how big did ff11 area grow before and after all the expansion?

[kyuven]

Are you saying "not even close" as in it's not the smallest MMO on the market? Please tell me one that is smaller.

I spend 90% of my time sitting at my FC house, or sitting in The Gold Saucer, or sitting in Mor Dhona while I queue for instances. There is really no use to the open world outside of gathering and hunts.

There are a number of MMOs that use nothing but instanced content with fewer mapsets than we have access to. Guild Wars, at launch and until it gained expansions, was no bigger than XIV is now. EQ2 was the same way, with only about 12 zones at launch. They are all now FAR bigger, but that's after YEARS of content. FFXIV: ARR is only about 2 years old and is just now getting their first expansion.
Gathering, hunts, the road to 50, class quests, job quests, FATEs, treasure hunts, regular hunts, leves, other quests...the game gets a lot of traffic through the zones we DO have. It's rare for a zone to be empty for very long in this game.
Contrast games with OMGHUGE numbers of zones, where it can be MONTHS between player visitations.
SE is currently very good at making use of the space they have, whereas the design mentality for XI and XIV 1.0 was "MAKE MANY HUUUGE ZOOOOONES!"
With very little in them.
Allow me to provide an example:
http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Ea...pa_Desert/Maps
This is Eastern Altepa Desert.
It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point, which are largely irrelevant now.
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.
EQ1 had problems like this too, ironically also with a few desert zones. They responded by merging them some years back.

[Alipoprocks]

This is Eastern Altepa Desert.
It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point . . .
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.

I have to disagree with you. Personally, I spent so much time in every zone (except Windy areas) that I still vividly remember each one and it has been 6 years since I played XI. I spent time in both eastern and western altepa leveling many jobs. I remember camping a spider NM and occasionally killing a fast running cactuar NM. There were some lower dungeons that were used for leveling and other things too.

It really doesn't make a lot of sense to compare XI with XIV because the open world was used for everything. There were very few instances compared to XIV.

[Imoye]

Doesn't feel like a world because it's not seamless.

Hint: comsole.

[Blazer]

I remember camping a spider NM and occasionally killing a fast running cactuar NM. There were some lower dungeons that were used for leveling and other things too.

The spider NM was awesome, Cactrot Rapido is legendary, but I spent the most time trying to get that damn intruder earring off the 21-24 hour NM.

EVERY ZONE IN FFXI has a purpose and you better believe you would be going there multiple times. White Mages would literately stand around town and shout making money from teleports because of the time save they gave you. The FFXI zones are so massive and ugh... I'll just stop. I miss the good ol' days.

[Alipoprocks]

The spider NM was awesome, Cactrot Rapido is legendary, but I spent the most time trying to get that damn intruder earring off the 21-24 hour NM.

EVERY ZONE IN FFXI has a purpose and you better believe you would be going there multiple times. White Mages would literately stand around town and shout making money from teleports because of the time save they gave you. The FFXI zones are so massive and ugh... I'll just stop. I miss the good ol' days.

Oh yeah, that HNM that was kited around a bush until your friends showed up to help kill it. I still miss that game and those days too.

[Felis]

1.0 Western Highlands : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMTk...22E4C3766EBA70
They reach Western Highlands around 6:34

And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZPD0sqx4gA

I hope the river is still here, even if frozen ^^

[Xatsh]

It is involved in 11 quests, none of which are all that necessary. Its only role is to serve as a teleport point, which are largely irrelevant now.
11 quests is fewer than any single zone has in FFXIV. And this zone is easily as large as some of our zones.
This zone, therefore, has little reason to exist, yet the developers went through the effort to do so.

The zone housed several NMS, entrance to underground open world dungeons, and Leveling camps as well as a few quest.

XI was NOT A QUEST DRIVEN GAME.

Honestly the zone has more reason to exist then alot of areas in XIV currently which have no purpose once the leveling quest are done.

[Laughlyn]

XI grew alot of feels.... strong feels, and now it feels like an open wound of emptyness. ; ;

Something XIV is lacking in many ways & dosent seem to be able to replicate.

[Kotemon]

Have a nostalgic laugh.

http://z4.invisionfree.com/HCII/ar/t2095.htm

"•Learning from the failure of last Doomed event(Fighting a doomed that has extra HP for nothing), they revived the same event except replacing the monster with Treant. This was of course not well recieved. At 1st, no matter how much you hit it, the HP isn't dropping, without any choices, they decided to fix it alongside the announcement "Failure in killing the treant will result in no OP warp for the server", at the end, every server killed the treant and OP warp was made avaliable to players."

Wow they literally had a gun to their head with that event.

"•Also announcing that they have prepared the game to go up to lv100 or so"

Eehhh??? It took them how long to raise the Level cap to 80?

Maybe I missed it but didn't Dynamis get released with a entry fee of 1Million gill or so for the entry item?

"•MNK hit with 1 hand only"

And what a mighty right had that was. (insert auto-translate for three words)

"•DRK can now use GSword WS, though, from .dat surf, Ragnarok and stuffs were listed as PLD only, which mean that GSword was actually meant to be a PLD weapon, DRK was extra."

Wow, that would mean Scythe was useless, and Excalibur and Aegis was meant to be a Red Mage only Relic?

Jesus H. Moley, I waited a year or so after the NA release out of doubt and got into XI three months before Chains of Promathia came out. God damn how the heck did this game last so long with a start up and coin toss development like that? No wonder some call it a successful fluke.

The world wasn't as huge as it felt. A lot of it was moving around a lot of things that would otherwise kill you and send you back to your HP. Sneak and Invisible duration was almost as RNG like craft skill ups.. With it either wearing off quickly after the cast or when you were surrounded and had no place to hide. It felt like it was designed to have you dungeon crawl across the world map or travel in Alliance from point A to point B.

FFXIV if anything is a slightly bigger world via zone size. While FFXI was mostly Zones that made you slow down, role play and use the environment so as not to get killed.

[Sanne]

While I do miss FFXI at times....

The things I don't miss are the zones, a lot of them felt empty (not interesting) to me, and most zones I never done anything in, expect passing through, now I had never interest of NM.

And I hated traveling them, at first it is great, it gives a really large feel to the world, but soon it gets boring, and took me out of the game, watching youtube and forums etc, to pass time while my chocobo was autowalking most of the time.

I had 3 chars in the end, and all 3 at leats had WHM for the first 3 teleports, and even with that it was still very long travel times :/ (which to me meant, out of the game time)

I do hope to get a lot more zones in FFXIV with the expansions. But I do hope they all make it interesting.

(I played FFXI from 2003 and the last time I played was in 2013, I did have many many breaks through the years)