What are the chances of ever getting similar sized massive zones/maps that 1.0 had?

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Originally Posted by Kazamoto

Why leave Mor Dhona/Wineport? Everything you need is in those two locations, and you can queue for all content from there....

Working as intended.

Please look forward to it.

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Beastmen dailies and treasure maps disagree with this sentiment.

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Originally Posted by XNihili

Let's be reasonable, FFXI maps size would already be an improvement.

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This guy has a point. At the same time I have to say that the area would beed actually dangerous mobs to be in there. Just running for a long time means nothing of the road doesn't have killer monsters lurking around.

I also wish the game had zones more on scale with what XI had but I can also understand that this game just isn't built around content that requires large zones at the moment.

In XI you needed large zones. You needed to separate experience camps so people weren't pulling over each other, in contrast XIV focuses more on FATE content in open zones where you benefit from smaller maps where people can quickly commute from a FATE on one side of the zone to one on the other side.

I would love if this game had XI sized zones, but even XI's large zones were a fairly hollow experience. How much of most zones actually got used? Most of the games initial zones were just large roads in between experience camps and cities. For example look at zones like Meriphataud, Sauromouge and Zi'tah. Large zones with some great features... but can anyone recall ever doing much in any of them? Maybe a bit of farming and the occasional Ballista but otherwise the zones were little more than pretty pathways to Garlaige/Boyhada/Ro'maeve where you actually camped out.

I do agree though with the idea that the game needs more open world "dungeon" content right now. The wide open spaces we have are fairly boring and could be immensely improved upon without having to extend the maps outwards if they would add in open world caves and dungeons that extended the world downward.

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Originally Posted by Naraz

and i wish i could have posted that all in 1 post

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You can edit your original (first) post to have more than 1000 characters.

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Originally Posted by Tiggy

Beastmen dailies and treasure maps disagree with this sentiment.

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While I intended a heavy dose of sarcasm in my post, beastmen dailies provide a mount, treasure maps provide a minion, neither apply to 'end game' content. Account customization is nice, and side activities are nice. Heck, I played a good deal of Pankration in FFXI, but my Frost Bunny of doom didnt help in Dynamis or Sea...

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Originally Posted by Seif

This guy has a point. At the same time I have to say that the area would beed actually dangerous mobs to be in there. Just running for a long time means nothing of the road doesn't have killer monsters lurking around.

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No need for monsters, though having a bigger variety of creatures and higher populations for mob farming (for those who like farming mobs, anyway) would indeed be nice. But what you need to make big areas interesting are various things. Mobs to kill. Resoruces to gather. FATEs. But above all of them, landmarks. Places to go to, places to see. They don't work on their own, but having mobs sprawled all over an area doesn't work. Dark Souls tried to pull that off when they ran out of time in the demonic area, and it is one of the blandest zones ever seen in any videogame. Similarly, the old FFXIV 1.0's areas were just as silly because of the copy pasting, cheapening any unique locations you could find (because there were no unique places to see on most of the map). ARR's areas are stupidly small because of one of two reasons: either Squee didn't have the manpower to design big areas, or they hilariously misunderstood what was so bad about the copy-pasted big enviorements.

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Originally Posted by Ildur

ARR's areas are stupidly small because of one of two reasons: either Squee didn't have the manpower to design big areas, or they hilariously misunderstood what was so bad about the copy-pasted big enviorements.

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Or the third, most obvious, reason... PS3 memory limitations.

They spoke about this at length prior to 2.0's release. They wanted to make the environments more detailed and more varied but this came at the expense of having to reduce the size to cater specifically to the PS3. The PS3's pathetic memory is to blame for a huge number of this game's issues. I know I'm not the only one wishing they would have just made it a PS4 exclusive instead... the game would have the potential to be MUCH better if the PS3 wasn't holding it back.

I didn't play FFXI, neither the 1.0 of this game... So I can't give an expert opinion, but I can give the opinion of a newbie and starter in this wonderful game. The maps are really nice already, you really feel like if you are living it, awesome beautiful graphics with a lot of different places, it takes more than a month to really start to memorize all the areas AROUND the starter cities... I can't imagine yet those I have not visited yet like Coerthas and Mor Dhona...

About long maps... Uh, well... It was a pain, I have to say, running all around thanalan with the Seventh Dawn's first missions where you have to go from the waking sands in Vesper Bay to Camp Drybone, crossing western, central and eastern thanalan... My second character I just used a chocobo to return Ul'Dah and another from Ul'Dah to Camp Drybone... But with my first I did crossed the entire dessert in an epic travel... It depends of how you want to do it... You can't argue about the maps being small if you use teleport or chocobo porters/mount...

Of course, just the opinion of a noob that didn't see the other games/versions... But what I wanted to say is that, at least for newbies, maps are really great and Square-Enix could focus in different areas of the game.

Regards.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

Or the third, most obvious, reason... PS3 memory limitations.

the game would have the potential to be MUCH better if the PS3 wasn't holding it back.

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You are 100% correct, but expect a giant inflow of hate for saying what we all knew.

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Originally Posted by Kazamoto

While I intended a heavy dose of sarcasm in my post, beastmen dailies provide a mount, treasure maps provide a minion, neither apply to 'end game' content. Account customization is nice, and side activities are nice. Heck, I played a good deal of Pankration in FFXI, but my Frost Bunny of doom didnt help in Dynamis or Sea...

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I think her point was that there are things to do outside of instances. Personally, I've noticed a LOT more people out in the game world and doing stuff since maps and dailies were added. Zones that were previously empty, dead, and unused have quite a lot of life in them now.

But you are right that if someone only cares about endgame progression, they have no reason to ever leave their inn room except to spend tomes in Mor Dhona and enter Coil through Wineport (until 2.2). I think ignoring activities in the world because they aren't "necessity" though is like never leaving your house because you can order groceries online nowadays.

Though I agree with the sentiment that there should be lots more content in the world and adding non-instanced open-world content should be something always on the priority list when adding new content, as much adding new instanced content. Afterall, the point of an MMO is having a big world. Otherwise, its just a lobby game like Diablo or Halo where you wait for matches to start.

*Skips 5 pages, late to thread*

OP: I agree. Definetly supporting this. Though the original 1.0 maps were (for the most part) fairly uninteresting compared to the area designs now, they were so large they felt real. They don't feel real no more.

I couldn't agree more. There are so many invisible walls everywhere they could as well have done without jumping. ARR right now feels like a pointless world with pointless mechanics and pointless mobs. Everything of interest is instanced. :(

I enjoy huge open world areas but the problem with them is that no one would go to these places unless you give them a reason to go and currently there is none. Maps and dailies aren't enough incentive to go out exploring. If they made the area huge and there is nothing to do in them except some quests, these areas quickly become ghost towns. It would take time and effort that could be spent on more important things to make these areas important.

Also with waypoints no one is going to run though a zone to get to another zone. The argument to this is take out waypoints and if you take waypoints out it hinders new players to the game who don't have a mount and would need to run though these zones to do all the quests they need to do. New players are the lively hood of any MMO and you don't want to lose them in the first month.

In other words SE doesn't have any incentive to make huge open areas and the game clearly doesn't need them. It's a shame but it is what it is.

Sagolli desert should have three zones for itself alone :P

Really this system reminds me of FFXII with the zones and all, only Ivalice felt so much larger.
I know it wasn't online and stuff but still, that was a PS2 game and FFXIV's Eorzea feels like the went backwards with the maps. :/

I can only hope we will see Garlemand like we were able to see Archadia in FFXII, that was fun walking around the enemy's city and getting to know them better :p

Personally, I'd rather not have even more humongous stretches of scenery to have to run back and forth across every day.

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Originally Posted by Penguinmayhem

Personally, I'd rather not have even more humongous stretches of scenery to have to run back and forth across every day.

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With aetherytes, there's very required little running. I doubt that would change much with larger maps.

[edit] for clarity

http://youtu.be/CA7GGnyNwEs

I hated that stupid stream with the 2 trees.

I think it's funny that the people complaining about having fast travel (can save several minutes of time) are complaining about loading screens (several seconds). FF14's zones are generally around the size of 11's zones, you just move much quicker on foot and mounted in 14 compared to 11.

1.0's maps were massive but there were only 5 actual zones. As an example, what we have as Northern/Central/Western/Eastern/Southern Thanalan was all one zone that still had loading screens, just hidden. All the major sections were connected by long, narrow tunnels which were where the loading took place.

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Originally Posted by Poyozo

I disagree. You can have everything, its called WoW. Alas it does not have that FF skin on it, so you may be right in that respect (you can't have everything). But really, World of Warcraft does everything this game does but better and has more content, AND the world is seamless and HUGE and completely OPEN. Disregarding the FF skin, why would anyone pay $15 a month for an inferior product?

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Because they started selling 90s. That's why I quit. I'm quitting this too, though. Lacking content... small world... no PvP. It's just not worth playing atm.

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Originally Posted by odintius

Sagolli desert should have three zones for itself alone :P

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I agree.

Sadly, Sagoli is only 20-25% of one zone...

Wow, what a "desert"!

Hopefully more of it opens up and is done properly in an expansion.

I play WoW on top of ARR and personally I enjoy ARR more environment wise. Alot of the big space in WoW to me feels bleh and forcing us to move from the bottom all the way to the top to complete some quests is annoying, I mean hey if its a beautiful area then no problem, but what if you hate the area and it only makes it worse? In AAR even if the areas are broken up each feels beautiful and alive, the world does not feel dead. This is all personal opinion of course, I wouldnt care if we got bigger areas, I just do not care that they are small now. PS3 player by the way.

That's weird, because I thought WoW's aethetic design of the geography was ussually top notch. Places like Desolace and Burning Steppes and the Hellfire Peninsula need to go die in a fire, though.
It's all a matter of having clever level designers and a small ammount of inspiration.

On the matter of travel times, that could be fixed by making mounts faster. Or by having tiered mounts (like a bunch of other MMOs do). Or by making mounts have multiple velocities that get unlocked with levelling or something. Possibilities are endless! It's all a matter of having a clever game designer.

A lot of area's could surely use a lot of expanding. Just looking out over the coastline in the Costa Del Sol. So many amazing and breathtaking places we cant travel to now because of the "Zone" setup, instead of the previous "What you see, you can go to" setup :/ It's becomming a little frustrating.

This is something that has bothered me a bit while exploring FFXIV, the lack of a sense of exploration, the zones are too confined, too many corridors or analogs to corridors, all those secret nooks and crannies you usually find in mmo's are strangely absent. I play The Secret world as well as this, and let me tell you, that game does really promote investigating your environment for random quests and items that you usually dont find in the more traveled areas. I miss that in this game.

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Originally Posted by ispano

Also, What we have for Coerthas is only the eastern half.

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You mean the northern-central one sixth. Gwyr-Aen with the Lover's mark and Crooked Fork in the northeast, Owl's Nest and Glory in the southeast, Riversmeet in the west and Twinpools in the northwest, as well as the Central Lowlands with Ever Lakes, which separated Central Highlands and Mor Dhona, but has just vanished, leaving the border to Mor Dhona in the Central Highlands... All of that is still missing. It makes no sense that Mor Dhona moved north several malms and that central lowlands disappeared...