Is it too late to make the world in FFXIV seamless?

[Kewitt]

As much as I loved Wow because of this..

Will never happen because how they have setup FFXIV. so it's too late.

Also current zones don't connect correctly to others.

[Mahri]

It has less to do with technology and everything to do with art direction and game design.

The utter vastness that the current look conveys would not be possible in an open world without massively diluting the actual content of the playable areas. Gigantic stretches of scenic but useless emptiness would exist beyond points of interest, and things like quest destinations, FATE locations, and hunt mark spawn points would be spread far away from places that players could easily access, let alone be able to readily join in with.

You could cluster these points of interest around aetheryte locations, effectively retaining the same layout they've got now, but this would only serve to demonstrate how much terrain was going completely unused -- "filler", people would call it, as they complain loudly about how long it takes to get absolutely anywhere -- even more than they do now, as Eorzea does not lack for landscapes that can be time-consuming to navigate.

Other games, such as Skyrim, do indeed offer diverse landscapes that are completely open to exploration, but these games, for one, are designed for single players to explore at leisure, and two, contain numerous instances of recycled assets and flat-out copied locations with slightly different window-dressing. FFXIV 1.0 did this. It was one of the numerous reasons why it was such an embarrassment.

As for the art direction, here's a few examples of how zone boundaries are used to help convey the size of the world beyond the explorable areas players have access to:







You'd need to either flat-out delete these vistas and instead end zones abruptly with sheer, unclimbable walls or oceans, with nothing beyond, which would be ugly, slapdash, and serve only to shrink the perceived size of the world, or populate these vast reaches with things that actually served some purpose to gameplay, which is not within the scope of the game's overall design capacity. There is such a thing as being given too big a canvas to paint on.

Simply put: Yes, it is too late. It would require that FFXIV's world be redesigned once again from the ground up to have it actually exist to combine both aesthetic appeal and having it be an enjoyable space to play in.

[tka]

PS3 only has 512mb of ram so it could not support large open areas which is why they did a bunch of smaller ones.

Only 192mb ram is free the rest is used by the system.. and only a Reference Tool has 512mb ram.

[Azazua_azura]

this wasn't even a ps3 issue. As someone who was around they did "try" to do a semi seamless world which was copy/pasted (or so ppl claim) it was vast and barely any pc could handle it cuz of the high poly count of everything. They opted for smaller maps to accomidate more details, which imo is good. Also the above games you mentioned are eoither older games, or games with simpler graphics, WoW world isn't as seemless as it appears there just no loading screens the world was very simplistic as was the games grphics.

Also they wanted to accomidate more middle end pc and ps3. before you needed a high end pc to even play @ max setting.

[Colorful]

WoW world isn't as seemless as it appears there just no loading screens the world was very simplistic as was the games grphics.

Simplistic graphics doesn't mean the world isn't seamless, if we were to go with that then no world is seamless as they pale in comparison to the Witcher 3. But while WoW's graphics are simplistic, they manage to make large, beautiful and open worlds where you can "feel" the scale. Just because the 1.0 developers didn't manage it (when I go back and watch 1.0 videos the world is so bland and pale unless you look at it from a specific screenshot angle) doesn't mean it's impossible.

Examples: 1 2

[Letbluevannback]

Huh, I played Witcher and I'm pretty sure the world was not seamless....

[Felis]

Huh, I played Witcher and I'm pretty sure the world was not seamless....

exactly. Witcher world is still zoned, even if it are very big zones.

[KaedrianLiang]

the servers CAN convert over to seamless, but its more a PS3 limitation. during the transition between zones in a seamless environment the game pulls files from the HDD/SSD which causes severe stuttering for systems with slow HDD's during 1.0. This was when i bought my first SSD to alleviate this issue, buying a SSD back then was worth every penny. Today SSD's are far more affordable and much larger capacity.

In short, we have loading screens because of retail PS3 hardware capability.

[Synestra]

Yet another good example why PS3 is hindering this game, cant wait the day SE drops its support maybe then we get QoL things that should already be here in the firstplace.

[StrejdaTom]

PS3 couldn't handle it, old computers couldn't handle it, servers couldn't handle it.
It is definitely nice to have seamless world, as it furthers the immersion (as you have said), but imo game has to be created with this idea in mind. At this moment it wouldn't probably be worth the effort and might just cause some more problems (and we already have people stopping and then running fast for next 10 metres in game, atleast here on EU servers, that breaks immersion more than not seamless world, atleast for me).

Yet another good example why PS3 is hindering this game, cant wait the day SE drops its support maybe then we get QoL things that should already be here in the firstplace.

Agreed, personally I don't think there are many people against dropping PS3 support except people who still have only PS3. But they would still be able to play the game, the game just wouldn't be expanded with PS3 (and its huge limitations) in mind.