SE, we need to talk about your zone ceilings

http://68.media.tumblr.com/baa595e2e...k3eo1_1280.png

Why, SE? What is this nonsense? @_@

No chance of getting up to the flag post M'naago did her Thing from, either. That's even higher than this no-go-platform.

I understand that with flying there has to be SOME Z-axis limit, but at least have it make sense? Things like this are why your zones feel so claustrophobic!

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Originally Posted by Naunet

zones feel so claustrophobic!

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That is the last thing I feel in any zone in this game lol.

I agree. I wanted to fly in Yanxia above the Moon Gates or heck, I'd take flying through the top circle, but couldn't. Also wanted to fly above the pillars there to see the area more clearly, maybe make some nice gpose screenshots, but... no dice. Yanxia is my fav new zone and it just breaks my heart that the height limit is so low there. :(

cant even fly over the mountain in Yanxia

The relatively low ceilings are a bit aggravating at times, as is the general inconsistency of what you can and can't land on, but I'd hardly claim the zones feel even the least bit claustrophobic.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

I understand that with flying there has to be SOME Y-axis limit, but at least have it make sense? Things like this are why your zones feel so claustrophobic!

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You mean Z-axis.

And I'm not sure how you get claustrophobic, most of the game is designed large enough that a gobbue or magitek armor can walk through everything. Switch to first-person view just about anywhere and notice that even regular doors in the game would be the equivalent of 12' tall and 6' wide at the smallest. Very little in the game is actually sized correctly if the people building the world from within the game cared about cost. I could get Uldah being large and extravagant, but it was built by Lalafells, why are the doors to everything in each city large enough to drive a wagon into it? Every door in the game is wider than a typical garage door in real life.

There are several things in the game once flying was enabled in the zone that doesn't make any kind of sense, but they have to set a ceiling at some point, and it takes up more memory the larger the "cube" is.

In most games, flying is just a trick to begin with. It's just moving the entire world's z-origin away from you.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

You mean Z-axis.

And I'm not sure how you get claustrophobic

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Thanks for the correction. Fixed!

As for how I get claustrophobic... From the endless invisible walls that are present even on the ground funneling you through narrow tunnels. Also the very low "ceilings" in the sky that don't even come close to the taller objects. There is a perfectly walkable platform within reaching distance in my screenshot and yet SE chose to make the ceiling JUST below it. M'naago sounds her horn from the flag higher up that platform and yet we can't even come close to it. Someone else in this thread mentioned the gates in Yanxia as another example. It does make things feel claustrophobic to me.

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Very little in the game is actually sized correctly if the people building the world from within the game cared about cost. I could get Uldah being large and extravagant, but it was built by Lalafells, why are the doors to everything in each city large enough to drive a wagon into it? Every door in the game is wider than a typical garage door in real life.

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Makes sense when you think dragons were closer to people, so the doors needed to be big.

Agreed; I was really disappointed when you couldn't go up the walkway. I completely expected it to be a sightseeing log location! A lot of the locations in Stormblood would feel a lot better with a Z-axis increase.

I'll play the devil's advocate :P ...

As much as it would be nice to fly even higher, I think there's a technological reason behind the ceiling restriction. Namely two: Distance cull, and Z-axis fighting. My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore. So, it wouldn't make for nice screenies anyways, and wouldn't be that great to look at either while flying.

There are many things that XIV is good at. Scaling is not one of them. FFXIV has a serious issue on scaling sizes and make them feel believable. Zone ceiling too low is one of them. Others include wrong sized buildings. Some buildings feel so small and they try to do that trick with extra small windows to make it appear as larger until you go a bit closer and see that it's made for ants. One other example is the Specula Imperatoris tower which gets shot by the canon. You can barely fit a chocobo inside yet it was supposed to be a tower where many people died. Other issues with scaling include an "army" of 4-5 NPCs in a cutscene liberating a whole nation and another is the leader of this nation who speaks to his people. That crowd is only 10 people or so. Please SE start making things properly sized and don't go so cheap.

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Originally Posted by Riardon

There are many things that XIV is good at. Scaling is not one of them. FFXIV has a serious issue on scaling sizes and make them feel believable. Zone ceiling too low is one of them. Others include wrong sized buildings. Some buildings feel so small and they try to do that trick with extra small windows to make it appear as larger until you go a bit closer and see that it's made for ants. One other example is the Specula Imperatoris tower which gets shot by the canon. You can barely fit a chocobo inside yet it was supposed to be a tower where many people died. Other issues with scaling include an "army" of 4-5 NPCs in a cutscene liberating a whole nation and another is the leader of this nation who speaks to his people. That crowd is only 10 people or so. Please SE start making things properly sized and don't go so cheap.

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This is an MMO, not a triple A single player game. You need to be realistic.

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Originally Posted by Radiosuitcase

This is an MMO, not a triple A single player game. You need to be realistic.

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There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

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Originally Posted by Riardon

There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

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Clearly not thinking about the LCD. If you want all that, you would need to go Mid/High-end PC only then.

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Originally Posted by Kyonika

I'll play the devil's advocate :P ...

As much as it would be nice to fly even higher, I think there's a technological reason behind the ceiling restriction. Namely two: Distance cull, and Z-axis fighting. My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore. So, it wouldn't make for nice screenies anyways, and wouldn't be that great to look at either while flying.

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I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

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Originally Posted by Frysia

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

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You're very right! At least in perception - I can't claim to have exact numbers. But HW flying definitely felt like you could go quite high - above mountains and such.

I was super sad that we can't go to where M'naago stood in that cutscene. :(

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Originally Posted by Riardon

There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

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They also have far worse graphics.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Things like this are why your zones feel so claustrophobic!

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That's an overstatement... like seriously, you're in the middle of the sky and you're worried about a platform on a tower, and that's what makes it claustrophobic?

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Originally Posted by Kyonika

I'll play the devil's advocate :P ...

As much as it would be nice to fly even higher, I think there's a technological reason behind the ceiling restriction. Namely two: Distance cull, and Z-axis fighting. My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore. So, it wouldn't make for nice screenies anyways, and wouldn't be that great to look at either while flying.

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This is very true, this is one of the many reasons why we don't have flying available in 2.0 areas. Some parts of the map would be incomplete, etc.

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Originally Posted by Frysia

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

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Well in SB you can also go underwater :P Though with the loading screen between underwater and above it does make it seem almost like a separate zone so idk.

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Originally Posted by Frysia

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

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Do these screenshots include shots taken from the perspective that lies beyond the game area's bounding box limits? If you did, you would likely notice optimizations take effect in a glaringly obvious way, but also artifacts like those due to the lack of floating-point precision at larger distances (i.e. z-fighting), as well as other issues too. And if there were no optimizations (i.e. distance cull or LOD), your FPS would start to suffer. In an MMO, FPS is god! Therefore the maps are designed, balanced and governed for maximum presentation for the hardware that is readily available to the playerbase as a whole. To increase these limits would be unfairly asking everyone on PS4 to upgrade to PS4 Pro while disallowing 4K HD. Similarly, it would place an onus on the PC playerbase to upgrade their GPUs to handle the increased load, just to accommodate more graphical exposure.

I wish we could fly higher in the new SB zones ... but there's a technical reason why we can't (there's a lot of geometry to render: i.e. The Peaks or The Fringes). The map design and QA teams almost certainly went over all of this with a fine-toothed comb, and arrived at a consensus that would work for everybody, and make the game playable and good looking all at the same time.

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Originally Posted by Kyonika

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WoW runs on potatoes and not once have I ever thought, "Dang, I can't reach _____ because the invisible ceiling won't let me."

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Originally Posted by Naunet

WoW runs on potatoes...

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That just made me think of Lalafels running in a treadmill powering an old MMO. ROFL. :D

(That was too funny!)

The invisible wall was annoying in Yanxia for me most. I wish you could fly over the mountains(they are massive) instead of going right around the river ><. There also are areas of map that are behind invisible walls but it looks like you can fly there.

Also I have a problem with areas you can land. Bits of the coral at Shoal Rock are unable to land on(I wanted to fish there XD) and a LOT of mountains are unable to land on too :(.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

WoW runs on potatoes and not once have I ever thought, "Dang, I can't reach _____ because the invisible ceiling won't let me."

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WoW and Mabinogi (good gawd both these games are still running) also have much smaller origin zones, and the maps that they allow flight in are very-very-very empty.

Archeage probably does the best air-to-sea transitions (you can quite literately jump off the airship and fall for quite a while and hit the ocean), and has some of the best looking water physics in a MMO game. That said, in terms of scale, lots and lots and lots of essentially empty space everywhere.

And this is a hard thing to balance really. You want the world to feel like it's lived in, not that all 10,000 players live within a quarter mile. In fact in pretty much every MMORPG, there is a "home" area that is where the game logic is better tied to, and then there are expansion areas that even when they include buildings, you often can't go in them, all the quest NPC's are hanging out outside.

In terms of scale we keep talking about continents, but really, it's closer to describing something like Manhattan Island as an Continent Island the size of Australia, because the game doesn't have the scale of the real world. One of the things Fallout 3 did was replicate the layout of Washington DC without actually making it the scale of Washington DC, yet, notice how empty it is.

It would suck taking 20 minutes in a game to walk half a mile in a video game, as least I don't feel tired in the game.

So in terms of scale, yes the world has to be smaller because a 1:1 scale with reality would have loading zones for every city block in a game like fallout 3, or GTA 4. By comparison with MMORPG's, you'd have loading zones if they weren't seemless you'd be hitting the loading screen when you walk inside and outside buildings as well since it would need to switch between outside and inside models. That's why the vast majority of PC FPS games take place outside. Many MMORPG's do the same by convention.

One day we will get a simulated world that isn't hellbent on giving us invisible walls (want to fly your airship into space? alright, go for it, but you're gonna die without a suit) but mostly the reason they exist is because the way the vehicle in the game exists is unrealistic in the first place. The mounts have no fuel or stamina.

http://img15.deviantart.net/a248/i/2...la-dah0lcj.jpg

This is from WoWs latest expansion. It is the huge city of Suramar, approx the size and capacity of Kugane and Dalaran, same size as WotL and the broken shore rendered in the same Phase with no issues. WoW has stepped up their game big time in legion .when it comes to graphics going from a ridiculously long draw-distance to incredibly solid texturework. These areas are far from empty featuring the most NPCs ive seen in any MMO- though it shall be noted Suramar utilised a specialised "Elf" model for the large crowds.


Really makes the FFXIV areas feel lacking when you really all we have is small-ish gray/brown zones with low rez textures and invisible walls aplenty.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

The invisible wall was annoying in Yanxia for me most. I wish you could fly over the mountains(they are massive) instead of going right around the river ><. There also are areas of map that are behind invisible walls but it looks like you can fly there.

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That one in Yanxia was made intentionally to prevent you from crossing to the north side until the main story takes you there, as you get flight in Yanxia way before the MSQ takes you north.

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Originally Posted by Kyonika

My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore.

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This is the case for World of Warcraft If you don't set your view distance and environmental detail settings all the way up so could probably be true here too (Not a good idea for casual play). Of course Enix does not give much in the way of graphic adjustable options so there no way of knowing how it'd be handled here.

Here's an idea of what to expect with extreme elevation
http://i.imgur.com/x3WXvsi.jpg

None of FFXIV's zones feel claustrophobic.

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Originally Posted by Kyonika

That just made me think of Lalafels running in a treadmill powering an old MMO. ROFL. :D

(That was too funny!)

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HAH! Great image. xD

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

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I really don't get the point of your post as not once have I demanded an in-game zone with real world scale. I was expressing my disappointment at how low the zone ceilings are and that they feel claustrophobic. It's a bit frustrating to see something you should be able to land on literally within arms' reach and yet there's an invisible wall blocking you from getting there. And M'naago gets to defy the rules by standing on the flag pole!

Some of my two cents.

I like the wall in Yanxia because frankly it made the zone feel like two zones which I think is awesome. IT was also fairly obvious that the other side was closed off for story reasons. I mean if they want to incorporate seclusion in a story, then why not? Are you really angry that you can't fly over a towering mountain that is clearly meant to keep people out? Okay...

HW areas do feel larger in terms of Z-axis limits. While flying in SB for the first few zone that I unlocked, I did have a weird feeling like something was off but I didn't think much of it at the time. Like... It feels like SB areas might be wider but HW were taller in terms of Z-axis limits. I personally might compare the two expansions to see if the Z-axis increases at different rates while flying (assuming they have the same capacity) and if they do, then I will question SE.

Zones aren't claustrophobic and this is a joke. Honestly SE could have made the Z-axis ceiling smaller because GUESS WHAT we have literally little reason to even fly that high. While I agree it was nice in HW, it didn't really server much purpose unless there was a structure very high up or below islands that you needed to get to (yes, I'm looking at you, Churning Mists).

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

WoW and Mabinogi (good gawd both these games are still running) also have much smaller origin zones, and the maps that they allow flight in are very-very-very empty.

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You seem very unfamiliar with WoW's game world.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

You seem very unfamiliar with WoW's game world.

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Yeah, I got a chuckle out of that. xD

It's not just the invisible walls in between areas and the ceiling that bug me but the inability to land. Often flying over mountains, walls or other vertical terrain I will try to land to look around and can't. My mount just sits there half buried in whatever flapping its wings. Add that to an invisible wall that lets me see my destination but makes me take the long way round and exploration for its own sake becomes a challenge.