Poll: Seamless+CopyPaste VS. Zones+Variety

[Nevrath]

PS3 has limited number of objects it can load at once.
The zone size you are asking for which is able to do the whole no copy-paste thing would be like 50 meters wide and long.
Horizon Area does not look the same as Blackbrush, where is that swamp area thing arround Blackbrush?
Also i am intrigued to hear of the "many" cross-platform mmos out there.
Yes FF11, and? There might be another im not sure about PSU.
But statements like "just change the engine" already make pretty clear how much of an idea people have about it all and that they dont care at all, its all just "lets QQ about <insert random thing here>".
I dont see any diffrence between Thanalan/La Noscea copy-paste then Red Dead Redemtion copy-paste. Maybe that is cos i saw all the copy-paste of RDR while looking at the screen for 1 min.
The only Area i see where its a little badly put is The Black Shroud. But that is a wood area. Those can easyly reach more then the double number of objects and still look more crappy then more open ones. It can easyly be that that area took twice of the time La Noscea needed and still doesnt look as good.

Also i rather run through a tight rocky passage then beeing stuck in a loading screen for up to 10 seconds. And now dont tell me FF11 loading screens couldnt do that.

Developing an mmo takes ~5 years, it costs 60-100 million dollars already. Some here ask of SE to just go dump ANOTHER 100 million into it and then what? Who would pay 30$ a month for such a game? Cos you know, game developers actually do that as Job not as freetime fun.
Oh wait but that one dude already said he dont care and i do believe many of the rest also dont care.
Also, if you develope a game for too long your getting the problem that ur game engine will be outdated at some point. And you can NOT just take a finished game after 6 years and change the engine. Thats so .. horrible stupid and ignorant and facepalm head to desk clueless that it hurts.
If that was meant as a troll, great job you just trolled very sucessfully.
Why do you think Cataclysm graphic update did for the usual users eye so "little" while being made by a company which has subscribtion fees of over 10 million users incomeing every month? Let me do some math for you thats ~150 million dollars EVERY month.

I think people with no clue had too much time too look at the landscape and ran out of stuff they could complain about. -.-
Its ok if someone asks how it come to be like it is but this thread is a slap in the face for all the work putted into those well done graphics. Well atleast a few know what they got when they look at the landscape.

[viion]

PS3 has limited number of objects it can load at once.
The zone size you are asking for which is able to do the whole no copy-paste thing would be like 50 meters wide and long.

As I've said before, look at the game FUEL, its on ps3 and is the currently the biggest ingame world.

[ObeiKinstar]

I like the large areas they have right now. I can see the copy/paste, but it honestly doesn't bother me. I look at the detail in the environments and it's good. I do agree that more things in the areas will help, landmarks, more beasts roaming in proper areas with more variety of mobs will definitely make things better.

The biggest complaint I have right now is when you zone in the areas like thanalan to black shroud, you instantly from arid climate to tropical forest??? what??? how did that happen??? I would be really happy with a zone in the middle to take you naturally from one climate zone to the next to make things more fluid.

[Munba]

The biggest complaint I have right now is when you zone in the areas like thanalan to black shroud, you instantly from arid climate to tropical forest??? what??? how did that happen??? I would be really happy with a zone in the middle to take you naturally from one climate zone to the next to make things more fluid.

Agree on this.

[Seif]

Like this post if you want

A world that has smaller zones, with loading time in between zones, that allows the game to load a greater variety of textures per zone and give the artists more leeway to make the environments more detailed and less monotonous.

101 likes! SE are any of the devs seeing these results?! Only 17 likes for the other option.

[Rentahamster]

101 likes! SE are any of the devs seeing these results?! Only 17 likes for the other option.

It's been hovering at around the same ratio of about 20% for seamless vs 80% for variety ever since the thread started. Seems about right compared to the general opinions of the people I talk to about this in-game.

[Sonic_the_Hedgehog]

Renta, I still don't get what you mean by smaller zones. Do you want there to be loading screens between let's say Eastern Thanalan and Western Thanalan or scraping those zones and making Thanalan a small zone and adding other zones where Thanalan used to be? Hopefully that last question makes sense.

[Xzen]

Surprised that with the number of people that hate The Black Shroud you're all asking for less space to move around in. There are a bunch of other ways they can handle the issues with copy paste terrain other than straight up copying entire mountains and paths and map sections and just repasting it all over the place. There's no reason for it other than lazy environment design. Keep the zones big and get some better people to redesign it.

[Elexia]

There's a difference between lack of knowledge and simply not caring. As a player, I don't give a rats behind if this game is supposed to run on Atari, I want it to be great on the console I'm playing it. And if you're gonna use the technical card, the PS3 can't handle it? SE knew this before starting development on this game and I'm sure we all would've been OK with a little less polygon count and a lot more variety...just saying. But of course I anticipate an attempt at a witty remark from you and others like you defending the game the way it is *no matter what*. There's two sides to a coin, something knowledge alone doesn't give you, try common sense.

The PS3 can "handle it", they just have certain design restrictions that everyone else in the industry has to follow. When we developed games for the Famicom we couldn't use 16 or 32 bit graphics. Some tried to push past 8 bit goodness with pseudo 16 bit goodness, but it rarely worked.

No one is "defending the game", you people who dislike this game and company truly need to stop thinking anything that is other than "SE fails!" or "There are no excuses" and "WoW/Rift/Blade&Soul is sex" is defending. You don't care for logical reasons, you're a typical gamer.

There's nothing wrong with that.

However, the main issue, is memory management, which doesn't necessarily pertain to graphics alone. You can consider Graphical design an innocent bystander when it comes to memory because it indirectly suffers or directly depending on the game's overall design. Why do you think graphically "superior" games always end up lacking in one department or another? Because the development team fails? Because they didn't have a good game design? Nope, because console development is heavily give-take, so while you can do your best to get everything you want, it's almost guaranteed you'll have to give something up due to memory management.

However, I should say "SE fails" every other line, then you wouldn't consider logic to be defending

As I've said before, look at the game FUEL, its on ps3 and is the currently the biggest ingame world.

Not an MMORPG.

[Nuru]

Surprised that with the number of people that hate The Black Shroud you're all asking for less space to move around in. There are a bunch of other ways they can handle the issues with copy paste terrain other than straight up copying entire mountains and paths and map sections and just repasting it all over the place. There's no reason for it other than lazy environment design. Keep the zones big and get some better people to redesign it.

If it were possible to do with the PS3 limitations, then I would support your idea. Otherwise, they will have to separate into smaller zones. Not necessarily 1/4 of the map size, that would be too small. What seems to be going on in this thread is that people are guessing that the zones are going to be incredibly small and take less than 5 minutes to zone to next map. The zones do not have to be that small for the PS3 to handle, Im sure it can handle much more than 5-minute zone.