Quote Originally Posted by Frysia View Post
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.