Will we see changes to the environmental game world?

[Platinumstorm]

One of the most common complaints we read about on English fansites are the repetitive textures and environmental object (doodad) sections that plague the zone continents, with the greatest offender being the Gridanian forest.

Ul'dah is often viewed as the most varied zone, even though it also sees the same repeated assets, but it's presented in an easier to digest way.

All of the zones have problems with environmental variety, however, and it makes the game feel like its just acres and acres of uninhabited land. In the Black Forest's case, it even affects gameplay too, with distances to levequests being unnaturally cumbersome, making the zone very unappealing.

To make the problem worse, areas like the Golden Bazaar don't really have a lot of meaning to them; there aren't even NPCs to sell items to there.

This has resulted in players congregating in Ul'dah, and leaving Gridania with very little occupation. Ul'Dah has a pretty well designed city, great music, and very wonderful assets to traverse through.

One of my most pressing questions is if the development team will be redoing the zones to make them feel more like being in a world, rather than running through repeated assets, and can you explain how significant the changes will be, and how you will go about doing that? If you do redo these zones, will you be working on increasing visual variety, like perhaps an area of giant mushrooms where a certain type of fungar would spawn, or maybe an outpost inhabited by goblins, for example?

If you do choose to answer this question, please go into as much detail as you possible can.

Side note: Can you also please change the Black Forest music to something that doesn't cycle over 30 seconds, and maybe make it rain a bit less there too?

Thank you for your time!

[Rjain]

Although I agree that some areas appear rather repetitive, this is not too uncommon in games. They could add more "doodads" to spruce things up a bit but as for the hard geometry I see nothing wrong with it. This was very common in FFXI, WoW, and many other games. I don't think this is an issue that needs to be fixed, but it's something that could be "taken into consideration" in the future for new areas.

[Gath]

The areas are not exact replicas, they are just merely keeping with the flow of the environment, I mean, Gridania isn't exactly going to go from looking like The Sanctuary of Zitah to looking like Valkurn Dunes. They copy and paste some, but not too much.

[Demacia]

It's not even that the areas are repetitive, it's that they're so few and so big. Going from Ul'dah to Limsa is a walk through ONE BIG REPETITIVE ZONE.

[Krisan]

For the most part, I like the zones as they are. (The limited variety in assets is to be expected, we're dealing with a pretty graphically intense game here.) The Black Shroud is pretty terrible though, I admit.. I kind of like the idea of a forest being confusing\difficult to traverse, but while the novelty of that is grand and all.. it really had no business being a starter area at all. Furthermore there's too little indication of where the safer lower areas end, and the higher level areas begin.. One can literally take one wrong turn in there and be eaten alive.

[Lebannen]

I was quite dissapointed by the game world, especialy black forest and coerthas. Ulda'h was ok at times as was Limsa Lominsa.

[Gath]

I was quite dissapointed by the game world, especialy black forest and coerthas. Ulda'h was ok at times as was Limsa Lominsa.

Man, Black Shroud looks like the Sanctuary of Zitah, but with a city in middle. It's an epic zone!. . .imo

[Platinumstorm]

I have played dozens of MMOs, as I'm sure many of you have, but I can't think of a game that repeats environmental chunks more frequently than FFXIV, with no variation involved. Comparing World of Warcraft's zone design to FFXIV isn't even applicable, because while they do reuse tons of individual doodads, and might add a duplicate cave here or there, the doodads within the cave will vary from cave to cave, and you never, ever think of oh I'm passing this stream with this exact tree here, and this exact rock here, and a mob in this area with the exact same pathing issue here 30 times over in a zone. World of Warcraft, whether you like it or not, has some of the most inspiring and awe-striking zone design in any MMO, regardless of technical limitations.

Assets will be reused - trees get rotated, have their heights adjusted, rocks get rotated, the layout of the trees and rocks can change, that's all fine; the problem is repeating large chunks of land over and over and over that really disconnects the user with the game world. It also doesn't involve changing from trees to deserts, it's about providing variety.

How about a grove of trees where dryads live, an area of giant mushrooms where a certain type of fungar spawn, different kinds of trees being more common in certain areas of the forest to create some variety - I'm not worrying about insane tileset deviations, just things that make logical sense to the world.

[Demacia]

Man, Black Shroud looks like the Sanctuary of Zitah, but with a city in middle. It's an epic zone!. . .imo

The black shroud looks like the entrance to konschtat highlands but with trees everywhere. It's nothing like Zi'tah.

[Nataku]

For the most part, I like the zones as they are. (The limited variety in assets is to be expected, we're dealing with a pretty graphically intense game here.) The Black Shroud is pretty terrible though, I admit.. I kind of like the idea of a forest being confusing\difficult to traverse, but while the novelty of that is grand and all.. it really had no business being a starter area at all. Furthermore there's too little indication of where the safer lower areas end, and the higher level areas begin.. One can literally take one wrong turn in there and be eaten alive.

Are you saying that because the graphics are so heavy, the only option is to use boring, huge repetitive zones?

Why not take that one huge zone, break it into three zones that have different terrain, scenery, types of camps, monsters, where a person actually feels like they're moving form place to place (forest to plains to desert, etc)