Why not improve the 3 initial city-states?

Just a random thought doing some early quests... It would be really interesting if they improved the 3 starter city capitals into one single instance, since we aren't bound to the PS3 limitations anymore, IIRC the whole reason that those capital cities are split into subzones.

Not just having a continuous city would be good, but also if they potentially filled it with novelty. One may argue that is a waste of resources, but honestly, they'll always be densely populated regardless of expansion, like we see continuously. The seasonal events always happen there. Every new job or many side features also start there, the MSQ casually goes there too sometimes, list goes on.

On the other hand... there's also the fear that they'd downgrade from what we have if a rework of the cities would also mean changing heavily the current elements. I feel Dawntrail's capital cities are kinda badly designed, with so much emptiness or closed doors.

That would be great but I'd imagine it would be a huge amount of work to untangle the instances and quests and whatnot which is probably better spent elsewhere. Silvermoon City in WoW is in a similar circumstance since it's instanced away from the rest of the game world and it's only being undone next summer because it's the focal point of the expansion, which is 19 years after it was added to the game.

Hopefully the devs can find a way to do that one day, though. I'd love to see them fix up the damaged parts of Ishgard as well.

it wont happen but i would like it.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Just a random thought doing some early quests... It would be really interesting if they improved the 3 starter city capitals into one single instance, since we aren't bound to the PS3 limitations anymore, IIRC the whole reason that those capital cities are split into subzones.

Not just having a continuous city would be good, but also if they potentially filled it with novelty. One may argue that is a waste of resources, but honestly, they'll always be densely populated regardless of expansion, like we see continuously. The seasonal events always happen there. Every new job or many side features also start there, the MSQ casually goes there too sometimes, list goes on.

On the other hand... there's also the fear that they'd downgrade from what we have if a rework of the cities would also mean changing heavily the current elements. I feel Dawntrail's capital cities are kinda badly designed, with so much emptiness or closed doors.

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the city states weren't split into zones during 1.0 launch... the split happened after they launched ARR.

too much cost

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Originally Posted by MsMisato

the city states weren't split into zones during 1.0 launch... the split happened after they launched ARR.

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I know, that's what I mean. I think the reason why it was split was due to the PS3 processing power, but may be something else and I'm not remembering it right.

It was split because the 1.0 city zones were... frankly... utter torture to navigate (Gridania being the worst of the three, having to tromp down long corridors or tunnels just to get anywhere.... urrghhh.. 'Emerald Labyrinth?' More like emerald nightmare!), and it was due to the city zones actually not really being one large zone, but really several combined together and their zonelines concealed by said corridors (you could actually tell in 1.0 when the zone line changed due to the client momentarily pausing for a split second and the map then updating), and was a major complaint of 1.0 players. So no wonder Yoshi changed this.

The current zones are fundamentally the same size as they were in 1.0 more or less, all SE did was take the blinders off by abolishing those long empty corridors and gave a proper zone change and split the map up into what they really were. So going back to those old days would not solve anything.

yoshida talked about this. merging the two hslfes together isnt as easy as its sounds because the maps dont actually fit together

I don't know about merging the zones into 1 whole zone per city, but improving them in other ways would be nice.
Maybe adding new sections that could have MSQ progress requirements, or just simply updating them with more buildings we can go into and things to interact with.

Too much work for smol Indie Dev.