"Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail" enters its "early access" period tomorrow. Players who pre-order will be able to board the ship to Tural before anyone else, but it's more of a formality (and a chance to get a shiny EXP earring), as the deadline for pre-order rewards is July 2, the game's release date.

To celebrate, Square Enix pulled out all the stops and created a fake tourist site for Tural, the continent we'll be sailing to. They even hired Rhys Darby ("Rhys Darby") to create a promotional video for Tural tourism ("Tularism"). He is familiar to many as Steede Bonnett from "Our Flag Means Death" and Russel from "Half-Life": Alix

Activities such as taking a ride on an airship or enjoying a gourmet tour of the bazaar are featured. Alpacas are not allowed to roam free. There is a warning about free-range alpacas, but "no further action is required," the website promises: "For those who love alpacas and want to pet them, we have news for you."

As you can see in the photo below, there appears to be a petite ARG going on. There is a small map fragment hidden in the lower left corner, which can be opened by right-clicking and selecting "Open Image in New Tab."

Solution Nine, the most mysterious zone in the expansion, also has a mysterious password entry form; in the FFXIV subreddit, one player wrote: "The submit function just always returns an error no matter what password I enter! ...... Furthermore, submit has no network requests, so if there is a password, it is probably stored statically somewhere on the website.

The website has a section called "Need Help' Tural talk" that says "coming tomorrow." As for the hidden map piece, I could only find two:

But my favorite page is by far "Inside the Board," which contains a couple of very small fine print disclaimers that are, oh, curious:

you can already tell from my writer's bio that I'm excited about this expansion, but I'm humble enough to admit that I'm not immune to marketing, and this website would be a darling slam dunk even if it weren't obvious that a lot of effort has been poured into it. Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail will go into Early Access tomorrow, June 28 at 5pm PST/10am BST, with a full release on July 2. Until then, you can read the patch notes anytime.