I have a simple hope for 8.0: The return of single-zone starting cities! (+Ishgard?)

[Enkidoh]

As a 1.0 player who remembers only too well how 1.0's cities were, it actually wasn't great at all, having the cities as single areas ended up as just a laggy mess that actually broke things because of the high resolution (and it had nothing to do with 'PS3 limitations', it was just being too ambitious for the technology available).

Ul'dah especially had the worst of it, you couldn't even run through the main gate but had to deviate around through side passageways to allow the game client to break the zone up into more managable 'chunks', to say nothing of the Inn Room being broken due to so many people congregating in the Quicksand they had to put a backdoor away from there to enter the Inn just to stop the server crashing.

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

Nostalgia for 1.0 aside, things really are better now than they were back then.

[Xbob42]

As a 1.0 player who remembers only too well how 1.0's cities were, it actually wasn't great at all, having the cities as single areas ended up as just a laggy mess that actually broke things because of the high resolution (and it had nothing to do with 'PS3 limitations', it was just being too ambitious for the technology available).

Ul'dah especially had the worst of it, you couldn't even run through the main gate but had to deviate around through side passageways to allow the game client to break the zone up into more managable 'chunks', to say nothing of the Inn Room being broken due to so many people congregating in the Quicksand they had to put a backdoor away from there to enter the Inn just to stop the server crashing.

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

Nostalgia for 1.0 aside, things really are better now than they were back then.

Uhh. The entire game was a laggy mess. The PS3 limitations I mentioned were in 2.0, not 1.0. The game doesn't lag/drop frames by an excessive amount when we have 200+ people fighting an S-Rank (dependent on your personal hardware of course, but I've never experienced 2.0+ performance anywhere near as bad as 1.0, and 1.0 rarely had many people gathered at all), it's not going to lag because there's 50% more people in Limsa. The engine and modern machines are more than a match for rendering the entirety of any of the cities because all modern zones are tremendously more massive than any starting city.

Know how I know this? Because the entire point of my post is that new expansions have single-zone cities.

It kind of reads like you have a very limited understanding of the subject and are just making sweeping statements that don't really jive with reality. The engine and modern systems are totally capable of handling an entire city.

Finally, it has nothing to do with "nostalgia" and everything to do with coherent map design. Split cities are weird and feel bad. They're antiquated and unusual in the genre and provide a benefit we no longer need.

[Enkidoh]

Uhh. The entire game was a laggy mess. The PS3 limitations I mentioned were in 2.0, not 1.0. The game doesn't lag when we have 200+ people fighting an S-Rank, it's not going to lag because there's 50% more people in Limsa.

Know how I know this? Because the entire point of my post is that new expansions have single-zone cities.

It kind of reads like you have a very limited understanding of the subject and are just making sweeping statements that don't really jive with reality. The engine and modern systems are totally capable of handling an entire city.

Except it was also a conscious choice by Yoshi to make ARR's cities broken into two to make them easier to manage and to cut down lag for the reasons I mentioned (and because 1.0 players were complaining about it - it was one of the major player complaints about 1.0).

Having said that, as Yoshi has gone back and redesigned several dungeons based on player feedback, I guess changing the starting cities back to single zones may be possible, but really, you're not actually going to gain anything - modern Gridania still would require travelling down those stupid long corridors between New and Old Gridania again, or leaving the gates out in the Black Shroud - all the current arrangement of split zones does is skip all that, cutting out the pointless and dull padding.

Restoring them to single zones will not suddennly make them on par with the Crystarium or Kugane in size I'm sorry to say.

[Lihtleita]

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

i wouldnt be surprised if they kept zone dividers up but surely rejoining (lol) the segmented cities wouldnt be that taxing? it feels weird looking down at limsa aetherite from the upper decks and seeing it deserted

[Hasrat]

i wouldnt be surprised if they kept zone dividers up but surely rejoining (lol) the segmented cities wouldnt be that taxing? it feels weird looking down at limsa aetherite from the upper decks and seeing it deserted

I'd say this is very likely underestimating the work involved. It wouldn't be a "rejoining." This would require remaking the entire city, ensuring every single quest NPC is accurately placed, and there's lots of those in the cities; somehow not breaking things in the process for players in the middle of those quests, since this is in effect deleting the quest marker and creating a new one; not causing errors/crashes for any players that left the game in the old city zones before attempting to remove them and replace with the remade one; to just start the list of potential issues.

I really can't see them ever going to that effort for what little would be gained. Worse, nearly every time they've gone back to re-adjust old content like that, there's almost always been significant problems and oversights from the dev team not taking every single possible situation into account.

This will likely always fall under "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[Xirean]

I'd say this is very likely underestimating the work involved. It wouldn't be a "rejoining." This would require remaking the entire city, ensuring every single quest NPC is accurately placed, and there's lots of those in the cities; somehow not breaking things in the process for players in the middle of those quests, since this is in effect deleting the quest marker and creating a new one; not causing errors/crashes for any players that left the game in the old city zones before attempting to remove them and replace with the remade one; to just start the list of potential issues.

I really can't see them ever going to that effort for what little would be gained. Worse, nearly every time they've gone back to re-adjust old content like that, there's almost always been significant problems and oversights from the dev team not taking every single possible situation into account.

This will likely always fall under "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

It is still possible to do without adding more map terrain or messing up the quests. Vindictus is a decent example of a starting zone that was two seperate maps that later was merged into one. Their solution? They basically hid a buffer zone in the hallway connecting them. It's relatively seemless and hard to notice unless you are looking for it. The mini-map would still show that you went from one map section to another. A similar thing could be done here. I do however agree that it's not something I would expect to be fixed. As you said, it's not broken.

[Xbob42]

I'd say this is very likely underestimating the work involved. It wouldn't be a "rejoining." ...

(Snipped because I hit the character limit, please see the actual quote!)

Regardless of how likely it is or isn't, it is not my job to concern myself with the technical details, only to offer up my hope of what I think would be a relatively simple, tangible improvement to the game, and that would enhance the new player and veteran player experience alike. And I do think it would be more beneficial to new players than most might think. Especially those familiar with more open MMOs. The idea of a city with 2 different loading screens that connect only at weird points along with the map (which a lot of new players seems EXTRA confused by, though I'm not new so I'm not sure what exactly confuses them so much) is probably a stopping point for many potential players.

Frankly every single thing you can recommend in an MMO can be viewed as a huge PITA that the devs wouldn't want to undertake. "Redo the old zones for flying!" followed by a list of 700 reasons why it's not worth it and why it's fine to just run around. "Redo old dungeons with better graphics and less lame bosses!" "But that would be so much work for barely any difference for just little 10-15 minute snippets of content!" "Build a new zone with spells you can switch in and out at will and 1-on-1 boss duels! Also you can't use those spells anywhere else!" "You want them to build a bunch of spells that only work in one zone?! New mechanics?!"

I've heard all of these same counter-arguments before in every MMO I've ever played and I've played many. The bold developers unafraid of some challenges tend to lead (as we saw with 1.0 -> 2.0) while those who stagnate because they can't imagine a high enough ROI on improving this or that aspect of the game often... languish. I think we all know of some examples of that.

That isn't to say my idea is super worthy of attention or anything as audacious or self-centered as that, as I said it's just a simple hope not a demand or an expectation. But I like bold Square Enix best. And this thread is for them, not really an invitation for counter-arguments on why it's infeasible. Although of course it's not my forum, all are welcome to provide feedback to the idea! Now I'm just going in circles, so I'll just reiterate once more that for me, stuff like this is absolutely worth it as a longtime player of MMOs.