Boulders Down

[alimdia]

When they revealed the first expansions to involve Ishgard and its surrounding areas I was almost sure we would see what's behind the glaringly obvious entrance to whatever is buried under it, yet now the last two dungeons of this expansion have been announced and Boulders Down wasn't even looked at.

With the reveal that 6.0 might take us to the northern part of Ilsabard to Garlemald, and the high likelihood that 5.0 will involve the southern part of Ilsabard + Thavnair I wonder if they plan to do anything at all with Boulders Down, or if that's just an idea they discarded.

[treuhavik]

These "swords" and shards of are found throughout ARR areas, some of which were used as entrances to the coils containing Bahamut. As it wasn't chosen, for one reason or another, to be one of these entrances, Boulder Downs seems to be just another impact crater in which a piece of Dalamud is impaled.

[Theodric]

It's possible that - at some point the future - we may see existing zones revisited for the sake of additional dungeons. Especially if there's positive feedback regarding such an idea.

[Anonymoose]

I've long suspected that this is a case of scenario supply and demand.

Dalamud dropped quite a few internment hulks on Eorzea (especially if you try to count all of the ones you can see "in the distance" added as horizon flavor to other zones). By making sure that all of the main ones had obvious locations and ways you might get to them, they could ensure options if the need arose (kind of like how I suspect that they haven't released the world map even though they have a general idea of it just in case they need to tweak it to work with future ideas). Should this have been the case, they'd have ended up with more options than coils.

I was pretty surprised when Boulder Downs turned out to be nothing, but I was downright shocked that we didn't do more with the Mor Dhona hulk. Look at that thing. Is has its own thunderdome! And we skipped it!

Now, part of the answer is obvious: only four hulks survived the collapse of Dalamud to the degree that they could functionally burrow and re-align to find Bahamut's heart. The others are varying degrees of broken, and we can only speculate as to what (if anything) within remains functional after five-point-some-odd years without the systems that failed.

On the one hand, we can quote Koji Fox:

There are some that aren’t as destroyed as others and there might be a chance in the future to re-explore them, but you’ve spent enough time in these coils for now.

On the other, we have to consider Xelphatol Protocol: going back and opening up the other hulks is possible, but are we sure that it's more interesting than other options? Similar to how Xelphatol is mostly a bleak, windswept region with barely anything to see, its sacrifice might pave the way to something more novel or enjoyable. (Open-world Promyvion-like zone, please. Purple glows.) If Earth were an MMO, and we wanted to add, say, Spain, does that inescapably bind us to have France, Germany, England, etc. at the cost of India or Russia or Peru? We could see a little of so much, instead of so much of a little. Those are scales that must be balanced. (With open-world, purple Promyvion, please.)

[Espritduo]

Wasn't Boulder Downs one of the exit points for the Binding Coil storyline? Each Coil had you start from one place, but once you completed it, the storyline had you appear outside somewhere else.

[Fenral]

Don't have the source right now, but I remember reading in an interview that the Allagan ruins in Boulder Downs were stated to not be parts of Dalamud. It's not too far from the Mor Dhona zone wall (which itself is actually pretty far from Mor Dhona), so it may simply end up being used as the cop-out entrance for Eureka to keep them from ever needing to acknowledge Syrcus Tower again.

[Anonymoose]

I remember reading in an interview that the Allagan ruins in Boulder Downs were stated to not be parts of Dalamud.

I'll see what I can dig up. My notes on the area are kind of a mess of back and forth claims from 2.00 onwards.

At the very least, the Sightseeing Log implies that the red junk around the Allagan ruins was Dalamud's doing.

Before the Calamity, Boulder Downs was a vast sloped lea littered with moraine deposited by realm-swallowing glaciers long receded. The rain of debris that accompanied the fall of Dalamud, however, transformed the landscape into a frozen wasteland pocked with gaping impact craters and peculiar dark matter formations.

[Mholito]

I was pretty surprised when Boulder Downs turned out to be nothing, but I was downright shocked that we didn't do more with the Mor Dhona hulk. Look at that thing. Is has its own thunderdome! And we skipped it!

We didn't entirely skip the Singing Shards hulk. We get teleported to the end of it when we enter t13, before entering the Burning Heart

[Zohar_Lahar]

I wonder if another internment hulk fell in Dravania beneath the Churning Mists. There are a lot of impact holes in that zone. Maybe another one fell in Gyr Abania.

[LuckyFish]

This got me thinking about all the areas that look like they should be a dungeon entrance but (at least as far as I know) aren't. Some of them might be used in solo content I haven't gotten to yet, but the one that springs to mind immediately is the tomb just outside Ul'dah with all the Spriggans. What is that place?