Poll: Seamless+CopyPaste VS. Zones+Variety

[Chrees]

That being said, because we wanted the game to be seamless, we do understand there’s a lack of variation.

See, when they mentioned having a "seamless" world, I was under the assumption that there would be, you know...NO SEAMS. Yet we're stuck with seams between the 5 areas in the game. Made me quite the sad panda.

[Mack]

That being said, because we wanted the game to be seamless, we do understand there’s a lack of variation.

Talk about someone not thinking straight. Still, considering map like the Black Shroud can't just be called lacking variety but its all the same exact thing everywhere you look, they didn't put in any effort. On top of this, lack of zones gave us long "transition regions" between every area in a region...its lame and stupid design. Look at the distance (one path) from Bentbranch to Tranquil for instance, or Brentbranch to Emerald. Its the same deal all over Thanalan and all over La Noscea but its a little disguised in the open space at least. The entire game is ugly and bland and if they were going with the seamless world they should've added a lot more meat to it (like temples, dungeons, landmarks, towns, something!). I hate this game.

[Jennestia]

See, when they mentioned having a "seamless" world, I was under the assumption that there would be, you know...NO SEAMS. Yet we're stuck with seams between the 5 areas in the game. Made me quite the sad panda.

They actually changed it, originally the only zones were the region zonelines. Zoning into/out of a city is still seamless, but considering this game will be on a console it prevents NPC and scripts not needed from loading, e.g you have zero need for a city to be loaded when you're in a volcano.

[Chrees]

They actually changed it, originally the only zones were the region zonelines. Zoning into/out of a city is still seamless, but considering this game will be on a console it prevents NPC and scripts not needed from loading, e.g you have zero need for a city to be loaded when you're in a volcano.

That's not entirely true. There were always invisible "seams" between the zones in each of the five regions, for example between Central Thanalan and Eastern Thanalan. Then in one of the patches last year (I can't remember which off the top of my head) they began to span high-traffic areas of each region/city across multiple servers, creating more invisible "seams." Which was (for the most part) a good thing, since it alleviated lag and, as you said, got rid of the need to have something all the way across the map loaded when it doesn't need to be.

I don't mind the loading screens between regions, I just wish the transition between the invisible "seams" wasn't quite so obvious. Nothing sucks more than having someone on auto-follow while you go AFK and crossing one of those server borders and losing the auto-follow, making you infinitely run off in one direction.