So I first saw the Dawn of the Morninglight trailer, yay, and wondered if the Morninglight preacher was ‘Beaumont’/Loki.
Then I wait, no, stupid me, he has different eyebrows, seems to otherwise look different enough, probably different voice, this is just overreaction to Funcom recycling of face types.
Then I played the story content released. The preacher does seem to look intently at our Bee. He lacks a name(? I think) and we don’t get dialogue or missions with him (yet?). The content mostly addresses characters we get to see and hear and interact with (Che, John, Marquoid…'s family, faction handler, that deal), but the one character we don’t knowingly deal with, but who gets lots of text explanation, is ‘Beaumont’. Beaumont, its made even clearer here, has an experience with the Morninglight, knows its workings, certainly can deal with illusion magic, can even have magic to the point of creating duplicates, and has faced us directly enough to know that an indirect method would be preferable.
So now I’m back to thinking that this preacher is an early nod, a hint, that Loki is out (yeah I’m aware he’s supposed to be put somewhere and is weakened, but writing can easily get through that; perhaps he leaks out a depowered duplicate to watch the Morninglight) and we’re back having to deal with him. Dawn of the Morninglight is a ‘new dawn’, sure, but its also clearly a new bubbling up of characters and issues from the very beginning; Che, Morninglight, Tokyo attack… why now Freddie?
Yeah whatever - its just that the preacher’s stare seemed a bit too direct…
I think we can categorically state that it’s not him. Him staring at you is just setup for the joke of the dangerous stranger he’s talking about being pride and not us.
Not everything has to be a callback to something else otherwise the story would never go anywhere.
I’m aware of the joke setup - I’m just unable to shake it off as an easy mislead.
Beaumont talks of ‘spreading the virus’ and how that virus can be his ideas. This new content implies he found persuasive ways to find followers. You may be right. I’m just saying its… very easy for me to believe that he’s in some form the preacher here.
EDIT: Also hey, be real here, its not like I’m saying the first Bee we meet is someone secretly from Scorched Desert, and that the misc future mission NPCs are all secretly people from Savage Coast. I made a specific theory.
I think the Preacher is Nathaniel Winter.
The Illuminati wouldn’t/couldn’t give him what he wanted, so he found someone/something who could.
I think Loki is masquerading as Che. Think about it: Che is supposed to have been born in 1952 he would be 66 years old now. He looks mid thirties, tops. Something doesn’t add up. If the real Che is even still alive, then he is the one locked up in whatever hole 'Loki" is supposed to be locked up in, leaving the real Loki free to manipulate events to his advantage. He said it himself: He’s all about the long con.
I had thought that ‘time’ started to move on at some point? Maybe with the launch of Kaidan? Of course, I haven’t checked anything official about the time keeping in literally years. However, I had assumed that the Antarctica Events were references to ones that happened over the last year or so. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/enormous-pyramids-just-discovered-in-antarctica/ Still, he doesn’t look any where near 62 years old, either. He looks a decade younger than me, not old enough to be my father.
Assuming SWL still takes place largely in 2012, Kaidan events would be in December 2012 (there is a photo in Contract Killers with a December timestamp; the sakura are blooming wildly out of season, so time is weird there). Time moves forward, but not very fast. Solomon Island is in October, Kaidan is in December.
I’m pretty certain that the timestamp on that one is 2013. I also have vague memories of the developers saying that leaving an actual date on that print was a mistake.
There was. And there is. If you run the Nightmare in Love Hotel mission, when John explains stuff, you get the timeline for all that has happened from Solomon to Kaidan.
Like I’ve always said, each portal in Agartha leads us to, not only a place, but a set time. That’s why no matter our actions, nothing ever changes and will be reset when you revisit the zone. Every zone is contained in a time bubble.
Given Gaia’s nature as a transdimensional wibbley wobbley timey wimey entity, I think each adventure zone is a set period in time however some are fixed, while others can progress through ‘linear’ time aka new side missions depending on the needs of the plot
