Anyone else feel like Tural was kind of wasted?

Tural looks visual pretty but is also pretty boring.
there are barely intriguing landmarks.
It feels more they created the land more with the IRL counterparts in mind than with the fantasy setting.
There is also a lack of enviromental story telling. most stuff is just there for the MSQ.

Shaloaani is such a place its literally just a desert with one mexican themed settlement, one Cowboy themend settlement and one native northern American settlement.

Tural feels like the rejoinings never happen there. Normally the source should be a distaster scared world.
Also were are the ceruleum laced canyons shimmering in blue, they referenced in the Bluemage questline.

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Originally Posted by Unyqua

Also were are the ceruleum laced canyons shimmering in blue, they referenced in the Bluemage questline.

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Oh, just second left after all those culturally unique villages that each of the Role Quest Giver npcs are from.

This explains why there were so many cutscenes to pad out the lack of zone growth. Each zone was dissected into two instead of being one large zone each that we could expand on, each housing two (beast) tribes that lived alongside each other (but instead of exploring more we simply revisit the same zones). Wuk Lamat didn't know a single detail about any of it. The Dawnservant never addressed the apparent food crisis Yak T'el was facing that was ongoing before the storm wreaked havoc, or the cold war both tribes therein were caught in. There was no reason for that entire side of the plot to have been there (What was it again? Oh yeah: 'We only get to eat this and they get to eat that' vs. 'they have issues with us, so now we have issues with them' -- oh yeah, and a brief snippet of 'blessed siblings' to add just a splash of depth), since every other crisis seems to have been caused directly from the storm while Yak T'el was already in place long before Valigarmanda's warning signs. Valigarmanda itself was treated as an afterthought when it could have been a fantastic plot point for all four Promises to use their strengths and rely on each other to cover their weaknesses, getting past the family-feud that seems to be their only issues (and for Lamat's case, the only relatable trait to hardship), but instead it was treated like a hurdle likening to that of the alpaca just down the cliff; barely an inconvenience. A world-ending threat, just 'poof', and released for no real reason either other than to use a weak trope of 'oh this guy is bad, whatever could have he been thinking', where Lamat never made a single mistake other than 'being too trusting'. There was no room for thought-provoking mistakes on our side, and so much tomfoolery on the 'villains' side. All of this was a Turali Disaster, and that was just the first half.

I love that we saw a Mesoamerican themed city and culture but it would have been FANTASTIC to go far north or far south. The cultures around the Arctic and Antarctic are fascinating and we see none of it. We don't even get to see any temperate forests. My favorite area of NA is the Pacific Northwest, which is a temperate rainforest. I was all excited thinking hey maybe we'll see it. But nope. Just Texas.

If they really wanted to do Fantasy North America and Fantasy South America, they really did it a huge disservice by making it all into one expansion. The breakdown is pretty sad. We get three Fantasy South America zones + city. Maybe not so bad. Othard only has one city and three zones to it currently, so it's tied with that continent. But then we get ONE zone for Fantasy North America in Shaaloani, which is just the southwest corner of Fantasy Texas. I don't count Heritage Found as a zone that adds to this, because it's been so heavily merged with another shard and lost most of its landmarks and is now ugly and cloudy all the time and full of electrope crap. Everything in that zone is tied to Alexandria and Solution 9, it's not really adding anything to the "America" part. Solution 9 isn't "Fantasy North America," it's from another shard entirely. And then the final zone is just Dead Computer Purgatory.

It's important to note that while you have big areas circled for the early expansions, we really only experience a fraction of the areas on those maps too.

I've been upset about this sort of stuff since Xelphatol got relegated to a dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Anarnee

It's important to note that while you have big areas circled for the early expansions, we really only experience a fraction of the areas on those maps too.

I've been upset about this sort of stuff since Xelphatol got relegated to a dungeon.

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Yeah, Xelphatol, Yafaem Saltmoor, and Paglth'an are large chunks of Eorzea relegated to instances. Then there's stuff like Bozja, Werlyt, and the Return to Ivalice storylines which take out a large chunk of Ilsabard and Othard that prevents us from going there as well unless we awkwardly dance around the areas that are being locked up in something else. There's no chance of us returning to Dalmasca at all without Matsuno being hired as the main writer or at least a consultant and while expansions often feel similar to other FF games, I doubt they would devote a whole expansion to a region based so completely and utterly off another game.

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

And yet, despite having the second-least amount of quests out of all main MSQs, Dawntrail hands-down takes up the most amount of space, geographically.

This is immutable space on Hydaelyn that will never be touched again in the MSQ after the post-MSQ patches, save maybe for 3-quest asides.

Did we really need to eat up all of Tural for this? Couldn't have fit the MSQ into one half or the other? We could have had an entire expansion dedicated to cowboys.

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One thing to remember is that this map did not exist before Dawntrail. Xak Tural and Yok Tural were not separate concepts before the writers invented them for us to go over there and actually visit it. The shape of the whole continent was only just created for this so anything that's "wasted space" didn't even exist before the story did.

It feels like the main argument here is being made more about the map space as a resource for future content but it was already established all the way back in Stormblood with the release of Blue Mage that the part of the New World that is based on North America is controlled by the Mamool Ja and they have hegemony over the whole continent. Anything that would have taken place in a theoretical Xak Yural expansion would have been required by necessity to be intrinsically linked to anything in Yok Tural regardless so there's little room for a story that in Xak Tural that is independent of Yok Tural unless we wanted Garlean Empire 2 situation.

That said, what we did get did feel poorly utilized. The Mamook area of Yak'tel is certainly pretty but the whole zone as well as Kozama'uka don't feel too different from Rak'tika and Thavnair in a way for them to completely stand out on their own. One could argue that there's only so many ways to make a jungle zone but maybe that's why they should have branched out and given us stuff like the pantanal wetland of Brazil that could have had Hanuhanu living on village-sized lilypads or the tepui of Venezuela that could have given us extremely weird and crazy wildlife that aren't palette swaps of other mobs in the game and given the artist team freedom to run wild.

The dev team seems to like sticking to their whole "6th zone is wild and crazy" gig (except Stormblood), but Living Memory would have been much better utilized as an instance instead of a zone which could have given room for Heritage Found to be much more fantastical with better utilization and mixture of Alexandrian city and its landscape being mixed into the prior existing area. Cliff pueblos overlooking Alexandria and spires of glass where lightning has struck the desert sand. The rebels could have been living in a cyberpunk junkyard were electrope is recycled.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

The dev team seems to like sticking to their whole "6th zone is wild and crazy" gig (except Stormblood), but Living Memory would have been much better utilized as an instance instead of a zone which could have given room for Heritage Found to be much more fantastical with better utilization and mixture of Alexandrian city and its landscape being mixed into the prior existing area. Cliff pueblos overlooking Alexandria and spires of glass where lightning has struck the desert sand. The rebels could have been living in a cyberpunk junkyard were electrope is recycled.

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Heritage Found is one of the most boring zones in the game. I have my complaints with some Stormblood areas (the Peaks has a lot of interesting things that barely get touched and The Lochs does as well) but there's next to nothing interesting in HF.

The whole of DT should have taken place in Yak Tural, yeah. It's a lot of squandered opportunity.