... or a monastery... or just some signature building. I like the zone overall, but as I was playing it through for the first time yesterday (yes, I hadn't bothered until now - sorry), I was struck by just how samey the whole thing looked. You just kind of rove from vignette to vignette; hub to hub, all of which are basically right next door to each other, in a manner that reminded me of (unfortunately) modern zone design in World of Warcraft... which sucks.

One of the things I really enjoy about BDO is that it tends to default to the grand - almost every major location you visit in the game overawes the player with a combination of great scenery and even more imposing structures. Yet the Mountain of Eternal Winter lacks arguably both of these - the landscape is pretty (and I love how they handled the snow, having it be an intermitent occurence that could actually accumulate or dust the terrain), but it's also very limited in terms of field of vision; the structures we got are nice, but they aren't striking in any way.

And this isn't to say that I think there should just been CASTLE! dropped into the middle of the region... nor do I think it needed some major city like Calpheon. But there are building inspirations in the real world that would have fit the overall theme really well, and it's a shame that PA didn't make an effort to incorporate anything like them. 

I was rather disapointed with this as well, and as a whole I was expecting the entire area to be larger...not just a small corner with a dirt town in it that sometimes gets snow. Though I will say I did love the quest series and how painless it made the 1-56 process, great job on that. Maybe we'll see a city for the Drak sometime down the road?

Imagine having a castle like this:

...Well, maybe it would have been great, especially given how significant the "item" the plot focuses on, may be.

That said, PA has not used the potential of castles at all.

Cron Castle Ruins? Not much to do there in the end.

Heidel Castle? A very optional activity to be done there.

Calpheon Castle? No, nothing. I even thought it could be linked to a certain someone, but...

Mediah Castle? Nah.

Valencia Castle? Nothing in itself.

Kamasylvia? Well, you can consider Grana and Grandiha, but they're not castles in themselves.

Drieghan? Little shrines all around, that's all.

The only huge domain that got a purpose seems to be O'Draxxia, but I'm not even sure of it.

Highly wasted potential, I say.

Oh and yes, the region of the Mountain of Eternal Winter is TINY. When I saw all of the unexplored zone between the South of Mediah and the South of Valencia, I thought it would take place there (that said, a region that is beyond cold and desolate not far from one that is beyond hot and desolate would be pretty dumb, so I had my doubts too^^).

...But yeah, nope, nothing like that. For it to be around Duvencrune was pretty nice, but I didn't expect it to be so compact, just consider how the plot unfolds and how you travel in the new region. You'll see what I mean by it.

Call it a hunch, but I don't think MoEW is the last of what we'll see of the snowy region...

It might just be a precursor of what lies beyond the Mountain. Inb4 downvote :)

MoEW is more of a Drieghan Part 2 expansion than a true region on its own to be honest.

There surely will be more to come in the future

I mean, we just have to look at the frostbite debuff that they implemented, that we can actually get only on a tiny, tiny portion of the map where there is nothing to do except going through to go to the Limbo Portal.

The Mountain of Eternal Winter could use the rest of the The Mountain of Eternal Winter

...At least Cron Castle has become relevant again with the Balenos questline rework.

Waiting for that big winter taundra region to open if there is such a thing. I want to explore the white desert i mean.. taundra, go fishing in ice holes because this game could be well known for its abundance in ice holes. The one minigame that was actually kinda fun and they still have yet to put it in the game :'(

I think they were supposed to introduce climbing as well, That would have been neat but they discontinued climbing as a feature.