The World: so Big so Beautiful... But yet so empty

[dinnertime]

The zones lack substance honestly. Sometimes there's nothing to see, sometimes there is something to see, but you'll only know very little about it even if you try to find lore about it. Settlements seem so barren and they'll just have a bunch of buildings you can't access. The zones feel kinda flat, too.

[Shurrikhan]

The zones lack substance honestly. Sometimes there's nothing to see, sometimes there is something to see, but you'll only know very little about it even if you try to find lore about it. Settlements seem so barren and they'll just have a bunch of buildings you can't access. The zones feel kinda flat, too.

The sad thing there is that sometimes it doesn't take all that much to draw a player into a zone or especially a given settlement, depending on the size and scope thereof, but those parts that extend beyond merely filling them up with items, objects, doodads, etc. are absolutely crucial, more so in almost every case than the breadth or depth of objects themselves. In essence, so long as the object feels primarily decorative (and for reasons not taken from the settlement), it will fail to be wholly impactful; apparent and reasonable utility is necessary, not because it's "realistic", but because it tells you something about the area.

For me, it took all of two quests to fall in love with Owl's Nest, a small settlement in the eastern mountain borders of 1.x Coerthas. The first was a request from a doctor who was treating a wounded Ixali in secret, away from the eyes of his neighbors (who you could speak to and see why this would be such a massive concern), and the second from a shepherd who had seen strange lights and shadows behind the clouds (subtly encroaching Garlean gunships). I could talk to each NPC, and though not all houses could be entered (which seemed fine given that I wouldn't leave my house unlocked either), there was a decent sense that they were real residences and belonged to an actual community. Add to this their patrol cavalry and their captain being accessed through the Lancer and Archer quest-lines and while small a small-ish settlement it felt very vivid. Heck, a couple of the mere ring-fence and tent encampments felt like they had more to them, just from the advice and leve materials you could get off one of them and the behests from the other.

What actually made ARR feel so flat to me by comparison is that there seemed to be no sense of purpose for so many of the structures. My first lasting thought after seeing the revised Coerthas wasn't even how many of my favorite locals and how much of the overall size and sense of the place had been removed, but simply... "why would a keep be within a half-mile of another?" Until you get to the inquisition, which read like a shallow trope-heavy synopsis of a story, Coerthas actually felt somehow less populated than before simply because the expectation was in place for a far larger community, based on local needs and utilities, and yet that all felt unaccessible. One could faintly guess at the situations by the doodads, but then the next sub-area would contradict it. More than not feeling "realistic", necessarily, it felt "unfinished" and "opaque". Added colonizing details and doodads do little in themselves to enhance a setting; it's the access to the living lore of the area that makes it feel full, and that requires whole concepts more.

[Shurrikhan]

They don't had tunnels, yes. But they had canyons

And this was a bad thing? If so, I find it odd that ARR had higher portions of constrained areas than 1.x ever did, and HW and SB still more than, say, old La Noscea or Thanalan.

While the Emerald Shroud, especially in the stretches around Bentbranch and Camp Tranquil had practically become memes, many forget that the Black Shroud also had vast open wade-able misty rivers and multiple levels of terrain that gave it much more traversable area overall than one would expect from the reports of "tunnel, path, glade; repeat". Outer La Noscea is more constrained by comparison, even if certainly a more unique and generally likeable zone. Thanalan averaged to larger expanses than any of its current sections. La Noscea was more open on average than any zones since. Coerthas was something of a middle-ground; the mountains broke and blended it seemingly realistically into rolling canyon sections, especially in the SW corner around the old Boulder Downs or, separately, in the high paths around Prominence Point. Other areas of Coerthas, however, were split only by the rivers or the central gorge and were otherwise unbroken nearly to max sight distance. They were designed to create different moods through the openness of traverseable space, and did so, even if far from perfectly. This is part of any zone design philosophy, not just 1.x's, and you'll find little in that overall take on zone design that you won't find in any other MMOs or in XIV since, save perhaps for a portrayal of Eorzea as a frontier, instead of an arbitrarily populated space.

I'm not sure why people assume that because these zones were large, they must have been thin or largely unusable (or by extension that there was a some sort of cap to traversable area renderable); WoW was able to seamlessly place entire continents into single zones with PCs about the power of a first-generation Xbox. The area itself is irrelevant.

In going from 1.x to 2.0 they simply swapped the copy paste endlessly looping terrain for loading screens, since people complained about the copy paste terrain.

That would only had been the case if assets were being changed across those hallway areas of 1.x's zones. They weren't. In fact, areas where assets were being swapped out were just as often open areas, such in crossing a wade-able stream than ran along either end of the adjusted areas, meaning that both were still being loaded, rather than one traded for the other beneath the obfuscation of a hallway area. The famous loops of 1.x were less often a limitation of processing power as a limitation in budget.