SE, we need to talk about your zone ceilings

[Riardon]

There are many things that XIV is good at. Scaling is not one of them. FFXIV has a serious issue on scaling sizes and make them feel believable. Zone ceiling too low is one of them. Others include wrong sized buildings. Some buildings feel so small and they try to do that trick with extra small windows to make it appear as larger until you go a bit closer and see that it's made for ants. One other example is the Specula Imperatoris tower which gets shot by the canon. You can barely fit a chocobo inside yet it was supposed to be a tower where many people died. Other issues with scaling include an "army" of 4-5 NPCs in a cutscene liberating a whole nation and another is the leader of this nation who speaks to his people. That crowd is only 10 people or so. Please SE start making things properly sized and don't go so cheap.

[Radiosuitcase]

There are many things that XIV is good at. Scaling is not one of them. FFXIV has a serious issue on scaling sizes and make them feel believable. Zone ceiling too low is one of them. Others include wrong sized buildings. Some buildings feel so small and they try to do that trick with extra small windows to make it appear as larger until you go a bit closer and see that it's made for ants. One other example is the Specula Imperatoris tower which gets shot by the canon. You can barely fit a chocobo inside yet it was supposed to be a tower where many people died. Other issues with scaling include an "army" of 4-5 NPCs in a cutscene liberating a whole nation and another is the leader of this nation who speaks to his people. That crowd is only 10 people or so. Please SE start making things properly sized and don't go so cheap.

This is an MMO, not a triple A single player game. You need to be realistic.

[Riardon]

This is an MMO, not a triple A single player game. You need to be realistic.

There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

[FallenArisen0990]

There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

Clearly not thinking about the LCD. If you want all that, you would need to go Mid/High-end PC only then.

[Frysia]

I'll play the devil's advocate :P ...

As much as it would be nice to fly even higher, I think there's a technological reason behind the ceiling restriction. Namely two: Distance cull, and Z-axis fighting. My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore. So, it wouldn't make for nice screenies anyways, and wouldn't be that great to look at either while flying.

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

[Naunet]

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

You're very right! At least in perception - I can't claim to have exact numbers. But HW flying definitely felt like you could go quite high - above mountains and such.

I was super sad that we can't go to where M'naago stood in that cutscene.

[Radiosuitcase]

There are other MMORPGs with far better scaling with larger maps and more convincing building sizes. They don't need to make it triple A but ant sized towers and an "army" of 3-4 NPCs in a cutscene? C'mon

They also have far worse graphics.

[ErryK]

Things like this are why your zones feel so claustrophobic!

That's an overstatement... like seriously, you're in the middle of the sky and you're worried about a platform on a tower, and that's what makes it claustrophobic?

I'll play the devil's advocate :P ...

As much as it would be nice to fly even higher, I think there's a technological reason behind the ceiling restriction. Namely two: Distance cull, and Z-axis fighting. My guess is... when you get reaaaalllllyyyy high up, the ground models and textures start to look like garbage, the maps start to have noticeable holes/gaps in them, and the textures start clipping all over the place. It would become an eyesore. So, it wouldn't make for nice screenies anyways, and wouldn't be that great to look at either while flying.

This is very true, this is one of the many reasons why we don't have flying available in 2.0 areas. Some parts of the map would be incomplete, etc.

[DaikiKiyoshi]

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

Well in SB you can also go underwater :P Though with the loading screen between underwater and above it does make it seem almost like a separate zone so idk.

[Kyonika]

I have screenshots of entire zones from HW where I see everything fine. HW seemed to have a much bigger Z-Axis than SB does for some reason. Look at Sea of Clouds or Churning Mists where not only can you fly quite high up, but you can go under the floating islands as well.

Do these screenshots include shots taken from the perspective that lies beyond the game area's bounding box limits? If you did, you would likely notice optimizations take effect in a glaringly obvious way, but also artifacts like those due to the lack of floating-point precision at larger distances (i.e. z-fighting), as well as other issues too. And if there were no optimizations (i.e. distance cull or LOD), your FPS would start to suffer. In an MMO, FPS is god! Therefore the maps are designed, balanced and governed for maximum presentation for the hardware that is readily available to the playerbase as a whole. To increase these limits would be unfairly asking everyone on PS4 to upgrade to PS4 Pro while disallowing 4K HD. Similarly, it would place an onus on the PC playerbase to upgrade their GPUs to handle the increased load, just to accommodate more graphical exposure.

I wish we could fly higher in the new SB zones ... but there's a technical reason why we can't (there's a lot of geometry to render: i.e. The Peaks or The Fringes). The map design and QA teams almost certainly went over all of this with a fine-toothed comb, and arrived at a consensus that would work for everybody, and make the game playable and good looking all at the same time.