What if they did a "restoration" quest series...

[Tahli]

As for it being strange, it's not strange for ARR. They have the La Nosean volcano visible from all the La Noscea zones, and I think Western Thanalan viewable from a distance? You can see Limsa Lominsa from a distance in La Noscean areas too. In Thanalan, you can see Ul'dah, Eastern Thanalan's bahamut damage from most areas, the Gold Saucer and the garlean place from Southern Thanalan. It's just the sort of love they stopped even caring about or that their overburdened procedures phased out.

Oh, didn't realize that! That's a shame, it really is a nice detail. At least for the Shroud, it gives an air of mystery for what that place is like now, since we can't currently visit it.

[AmiableApkallu]

As for it being strange, it's not strange for ARR. They have the La Nosean volcano visible from all the La Noscea zones, and I think Western Thanalan viewable from a distance? You can see Limsa Lominsa from a distance in La Noscean areas too. In Thanalan, you can see Ul'dah, Eastern Thanalan's bahamut damage from most areas, the Gold Saucer and the garlean place from Southern Thanalan. It's just the sort of love they stopped even caring about or that their overburdened procedures phased out.

All of your examples are confined to a single city-state, and that hints at what I think actually happened: We went from 3 very large regions in ARR (the three city-states) to 6 smaller regions in all of the other expansions.

You can't see Coerthas Central from North Shroud, and vice versa, despite them being connected in game. Same for Coerthas Central and Mor Dhona. Same for Coerthas Western and Dravanian Forelands. Etc.

The city-states were probably each designed from the start as one, coherent map that then got chopped up into pieces because I guess the hardware of the time couldn't handle anything more.

[Shistar]

[...] Either way as the place is badly crystallized it would essentially just be like Mor Dhona (apart from the aforementioned PvP battlefield), a crystallized wasteland and thus, not very interesting as a location, hence why the development team have kind of forgotten about it [...]

I have to disagree. What we can see in-game suggests there's a healthy mix of crystallization, vegetation and waterfalls caused by the ground being torn apart from the impact (something that also happened in other areas of the Shroud that we can actually visit!)

This could make for an amazing area that features all of these + new cavernous systems, unearthed ruins of Gelmorra (we can never have enough Gelmorra!!) and possibly more lore about Keepers of the Moon and Duskwights, since they are known for having moved away from Gridania to do their own thing now that the elementals aren't powerful enough to blast them out of orbit with the Greenwrath.

I desperately want to fix Coerthas. C'mooooon, Yoshi-P, Garlemald has the "colorless frozen hellhole" aesthetic covered. #DefrostCoerthas2025

Garlemald sure knows how to drive that seasonal affective disorder straight into our brains. lol no wonder all Garleans are so bitter.

I like snowy Coerthas too, but I think the lowlands could be less snowy and more green and keep the highlands as the snowy areas!
Mostly because going back and editing areas that are used for HW+ MSQ would be difficult. They can choose what to do when re-adding old areas, though!

All of your examples are confined to a single city-state, and that hints at what I think actually happened: We went from 3 very large regions in ARR (the three city-states) to 6 smaller regions in all of the other expansions.

I think the lore would greatly benefit from going back to the multiple smaller zones in a bigger region format. Or just do all 6 areas based on a bigger region for once... would be a nice change of pace if they're dead set on the 6 areas per expansion!

[LukaRoselia]

There's quite a few areas they could do it for tbh. Garlemald comes to mind.