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

[Enkidoh]

Loading screens are only an issue if you're still running the game on a HDD - with a SSD though zones load up extremely fast (I reinstalled the game with Win 10 on a SSD a few months ago and was blown away by how quickly zoning is, so making it moot).

As for your comment about them being "coherent places", what exactly do you mean by that? The three cities are full of players regardless - so, why is this an issue? Please help a kitty out here!

[Xbob42]

Loading screens are only an issue if you're still running the game on a HDD - with a SSD though zones load up extremely fast (I reinstalled the game with Win 10 on a SSD a few months ago and was blown away by how quickly zoning is, so making it moot).

As for your comment about them being "coherent places", what exactly do you mean by that? The three cities are full of players regardless - so, why is this an issue? Please help a kitty out here!

Loading screens being fast are still loading screens -- an interruption of gameplay for technical purposes. The less you have, the more coherent (that is, unified, whole) the experience is, the more coherent a city is. It feels like one continuous place that exists as that place. Like Lihtleits above me says, looking down at the lower decks from the upper decks and seeing it completely empty when it's most certainly not is just this weird layer of abstraction that makes the city feel less alive, and less like a real place. And by real place I mean a physical space that makes sense within the game, not a real-life place.

It's the same reason why being able to run right out of Limsa right into La Noscea in 1.0 was cool. It makes the world feel bigger, more connected, like it has a sense of scale, like monsters exist right outside the city gates and could get inside and thus guards and stuff make more sense, there's both big and small reasons why I like it. But I also fully understand, as I said in my original post, that something like this probably won't make a return, and without being able to mount to leave the city quickly, would probably just slow the game down for newer players. Zone transitions that move you a great deal of distance are more sensible than arbitrary ones like in the cities. And I'm fine with that, I don't need a return to it since it would likely be a big undertaking. I only want it for the cities because it still feels like a hold-over from the old days and does not match the modern design of other cities in the games.

Even just atmosphere, seeing folks in the Upper Decks doing stuff during a Halloween events would get me talking to them and make me curious, little stuff like that is important to me.