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

[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.