Do you have any idea how damn cute your sketches are? I hope SE takes note, the suggestions here are just too great to pass up, and the visual aids are a fantastic touch.
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200+ likes in 3 days. Thread delivers.
yeesh i wake up and there like 8 more pages to go through, guess its clear people want some sort of response (doesnt seem to be happening) I still find it funny that SE is one of the few MMOs being run where it feels like they just plain old shut down on the weekend.
hope you dont mind Richard, but im going to nab your "support the re-design" thing and add it to my sig.
Also would be cool to see some more map re-designs out there, im not very artsy or good with artsy PC programs, but i know a lot of people out there can, KEEP UM COMING!
Even if they just removed some of the copy-pasted land marks and put in some more variety, like a few gridanian trees on the horizon as you approach the black shroud, it would really help. FFXI had land marks and you could visually check where you were just by taking a glance around, if you knew the lay of the land. But in XIV everything looks totally the same and i find myself staring at the minimap to stay on course.
I think this is why they chose to go with a mini-map instead of a compass. I would have preferred the latter simply because I find myself looking at the mini map the entire time instead of the actual world. Though I think everyone would agree that, with a compass, you would just be spamming the map every few seconds, even if you've been in the area a thousand times before. It all comes down to everything looking exactly the same.
honestly you could take away my maps in FFXI and i could navigate 60% of the areas without fault. They were just plain old well done. In this game i dont even know what camp im at half the time, its just too much of repeates with little to nothing around to make you say "oh well that [insert landmark here] is over there so im at X camp"
I think part of it is also that, at least for FFXI players, that we didnt start off with he maps, we had to buy or earn them, so learning the areas was a crucial part of the game, which for some odd reason i almost miss, though i understand the frustration it would cause new players.
In this game im using the mini-map and the normal map way more often then i should.
OMG such good work here Siobu, honestly this is a very good sketch expressing the concept. Wouldn't it be exciting if the dev or producer would say "hey here is what we plan for the design of the zones" and show us something like that? That would create such hype and hope. I doubt this will ever happen but it's still sad to think that in 2 days you/we come up with all these ideas and that with 5 years of development the game looks like it does today (looks the same as it was shown in the development vid posted earlier).
Anyways I hope they do address that issue, I think it's what all the community is asking for, and maybe they should have reworked the zones when they were in the testing phase.
If they could have the combat changes in solid shape, the class changes, a chunk of good content (including endgame) chocobos/airships, companys, a mail system, maybe an AH (debatable i guess) and the world re-done before the PS3 version is out, then il go back on what i said in another forum...i WOULD have hope that this game could come back and at least live up to FFXI.