Normally when I do speculation columns – about Final Fantasy XIV or really anything else under the sun – I’m doing so for a particular reason that’s at least more developed than my own idle musing. There is a reason for this, and it comes down primarily to the fact that if I wrote a column about every idle speculation that passed through my head, I would write even more columns every week, even if I cut out the ones that start and stop with, “It would be super awesome if FFXIV had a motorcycle chase minigame, slash slash slash.”
But in this particular case, we have a little while before the next live letter, and honestly I just feel like writing about some speculation that’s based on nothing more than “I think this would be cool.” And unlike speculation that has no basis beyond that, it does at least make sense within the context of FFXIV. So let’s talk a little bit about where I hope we’re going next for our upcoming expansion: Meracydia.
Is there any reason to assume it’ll be our next destination? It has been name-dropped, and it has some tangentially connection to Azdaja and the First Brood, but for the most part, no, not particularly more than anywhere else. Heck, if the next expansion wants to fill out the map more, we still have the entirety of the continent around Garlemald to fill in. But Meracydia has been in the back of my mind for a long time, and for good reason: It’s the biggest question mark we currently have in the world that doesn’t have information flowing in and out.
There are a lot of question marks still floating around Etheirys, yes. We still haven’t seen most of Ilsabard, we’ve never been to the New World, there’s the northern reaches where the Roegadyn originally hail from, and so on. I’ve done columns about this before. But Meracydia also has two big differences from any of these other reasons, and the first is what I just mentioned: There is no information flowing in or out of Meracydia.
Everything we know about the continent comes secondhand or with a time lapse. The Warring Triad comes from the region, but that dates back to the time of ancient Allag, and that’s the last contact most anyone had with the continent. Tiamat might know more, but she seems disinclined to talk even in the wake of being freed before Endwalker. Emet-Selch mentions it as a land yet to be explored, but he doesn’t go into any particular detail about it. The land is still a huge question mark, and we don’t even know what it looks like right now.
What is known is that the land was heavily scarred by the Allagan invasion of the continent, and some parts are still a wasteland… probably. That’s the last we’ve heard of it, but it’s not clear how recently anyone has even looked. The knowledge that the settlements there will attack anyone coming close is well-known, but when was the last time someone even checked? The miqo’te arrived on the mainland from there back in the Fifth Umbral Era, and as near as we can tell none of them kept very detailed records about what the heck it was like there.
Put it another way: It would be very easy for everyone to just know you don’t go to Meracydia and so no one has tried for a very long time. You might say that it’s kind of stupid to imagine that no one would try sailing to this land when everyone knows it’s there, but the Norse knew that Canada was there and then basically decided there was no point in going back for 500 years, so stranger things have happened in actual human history. It feels like there might have been other things occupying the attention of the three great continents in the intervening time, including multiple calamities.
But that’s just one reason. The other big reason is that it allows for something that I feel like FFXIV has done a lot: exploring the areas that Final Fantasy XI very explicitly never did.
I don’t mean that to imply that, say, FFXIV went to a land covered in ice and snow but FFXI has no snow-covered zones. It absolutely does. And those are places where none of the player races live. There’s not a city in that region. The closest city to Limsa Lominsa is Bastok, and that’s a rocky waste at the coast instead of a lush island with volcanic activity. FFXI famously never went to the Far East despite having numerous stories, characters, and organizations tied to it; FFXIV went to the equivalent in its second expansion.
Fine, Reisenjima exists, but an isolated island where nobody really lives is not what people wanted or expected from the Far East in that game.
The other obvious continent to explore is the New World, and… well, we did get that. Whether you liked Seekers of Adoulin or not, it was very much based on that particular aesthetic. It’s clear from what we know of the New World at this point that you can fill in some of the blanks there. Meracydia doesn’t have that; it is, at this point, an open question.
And that in and of itself gives us the potential for something very different, to boot. At a very basic level, all of the FFXIV expansions to date have seen us usually going to familiar, known places. There are exceptions, of course – Ultima Thule, Azys Lla, the Ronkan half of Rak’tika – but for the most part we are in places that have familiar settlements and people that are fundamentally known. Sure, we didn’t go to Thavnair until this expansion, but it’s not like the world as a whole was wondering what the heck it was like down there. It’s a merchant kingdom. People know it very well.
Meracydia is not like that. No one there has had contact with the outside world for ages, which means that culturally it is an entirely separate affair. We don’t know who lives there other than probably miqo’te and hyur, and what little we do know is subject to speculation as well. These will be unfamiliar shores with unfamiliar people who may or may not be friendly, and may or may not have good reason to distrust outsiders.
And, you know, it’s the sort of place that an out-of-the-void Azdaja might well go flying off to without the slightest care for what that might do to the landscape, so that helps too.
Is this what I’m betting on at this point? Nope. Will I be disappointed if we don’t go here next? Heck no. There’s tons of stuff in Ilsabard alone yet to see, and quite frankly I’m happy to be along for the ride. But if you were asking me what my first choice would be? Yes, it’s Meracydia, whether or not it winds up being our actual next destination.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Thank you for joining me on this particular speculative tour; next week, I want to go back and talk not about narrative misfires in FFXIV but places where the narrative feels oddly truncated.
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.
