I don't feel like i'm playing an mmo...and I know why

They have said that they split the zones up to make it so the game is more widely accessible. If you look at the min PC requirements for 1.0 vs 2.0, you can see that they made it so.

BUT ... with that being said, in their original road map, they had the PS3 release 100%, it wasn't until sales and subs did not meet their projected sales goals that they scrapped the PS3 version.

I played XI on PS2 for 6-7 years and those zones were HUGE, from zone edge to edge you probably spent 15-20minutes running or 5 + minutes on Chocobo. The graphics, obviously, as it is a 12 year old game, were not as nice.

I bring this up in every post regarding current state of the game, Give them time to grow. The game has just released. I urge you all to look at what WoW had available to do in its 4th month after release. Go look at FFXI in its first 4 Months. Hell, go look at Diablo3 going on 2 years after release(even though its not technically a MMO)

I just wonder if it's technically possible to remove Zone restrictions for PC and PS4 versions and just keep them for PS3 version.

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Originally Posted by Allyra

Now, does this mean we shouldn't ask for more? Nah. I just want people to at least appreciate the world for what they were able to do in such a short time-span and ask with the perspective of hoping they add more in the future (which I do believe is their intent).

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This......

To put this in perspective...the absurdly, ridiculously small zones in this game are smaller than both WoW and City of Heroes, both of which were launched a decade or more ago.

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Originally Posted by Mohamed

Oh man, would I love to see Square Enix transition at one point in time to just a huge fricking world – no instanced “zones” but keeping the instanced “dungeons” – that would be awesome.

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They tried it 2010 and failed.
Oh, the huge world worked, but the design was awful.

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Originally Posted by Nestama

snip

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OMG! Miqo'tail isn't glued to mount in awkward U-shape, what is this witchery?! (For that matter, I've seen robes with rope belts in 1.0 vids. Rope. Belts. Witchcraft, I tell you!)

That video has a greater sense of scale of Twelveswood than playing ARR has, which is bad (usually when I watch vids and then play the game, it's the other way around).

While I get that they didn't want pasta copynara, they went too far in the other direction, on top of the instancing, which shrinks the feeling of an already claustrophobic world. It's not bad to have a few areas (such as woods, desert dunes, fields and snowscapes) where there is little variety. Think of most great paintings out there. Sure, the interesting bits dominate, but they have relaxed areas for the eyes to turn to. I mean, even Michelangelo's The Last Judgement (very busy painting) have all those fields of plain blue.

I agree whole-heartedly with you, OP, and I'm just gonna leave this illustration of my thoughts right here:

http://i.imgur.com/ujZuzcC.jpg

I've posted it before, but the image remains relevant. Open up the zones. Stop funneling us from one quest location to the next and give us the entire zone to explore rather than just narrow canyons and small clearings. And stop with the utterly arbitrary invisible walls. There is no reason this rock should not be climbable when I can run all the way around it on the ground and it has a perfectly reasonable slope. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to enter a river or cross a river by going down into it.

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Originally Posted by pepero

oh you fell off a cliff? Too bad you're dead.

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Yes, this, too! It infuriates me that I'm not allowed to jump to my death. I know that may sound strange, but damnit, remove the bumpers; I want to play a real game of bowling.

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Originally Posted by Darlan_Ashwood

The thing is, when an MMO comes out with all these classic MMO features ( gigantic open world, open pvp, super grindy leveling system)

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Uh, I think you're 1) misrepresenting what causes MMOs to "flop" and 2) grouping completely unrelated things together to try and make your point. I can't think of a single MMO that failed because its zones were "too big".

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Originally Posted by LordSaviour

If you look at the min PC requirements for 1.0 vs 2.0, you can see that they made it so.

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There are MMOs with much lower min PC requirements who manage more open-feeling zones than XIV.

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Originally Posted by LordSaviour

I bring this up in every post regarding current state of the game, Give them time to grow. The game has just released.

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Hi Saviour. Saviour here.

As far as the world-design goes, I mentioned this in another thread (which was apparently deleted), but they've kind of shot themselves in the foot as far as scale goes.
They can continue to add and build upon the world, but every new area is going to have to maintain the same sense of scale unless they completely remake Eorzea again. Otherwise, it will create this huge disconnect; if Eorzea and Continent 2 are the same size on the world map, and Continent 2 is 3x bigger, then things just seem... off... Likewise, even if Continent 2 were significantly larger, if the towns/outposts are actually a proper size and more than 1 minute from one another, it again just highlights a disparity that makes the two areas feel like they don't belong in the same world.
:-/

I actually love the look of some areas in 2.Ø; in particular, the East and South shrouds look amazing. Everything just feels so bloody hyper-condensed though. Stumbling upon the Sanctum of the 12 felt amazing the first time... Until you realize that's the edge of the map and it is actually still just about 2 minutes away from everything.
I really would prefer large open areas (provided we don't get the terrible copypasta of 1.Ø [and the terrible aesthetic of its Black Shroud]). Ideally with areas you could wander off into for half an hour plus, rarely encounter mobs, and not hit any form of civilization. Honestly, that's one thing that really starts to irk me... When every corner of the world feels like its been settled and nature is never anything but a 'bridge' between settlements. :-/

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Originally Posted by Shioban

"Completley" was the wrong word to use there, it was if anything one of the larger considerations amougst the others such as the server pressure, design time, overall performance impact/loading data. (Not to mention the horrific LUA scripting they did.)

But the fact still remains that the Playstation 3 limits each zone to a smaller area, and designing a smaller area with detail is easier than a larger area, a problem i'm currently having with my own projects actually. (Fleshing areas out is a nightmare)

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You keep wanting to blame ps3 but have no idea what you are talking about the small zones in this game were decided by SE because of the horrid and unoriginal open world of 1.0. There are ways to put large zones on the ps3 that have worked in the past all they had to do was on a large map break it down into smaller zones that just load in when you get close for example how SOE did in DCUO with metropolis.

Corridor worlds seem to be a common thing in the East, or at least the few eastern games I have played. Some manage to disguise this better than others, and even ARR manages it in the area around Drybone and the Sagolii Desert areas.

I reject the idea that we have to give them time to grow. Open-world areas aren't something you change after releasing them unless you want to pull a Cataclysm thing...which we did already. 2.0's zones are like they are because Dalamud went kaboom and changed the landscape. No, this areas were designed like this, probably for some weird technical limitations (insert senseless blaming of the PS3 here!) and because Squee missed the point about what was wrong with 1.0's areas. Sadly, this is not something they can solve easily. They'd have to redesign some areas, and the most they can do right now is take away all the annoyingly arbitrary invisible walls that serve no purpose, like this previously mentioned rock.

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Originally Posted by Dark-Saviour

Honestly, that's one thing that really starts to irk me... When every corner of the world feels like its been settled and nature is never anything but a 'bridge' between settlements. :-/

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Considering that's how most of the developed world (barring Australia) is and has been for at least a couple centuries now, I doubt most game designers know anything different. I, for one, would find large amounts of wilderness with nothing in it with tiny pockets of far-flung settlement only at the far reaches, very alien, and overwhelming, even unrealistic compared to my own real experiences (yeah, I've been in real wilderness, but after I leave it still doesn't seem real--and at least in the US it is peppered with pockets of settlement, even if only a house or two, in most places). Maybe this is what people want in games, though; I don't know. I can see the appeal of that, but I can also see the appeal of what this game already has, as well: easily-traversable zones that remind one of real life and don't take forever to cross. One of the aims of this iteration of the game was always to be newbie-friendly, and large inhospitable zones are pretty much the opposite of that.

I'm giving you an enormous like, OP. I made a thread a couple of days ago concerning much of the same dilemmas:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-just-dungeons

And like others have already said, it bugs me a great deal that there are houses, settlements and NPCs literally everywhere. There is no wilderness whatsoever, not even Sagolii Desert - you can see the nearest aetheryte very easily.

Edit:
I don't mind having to see the loading screen in between zones, the zones themselves are what troubles me.

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Originally Posted by Phe

I just wonder if it's technically possible to remove Zone restrictions for PC and PS4 versions and just keep them for PS3 version.

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I hate to sound like a broken record, but people need to understand this. If the ps3 version never existed we would still have these zone lines.

For whatever reason be it terrible hardware, coding, etc. the game could not run in a seamless world on the pc. This is not strictly a ps3 issue.

The zones helped tremendously in fixing the lag found on the pc during 1.0. And yet, there are tons of people still getting lag issues including on the pc (not nearly the kind you got in 1.0, but it's still not completely fixed). I think we'd find that the zones are kinda at capacity for what all the systems can handle atm.


Now, they may in the future fix w/e it is that is holding the game back from a seamless world, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. At this point, the zones are the least of their worries as it was a fast and easy band aid fix.

IMO, the problem isn't the zone lines, it's that there's so little actual space to go. The world isn't very big. FFXI had zone lines and they were much more annoying than the ones in XIV (countless LS comments of "zone" so that people wouldn't miss part of a conversation, them were the days).

The problem is there aren't many zones, and once you get to the level cap you don't really go anywhere except major cities and Wineport. It stops being so big and becomes somewhat like a hub-and-instance game. I don't want to make everything open-world, but I would like to see more zones.

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(countless LS comments of "zone" so that people wouldn't miss part of a conversation, them were the days).

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Thank you. I had actually forgot that. Those where the days. *Overcome with nostalgia feelings*

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Originally Posted by Mohamed

Someone mentioned corridoring... maybe that's it.

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It's bad, and it's disappointing that the genre has taken such tremendous strides backwards on this (wtf why do developers copy all the crappy things WoW does wrong, but not the handful of things they did right).

But it's not SWTOR bad.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Oh, the huge world worked, but the design was awful.

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And now we have a small world which doesn't work, and the design is still awful. /duckandrun ;-)

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Originally Posted by Allyra

If the ps3 version never existed we would still have these zone lines.

For whatever reason be it terrible hardware, coding, etc. the game could not run in a seamless world on the pc.

The zones helped tremendously in fixing the lag found on the pc during 1.0.

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Exactly. Most people where not there back then and just don't know. But if you were there, maybe you remember how SE had no other idea to reduce server load in Uldah by splitting it into zones AND moving the inn to a less frequented one... just one example of many. The Duty Finder, and the splitting of so-called "data centers" which are not even separate data centers but just different groups of servers at the same location to reduce latency issues between their interconnects are more recent ones. And don't forget the ridiculous "Make or Buy -> Buy" database concept which caused actions like opening retainers to time out.

This is not a PS3 issue at all. It's a bad infrastructural architecture, probably in conjunction with "Rapid Development" and IT infrastructure cost minimization. Sorry for ranting, but seen this too many times in the real life... I would not even be surprised if the "data centers" would turn out to be non-redudant 64 core boxes with VMware's ESX server running on it, virtualizing each "world".