Will we see changes to the environmental game world?

[Gath]

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

Nope, just wrong.

[Zahak]

I am all for implementing smaller zones if it means there can be more beauty and wonderous areas added to every area. I agree all of the areas are pretty much bland It makes me very unexcited when I explore; more like boring I am sorry to say. Please fix the world SE <3

[Rhianu]

What? lol. Oblivion had one type of forest, a monotonously similar 'hell world' and the same dungeon was repeated thousand times. Fallout 3 was very similar.

On top of that, the games were really not graphically intensive at all (aside from the fact that the game engine was so poorly coded), and looked pretty damn bad at times. Especially the character models. You couldn't have picked a worse example.

I'll agree that the character models in Oblivion were not always the greatest, but we're talking about environments here, so character models are irrelevant (and the coding of the game engine even more so).

And yes, while it's true that there were only a few different TYPES of environments within Oblivion, none of those environments felt ever like you were constantly seeing the exact same identically copy-pasted terrain over and over again.

[Demacia]

Nope, just wrong.

No i'm right. Hallway maze with trees =/= glorious Sanctuary of Zi'tah.

[Croy]

I hope they take the criticism in this thread for future areas. I'd rather have more zoning then these huge repetitive yet streamlined worlds . One thing I'd like to see them do with the current worlds that I would hope isn't too difficult to do is maybe add more atmospheric effects to the various sub regions. Perhaps make each place get different weather and different style of textures. Basically my main beef is that sub regions need to have more character then a single continuous zone.

They also really need to adjust transfer between the actual zone lines. I don't want to go from a dense forest into desert wasteland without any hint of the terrain coming up. FFXI was better at this. You could see a canyon starting to form in Sarutabaruta, you saw an entire city in the distance and then zoned into. What i'm asking for is maybe make a 'meadow' setting where the foliage starts decreasing at the Gridania to Thanalan zoneline, and maybe add some lush foliage leading into the Gridania zoneline from Thanalan.

[Aldwin]

I totally agree with this thread. While other games may copy/paste sections also, it was never as apparent to me as is in this game. In fact it was one of the first things I noticed my first time exploring.

[Krisan]

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.

Actually, I did think exactly that with WoW.. Practically every damned cave in the world was only one of TWO maps. It was so easily identifiable to me that this had to be one of the most dejecting aspects about the whole game for me. Lots of other stuff was reused too that I noticed, notably homes\inns were almost all clones of the same one-three layouts..

[Visch]

I can't STAND The Black Shroud. I was hoping for a bigger Jugner forest but we got a bigger Yhoator Jungle.

[Rustyhagun]

If SE could just add some oddities like, and old broken down cottage, random npc's scattered through out the zones, abandoned carts/carriages, more foliage as you make you way to the Black Shroud. Hopefully Yoshi knows this, and the big update that is going to change the world, will incorporate things like the above.

[Coyohma]

They've copy/pasted a lot more than any other game I've played, to the point where it's painfully obvious. Compounding this is that they've really done nothing to hide this fact, and so 'exploring' is unrewarding with such a bland, repeating environment.

I realize the explanation that has been given, but players aren't going to give them a pass because of it. What's important is what people are seeing ingame.