Quote Originally Posted by Anarnee View Post
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.
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.


Quote Originally Posted by NegativeS View Post
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.
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.