logically speaking - a stable time-loop can still exist in a case where there’s branching timelines, it just means you don’t see the other branches where the loop breaks down.
Which leads to another situation, as another common time-travel trope is the “butterfly effect”, where even the slightest changes have major consequences. The old case of Homer Simpson and the time-travelling toaster being an easy example.
So something that’s in-between those two extremes, neither being immutable nor prone to wild variations, is probably hard to imagine for many because most of fiction tends to show either one or the other.
Conversely, FFXIV (by accident or design) has created a setting where the timeline is stubborn but still flexible. It can branch off, but not easily. Must be the Ascians (and other parties) consistently working towards a Rejoining, or something like that.
Or as one perfectly abridged character once put it:
I suppose after this huge, long tangent one could just say:
“The story is good, stop nitpicking it”.
It’s certainly miles ahead of pretty much anything WoW ever did, especially in recent history.
Heck, even the best parts of WoW story you try to defend, you get WoW players attacking you (like when I tried to say that Wrath’s story was probably some of the best writing in WoW, I immediately had some putz trying to attack it).
If you ignore that the empire was killed off screen after being set up for multiple xpacs, the big bad was pulled out of thin air in the second half of the final story arc xpac, and the story also presents a couple of genociders as good/neutral, then sure I guess the story is good?
It had some highpoints, but it’s a solid 7 out of 10. It’s funny how DT does basically the exact same thing they’ve been doing since ARR but suddenly the story is awful.
I didn’t think it was “awful”. I mean, it was going to be really hard to start a new story from mostly scratch and have it live up to the epicness that was Endwalker.
I just think they could have sped the succession up just a little, but eh that’s just me I suppose.
Also, Grey Morality is always going to be better writing than total evil and total good.
Was Venat perfect holy good? No. But did she generally have good intentions, and therefore is a “good” character? Absolutely.
Were the Ascians total evil? Not really, their motives were mostly understandable even if their means were reprehensible.
Eh… it’s very much misconstrued at this stage, mostly because of bad writing handling “morally grey” characters poorly. What is almost always better is NUANCE, which is all too often absent in bad writing.
There’s a pushback against “morally grey” characters, mostly because it is leading to bad writing that is also unsatisfying because there’s no easy outlet (a villain) to beat up at the end of it. And when the writing is up to snuff… you’re kind of better going off with basic black-and-white morality.
And besides, there’s also Zenos the murder-hobo.
Seriously, he’s essentially a caricature of hardcore MMORPG players.
Now then, a key element of many of FFXIV’s villain is that they are tragic villains.
That doesn’t mean they’re not villains, but it does mean they are developed and nuanced as we get to either see them fall or learn of how they fell from being more upstanding people. Their motives are justified, but they are often too far gone to save.
