how big did ff11 area grow before and after all the expansion?

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Originally Posted by Nalien

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This may happen in the "new" ffxi, but back in the old times, using a reraise item, or sneak/invisible items was not usual, it supposed a great pain for your pocket, most people just evaded mobs with patience and skill, others by force and others escorted by mages with access to sneak/invisible, the danger was real, but the game started to introduce more convenience later.

Now more o topic, i think the OP is trying to guess how big the world will be taking his older brother as example, i think Hydaelyn will be bigger than Vana'diel, and even bigger if SE keep the plan to add swimming after flying they announced long time ago.

I just hope they give more importance to the open world with appropriate content to make it "feel" bigger as well.

I miss the good old days when mobs never despawned no matter how far you ran and would linger in the zone line picking off anyone new that entered an area rather than going away... aaaah dunes goblins... how i miss thee... or the time when Vrtra went on a rampage and killed whole linkshells at zone after fallowing someone and they finally sent a gm to exicute it in godly combat amongst the bodies of fallen adventurers.. memories -daydreams-

And actually they did add alot of true-sight mobs to some places.. level 99 aggro ones at that but they are generally in out of the way places.

Places in XI were always fairly huge, I admittedly miss the long boat/airship rides where you could just sit back and watch the scenery (first time I noticed whales next to the ship that came to the surface.. wow <3 that was a moment..)

The tele and warp system makes travel so much easier and i like that but when I'm not in a hurry i still prefer to walk XD old fashioned that way...

Well, the opening movie does speak of 3 Great Continents, of which one is Eorzea and the 3 alliance nations are but less than half of it... given that Ishgard and Dravania zones will be even bigger...

Maybe in the future we will get to see the ruins of the Doman civilization and infiltrate the Empire's territory...

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Originally Posted by Renik

I just hope they give more importance to the open world with appropriate content to make it "feel" bigger as well.

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That really is the main thing I think, I'm kind of sad that so far all we seem to have is "You asked for bigger zones so here they are!". The zones need a better quality of content, not more size.

I'd absolutely love it if we had a force pop NM system in place. That would have improved a fair amount of content so far IMO (something like Atma farming (ignoring drop rate) would have been much more enjoyable if there was a NM at the end; Farm Atma, trade to spawn point, fight NM). Bigger zones will certainly help with that though, it means they can better balance out casual content with more hardcore content in a zone, but so far I've not really heard any mention of them implementing such stuff... New Hunts, Odin level FATEs and Treasure Map tiers sound nice on paper but in practice they're not great IMO.

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Originally Posted by Teslo

Beaucedine and Xarcabard/Castle Zvhal were non-expansion zones. The Shadow Lord was original non-expansion end boss, which is why it was level capped at 50. Much like XIV, the original level cap in XI was also 50. :P

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Yes, I said they weren't expansion zones. But they weren't there in the beginning. The Shadow Lord is the original non-expansion end boss, but he wasn't there on release. I believe you could only get to rank 5 on release; the rest of the content wasn't there yet.

XI is big. Too big. People say "Oh it's so nice and big with plenty of places to go and explore!"
Yeah.
That's great.
The first time.
What they don't tell you, is that many of those areas are locked using the most obtuse and annoying keying methods around. They actually added a bunch of Home Points and Survival Guides (think mini-aetherytes scattered around the world) because it was so incredibly tedious to get to a locked area and die, and have to run back through the locked doors AGAIN.
Moreover, many quests had you returning to the same place over and over. Delkfutt's tower was central to at least 3 different pieces of content, and if it weren't for the survival guides and elevator keys, it'd be a MAJOR chore to return to over and over and over and over and over again. Norg was equally monstrous to have to return to, and it was central to the Samurai and Ninja job quests.
The game is a perfect example of why having no fast travel was a horrible idea. The game with these options still feels very big, with lots of exploration you have to do, but at the same time it doesn't get tedious having to return to the same places over and over again.
It's also an example of why having a whole bunch of huge zones isn't necessarily a good idea. There are some zones in that game that get NO visitors except those passing through for other quests. Hell, there's at least one whole dungeon whose only real purpose is as a "gateway" to a couple of boss fights/raids! The vast majority were abandoned as soon as new content came around, with no concrete reason to ever return.
"Tons of big huge zones" sounds great on paper, but in practice WILL lead to waste-of-space abandoned content.

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Originally Posted by Conradus

Yes, I said they weren't expansion zones. But they weren't there in the beginning. The Shadow Lord is the original non-expansion end boss, but he wasn't there on release. I believe you could only get to rank 5 on release; the rest of the content wasn't there yet.

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This is all irrelevant as NA players didn't get the game until after RoZ :P

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Originally Posted by Eidolon

The teleport system had nothing to do with XI's size. XI was just... Plain massive. Even on a chocobo it took time running from one end of the map to another. Each zone had some unique flavors to it to boot (still remember that giant skeleton in that one zone, even if I don't know its name.) and there was danger in many zones that made you have to think before running through.

From a world building standpoint, XI was better. But XIV has good potential - and I'm excited to see if SE can do something amazing.

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And danger that made running through the zone for the umpteenth time a tedious chore. "Challenge" is only "challenging" if you don't have to do it 40,000,000 times. Then it's tedious.
Now, Exploration is STILL a thing. You don't walk into a zone and instantly get all the HPs and SGs, you have to actually find them. It rewards exploration, but doesn't make it tedious.
Also you mention chocobos...Chocobos took the challenge out since mobs wouldn't attack you while riding. Though it took a MONTH in real time to raise one for your own use.

The teleport system had nothing to do with XI's size. XI was just... Plain massive. Even on a chocobo it took time running from one end of the map to another. Each zone had some unique flavors to it to boot (still remember that giant skeleton in that one zone, even if I don't know its name.) and there was danger in many zones that made you have to think before running through.

From a world building standpoint, XI was better. But XIV has good potential - and I'm excited to see if SE can do something amazing.

Getting past XI for a moment... In terms of pure explorable land-mass, XIV is probably the smallest MMO on the market. I don't really expect this to change in the expansion either. They put so much thought and care into crafting dungeons, raids and other instances. I wish they'd put even half that effort into making the open world interesting to explore.

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Originally Posted by Akuryu

Getting past XI for a moment... In terms of pure explorable land-mass, XIV is probably the smallest MMO on the market. I don't really expect this to change in the expansion either. They put so much thought and care into crafting dungeons, raids and other instances. I wish they'd put even half that effort into making the open world interesting to explore.

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Not even close. ARR just has less useless areas. Everything in the game has at least SOME value. They took a game that was oversized (FFXIV 1.0) and streamlined it.
Development 101: Don't make more than you'll actually use.

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Originally Posted by kyuven

Not even close. ARR just has less useless areas. Everything in the game has at least SOME value. They took a game that was oversized (FFXIV 1.0) and streamlined it.
Development 101: Don't make more than you'll actually use.

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Are you saying "not even close" as in it's not the smallest MMO on the market? Please tell me one that is smaller.

I spend 90% of my time sitting at my FC house, or sitting in The Gold Saucer, or sitting in Mor Dhona while I queue for instances. There is really no use to the open world outside of gathering and hunts. Even those activities are heavily scripted (you know where and when gathering nodes will appear... you know roughly when hunts will spawn, and even if you don't a hunt linkshell will inform you). There is no reason to get out there and explore.

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Originally Posted by Akuryu

Are you saying "not even close" as in it's not the smallest MMO on the market? Please tell me one that is smaller.

I spend 90% of my time sitting at my FC house, or sitting in The Gold Saucer, or sitting in Mor Dhona while I queue for instances. There is really no use to the open world outside of gathering and hunts.

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There are a number of MMOs that use nothing but instanced content with fewer mapsets than we have access to. Guild Wars, at launch and until it gained expansions, was no bigger than XIV is now. EQ2 was the same way, with only about 12 zones at launch. They are all now FAR bigger, but that's after YEARS of content. FFXIV: ARR is only about 2 years old and is just now getting their first expansion.
Gathering, hunts, the road to 50, class quests, job quests, FATEs, treasure hunts, regular hunts, leves, other quests...the game gets a lot of traffic through the zones we DO have. It's rare for a zone to be empty for very long in this game.
Contrast games with OMGHUGE numbers of zones, where it can be MONTHS between player visitations.
SE is currently very good at making use of the space they have, whereas the design mentality for XI and XIV 1.0 was "MAKE MANY HUUUGE ZOOOOONES!"
With very little in them.
Allow me to provide an example:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ea...pa_Desert/Maps
This is Eastern Altepa Desert.
It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point, which are largely irrelevant now.
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.
EQ1 had problems like this too, ironically also with a few desert zones. They responded by merging them some years back.

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Originally Posted by kyuven

This is Eastern Altepa Desert.
It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point . . .
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.

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I have to disagree with you. Personally, I spent so much time in every zone (except Windy areas) that I still vividly remember each one and it has been 6 years since I played XI. I spent time in both eastern and western altepa leveling many jobs. I remember camping a spider NM and occasionally killing a fast running cactuar NM. There were some lower dungeons that were used for leveling and other things too.

It really doesn't make a lot of sense to compare XI with XIV because the open world was used for everything. There were very few instances compared to XIV.

Doesn't feel like a world because it's not seamless.

Hint: comsole.

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Originally Posted by Alipoprocks

I remember camping a spider NM and occasionally killing a fast running cactuar NM. There were some lower dungeons that were used for leveling and other things too.

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The spider NM was awesome, Cactrot Rapido is legendary, but I spent the most time trying to get that damn intruder earring off the 21-24 hour NM.

EVERY ZONE IN FFXI has a purpose and you better believe you would be going there multiple times. White Mages would literately stand around town and shout making money from teleports because of the time save they gave you. The FFXI zones are so massive and ugh... I'll just stop. I miss the good ol' days.

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Originally Posted by Blazer

The spider NM was awesome, Cactrot Rapido is legendary, but I spent the most time trying to get that damn intruder earring off the 21-24 hour NM.

EVERY ZONE IN FFXI has a purpose and you better believe you would be going there multiple times. White Mages would literately stand around town and shout making money from teleports because of the time save they gave you. The FFXI zones are so massive and ugh... I'll just stop. I miss the good ol' days.

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Oh yeah, that HNM that was kited around a bush until your friends showed up to help kill it. I still miss that game and those days too.

1.0 Western Highlands : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMTk...22E4C3766EBA70
They reach Western Highlands around 6:34

And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZPD0sqx4gA

I hope the river is still here, even if frozen ^^

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Originally Posted by kyuven

It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point, which are largely irrelevant now.
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.

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The zone housed several NMS, entrance to underground open world dungeons, and Leveling camps as well as a few quest.

XI was NOT A QUEST DRIVEN GAME.

Honestly the zone has more reason to exist then alot of areas in XIV currently which have no purpose once the leveling quest are done.

XI grew alot of feels.... strong feels, and now it feels like an open wound of emptyness. ; ;

Something XIV is lacking in many ways & dosent seem to be able to replicate.

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Originally Posted by Bluevann

Have a nostalgic laugh.

http://z4.invisionfree.com/HCII/ar/t2095.htm

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"•Learning from the failure of last Doomed event(Fighting a doomed that has extra HP for nothing), they revived the same event except replacing the monster with Treant. This was of course not well recieved. At 1st, no matter how much you hit it, the HP isn't dropping, without any choices, they decided to fix it alongside the announcement "Failure in killing the treant will result in no OP warp for the server", at the end, every server killed the treant and OP warp was made avaliable to players."

Wow they literally had a gun to their head with that event.

"•Also announcing that they have prepared the game to go up to lv100 or so"

Eehhh??? It took them how long to raise the Level cap to 80?

Maybe I missed it but didn't Dynamis get released with a entry fee of 1Million gill or so for the entry item?

"•MNK hit with 1 hand only"

And what a mighty right had that was. (insert auto-translate for three words)

"•DRK can now use GSword WS, though, from .dat surf, Ragnarok and stuffs were listed as PLD only, which mean that GSword was actually meant to be a PLD weapon, DRK was extra."

Wow, that would mean Scythe was useless, and Excalibur and Aegis was meant to be a Red Mage only Relic?

Jesus H. Moley, I waited a year or so after the NA release out of doubt and got into XI three months before Chains of Promathia came out. God damn how the heck did this game last so long with a start up and coin toss development like that? No wonder some call it a successful fluke.

The world wasn't as huge as it felt. A lot of it was moving around a lot of things that would otherwise kill you and send you back to your HP. Sneak and Invisible duration was almost as RNG like craft skill ups.. With it either wearing off quickly after the cast or when you were surrounded and had no place to hide. It felt like it was designed to have you dungeon crawl across the world map or travel in Alliance from point A to point B.

FFXIV if anything is a slightly bigger world via zone size. While FFXI was mostly Zones that made you slow down, role play and use the environment so as not to get killed.

While I do miss FFXI at times....

The things I don't miss are the zones, a lot of them felt empty (not interesting) to me, and most zones I never done anything in, expect passing through, now I had never interest of NM.

And I hated traveling them, at first it is great, it gives a really large feel to the world, but soon it gets boring, and took me out of the game, watching youtube and forums etc, to pass time while my chocobo was autowalking most of the time.

I had 3 chars in the end, and all 3 at leats had WHM for the first 3 teleports, and even with that it was still very long travel times :/ (which to me meant, out of the game time)

I do hope to get a lot more zones in FFXIV with the expansions. But I do hope they all make it interesting.

(I played FFXI from 2003 and the last time I played was in 2013, I did have many many breaks through the years)

[QUOTE=Lexia;2934550]

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Originally Posted by Alipoprocks

I have to disagree with you. Personally, I spent so much time in every zone (except Windy areas) that I still vividly remember each one and it has been 6 years since I played XI. I spent time in both eastern and western altepa leveling many jobs. I remember camping a spider NM and occasionally killing a fast running cactuar NM. There were some lower dungeons that were used for leveling and other things too.

It really doesn't make a lot of sense to compare XI with XIV because the open world was used for everything. There were very few instances compared to XIV.

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Wasn't Altepa also a major leveling area? Recall being there in the early level 30s I think?

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

The zone housed several NMS, entrance to underground open world dungeons, and Leveling camps as well as a few quest.

XI was NOT A QUEST DRIVEN GAME.

Honestly the zone has more reason to exist then alot of areas in XIV currently which have no purpose once the leveling quest are done.

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Bingo. People are applying WoWs system and every game that copied it after to FFXIs more general world system. The game gave you a bunch of things to do in a zone, zones weren't just hubs for quests... Then to die after you completed them.

Don't forget that on top of all the zones in FFXI, we had the option of hopping through a Cavernous Maw and traveling back in time to revisit many of the core zones during the Crystal War. I always thought that was a hoot.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

The zone housed several NMS, entrance to underground open world dungeons, and Leveling camps as well as a few quest.

XI was NOT A QUEST DRIVEN GAME.

Honestly the zone has more reason to exist then alot of areas in XIV currently which have no purpose once the leveling quest are done.

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But let me ask.
What makes THAT zone special that couldn't be done by just making "Altepa Desert" rather than splitting it into two zones?
This was the mentality that Yoshida and co. adopted when they began trimming down the 1.0 zones, and it's one I wholeheartedly agree with. Denser, juicier zones rather than massive zones with repeating tiles and lots of nothing.


And if it wasn't a quest driven game, what was it? I mean, it had two different entries for "quests" and "missions," and you start doing quests really early. Why have two different entries and cutscenes if that's not the focus?
I mean really, even SE didn't appear to know what they wanted to do with it. Take a look at those old patch notes.

This isn't WoW logic either. Trimming the fat in oversized games had been going on for years prior to WoW. Player complaints about "large empty fields of nothing" had been going on for a long time. Even EQ1 introduced fast travel options in 2003 that made getting around a lot easier. It was criticized at the time (and still is by people who don't remember dying repeatedly trying to get around) but turned into an industry standard.
Even FFXI started to move into the direction of smaller, meatier zones eventually, after ToAU.

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Originally Posted by kyuven

But let me ask.
What makes THAT zone special that couldn't be done by just making "Altepa Desert"

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your overthinking this its really obvious, ps2 limitations. Both zones are massive by any mmo standards that and they came out in what 2004, i mean is this really a disscusion point really?

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Originally Posted by erish

your overthinking this its really obvious, ps2 limitations. Both zones are massive by any mmo standards that and they came out in what 2004, i mean is this really a disscusion point really?

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wester was for low lvls had an oasis the teleport crystal and acess to korroloka , mobs from 30-45 ish , and easter was for 50-65 , revelation rock was awesome :3 ,the antican race lived there (quicksand caves) , Titan crystal is here too, + rabao city and access to kuftal tunnel , both zones served a purpouse , and yeah Ps2 limitations.

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Originally Posted by Warlyx

wester was for low lvls had an oasis the teleport crystal and acess to korroloka , mobs from 30-45 ish , and easter was for 50-65 , revelation rock was awesome :3 ,the antican race lived there (quicksand caves) , Titan crystal is here too, + rabao city and access to kuftal tunnel , both zones served a purpouse , and yeah Ps2 limitations.

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Both served a purpose, but my biggest lingering issue with XIs zones is that most of the zone didn't. A lot of it was just empty space that had no purpose outside extending travel time. Mark on any XI map the areas which were actually frequented, it's a lot of open unused space for the majority. That was one of the major things Abyssea made me realize, and probably the only thing Abyssea did right IMO. Places like La Theine were suddenly bursting with content.

Despite that XI still made better use of its zones than XIV though, because XIV just plainly doesn't really use them once you've hit the cap. That's the real issue I think people should be focusing on, rather than just begging for (and actually getting) bigger zones. The problem with XIVs zones isn't their size, it's the utter lack of quality endgame content in them. Hunts bombed. Treasure Maps are "cute" at best. What this game needs is not bigger zones, it is quality open world content which isn't dead the moment you stop needing EXP (not that I mean to imply FATEs are "quality content").

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Originally Posted by kyuven

And if it wasn't a quest driven game, what was it?

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Well, lets see here..haha. In the zones..you could...
Hunt NM
Hunt HNM
Do Campaign
Farm monsters for gil items or equipment
Pop your own NM at the ??? with a PT/Alliance
There was always EXP parties going on
Use the monsters to level up your skills/evasion/etc

I may be forgetting things..but FFXI used zones for MUCH more then just quests.

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Originally Posted by Nalien

Both served a purpose, but my biggest lingering issue with XIs zones is that most of the zone didn't.

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While I don't think there was a zone that didn't have a purpose for something, you are looking at it wrong. You are thinking "this zone should exist to deliver this content". The way the game was designed was "this zone should exist because this is how Vana'diel exists". It was world building, everything was built to make the world seem alive. Shops closed on certain days, ferries/airships came in on a schedule (which operated in realtime), and every mob was effected by different factors and had different aggro types (undead aggroed by dying characters, dogs tracked scents, blind monsters aggroed by sound so you could walk around em).

Not so much in this game, where everything is basically some kind of content delivery system. When I see something interesting in the world (ie, the dead treant in South Shroud) I don't think "wow I wonder what the story behind that is", I think "some quest is going to use this as a marker".

To give an example... by FFXIV standards Korroloka Tunnel shouldn't exist because it didn't have some quest hub, or major quests. Except it HAS to exist because there needed to be a connection between Bastok and Altepa (going under the sea). It exists to give a reason why these two zones are connected. It builds the world up to be believable. FFXIV would do the opposite... it would just teleport you across the two zones. This breaks the flow though of how the world is laid out and shrinks it. Heck even existing zones are jarring due to your character doing massive jumps between regions when you zone (Mor Dhona to Coerthas, though I can let it slide due to short dev time for 2.0). That rarely happened in FFXI because the zonelines had some border to give the player the idea they were moving into another zone (a lot of time tunnels were used for this). There wasn't even a magical literal zone line, it just went straight to a loading screen so the devs had to put something there to give the player the idea they were entering a new area.

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Originally Posted by Magis

While I don't think there was a zone that didn't have a purpose for something, you are looking at it wrong. You are thinking "this zone should exist to deliver this content". The way the game was designed was "this zone should exist because this is how Vana'diel exists". It was world building, everything was built to make the world seem alive. Shops closed on certain days, ferries/airships came in on a schedule (which operated in realtime), and every mob was effected by different factors and had different aggro types (undead aggroed by dying characters, dogs tracked scents, blind monsters aggroed by sound so you could walk around em).

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I actually think the world building in XIV is superior, in a strictly zone-related sense (I'd love actual ferries and the like).

Eorzea feels lived in. You walk outside Ul'dah and it feels like you've walked out of a bustling city. You walk out of San d'Oria and it's wilderness. All the odd camps like Rabao were so isolated and I have zero sense NPCs did any travelling in Vana'diel. XIV has done a superb job of making a world which actually feels lived in, where as XI made a world you could live in, but felt like it had undergone an apocalypse as far as NPCs were concerned. That made sense for places like Tavnazia (and from what I've heard the new expansion location), but for all the other places? No. It was absurd. More so when Wings of the Goddess came around and we got glimpses of actual infrastructure outside of the city walls, and then are told that our Vana'diel is the hope filled future. Really? Their hopefully future is cowering behind their cities gates while wilderness takes over?

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Originally Posted by Magis

To give an example... by FFXIV standards Korroloka Tunnel shouldn't exist because it didn't have some quest hub, or major quests. Except it HAS to exist because there needed to be a connection between Bastok and Altepa (going under the sea). It exists to give a reason why these two zones are connected. It builds the world up to be believable. FFXIV would do the opposite... it would just teleport you across the two zones. This breaks the flow though of how the world is laid out and shrinks it. Heck even existing zones are jarring due to your character doing massive jumps between regions when you zone (Mor Dhona to Coerthas, though I can let it slide due to short dev time for 2.0). That rarely happened in FFXI because the zonelines had some border to give the player the idea they were moving into another zone (a lot of time tunnels were used for this). There wasn't even a magical literal zone line, it just went straight to a loading screen so the devs had to put something there to give the player the idea they were entering a new area.

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XI and XIV do the exact same thing in this regard, to be perfectly honest. Both cut out the intermittent "zones". XIV actually does a better job of this in most cases. When I travel from North Shroud to Coerthas, it looks like I'm heading into snowy mountains. When I traveled from La Thiene to Valkrum Dunes? It looked like I was travelling to more of La Thiene but then the loading screen stops and suddenly I'm surrounded by sand? Yeeeeah....

XIV cuts a lot of the intermittent zones out because they have no purpose, but so did XI. You just wouldn't know because XI wasn't rebuilt to the point where you can actually tell that Coerthas Central Lowlands is missing. There should still have been a fairly large gap between places like La Thiene and Valkrum Dunes. The boat rides and various tunnels are the only thing XI got right in that regard. The only other thing XI did differently was not including the XII-homage zone lines because XII didn't even exist at the time...

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Originally Posted by Warlyx

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/images/maps...ack-shroud.jpg

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Ugh, seeing that gives me nightmarish flashbacks! :/

Personal opinion here, but I think XIV and XI are roughly on the same page in terms of size, and I say this because if you were to look at XI and XIV vanilla (minus 1.0 XIV) but XI (non-Zilart) and XIV (just 2.0) they have roughly the same amount of area to explore. The optical illusion here might be that in XI dungeons were free-roam open-ended, meaning you didn't have to load into an instanced area to do them.

Also on the note of cities, Selbina, Rabao, Mhuara, and the like I would not classify as a 'city', more like a settlement or town. While they might have been spacious they really didn't have much inside, however if you look at the towns in XIV (Hyrstmill, Vesper Bay, Moraby Drydocks, they are smaller space-wise but feel more lived in. As for cities in XI there were:

San d'Oria
Windurst
Bastok
Jeuno
Aht Urghan
Adoulin


Now I will say the one thing that XI has (and had during vanilla) that XIV doesn't really have yet are diversified zones. We have extreme snow zone (Coerthas Central Highlands), forest zone (Shroud all them), desert zone (Thanalan all them), lush-greens, almost meadow-y zone (Noscea zones), waste-land zone (Outer Noscea), aether-heavy zone (Mor Dhona).

Where is the tropical zone, mountainous zone, fiery zone, underground zone, water(underwater) zone, void zone?

I'm all for a bunch of dungeons, but honestly the pull for me to XI-and most MMOs-is the exploration aspect. I love to find all those nooks and crannies and be able to see a spectacular world (not saying XIV isn't one by any means). But I'd like the variety in the open world portion of the game, not just in dungeons where the goal is "How fast can we rush through this"

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Originally Posted by Nalien

I actually think the world building in XIV is superior, in a strictly zone-related sense (I'd love actual ferries and the like).

Eorzea feels lived in. You walk outside Ul'dah and it feels like you've walked out of a bustling city. You walk out of San d'Oria and it's wilderness. All the odd camps like Rabao were so isolated and I have zero sense NPCs did any travelling in Vana'diel. XIV has done a superb job of making a world which actually feels lived in, where as XI made a world you could live in, but felt like it had undergone an apocalypse as far as NPCs were concerned. That made sense for places like Tavnazia (and from what I've heard the new expansion location), but for all the other places? No. It was absurd. More so when Wings of the Goddess came around and we got glimpses of actual infrastructure outside of the city walls, and then are told that our Vana'diel is the hope filled future. Really? Their hopefully future is cowering behind their cities gates while wilderness takes over?

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Well, the Crystal War did wreck shit and the three nations didn't exactly like each other. However that is probably the story being built to the established world, not the other way around. Wasn't that the point with Rabao? It was a oasis in the desert, settlements clump up to fresh water in desert areas. The world of FFXI was one to explore and find out for yourself. FFXIV everything had been explored, with safe spots everywhere to hide in and no danger after you've "grown". It's like trying to go off on an adventure in the suburbs. Now with some things Yoshi said about Heavensward and a zone called the "Outlands iirc?" maybe we will start exploring the wilderness and have some danger once again. Also the more interesting of areas are locked behind instances, which players teleport straight into. There isn't even a point to the entrance of a dungeon other than to remind people that "actually, yeah this place does exist in the world even though you never have to see it to enter". It just disconnects those areas from the world.

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Originally Posted by Magis

Well, the Crystal War did wreck shit and the three nations didn't exactly like each other.

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IDK, it's just something that really ended up bugging me before I finally quit... "Oh, so you had a ramp up this cliff in the past but you just demolished it after the war? Thanks for making me take the loooong way round", granted we did eventually get to use Timelord hacks to skip up cliffs like that IIRC. Even Wings of the Goddess zones didn't really feel lived in, though they did feel like there was a war going on which was the point. I think the new Windurst side zone (Fort somethingsomething?) was probably the best example of what I'd have liked more of in XI (and am getting more of in XIV). XI never did zone transitions well IMO though, with the exception of caves, all the zones looked the same, whether you were travelling from a mountainous region to a jungle, forest, or beach, they all looked the same. North Shroud to Coerthas is a perfect example of zone transitions done right.

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Originally Posted by Magis

Also the more interesting of areas are locked behind instances, which players teleport straight into. There isn't even a point to the entrance of a dungeon other than to remind people that "actually, yeah this place does exist in the world even though you never have to see it to enter". It just disconnects those areas from the world.

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This is actually one thing I have consistently begged for in XIV; Dungeons to become part of the open world following their completion. I guess ultimately it didn't gel well with their "Lets recycle these for Hard Modes" strategy, but I still think it would have been an awesome addition to the game. It really does sadden me that so many of the zones are locked in instances, I can just imagine going fishing in Brayflox's Longstop (prior to the Hard Mode ruining the place). Keep the "scenario" that played out there in an instance, sure, but give me the actual zone to enjoy after... /sigh

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Originally Posted by Nalien

This is actually one thing I have consistently begged for in XIV; Dungeons to become part of the open world following their completion. I guess ultimately it didn't gel well with their "Lets recycle these for Hard Modes" strategy, but I still think it would have been an awesome addition to the game. It really does sadden me that so many of the zones are locked in instances, I can just imagine going fishing in Brayflox's Longstop (prior to the Hard Mode ruining the place). Keep the "scenario" that played out there in an instance, sure, but give me the actual zone to enjoy after... /sigh

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Sadly the reason is because those instanced zones are not scaled to fit the open world. Here is a project I am working on, I had to scale down all the dungeons in order to make them work/fit in the world.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e3...onstructed.png

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Originally Posted by OMEGA_HACK

Sadly the reason is because those instanced zones are not scaled to fit the open world. Here is a project I am working on, I had to scale down all the dungeons in order to make them work/fit in the world.

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Sadly the maps (since we have about 3 different ones?) in this game are fairly poorly done in general. Here's something I made a while ago highlighting an issue with Coerthas/Shroud;

https://i.imgur.com/hsBcx2z.png

I'd love to have a world map like this, though they'd need to fix this issue. Honestly though, when it comes to the individual maps I'm not all that bothered if they don't fit in place properly. I just need to look at Wanderer's Palace and that issue is already plainly highlighted; From Bronze Lake it has no real base, yet that is what we fight our way through in the dungeon. I expect more of that in the future and at this point I don't particularly mind it anymore.

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Originally Posted by Nalien

IDK, it's just something that really ended up bugging me before I finally quit... "Oh, so you had a ramp up this cliff in the past but you just demolished it after the war? Thanks for making me take the loooong way round", granted we did eventually get to use Timelord hacks to skip up cliffs like that IIRC. Even Wings of the Goddess zones didn't really feel lived in, though they did feel like there was a war going on which was the point. I think the new Windurst side zone (Fort somethingsomething?) was probably the best example of what I'd have liked more of in XI (and am getting more of in XIV). XI never did zone transitions well IMO though, with the exception of caves, all the zones looked the same, whether you were travelling from a mountainous region to a jungle, forest, or beach, they all looked the same. North Shroud to Coerthas is a perfect example of zone transitions done right.

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Windurst side zone? Might have been after I quit. I don't see how you can say all zones "looked" the same when their environments varied greatly as well as their layout. How does Yahtunga Jungle, Valkrum Dunes, and Xarcabard look the same to each other? Even similar environments were different, such as Ronfaure and Sanctuary of Zi'tah which while both forests, were both different in their asthetic (also that music, both sooooooooo good).

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Originally Posted by Nalien

This is actually one thing I have consistently begged for in XIV; Dungeons to become part of the open world following their completion. I guess ultimately it didn't gel well with their "Lets recycle these for Hard Modes" strategy, but I still think it would have been an awesome addition to the game. It really does sadden me that so many of the zones are locked in instances, I can just imagine going fishing in Brayflox's Longstop (prior to the Hard Mode ruining the place). Keep the "scenario" that played out there in an instance, sure, but give me the actual zone to enjoy after... /sigh

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Even WoW did this better than FFXIV did. You still had to go to the entrance of the dungeon, but the zone line generated the instance. When "hard modes" came out, you chose which zone it would enter you into after crossing the zone line IIRC... that or there was multiple entrances I forget.

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Originally Posted by Magis

I don't see how you can say all zones "looked" the same when their environments varied greatly as well as their layout. How does Yahtunga Jungle, Valkrum Dunes, and Xarcabard look the same to each other? Even similar environments were different, such as Ronfaure and Sanctuary of Zi'tah which while both forests, were both different in their asthetic (also that music, both sooooooooo good).

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I mean the transition into each zone in a zone are the same, not that Yahtunga and Dunes look the same. If I showed you a picture of, lets say, the area used to transition from Meriphataud Mountains to The Sanctuary of Zi'Tah, how do you know it isn't the area used to transition you from Meriphataud Mountains to Sauromugue Champaign? I don't think you can. The areas used to zone you out of Meriphataud look identical to one another, this was true for most of the "overworld" zones in XI (only exception I can think of off the top of my head involve you travelling into cities, though even for that you'd probably only be able to tell the difference between West San d'Orias gate and Easts is by the NPC names), and when you consider what Meriphataud looks like in comparison to Zi'Tah, that difference becomes even more jarring. You're clearly skipping over a large area when you zone in XI, just like you do in XIV. The difference is in XIV you can tell the difference. Again; Compared any of the XI examples I've given to North Shroud to Coerthas. In XIV you can tell you're heading to a different area. If I took a screenshot of every zone line in XIV, you could tell the difference between them, each one is visibly unique. If I did that for XI, every zone (invisible) zone line for a given zone (eg. Meriphataud) looks the same (with the exception of cities/caves). Meriphataud to Zi'Tah looks identical to Meriphataud to Sauromugue. There is no indication that you're travelling into an ancient forest for Meri>Zi'Tah, for example. That's an issue with the age of the game, sure, but it's something XIV has excelled at.

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Originally Posted by Magis

Even WoW did this better than FFXIV did. You still had to go to the entrance of the dungeon, but the zone line generated the instance. When "hard modes" came out, you chose which zone it would enter you into after crossing the zone line IIRC... that or there was multiple entrances I forget.

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Well that's the price of convenience. Technically you can still walk up to the entrance of Amdapor Keep and pick the regular one or the hard mode, but when it's more convenient to queue up from the Market Board no one does. Making things more "believable" in this regard would directly mean making things more inconvenient. I'd much rather just have an extra zone unlocked after which I can travel to to enjoy the dungeon itself, rather than speeding through. That keeps the convenience of the Duty Finder while still making dungeons a part of the open world, win-win. For instances like Primals I'd love for them to actually be server based when FC summoning is a thing, so if you want to try and earn Ifrit to summon with your Free Company, you have to travel through to his crystal like you did to unlock Hard/Extreme.

That's basically what I'm talking about when I'm saying XIV needs more quality open world content, rather than bigger zones (sadly we only seem to be getting the later). We don't need large zones like XI. XIVs zones are perfectly fine. Until 3.0 proves otherwise, all I'm thinking we're getting with it is bigger zones that will suffer the exact same issues the current ones have; They're poorly used. Sadly the most people seem to ask for is just bigger zones. Beastmen Dailies are probably the closest this development team has gotten to making use of the zones properly, sadly that is extremely casual content. What this game needs more than anything is an "endgame" tier series of content akin to Beastmen Dailies which actually makes use of the world they've created. Doesn't even have to be free of instances; They could give us an Ifrit Trial where you obtain an item from a FATE, trade it to the Crystal used to unlock Ifrit Trials, and get ported to a BCNM style instance. That would work wonderfully.

Instead, a lot of people just insist that "The world is small, we need bigger zones", when what they should be saying is "The world is unused, we need more content that doesn't use the Duty Finder". I'm cautiously hoping FC Airships will provide something like that I suppose, but that seems to be providing its own set of zones, rather than making use of existing ones, so I wont hold my breath. More Hunts, FATEs, Levequests and Treasure Maps are the only other thing I've heard, and they haven't cut it so far so I doubt they will at Lv60 either. They could, but they'd have to be of a substantially higher quality.

Just to correct people here, Eorzea isn't a continent, it's a region. The continent is called Aldenard. Eorzea consists of the Black Shroud, Coerthas, Thanalan, and La Noscea. The Black Shroud, Coethas, and Thanalan are on Aldenard while La Noscea is on Vylbrand.

There are lots of areas on Aldenard and Vylbrand we haven't been to yet, but still exist outside of Eorzea (such as Dravania, Sharlayan, Xelphatol, Ala Mhigo, O'ghomoro, Gyr Albania, Paglth'an, etc.)

The last mmo i played before ff14 was guild wars 2. That game had many flaws, but world exploration was not one of them.

It was so exciting to enter new zones and every zone has major FATEs that sometimes end in world bosses.

If you dont care about that, there are also exploration puzzles which is like a much improved version of our sightseeing log With actual fun and challenging platforming

And the best thing about that game world is that it isnt flat. A lot of zones have either 2nd floor to them or underground level

Unfortunately the game failed really hard in skill development (same 8 skills from lvl 1 to the end wtf) and dungeon.

Ironic since ff14 is really strong on those 2 points

How the 1.0 maps looked connected together:

http://www.ffxivinfo.com/images/maps...ea-regions.jpg

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Originally Posted by Magis

Even WoW did this better than FFXIV did. You still had to go to the entrance of the dungeon, but the zone line generated the instance. When "hard modes" came out, you chose which zone it would enter you into after crossing the zone line IIRC... that or there was multiple entrances I forget.

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It's the same in FF XIV. Only that it is not forced, but an option. You can go to a dungeon entrace and click there on the portal. If it have a hard mode you can choose which mode after unlocking them.