[Suggestion] Have an Aetherial Loading Screen when Teleporting.

Hello,

I really love how there's an undersea/water transitional loading screen when we go underwater or come to surface. That little touch helps with our subconscious when it comes to loading screens.

I'd like to see something similarly implemented when it comes to teleporting. I'd like to see a neat animation of what it's like to be using the aether to move to a new zone. The current screen is just black.

There may also be a different screen if you're just switching zones like possibly the map of the world? Depending on how much work, maybe an animation of a plot point moving to the zone we're going into?

I'm not sure how much work that would take but I think it can help with gameplay immersion (and lore integration) especially on zones that may take a bit longer to load due to the number of players in. Kind of like...elevator music if you will.

Thank you for your work, would look forward to a response if this is possible or not.

All the little touches that can add to immersion are a lot more important than some people give them credit for. I'd like there to be a clear difference between teleporting and using an elevator, for instance, or taking a ferry. Currently, they're all pretty much the same thing, which can make it hard to think of the setting as being a real world.

They've got it in bits and pieces already. We can get an animation of taking ship from Limsa to Vesper Bay, but not for taking a ferry from Limsa to Aleport. We get an animation for taking an airship from Gridania to Ul'dah, but not for taking an airship from Gridania to the Gold Saucer. It would do wonders for immersion in the world if all of these missing transitions were included, ferries, elevators, the missing airships, and places like the labyrinth in Southern Thanalan that takes us from Nald's Reflection to Minotaur Malm.

As for when we just walk across a zone boundary, there was a suggestion a while back about using the zone art that we currently only see when first logging in to the game. It could be put in place of the plain black screen. (We already get a brief animation here, of our character running off into the distance from the zone we're leaving, but following that with zone art of the zone we're entering would be a bit nicer than following it with a plain black loading screen.)

I'm not quite sure what teleporting through the aether should look like. Maybe some sort of screen transition effect that morphs your view of the area you're leaving into something akin to the aetheric mist seen in Mor Dhona's gloom weather, and then morphs that into the area you've teleported to. Or SE could come up with something cool looking. But at any rate, I'd like it to look different than more conventional movement by taking an elevator or boat.

From what I understand lore-wise teleportation is meant to be perceived by the teleporting person as virtually instantaneous, meaning it's literally, "blink and you're there". So a loading screen of travelling through the aether would be rather superfluous. I do miss the airship arrival and departure scenes when travelling on the airship to and from Ishgard and the Gold Saucer - sadly there's been a little too much streamlining of zone transitions as the game has progressed at the expense of immersion (I hate using that word but it's the most fitting term).

Ah well, I guess it's one of those situations where you can't have your cake and eat it too sadly. :(

Even though it's supposed to be instantaneous it unfortunately isn't. The black screen just seems so dull. The bubbles/surfacing animation is very clever way to deal with loading times. You can enable the airship cutscenes in the settings if you miss them.

The general idea is to just get rid of "plain black loading screen" for transitions to zones or content. It just feels archaic in general

This is a great idea.