Not New, But Still Unused Zones

[Gwynplaine]

Apparently there's not any brand new areas being tossed out in the short-term future. But come to think of it there are a significant number of places that already exist and have yet to be used for anything at all. So I'm wondering if maybe the development plans might attempt to cover some of these strangely untouched locations in some way eventually. It's not a brand new zone, but I guess it's the next best thing.

Off the top of my head there's this one lonesome island on Mount Zhayolm at F-9. There's a path down through Halvung that would lead out to it except the pressurized door handle will not open.

In Pashhow Marshlands [S] there's a blocked path leading to some isolated area, and a similar one in East Ronfaure [S]. While Fort Karugo-Narugo has it's own set off entirely from the map. Maybe these get used for a cutscene or something, I dunno.

Then there's the Aht Urghan Colisseum. While half of it is used for Pankration, the other half seemingly has no purpose and still hasn't seen any action years after Aht Urghan finished.

Walk of Echoes part 1 got released but is there still more to it? In total there are 17 "platforms" for battlefields, but of them only 9 are utilized right now. 1 platform is the final Wings BC, 1 is the "lobby" type area, and 7 are for Conflux battlefields. So there's still 8 more and half the zone hanging around. Maybe it's being developed for the levels 95 and 99 WoE trials I suppose.

In any case there's still a few things sitting around dormant that seemed like they could be tapped into for something new.

[RushLynx]

There are tons of places even in the original areas like Konschtat Highlands and Sanctuary of Zi'tah where it would appear that there were plans to add zones to other areas and it never came to be... Every time you run across a random hole in the wall, or a tunnel that leads to nowhere at all, it was a potential zone point... The fact of the matter is that they ran out of space and had to start recycling areas because of PS2 space restrictions...

I understand that your post is pertaining to actual existing areas that serve no function, but i just wanted to throw it out there that anyone seeking all new areas may need to readjust their expectations...

I don't know specifically what you're referring to in the past areas but it's possible that they're simply parts of the original maps that they didn't want to use, so they just blocked them off...

If I had to guess, I'm going to say that level 99 areas will just be recycled versions of the areas that they've yet to recycle... like ToAU areas...

[Gwynplaine]

There are tons of places even in the original areas like Konschtat Highlands and Sanctuary of Zi'tah where it would appear that there were plans to add zones to other areas and it never came to be... Every time you run across a random hole in the wall, or a tunnel that leads to nowhere at all, it was a potential zone point...

Well we do know that a lot of the time they just stick things in with no explicit future purpose in mind, just in case they want to add something. For example the green Sky teleports were doing nothing for years before they made up a use for them.


The fact of the matter is that they ran out of space and had to start recycling areas because of PS2 space restrictions...

I made a blog post about why this isn't true not long ago. See here: http://parchmentpaper.blogspot.com/2011/03/explaining-why-reskinned-graphics-dont.html


I don't know specifically what you're referring to in the past areas but it's possible that they're simply parts of the original maps that they didn't want to use, so they just blocked them off...

They aren't they're uniquely grafted onto only the past areas.

[Kegsay]

To be honest, one thing I have missed is new zones. SE showed some nice concept art for a new zone which looked like a mashup of sea/riverne sites, which sounds awesome.

Whilst 'PS2 Limitations' are not the cause of reskinned zones as Gwyn rightly points out, there is an overall limit on the number of zones (256). Just as SE decide to reskin old zones to save time, they will not remodel the whole structure of packets to accommodate for 65536 zones (by increasing the zone ID from 1 byte to 2 bytes).

That means there are only roughly 3 'free' zones (which at the moment either don't load correctly or are test zones). One zone we know they are going to overwrite is 'The Last Stand' which at the moment serves as a base for testing new monster mechanics (Shinryu/Ironclads were tested in this zone).

One fleeting hope that SE would do for a map was a massive 'field' type area. All too often you have loads of cliffs/islands/tunnels/slopes/etc and there are very very very few cases where there is just a massive field to roam in where you can see way into the distance.

[Saenomo]

I've always wondered about the path that leads from near the Alchemist's Guild into the Galkan District that is blocked by a Galka. It would be kind of cool to see present day equivalents for some of the Shadowreign Era zones (Vunkerl Inlet for example) and the reverse (Carpender's Landing [S]).

In all honesty though, I've always hoped that we would one day get to see a complete world as a map I once saw of the world with lands to the west of Altepa and to the east of Al Zahbi.