Area Transitions

I only played 1.0 for a very short time right at the end of it's life and A Realm Reborn legitimately beats it in almost every category...almost. I'd even venture that with a single improvement, it could become the best MMO.

Area Transitions. It's 2015, people want realism and that comes with one big open world like Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, etc. Transition/load screens significantly draw away from realism. After having played A Realm Reborn/Heavensward for almost 2 year since it was released on PS4 I still haven't completely gotten used to it. I find it particularly sad that it still doesn't have the seamless transitions between areas. Especially considering the power/capability of the company behind the game.

Make Eorzea one big open world with no load screens between areas (or towns) and it will be without equal!

I think the PS4 would melt trying to have the entire realm loaded up at once. AC and GTA maps are no where near the size of this game.

Unfortunately, due to the amount of dynamic load required for this kind of transitioning, it had to be dropped for ps3 support.

That being said, 1.0 only got around this by having long corridors between zones to hide the loading done so things wouldn't pop up suddenly in front of you. If you account for the time it took to traverse these corridors, it's exactly the same as the load between zones now. The benefit of the latter is that it's not as resource intensive and it allows for the more unique zones we have now instead of the copy+paste environments from 1.0, all while still allowing players on ps3 to log on.

Even if they couldn't do the whole world, just combing some of the zones would help a lot, to just reduce the frequency of zoning. Instead of having Old Gridania and New Gridania, having just Gridania, and the same with the other cities, would help. And if they can't combine all of Eorzea, what about combining all of Thanalan, or all of La Noscea? Both PS3 and PS4 support worlds or zones that size in other games.

(Then again, given how few housing zones their servers can support, maybe it's the servers which can't handle bigger zones. They seem to be running on some horribly outdated equipment. :()

Not this again... 1.0's giant open world came at a severe cost, in that the maps were basically big expanses of nothing with the same environment model and texture literally copy and pasted ad nauseum, and and as Velox mentioned, the transition between different areas in a zone was disguised by having frequent long tunnels you had trudge down, all very dull and boring. And ironically, actual region transitions were still handled much like ARR does with a black screen, a long pause and a 'now loading' icon.

These problems were one of 1.0's major complaints and thus, ARR's development was actually guided by this, thus the much smaller, but more greatly detailed and varied zones, with the result that zone lines are also separated by a now loading screen. And before you pass judgement, this is common with practically every FF game before FFXIV (even FFXIII has zone borders!).

This game is not Second Life, GTA or any other sandbox game, nor will it ever be. It's not trying to be an open world-simulator, it's an RPG. And RPGs have limitations placed on how that world is depicted gameplay wise - it's one of those things where you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Considering we teleport everywhere and dungeons are instanced, we're going to have transitions regardless. 1.0 had these loading screen also... when teleporting to an Aetheryte or when you reached the edge one the games fives regions. 1.0 also gave us a cutscene every time we load a lift. Or the ferry ride from La Noscea to Thanalan, which no one ever used.