(02-16-2016, 10:45 AM)Yuella Wrote: Why did Minfilia declare the 7th Astral Era at the end of 2.0? Who gets to decide whether we have moved from an Umbral Era to Astral Era? (Astral to Umbral is easy. It's a calamity). What if someone disagrees and thinks we're still in the Umbral era?
Fernehalwes addressed this at the 2014 Las Vegas Fanfest Lore Panel:
Fernehalwes Wrote:Q: So, officially, it’s the Seventh Astral Era… but there’s still… a lot of stuff going on. Who are the Grand Company Leaders that they can just be like, “Okay, it’s over, we’re done!â€
MCKF: This is a very political thing. Basically, five years ago, you had half of your world destroyed because Louisoix stepped in and tried to stop things and only half stopped things. A lot of people did pass away during the calamity and their livelihood as been destroyed and they have to rebuild and go into the shroud to move felled trees and rebuild their farms and it got a lot of people down. If you look at some of the NPC dialogue, one thing we did in 2.0 was, we thought you know if my life had been destroyed I’d be all depressed, I’m just trying to rebuild things and get back on my feet. SO we’ve tried to put that kind of text into these regular NPCs. You have all these people in these nations that are very down. They had this big war with the Garleans, they won all these great battles, it was the first time in thousands of years the Grand Companies were formed and then “hey we made… DIDN’T make it†so basically the GC leaders were waiting for something good to happen and they grasped onto that and said “ok! umbral era is over mission accomplished we’re done!†to hopefully bring peoples spirits up. It’s a morale thing, you can’t have your people depressed all the time, they won’t be productive thinking “why should I farm? Another Bahamut is gonna just destroy my fields.â€
Q: So we have that quest line, Chronicles of a New Era.. so we ARE in a new era then?
MCKF: Yep. When they announce it, that’s it. But it’s weird because if a new player picks up the game and starts today they’re still in the Umbral Era, it’s in that time bubble.
Of course, that only covers this most recent Umbral to Astral. For previous Calamities, specific events in history marked the recovery from Umbral to Astral time periods. For instance, mankind's discovery of magic (thaumaturgy) 3000 years ago marked the end of the 5th Umbral Era into the 5th Astral. And the 6th Umbral Calamity ended when the waters of the Great Flood receded and mankind destroyed the last traces of any remaining 5th Astral Era civilizations, including all libraries and books and science related to earlier discoveries. It was... a dark time... even for an Astral Era. Similar to what we're facing in this current, 7th Astral Era.
