I... really don't get the intense nostalgia some people on this forum feel toward a game that was so poorly received that it was one of the biggest flops in MMO history. The areas were big, yes, but they were random collections of copy/pasted map sections, and the "forest" was mostly made up of unrealistic tunnel-like corridors. There was a single secret area copy/pasted throughout the map. The whole game had a claustrophobic feel to it despite the areas being "bigger." Each world zone (Black Shroud, Thanalan, etc) was all one enormous zone, but the game ran abysmally and couldn't handle lots of people in one place because of it. As far as I can tell, the reason everywhere was so claustrophobically designed was because it couldn't handle very many people/mobs in line of sight, so they couldn't have large, open areas with the super-zones.

Seriously, FFXIV 1.0 was not a good game. If it was, it would never have been completely rewritten. The zones were not well designed in 1.0. If they were, 2.0 would have had the same zones. They were terrible, and they were fixed, and they are better now.