It’d really be nice to visit Ala Mhigo, but I sincerely doubt at this point that we’re ever going to go there in Final Fantasy XIV.
As with most nations in the game, this is a remarkably loaded statement. Ala Mhigo comprises three regions that we know of (the Fringes, the Lochs, and the Peaks) as well as the eponymous city itself, so it can definitely be said that we have visited the land of Ala Mhigo. However, the city itself is confined to a dungeon and a couple of instanced areas. Whenever we need to meet with representatives, they meet us in the Ala Mhigan Quarter on the outskirts of the main city rather than inside the actual city itself.
Does this make a certain amount of sense from a development standpoint? Yes. The expansion gave us a new full city in Kugane and a new partial one in Rhalgr’s Reach, and there wasn’t time, money, or will to build Ala Mhigo as another explorable city or move all of the resources from Rhalgr’s Reach into that map. But it also stands as a stark reminder that there is something that ought to be here but just… isn’t.
There are holes in the map of this world that are unlikely to be filled at this point.
Some of this is to be expected. As much as I would like to see Bozja proper now that we have ultimately won the struggle against the Imperial forces once arrayed there, the fact is that developing a new map for this region requires some reason for players to travel there. Creating new zones takes time, even if they are zones where players can’t fly everywhere, and the fact of the matter is that “Bozja after the Empire has lost” is almost definitionally the area when nothing interesting is happening there any longer.
If that’s a little too abstract in phrasing, let’s be more direct: Every new zone in the game has to be made with the idea that players have a reason to go there. And a lot of the areas that are currently sitting around as noteworthy holes are themselves areas wherein one must first conjure a reason for players to go there, and some of those reasons are going to be thin at best.
Look at the regions on the map from FFXIV v1.0 that we have yet to explore. Is it possible to create a story that sends us back to Ishgard and Coerthas? Absolutely. But is there really so much more story to tell in that region to justify adding the Eastern Highlands, the Eastern Lowlands, the Central Lowlands, and maybe Owl’s Nest along the way? What sort of story would explore these three zones specifically and still feel engaging and necessary?
At some point you have to admit that you want these zones to exist to fill in the space, and while I won’t pretend I don’t notice their loss, I can’t say that I think these zones are inherently more important than, say, actual new ongoing story elements.
They’re not alone, of course. Aside from filling in places we saw in 1.0 (however incidentally), there are other regions we know must be there but that we haven’t explored and likely will never get to. Bozja, as mentioned. Nagxia. Ivalice. Even some places we do go in dungeons are implied to be notably larger; Xelphatol is definitely bigger than just the Ixali settlement we attack, but we’ve never seen more of it and we most likely never will because the obvious reasons to do so are already gone.
Heck, we already know that Kugane is just one city and Hingashi is a larger nation; the capital of Bukyo is visible on maps, but it seems unlikely we’ll ever get to explore more of the region beyond the one opened port city.
I think there is a distinction of import to be made between the listed areas and places like most of Ilsabard. We very explicitly hopped to a lot of zones in Endwalker, and going to Garlemald specifically while ignoring the rest of the continent was a choice. A story could still be written around the rest of the continent, and I still kind of hope that’s in the cards. But what I’m talking about here are places where the narrative and the game has moved on from these regions even as we know there’s more to see.
Now, in some ways, this makes perfect sense and is downright correct. FFXIV is not a game in which it is mandatory for you to simply see every possible thing in the world, like that’s a replacement for narrative or setting. What would we see in Owl’s Nest in Coerthas? Probably a place very akin to Dragonhead or Falcon’s Nest, just filled with different people. While this would be interesting to myself and a lot of other people, making zones is time-consuming and expensive. If there’s no good reason to do so, there are probably other areas to focus on, and if there’s no content to fill in there… I mean, I might want to visit Ala Mhigo as a proper city, but with no content to clear there, I would visit a few times and then probably never go back.
We also know that it has been said before – correctly – that most people would prefer to see new stuff as opposed to being told it’s time to go back to the old stuff. People complain now about how disconnected Endwalker’s zones are already; imagine an expansion consisting of a zone in Coerthas, a zone in Thanalan, a zone in Hingashi, and so on. It would be kind of annoying. We all gave Endwalker a pass on this because of cosmic significance and hitting the highlights of places we’ve heard of and haven’t seen.
In the future, yes, I imagine Ilsabard, Meracydia, and the New World will be sites of expansions as the game goes on. There might be a few other places that can be expanded into expansion size, and so on. While the shape of the world is fairly well-known and there are only so many places to go, there are still several more new places to explore.
But at the same time… yeah, especially if we’re not going to get new relic zones like we used to, maybe there’s space for covering some of these regions we’ve otherwise not seen? Maybe we could have the Eastern Lowlands and Owl’s Nest feature as a different sort of content, something worth engaging in even if it’s not akin to the FATE-style grindfest of Eureka and Bozja? New areas are fun, but it’s also clear that the designers don’t want to leave the familiar spaces of the game world in the rear view; it’d be nice to keep getting more reasons to go back.
Especially when it comes to the First. That’s an issue for another day.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to talk about the latest live letter and first impressions from our patch 6.3 previews, since we know that’s coming.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
