Suggestion: Burn Gridania and the Black Shroud Down and Start Over

I must be odd, I actually prefer Gridania over the other cities because to me its far less confusing with all their upper & lower maps. One single map is good for me.. lol :) I don't mind The Black Shroud either, its not usually that difficult to figure out, once you use it a bit, you begin to easily understand which direction you need to go.

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Originally Posted by Demacia

This. XIV has the most boring and poorly designed world I've ever seen in an MMO.

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Originally Posted by Corrderio Why stop there? Do it to all zones.

you two should play DCUO. Now that is real copy and paste.

I've seen youtube vids of ffxiv, I don't see the copy and pasted ppl are complaining about. I tried dcuo and honestly that is copy and pasted, all buildng look similar, zones are small, lay out for police stations and clubs are the same. All npc look the same.

But in reality all games have copy and paste maps. Its easier to do this and takes less time to load. Maps in ffxiv from what I've seen on youtube are huge. It is easier to have coherant (sp) zones also. I used to do computer aided drafting, which is a corner stone in game development, and it takes a long time to build one tree w/o issues. With what you guys want, it will take a year for every zone to be made that didn't have any copy and pasting. Meaning each tree would have been made by hand, each rock, each creature. each all. Then loading will be a while also. Since all of they will need its own file.

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Originally Posted by Kilta_Firelotus

I've seen youtube vids of ffxiv, I don't see the copy and pasted ppl are complaining about. I tried dcuo and honestly that is copy and pasted, all buildng look similar, zones are small, lay out for police stations and clubs are the same. All npc look the same.

But in reality all games have copy and paste maps. Its easier to do this and takes less time to load. Maps in ffxiv from what I've seen on youtube are huge. It is easier to have coherant (sp) zones also. I used to do computer aided drafting, which is a corner stone in game development, and it takes a long time to build one tree w/o issues. With what you guys want, it will take a year for every zone to be made that didn't have any copy and pasting. Meaning each tree would have been made by hand, each rock, each creature. each all. Then loading will be a while also. Since all of they will need its own file.

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Take the Black Shroud, for instance. There's, like, one clearing with a stream. Every time you come across a clearing with a stream, it's the exact same clearing.

In Limsa, every time you come across a cave, it's pretty much the same cave.

Etc.

What you REALLY do as a developer is have several different models for rocks, trees, etc, and then have several different textures to apply to them. This gives you exponentially more options in terrain without ballooning file requirements.

Then you either create the world by hand (tends to give the best experience and most character, but is hella time-consuming), or you procedurally-generate the area using a wider variety of assets to create something that looks much more unique than it actually is.

What they did in XIV was, instead of coming up with a variety of smaller building blocks with which to make the large chunks of terrain, they simply made a few large chunks of terrain for each region and pasted them down. Oh, and rotated some of them. This way they can fit a larger environment into memory. It goes back to the whole console thing.

Personally i love the terrain in La Noscea and The Black Shroud.

The maze-like maps are one of the classic FF styles, hard to love the series without loving these type of areas.

Burn it all down, my fellow ls members know my hate of this poorly designed area.
20 mins to run from the town to the r20 camp, seriously?!

I can stomach the town, it's no where as bad as Windy, but sheesh, the black shroud is terrible.
I honestly feel claustrophobic and I am not. I avoid this area at all costs, and will run from the farthest points of Limsa and Uldah to save anima for avoiding running through the black shroud

Players should not hate an area this much.... but we do.

I've always hated maze type maps, and one of the biggest disappointments in FFX (and every FF since) for me was the fact that I couldn't explore a 'world map' on foot like in other FF games. It's one of the things I miss the most about older FFs.

Oddly though, what I dislike about 14 is that the maps are way too big. Which I wouldn't mind as much except that there are only 5 zones that exist and the terrain is pretty much identical no matter where in the zone you are. Large zones are not so much a bad thing themselves, but the repetitive nature of zones and the extremely limited amount of maps to explore make it almost insufferable to me.

Gridania is poorly designed and even the few graphical features it has are obstructed from view by bad layout of the roads to buildings. The city should feel alive and be a little more condensed yet open and reflect a bustling, robust populous haven amid the woods.

I love Gridania.



Burn ULD'AH