The March update will finally bring the long awaited (and over anticipated) Summoner avatars, Alexander and Odin.  Strangely, it's been years since the Treasures of Aht Urhgan storyline ended and yet here is a fresh addition to its content.  ToA would still appear to have a few loose ends that never seemed to materialize.  One other such example concerns the Nyzul Isle assaults.  During an interview done at FanFest 2008, it was stated:

Itou: It doesn’t end at floor 100, and it’s been made so that up to 200 or up to 300 can be made. You climbed upwards, and now you may descend downwards. We’re considering various things like that.

Be that as it may, once Balrahn’s Secret Treasures were added, the objective behind Nyzul Isle seemed to change completely.

Itou: It caused a lot of congestion, and now peak times are incredibly crowded. We implemented measures to address the issue, but it can’t solve the core problem. We can’t add even more new elements to Nyzul with it being this crowded to being with. (laughs)

Ogawa: Congestion levels vary from World to World, but if even one World has a significant problem with certain content, it precludes us from adding new elements to it.

This might not be too surprising.  It's a little odd for an assault NPC to only offer one mission to choose from after all.  I've always felt the twinge of sarcasm when the NPC would ask you which Nyzul mission you'd like to take.  The popularity of Nyzul has died down since then.  Could it still be possible there's a return of Nyzul in the future?  The idea is that archaic rampart's spit out enemies from all over, so incorporation of WoG area NMs might be a logical next step.  I had a lot of fun doing Nyzul runs and would be willing to see what else they could come up with, but perhaps with all their work this is just something that got delayed or totally scrapped.

There is also a large second half to the Colisseum that has never been used.  It's been assumed this area would be used for a type of PvP event but there's no word on what happened to their plans.  The Colisseum might be another casualty of Square being overworked with Wings and FFXIV.  Or perhaps it was decided that the level cap would be raised to 99 and they realized they had might as well wait until the jobs were settled down to finish it off.  Hopefully it will still see a use some day.

The next one is the most anticipated loose end of all.  Years ago the quest line of the Fellowship NPC's first alluded to the existence of the Far East, Alexander, Odin, and their eternal clash.  Even today however the Fellow NPC's are still capped to 75 and cannot be used in the Aht Urhgan areas.  This is probably a good decision given that access to NPCs might cause a lot of player grief while solo jobs use them for casual exping on easy mobs.  Now that the level cap is being raised to 99 however maybe we will see a day where camping in Bhaflau has become lesser utilized and able to support solo players with Fellows.  It seems strange that the Fellowship quests were the first lead-in to ToA but have since disappeared.


I do a lot of mining on Mount Zhayolm and this next loose end bothers me every day, staring me in the face.  If you take a look at the map you'll notice there are two small islands off the coast with open area to walk around on.  One island to the west is used for the ZNM Sarameya.  But the second one to the south appears to have no purpose.  In fact there's currently no way to even get to it.  From the looks of it, the isle could be entered from inside Halvung using levers that require multiple players.  But presently the gate doesn't open.  It seems very strange to have a whole isle just rotting there when it could be stuffed to the brim with Colibris or Puddings.

Speaking of unused spaces, it's not only ToA that has numerous mysterious loose ends lying around.  Wings of the Goddess has a few of its own.  Ronfaure (S) and Pashhow (S) both house some peculiar passages blocked off by rocks and debris.  Maybe they could be used for a BC arena, but it's getting awfully late in the storyline to make a segue to these places.  And actually they remind me a lot of the small islands used for ZNM so it's more likely I think they'll be involved with a similar system.


Lastly there was an odd comment made by Ito Mizuki in an interview stating that:

If you introduce such NPCs, we’ll get a solid idea of the background of Campaign?
Ito:Even after putting in these NPCs, we feel there will still be a few mysteries left. If possible, we want to give players their own unit commander to control: someone through who they can see results from their chosen actions.

The ability of FFXI users is incredible. They figure out new content quickly, too.
Ito:From the beginning, we just wanted users to explore Campaign without us really explaining anything. It was a way to let them play without restrictions. We wanted to avoid forcing them into playing a certain way.

There’s still a chance they will conform to a single style.
Ito: We put in as much mystery as possible. To invite players to “do whatever you like,” we sort of thrust them into this new world at first. From there, their personal experiences could guide their playing style. Still, we may be overdoing it with the lack of information. The aforementioned “commander” NPC still hasn’t appeared. (smile)

His usage of the qualifier "possible" could mean this is something that wound up getting discarded in the face of all their other work.  The idea seems interesting, although maybe redundant given players already have lots of pets and NPCs to cast silence on crabs already.  It could still be a surprise to see them introduce this content someday or find out they reincorporated it into the game in a totally different way.

Future updates will surely focus on the Walk of Echos and Abyssea, but will any of this side content ever be realized?  Perhaps it will get filtered in to the game eventually when we least expect it.