Possible to combine the City States?

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Im honestly hoping we do see this actually happening come either 7.0 or beyond.

That's been a rumor floating around for a while.

It’s a good idea;

There is often a bit of disconnect in certain zones when you can see the other (looking down on Limsa’s plaza, or into the markets of Ul’dah aregood examples).

It would be nice to see actual activity in what is generally a very active part of town.

Considering 1.0 had exactly that and it failed miserably - all that wasted space resulted in stretched server resources whenever there was even a remotely large amount of players gathered in the one spot, and thus severe lag in all three cities, and Ul'dah in particular was so bad it broke the Inn (the laggy large city zones was a major complaint of 1.0), thus the cities were split into two in ARR as part of the redesign. And I actually like the smaller cities, at least I don't have to run down those goddessawful long empty corridors between areas in each city that 1.0 had.

Thus despite the rumours, I doubt SE are going to do much of a change to this if any.

I also vaguely recall reading that the zones don't actually fit with each other. Like, the aetheryte in Limsa isn't where you'd see it from the upper decks and stuff like that.

pass. the larger the maps have gotten, the more barren they've felt. se would probably remove loads of environmental npcs that make the earlier cities relatively feel like people actually live there to keep it under the hardcapped entity limit or w/e if they combined the zones. shb and ew cities feel more like set pieces than they do cities.

It looks to me like a lot of ARR city states and many of the surrounding areas are actually one giant zone split on purpose to separate resources. We could make the same argument with Upper La Noscea and Outer La Noscea.

To merge them they would probably have to go back and modify thousands of npcs and quests that take place in the city states so that they happen in the unified area and a lot of other information like that would have to be combined as well. So it's not very likely.

The areas are bigger now, but when the game released it supported PS3 and lower specs. It might still be worth being this way because ARR are the first areas new players set foot in and therefore can be the most busy.

they talked about this recently. about the cities. they said they wont do it because the maps dont fit

Seasonal events would also probably turn into an excessive load on the zones if they're no longer able to bounce players back and forth between areas.