Quote Originally Posted by Doopliss View Post
I agree 100% with everything you said here. It's really well put. However, I wanted to mention that this has felt particularly egregious since Endwalker, not actually for most of the game's lifespan--though, for me, personally, the signs were blaring around 5.3, when they started making up somehow-more-convoluted-than-usual magical-science solutions that led to more, extremely convenient magical-science solutions.

I would also say the fundamental incuriosity and lack of interest in making the world fantastical was also at the front in Endwalker. Hilariously, I personally think Thavnair--a region that gets a measly two zones to it--has more flare and thoughtfulness in it than the entirety of Tural, especially with its mixing of both fantasy cultures and several real life cultures (surprise! it's not strictly fantasy India) to make something unique and respectful (at least in its most recent iteration... you'll have to unfortunately ignore some of the previous expansions' treatment of Thavnair...).

Unfortunately Sharlayan pisses me off though. It felt like they strove to make it as modernly appealing as possible while keeping the known architectural designs we'd seen in the Dravanian Hinterlands. Why does the whole thing feel like an upper-middle class college campus. Why does every NPC feel like your wacky-yet-palatably-relatable fellow office worker. There's absolutely no way this was the initial idea for Old Sharlayan, when characters like Matoya, or places like the Antitower, or insane groups like the Bibliothecs were all related to it. What happened to their implied, fantastical-levels of highhandedness?

Anyway, Tural feels to me a lot like basically EW Old Sharlayan but on a large scale. Everything is so sterile and unmysterious and essentially conflictless in spite of having a great set up for, you know, being the opposite. Sorry for the rant. This has just been something I've been stewing on too long.


Also I have never wanted to forget an entire questline before doing Myths of the Realm. God, I'd almost pay to forget it.
I think the three things that've been left unexplained with Tural are how the Alexandrians built the gate in the first place, how proximity to the gate gave the Yok Huy visions of the Golden City, and what it was the ancient Haragin people saw when they sailed east. I was so convinced it was gonna be Solution Nine, but that materialized later in the expansion.

Tural not having much conflict makes some sense because it's been in a period of relative peace for several decades, but the patches should be used to set up more tension. A lot of Alexandrians probably see Gulool Ja as a puppet ruler, especially since his guardian's the leader of another state. There are Turali people who were stuck in the dome for thirty years, and some of them have children who've never known the outside before. How will this affect Tural in the long run?