The World: so Big so Beautiful... But yet so empty

First of all do not get me wrong I absolutely love the design and the work the team has done to ARR HW and SB areas.I'm not gonna write an essay about it so I'll keep it short.

The areas are absolutely amazing but somehow they feel empty. They have become so big that they feel irrelevant to the game. We fly around to get a node or a hunt or a fate. And after that there's nothing else left to do for such a big instance.

It would be good to add more missions or something else to will make it feel or make it more active for players rather just jumping to area and go away and stand at FC houses or Reghals reach.

Make players more involve in areas with more things to do. I don't know, maybe be a new DOL class Called "Hunter" where you go and kill the mobs to obtain new stuff or make any DOW/M new missions there.

Just a few suggestions as I do believe the mobs and the world areas don't do "much" for such a huge effort from team to make it look great.

This is one of my biggest gripes about this game. We have these huge areas that are not being used for anything. I find myself leveling through FATEs just so I can immerse myself and see more of the landscape. It's also one of the reasons why I loved that period where Hunts were the most popular thing because I got to spend time with massive amounts of people in the HW areas. (Zergfest or not). I don't know what the solution is but I hope SE finds a way to make more use out of the SB/HW (and ARR) areas at some point.

This thread recalls me the past debate(s) about the maps soooo smaaaall and need be biiiiiigger because people felt "Claustrophobic". Cannot make everyone happy, isn't it.

This is the issue with running a game that almost entirely operates on instances, and with the convenience of the Duty Finder.

If the DF didn't exist, and it entirely operated on PotD's system/pre-Raid Finder system, you'd see areas fill up quickly, but at the cost of convenience to the player.

Yes you cant make everyone happy but they could at least give more life to the maps. It must be horrible to live in this world where even some small bugs are out for your life. I am playing rift next to this game and you have big maps that are full with different life and not everyone wants to kill you on sight. Where are the squirrels, little snakes and animals like that which could just be there without the need to kill them. Could we get monsters/bigger animals back that are passive to us until we attack them? Why would a herbivore wants to kill us? Can we have some world actions where we see a herd of animals being chases by a carnivore? Or at least more NPCs wandering the maps thus making it feel alive?

Why is a sea so bare of fishes and other water animals?

I mean it would be nice if we would do more with the maps itself but I would already be happy if I get the feeling that this is a living world where common people can really survive..not like our maps right now where there is one aggressive monster/animal next to another. Have some birds fly in the sky, have some big herds of animal graze and drink. See a little nutkin in the search for his nuts, or a mother animal with its young ones.

I think 2.0 had the best maps, when I heard HW was gonna have bigger zones back in it's early announcements I thought they were gonna go the more 2.0 design route but just larger, after which I feel the zone quality has dropped in many areas.

yoki event number 2 haha :)

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

For some reason the zones in ARR felt more active than HW and SB. Maybe cause they were smaller? Everywhere people ran fates/grinded for their zodiac weapons. Maybe cause game was fresh?

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Originally Posted by Rinuko

For some reason the zones in ARR felt more active than HW and SB. Maybe cause they were smaller? Everywhere people ran fates/grinded for their zodiac weapons. Maybe cause game was fresh?

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I can see a few reasons for that. The ARR story makes you go back and forth the maps, new players do FATEs or levequests for leveling and that FATEs were more efficient for leveling in ARR than they are in HW or SB.

ARR feilt more alive because people used Fates to level up. People don't use fates any more to behonest with you. I said from the get go that they should make the dungeons open world dungeons instead of DF/instances. Not only would that improve the community in this game but you would no longer feel like ur the only person in this world out side towns.

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Originally Posted by VargasVermillion

I think 2.0 had the best maps, when I heard HW was gonna have bigger zones back in it's early announcements I thought they were gonna go the more 2.0 design route but just larger, after which I feel the zone quality has dropped in many areas.

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Yeah, I felt similarly. I could have done with less of a size increase with the new maps in HW and SB, and a bit more acivity within them. Sure the smaller ARR zones have things improbably close to each other, but they didn't feel empty. Then again, the wastelands of Western Coerthas are just frozen tundra, so how could it not feel empty...

Seriously though, I think the balance needs to be a bit smaller than the new maps and about as 'busy' as the ARR maps.

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Originally Posted by Blackcanary

ARR feilt more alive because people used Fates to level up. People don't use fates any more to behonest with you. I said from the get go that they should make the dungeons open world dungeons instead of DF/instances. Not only would that improve the community in this game but you would no longer feel like ur the only person in this world out side towns.

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Open world dungeons would be a train wreck between OP players stomping everything and packs of characters zerging everything, no one else would have a chance to do a thing.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

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Indeed, this would help greatly. concentrating everything in a single location as a hub sucks players into that zone like a giant sponge, leaving other zones high and dry.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

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That would create more activity in chat, but not really in the 'zone', as people would just mob the specific NPC/entrance and the rest of the zone would end up dead.

Unfortunately, with the current system, you have pretty much one option to get people "playing" in the open world; make content there far more lucrative than anywhere else. In ARR, people did FATEs because they were the most rewarding content type at that time; after everything was "balanced" and dungeons became more desirable, FATEs went downhill. The spreading of the population across more zones has just made that (appear) even worse.

Other than that, I suspect the only way you can really forcibly liven up the zones would be to essentially kill the game; remove everything convenient. Remove teleporting and Chocobo porters, make it so you have to preselect a mount before going anywhere and give it stamina, give players more "realistic" sprint stamina themselves and require them to make camp to heal up, make all ingredients scarce and require them to be gathered from "regions" on the map rather than nodes (so a lot of "You begin mining, but find nothing at this spot"), etc. And then make the map 20-30 times bigger. Basically, take 1.0, then make it even more of a headache.

Players will only do a thing en masse if they are absolutely forced to, or its the most profitable use of time.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Seriously though, I think the balance needs to be a bit smaller than the new maps and about as 'busy' as the ARR maps.

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I disagree. Smaller will not help. It's entirely possible to make a large map full of character and life - see GW2, Rift, WoW, WildStar.

I appreciate when things are not crowded together. I especially appreciate when there are areas that may not serve any combat purpose but are there to enrich the world - enterable buildings, caves, shrines, whatever else.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

I disagree. Smaller will not help. It's entirely possible to make a large map full of character and life - see GW2, Rift, WoW, WildStar.

I appreciate when things are not crowded together. I especially appreciate when there are areas that may not serve any combat purpose but are there to enrich the world - enterable buildings, caves, shrines, whatever else.

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I agree with you on that, it's just that the HW zones really can feel extremely empty at times. Though that may be due to the nature of the map such as the Churning mists and Sea of Clouds which tend to defy normal mapping because of the numerous altitude changes. It makes them feel extremely fragmented, overly large and empty - IMHO. When I say smaller, I am not suggesting that the maps should be ARR sized, but unless more life (and in some cases sense) is applied to the maps, they could do with being a bit less than 4 times the size of an ARR map.

What's still funny to me is that traveling these maps on foot is actually a lot more fun that flying, and you get to know the maps better. Flight may add to the feeling that players have of maps being empty.

One of the things I've enjoyed when leveling my alts is the fact that I would have to experience all the zones had to offer from the ground again. Flying has in many ways stolen the beauty of the game from the ground given most will not travel by land when they can fly to where they want to be. Having more to do in this areas wouldn't be a bad thing.

I see what you did there with the title TC. I see it.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

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this is the worse idea ever. people already commute to work in real life, why do you want to force them to commute to play the game.

I'd like to see more interactive doodads and treasures hidden around the world. A good lot of the towns scattered over the world feel like hollow building veneers (Can't enter nor explore inside) with not a lot to distinguish them from one another. With a little bit of clutter and love, the game would have a whole new level of depth.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Open world dungeons would be a train wreck between OP players stomping everything and packs of characters zerging everything, no one else would have a chance to do a thing.

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They can solve that with leves like during 1.x
Dungeons itself will be open, but the enemies and bosses will be from the leves.

They should stop to press a whole region in a single zone. They should give each region 2 zones minimum, best would be 4 zones.
Like giving Yanxia a 2nd zone for more villages and to the Steppes to fit in all the tribes.
While the zones get bigger, I have the feeling that the regions get smaller.

That's pretty much the fate of all MMOs. Can't be helped. More areas are added, there's less and less reason to go back to old ones. In this case it's far worse because there's nothing of value in the open world, no rare drops, no out of the way packs of mobs that are useful to farm, no special anythings anywhere. We don't even have the benefit of alts of all levels swarming around, since you don't need any(nightmare mode alts for more crafting specializations aside) due to the job system the game uses, or tiered PvP that twinks would hold a specific level for.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

This thread recalls me the past debate(s) about the maps soooo smaaaall and need be biiiiiigger because people felt "Claustrophobic". Cannot make everyone happy, isn't it.

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That probably wouldn't be an issue if they removed hard zoning and made the world contiguous.

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Originally Posted by Limecat

That probably wouldn't be an issue if they removed hard zoning and made the world contiguous.

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I am sure people loved running through endlessly looping loading tunnels where you saw the same rock in the same spot every 30 feet.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

I am sure people loved running through endlessly looping loading tunnels where you saw the same rock in the same spot every 30 feet.

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Why do people think this is the only way to do open world zones? Surely you've played MMOs other than FFXIV 1.0.

Does anyone remember finding the Magic Pot on that one island near Pharos Sirius and giving it an Elixir? Why doesn't the game have more small interactables like that? Nothing major, but just throwbacks to old FFs or maybe some NPCs that start lore-giving questlines at sightseeing areas? (I mean, it's kinda gross to me that you find out a ton about this game's lore through outside materials you have to buy with real money. I always hated that about Warcraft.)

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Why do people think this is the only way to do open world zones? Surely you've played MMOs other than FFXIV 1.0.

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It was that way in the past in one game out of thousands, it has to be the only solution!

But with that being said, a bit problem is a large portion of the maps are not traversed during story quests or just for one or two where we go and forget about it. One that comes to my mind is the right hand side and bottom portion of the fringes map. There are just a few quests all in the same area from the same quest giver for these areas so there is no reason to go around them and you don't see people wondering around either because of it. The lochs is a really extreme example though. It's a neat looking area with some cool spots but the lack of quests, things to do and 20 second looping music makes people not want to be there.

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Originally Posted by enthauptet

But with that being said, a bit problem is a large portion of the maps are not traversed during story quests or just for one or two where we go and forget about it. One that comes to my mind is the right hand side and bottom portion of the fringes map. There are just a few quests all in the same area from the same quest giver for these areas so there is no reason to go around them and you don't see people wondering around either because of it.

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The SE portion of the Fringes is fairly bare right now due to it being the Deltascape entrance and the future base for the Anata Beast tribe quests.

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The lochs is a really extreme example though. It's a neat looking area with some cool spots but the lack of quests, things to do and 20 second looping music makes people not want to be there.

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The Lochs come off as if they designed it to have room for endgame content.

SB seems to suffer a lot from the "blaze through to 70" mentality.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

This thread recalls me the past debate(s) about the maps soooo smaaaall and need be biiiiiigger because people felt "Claustrophobic". Cannot make everyone happy, isn't it.

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Please stop making this out to be an unwinnable balance of two opposites. This isn't a spectrum. Zones can be "big" and "lively". They should be both.

The crux of the issue has always been that once MSQ has been completed in the area, zones no longer feel like a foundation for content, or solely for gimmick-ish grinding at best.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Seriously though, I think the balance needs to be a bit smaller than the new maps and about as 'busy' as the ARR maps.

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But there's no "balance" to it, anymore than would be the size of a car and its paint-job. Once SE has an idea in mind as to what they actually want zones to accomplish, the time spent allowing those assets to fill that function is far smaller even if far more effective, and to a degree inseparable from the assets themselves. Reconsidering how to reach the appropriate "equilibrium" when working from a particular concept, cutting it short to reduce work time (shrinking the car to accelerate its paint-job, so to speak), would likely push back schedules as much as the work itself. And given Stormblood's alleged budget there shouldn't be any reason to.

Now, 'crowding' is an actual spectrum, and affects the moods given by the maps, but that is entirely tangential to making a zone feel impactful in ambiance, and less relevant still to making it feel impactful or plentiful as a basis for content.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

I am sure people loved running through endlessly looping loading tunnels where you saw the same rock in the same spot every 30 feet.

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This applied only to the main roads of the southern half of the Black Shroud, not to:
- Mor Dhona, which was then 5 times its current size.
- Coerthas, which is still about double the size of Central and Western Thanalan combined
- Thanalan
- La Noscea

So let's not act like small samples from design decisions made solely in hopes of meeting deadlines tightened further than ARR's and with a fifth its staff and budget are representative of everything that any other design philosophy might accomplish.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

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But then threads like these would be replaced with threads complaining about how players have to do so much teleportation just to do basic npc/vendor things.

Can't please everyone.

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Originally Posted by Rinuko

For some reason the zones in ARR felt more active than HW and SB. Maybe cause they were smaller? Everywhere people ran fates/grinded for their zodiac weapons. Maybe cause game was fresh?

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The zones seemed more active because players had nowhere else to go. FATE grinding for alternate jobs and Relic grinding got you back into a world that had no other maps or areas to go through. The game was fresh and people weren't level 70 and bored, they were level 50 and discovering new things to do with each patch. And every patch had you moving about in all those areas again.

This is the fate of the MMO: The old world remains, but you move on.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere. This convenience factor is what kills the population in the maps. Duty finder is OK, but also maybe eliminate the ability to choose specific dungeons and Raids from the menu and force people to travel to the entrance of the specific instance you want to do to create some activity in the zones.

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This does little to make the maps themselves more attractive though. You're then just forcing additional time and movement in order to do something entirely separate. Placing a mere entrance to a dungeon in a particular place in itself does little to contextualize them, and spreading out key NPCs such as the Rowena vendors, materia melders, and the like each separately doesn't even make sense. Realistically, craftsman and vendors do gather at places convenient to their clients.

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Originally Posted by Antonio_Xul

I've said this before, but one solution is to not create hubs. Spread out the end game NPCs to different maps. Put something vital everywhere.

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You've played through the post 2.0 ARR game at least once, so you should know that many players really didn't like this idea. They were upset that they had to travel from Horizon to New Gridania to Quarrymill and back again while working through the Main Story.

They did exactly what you're suggesting and got few "thank you" posts and a lot of "waste of time" posts.

It isn't going to happen again.

For the record: I love lore, I love exploring, I love watching cut-scenes, I love chatting ... I also know that the majority of the players i run into do not give a pheonix-down about that stuff. I just accept it and move on.

People will always take the path of least resistance, why do Fates when you have PotD? Why run the same FATEs when others offer bigger an better rewards? You do have incentives to go explore, from logs to hunts... but the majority of the player base does not care about that, otherwise you would see them there. However they would be the first to trash the game into the ground if it was just a bunch of instanced areas. People do like exploration, but only on "their time" and when you are on the quest to get epic loot, that time does not involve sight seeing. There is another game out there that encourages world exploration and revisiting old areas, however I feel their incentives are clear, concise and appeal to loot/leveling greed; which is what this all boils down to.

I appreciate that they at least make it a note to keep the areas from previous expansions relevant in future quests as opposed to arbitrarily making everything take place in the expansion areas.

The zones lack substance honestly. Sometimes there's nothing to see, sometimes there is something to see, but you'll only know very little about it even if you try to find lore about it. Settlements seem so barren and they'll just have a bunch of buildings you can't access. The zones feel kinda flat, too.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

This applied only to the main roads of the southern half of the Black Shroud, not to:
- Mor Dhona, which was then 5 times its current size.
- Coerthas, which is still about double the size of Central and Western Thanalan combined
- Thanalan
- La Noscea

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They don't had tunnels, yes. But they had canyons

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Originally Posted by dinnertime

The zones lack substance honestly. Sometimes there's nothing to see, sometimes there is something to see, but you'll only know very little about it even if you try to find lore about it. Settlements seem so barren and they'll just have a bunch of buildings you can't access. The zones feel kinda flat, too.

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The sad thing there is that sometimes it doesn't take all that much to draw a player into a zone or especially a given settlement, depending on the size and scope thereof, but those parts that extend beyond merely filling them up with items, objects, doodads, etc. are absolutely crucial, more so in almost every case than the breadth or depth of objects themselves. In essence, so long as the object feels primarily decorative (and for reasons not taken from the settlement), it will fail to be wholly impactful; apparent and reasonable utility is necessary, not because it's "realistic", but because it tells you something about the area.

For me, it took all of two quests to fall in love with Owl's Nest, a small settlement in the eastern mountain borders of 1.x Coerthas. The first was a request from a doctor who was treating a wounded Ixali in secret, away from the eyes of his neighbors (who you could speak to and see why this would be such a massive concern), and the second from a shepherd who had seen strange lights and shadows behind the clouds (subtly encroaching Garlean gunships). I could talk to each NPC, and though not all houses could be entered (which seemed fine given that I wouldn't leave my house unlocked either), there was a decent sense that they were real residences and belonged to an actual community. Add to this their patrol cavalry and their captain being accessed through the Lancer and Archer quest-lines and while small a small-ish settlement it felt very vivid. Heck, a couple of the mere ring-fence and tent encampments felt like they had more to them, just from the advice and leve materials you could get off one of them and the behests from the other.

What actually made ARR feel so flat to me by comparison is that there seemed to be no sense of purpose for so many of the structures. My first lasting thought after seeing the revised Coerthas wasn't even how many of my favorite locals and how much of the overall size and sense of the place had been removed, but simply... "why would a keep be within a half-mile of another?" Until you get to the inquisition, which read like a shallow trope-heavy synopsis of a story, Coerthas actually felt somehow less populated than before simply because the expectation was in place for a far larger community, based on local needs and utilities, and yet that all felt unaccessible. One could faintly guess at the situations by the doodads, but then the next sub-area would contradict it. More than not feeling "realistic", necessarily, it felt "unfinished" and "opaque". Added colonizing details and doodads do little in themselves to enhance a setting; it's the access to the living lore of the area that makes it feel full, and that requires whole concepts more.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Why do people think this is the only way to do open world zones? Surely you've played MMOs other than FFXIV 1.0.

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I have played other MMOs with the "seamless open world" which if you ever had slow loading were basically stitched together with endlessly looping loading tunnels, be they tunnels with visible walls or not. As the system still had to unload the area you were leaving and load in the area you are entering.

In going from 1.x to 2.0 they simply swapped the copy paste endlessly looping terrain for loading screens. Since people complained about the copy paste terrain.

So yeah, that is literally what developers do in attempting to make the open world "seamless". Partition off areas with loading walls between them and a section of the terrain set as the loading wall terrain. If you got a strong machine that is quick to load, and a good connection to back it up, it seems seamless when really it is not.

ok, so there are a few things that i want that might help.

i believe beast tribe quest mechanics and progression (HW concept) should be applied to at least one settlement, one NPC, per map except the ones that do have beast tribes within them.

another is to add more visual economy, agriculture, trade, etc. i mean, Central Thanalan, Ul'Dah, has what looks to be a railroad system, but no train. i remember, as a new player, myself actually staying at the station expecting one, but was disappointed of course. there's also a war going on almost everywhere you go, but there are barely any fates that involve one side fighting empire soldiers in a large scale battle. there is barely any movement outside of cities and settlements, so a nice addition would be to add different types of NPC's such as soldier patrols, hunters, carriages, traveling merchants that actually travel, waiters that actually serve food and drink, traveling beastmen beyond their natural habitat, just a lot of things like this.

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Originally Posted by Felis

They don't had tunnels, yes. But they had canyons

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And this was a bad thing? If so, I find it odd that ARR had higher portions of constrained areas than 1.x ever did, and HW and SB still more than, say, old La Noscea or Thanalan.

While the Emerald Shroud, especially in the stretches around Bentbranch and Camp Tranquil had practically become memes, many forget that the Black Shroud also had vast open wade-able misty rivers and multiple levels of terrain that gave it much more traversable area overall than one would expect from the reports of "tunnel, path, glade; repeat". Outer La Noscea is more constrained by comparison, even if certainly a more unique and generally likeable zone. Thanalan averaged to larger expanses than any of its current sections. La Noscea was more open on average than any zones since. Coerthas was something of a middle-ground; the mountains broke and blended it seemingly realistically into rolling canyon sections, especially in the SW corner around the old Boulder Downs or, separately, in the high paths around Prominence Point. Other areas of Coerthas, however, were split only by the rivers or the central gorge and were otherwise unbroken nearly to max sight distance. They were designed to create different moods through the openness of traverseable space, and did so, even if far from perfectly. This is part of any zone design philosophy, not just 1.x's, and you'll find little in that overall take on zone design that you won't find in any other MMOs or in XIV since, save perhaps for a portrayal of Eorzea as a frontier, instead of an arbitrarily populated space.

I'm not sure why people assume that because these zones were large, they must have been thin or largely unusable (or by extension that there was a some sort of cap to traversable area renderable); WoW was able to seamlessly place entire continents into single zones with PCs about the power of a first-generation Xbox. The area itself is irrelevant.

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Originally Posted by TankHunter678

In going from 1.x to 2.0 they simply swapped the copy paste endlessly looping terrain for loading screens, since people complained about the copy paste terrain.

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That would only had been the case if assets were being changed across those hallway areas of 1.x's zones. They weren't. In fact, areas where assets were being swapped out were just as often open areas, such in crossing a wade-able stream than ran along either end of the adjusted areas, meaning that both were still being loaded, rather than one traded for the other beneath the obfuscation of a hallway area. The famous loops of 1.x were less often a limitation of processing power as a limitation in budget.