Open up the world, please! Part I

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

The question I ask, would you rather have a new expansion or this?

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If they made the world fully open then it would feel like a completely new experience.

EDIT: I don't mean they should make the "tunnels" on the map walk-able, I mean that they should think about how everything fits into place together. Put the puzzle together, work with the lore and figure out how people transcend flights of steps, how people walk the Limsa bridge etc.

Similarly like WoW map transitions.

EDIT2: For crossing the Limsa bridge it would be nice if they allowed mounts in city states too :). It would be a really nice touch to have mounts in cities.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

If they made the world fully open then it would feel like a completely new experience.

EDIT: I don't mean they should make the "tunnels" on the map walk-able, I mean that they should think about how everything fits into place together. Put the puzzle together, work with the lore and figure out how people transcend flights of steps, how people walk the Limsa bridge etc.

Similarly like WoW map transitions.

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It was like that in 1.0, and the result was corridors(canyons, caves, etc) that took 10-30 seconds to walk through because it was loading the next zone. The game's server infrastructure is a bunch of cardboard boxes held together with bubblegum and tape, it couldn't handle loading zones(hidden or otherwise) being removed completely.

I'm not talking of corridors, corridors don't put the puzzle together. The creative team behind FFXIV need to put their thinking caps on to work out how things actually fit together. Corridors do not fit things together.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

EDIT: I don't mean they should make the "tunnels" on the map walk-able, I mean that they should think about how everything fits into place together. Put the puzzle together, work with the lore and figure out how people transcend flights of steps, how people walk the Limsa bridge etc.

Similarly like WoW map transitions.

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WoW's maps are a lot less intensive than FFXIV maps. Not only that, but the lore was with long tunnels. You used to have to walk Limsa bridge. You used to have to walk under the canopies to leave Gridania. The main gate to Ul'dah was closed because they needed you to walk through the long tunnel to enter Thanalan. The lore excuse was security or something like that. You can still see those places in FFXIV. It's just where they started in 1.0, they become zone markers in 2.0. Things aren't placed willy nilly.

Wouldn't really be that much work. The transition zones are mostly already made. They just need to be retextured.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

I'm not talking of corridors, corridors don't put the puzzle together. The creative team behind FFXIV need to put their thinking caps on to work out how things actually fit together. Corridors do not fit things together.

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In one of the map views, you actually can see how the maps fit together, though.

That said, I want to be able to cross the bridges in Limsa again. Or travel under the canopies in Gridania again. Ul'dah should not be seamlessly connected to the map, though.

I don't know how anyone can fight this idea.

It's wonderful, I'd love for the world to be truly open. It would be wonderful indeed.

I wouldn't say no to this, really. But I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, either.

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Originally Posted by Galka_Rock

While 1.0 was not without its problems, it was nice how the world fealt truly connected. It would be nice to see the world reconnected.

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I'm not sure about this. Fixing Ul'dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa so they are back to single maps might be difficult, but these are the maps that suffer the most from V2.0's break up into smaller maps, because the loading time with just running back and forth between two parts of the cities is a detriment.

BUT...

V1.0 was far more seamless, you could literately walk in and out of everything without seeing loading screens.

But V1.0 was not SWTOR, SWTOR was pseudo-seamless, walking in and out of instanced areas without seeing loading screens was good, but places were clearly partitioned, and visually walled off if you weren't the right class/alliance. In FFXIV V1.0 none of these partitions existed. In V2.0 we see these partitions along the ground and the sky.

V1.0 was partitioned between La Noscea (where to get to the mainland you had to get on board the ferry which was an instance) and Ul'dah's Thanalan map. It took a very long time to walk between everything. Had they introduced Chocobos and Airships from V1.0 they might not have suffered from some of the initial backlash, since one of the pressing complaints was that the world was just copy-pasta, everywhere. People would have paid less attention to that copy-paste rush job if they weren't forced to keep going through it.

I do recall in V1.00 and the V1.00 beta that there was a loading partition somewhere between Thanalan and The Black Shroud , and it was filled with a lot of low-level mobs, so it wasn't a huge pain to get from one side to the other side, you were just likely to get lost on the Black Shroud side.

In V2.0, the entire Airships aspect feels glued on, why use them when you can just teleport? Why bother with a seamless world when most people aren't going to see it or revisit it. Even the Chocobo Porters, I have never seen anyone use these. I've only used them maybe twice before the getting the Company Chocobo.

In a way I'd say that V1.0 and V2.0 screwed up with how the Aetherytes were setup. Yes Teleports should exist, but they should only have existed as a way to be revived, and a way to get from one end of a city area to the other end. Getting to Limsa Lominsa from Gridania should have required taking the Airships or walking on foot, not selecting them from a teleport list. If you had a personal airship, likewise it should have only been available to use (for free) from the Airship landing points, which I might add there were more places for them in V1.00, outside the cities. That would have at least made the the seamless maps have a point even when you take the Airship. Instead in V2.00 we get a brief cutscene and then we're just instantly somewhere else, it's no different from teleporting.

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Originally Posted by Galka_Rock

Wouldn't really be that much work. The tunnels are mostly already made. They just need to be retextured.

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Not much work for the 3 original cities (the city maps from 1.0 just got halved to put in 2.0), but many works for the open world zones and Ishgard (there are more missing between the zones than just canyons, tunnels or stairs).

The 3 entrance to Ul'dah will get reduced to 2 again and will be changed back to the 10 sec walking tunnels.
The devs could put mini-zones between the zones to fill up the holes. It would be a good idea to put a sea zone between Limsa harbour and Vesper Bay, that allow us to swim or to dive ourself from La Noscea to Thanalan.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Instead in V2.00 we get a brief cutscene and then we're just instantly somewhere else, it's no different from teleporting.

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Have nothing to do with 2.0, the same did the airships also in 1.0