[Dec Request] Make all areas seamless overtime.

[DamianFatale]

Commercially speaking, doing it just to make things match isn't a strong argument. I'm sure everyone would appreciate it in a world with unlimited resources but this wouldn't add much value for most people. A whole expansion with no new maps to allow for reworking of old ones? It wouldn't be popular, especially after having done something similar already to turn the game around for ARR. People would expect new maps for an expansion now. And remaking the game's maps is such a massive task that it's a big ask for a free patch release, especially when it wouldn't increase subscriptions in any meaningful way.

you completely misunderstand. I never said a sole expansion of improvements.

[DamianFatale]

Nevar forget

This is NOT what I'm suggesting. All I'm saying is that they should combine several zones to make the game have less loading times. I'm not asking them to bring back the tangled copy and paste mess of 1.0

[ErryK]

Let me remind you of this little tidbit you posted a while back:

I feel like there's too many suggestions floating around. Not that player feedback is bad, it's just that there's no way they can accommodate all of us. All I'm seeing on the forums lately is suggestions of things that you think the developers should do. Then If people don't get what they want, they whine about it forever. I'm definitely supportive of fan content, but we need to let the developers make the next expansions how they would make them. That's how new, original, and solid content is usually made. I find it hard to believe that the developers can sustain themselves on fan suggestions alone. They need to be inspired for themselves.

Now that's aside, I don't believe all locations need to be seamless, and the city states needn't be seamless either. The main reason Yoshi-P stated for the fact that he would not make all city-states seamless is because it allows them to make the locations appear strikingly different. "The Pillars" area of Ishgard would not be possible if it were seamless due to the fact that the area is supposed to be located very high up, while "Foundation" is the base-level of Ishgard, you would have to walk a lot... just for a little bit of immersion.

[Eimian_Eda]

I don't think old zones have any need for flying, but I do love the idea of seamless city states.
Maybe not all, but Gridania (The city, not the actual zone) is pretty small, might be possible with there at least

[seekified]

Making the actual cities seamless should be fairly easy for them since there's not a lot "missing", except for Ishgard. The areas in the Shroud, La Noscea and Thanalan have much greater distances between them and they'd need to add substantial amounts of completely new ground area. To make them flying-compatible would require reworking the entire maps, since you can bet they've taken shortcuts with models and textures to improve performance where they could, since the world wasn't meant to be viewed from certain camera angles. There's probably entire sections of the maps that don't have textures at all since we'd never see those parts anyway, and that would all need to be fixed.

It's a lot of work for what is essentially a QoL update. I definitely agree that it'd be nice, but they'd either need to hire a bunch of new asset creators and level designers, or they'd need to divert significant amounts of the current team's attention away from making new stuff for a long time.

[DamianFatale]

Let me remind you of this little tidbit you posted a while back:


Now that's aside, I don't believe all locations need to be seamless, and the city states needn't be seamless either. The main reason Yoshi-P stated for the fact that he would not make all city-states seamless is because it allows them to make the locations appear strikingly different. "The Pillars" area of Ishgard would not be possible if it were seamless due to the fact that the area is supposed to be located very high up, while "Foundation" is the base-level of Ishgard, you would have to walk a lot... just for a little bit of immersion.

Oh yay, someone being aggressive toward me, based on something said in the past. You might want to add passive aggressive sarcasm as well. Point being, stop. You're not fooling anyone. You do have a point on the design of Ishgard, but that doesn't mean they couldn't try, or at least combine the other cities.

[DamianFatale]

It's a lot of work for what is essentially a QoL update. I definitely agree that it'd be nice, but they'd either need to hire a bunch of new asset creators and level designers, or they'd need to divert significant amounts of the current team's attention away from making new stuff for a long time.

I think it would be worth the effort, at some point the game is going to age, and it will age bad, like all games before it, but I would prefer if they hired more staff to get it done.

[Serilda]

you completely misunderstand. I never said a sole expansion of improvements.

No, you misunderstand.

Say I'm YoshiP's boss. The improvements you want come with a cost. I'll pull numbers out of the air for the sake of debate about the time and resources required - remember that the GARO gear took them a year even with multiple people involved. Say adding long transition maps between each zone and designing them to look good, as well as resolving the technical challenges in sorting out the transitions, would cost S-E a few hundred thousand dollars. Then say that redesigning all pre-HW areas to add flying would cost nearly as much as developing an entire expansion - it involves multiple artists, designers, modellers and testers for a huge number of zones, far more than HW added.

Tell me what the benefit is, other than in improving the immersion of a tiny number of people who aren't just going to use the aetherytes to bypass the walks after the first arduous jog. Justify the budget you're asking for. Where is the value to S-E coming from? Such a huge amount of work for the team can only be justified as the lead feature of a new expansion or an ongoing, slow, very expensive and inconsistent - having a seamless Shroud but not La Noscea would be weird - series of patches which add zero additional income. It would almost have to be an expansion and nobody would thank you for stalling the game for two years just so you could use your Bennu mount to get to the Gridania MB faster.

I agree that some zones could greatly benefit from better aetheryte placement, however, and that has negligible cost to develop.

[ErryK]

Oh yay, someone being aggressive toward me, based on something said in the past. You might want to add passive aggressive sarcasm as well. Point being, stop. You're not fooling anyone.

I'm just saying, you said this then just went back to making suggestions anyways, lol.

[DamianFatale]

I'm just saying, you said this then just went back to making suggestions anyways, lol.

How would you feel if I went back, and quoted old out of context posts, every time you said something I didn't agree with? It would suck. People deserve to learn and grow, not have people constantly bringing up the past when it's unneeded. Please let my past stay in the past.