New Areas

[Dibria]

I don't like zones. I like a seamless world.
EXAMPLE TIME: Skyrim, huge game, MOSTLY OPEN except for the big cities. I got a mod that makes it where its open skyrim or whatever, and the diffrence is crazy, sooooo much better, just that little zone going away boosted my immersion over 9000

That's a matter of personal perspective, I found Skryrims environment to be rather dull and repetitive; snow, trees, dirt, rocks... meh. Zones make it easier to generate a seemingly large world without endless traveling, I'm not saying open worlds are bad, I like a lot of open world games, but if you have one continuous area from Ul'dah to Gridania you either have to have them so close that the dessert to forest change feels unnatural or make large expanses of empty land to cross to get there.

[Colino]

Good to bring these up!

PS. Really hope that is a snow zone XD i miss the snow!!

There was a huge thread about this not long ago... Not sure where it went.

But if I'm not mistaken someone was saying north Coerthas will become at least partially snowy... But yeah we definitely need a full on snow zone!

[Mug]

This looks like Natalan.

[Picoman]

Its far too late in the day to romanticise with the idea of keeping seamless. That boat sailed off a long time ago. Welcome aboard the zone train.

<Travels back in time>

Thread topic: Burn The Black Shroud to the ground!
YouTube Video: Copy-Pasta!

<Back>

Well, i can't remember exactly where all the quotes, threads ect are hiding but there was certainly a huge dislike for the copy paste feel. (See video link from 8:30mins)

I am really looking forward to The Black Shroud makeover, i love that autumn themed forest zone. Can't wait to see how the snow zone in Coerthas has turned out also.

I think the zones will feel big enough but it will bring back the problem of having to alert people in chat that your about to zone. (Although, they did say they were looking into solutions for that).

Man, the topic of the world redesign really gets me pumped for 2.0 especially when looking at the concept art.

Yoshi-P! Stay up till 5:30am on a Friday and sneak us some screenshots!! (Just like the Job quests).

[Jinko]

Why not just make it seamless? They are getting new servers.

Because SE obviously don't know how to do seemless.

That being said Yoshi said the zones are pretty massive so I guess it won't be such a big deal.

As someone said Skyrim was pretty repetitive, of course Tera has amazingly detailed and different zones and does it all with streaming so SE has no excuse really.

I'm happy with Zones if they each have a completely different feel, like FF11 did.

[BruceyBruceyBangBang]

That's a matter of personal perspective, I found Skryrims environment to be rather dull and repetitive; snow, trees, dirt, rocks... meh. Zones make it easier to generate a seemingly large world without endless traveling, I'm not saying open worlds are bad, I like a lot of open world games, but if you have one continuous area from Ul'dah to Gridania you either have to have them so close that the dessert to forest change feels unnatural or make large expanses of empty land to cross to get there.

Correct. This is what you get with seamless. If you have a world that is seamless and you want to make it unique you are going to have an asinine file size. What seamless does is take a part of the same land and morphs the terrain to a different shape over and over as you move through it, but it generally all looks the same regardless. Some games do it better than others. Some don't. FFXIV certainly doesn't do a great job with it, but regardless you cannot really have a unique world like a world you'd find in the series and make it seamless.

A final fantasy world is generally too out there and unique in it's art direction to get away with it. Skyrim can due to it's art direction. It is suppose to have a realistic mid-evil feel.

[Picoman]

ZAM Question #9: Seamless zones are being eliminated in Version 2.0. Many people like seamless zones, which weren't in FFXI. What is the benefit to having zones with transitions?

Yoshida: "One of (my) favorite games lately is Red Dead Redemption, and they did the seamless world really beautifully. If you could make an MMORPG that fit in that size of a world, then seamless would be the way to go. For a large MMORPG, you have to have a lot of content, and when the map becomes too small, then you don't have enough room to put all that content in. For example, you have a battle with Garuda, and you want to have that on the top of a mountain, a very big mountain. But in a seamless world, people are going to have to get to the bottom of the mountain, and then climb up this whole mountain to get there. Unless your MMO is called Mountain Climbing Online, it's not something that most players are going to want to do. Yes it's seamless, but do players really want to spend 30 minutes climbing the mountain before they get to the fight.

"If you do have, for example, a small road leading up there, then yes, you can have monsters on it and have it a challenge to get up there. But if it's a seamless, open world, then you're just going to have this big mountain, and players are just going to be running up this mountain and that's it.

"You can make the game so you have that road up, make invisible walls and make that road up to the mountain and have it filled up with monsters, but that just creates stress for the players. Yes it's seamless, but there's that unwanted stress, when players, what they want to do is fight Garuda. Even though you take away the seamlessness by having the zones, you can still make the experience similar. For example, once you get to the top of the mountain, you can still look down and see the bottom of the mountain and have this wonderful landscape in front of you, but without having to actually go up that landscape. You can go there, fight your battle and still see the beautiful scenery without having to go through the pain.

"The one benefit of going beyond seamless is you can make things more dynamic. If you want to do something dynamic, yes you can make something dynamic in a seamless world, but you have to do everything in between there as well, which takes a lot of time and effort and can be a very challenging thing. By removing the seamlessness, you can make each area be that much more dynamic and add that much more content to it, and so that's the exchange that we're offering the players. Yes we're going to be moving to this zone type of system, but each area is going to be that much more original and that much more dynamic."

[Mug]

I remember that the battle climbing comment really saddened me. I want to spend 30 minutes climbing a mountain.

[Colino]

"Yes we're going to be moving to this zone type of system, but each area is going to be that much more original and that much more dynamic."

And that's all I'm hoping for really. If they can't do seamless without bland and copy/paste everywhere, I'd much rather have zones.

[BruceyBruceyBangBang]

I remember that the battle climbing comment really saddened me. I want to spend 30 minutes climbing a mountain.

You are right. I remember reading that and thinking... did he just talk himself out of a good idea because of what he ASSUMES we'd feel about it? That is preposterous.