Poll: Seamless+CopyPaste VS. Zones+Variety

[Rentahamster]

You can have it both ways, just with XIV it may not be possible (It's going to be a PS3 title), but they have expressed interest in changing up the current zones in various ways.

Yes, I know that in an ideal game engine you can have it both ways (lots of other games do this), but for the purposes of the thought-experiment and to get an idea of what players want more, we need to have this be an either-or decision.

[Keith_Dragoon]

Like this post if you want

A world that has smaller zones, with loading time in between zones, that allows the game to load a greater variety of textures per zone and give the artists more leeway to make the environments more detailed and less monotonous.

I had no problem "zoning" in XI or any other game especially when a more beautiful area is awaiting me on the other side. My only issue with XI's zoning was that chat that gets lost in "limbo" while zoning, not sure how the other games worked around this but XI is the only one that I recall that zoning loses all chat that was sent or recieved while zoning.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

To me as an MMO player having to zone really takes away from immersion, it was okay in FFXI but I really hated it even then. I have played several MMOs and the best feeling worlds in my honest opinion would have to be EQOA and WoW. I understand the graphical problems and what not but it is hard for me to believe that people would want zones over seamless worlds. I guess that goes to show that more people care about graphics over other things.

One thing though, this isn't something that would change in FFXIV anyways. Yoshi-P already said that only rules that effect Eorzea would change and not the game itself. Guess this is more of a "What if" kind of post?

[Chrees]

That being said, because we wanted the game to be seamless, we do understand there’s a lack of variation.

See, when they mentioned having a "seamless" world, I was under the assumption that there would be, you know...NO SEAMS. Yet we're stuck with seams between the 5 areas in the game. Made me quite the sad panda.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

I concur Chrees

[gifthorse]

Can't they just upgrade their engine to be properly seamless?

[Tirem778]

Can't they just upgrade their engine to be properly seamless?

I concur. They need to tell us all to shut up and take a few months and upgrade their engine in many aspects. I'm sure all of us can find something better to do with our lives while they work on that. XD

[Teknoman]

Seriously though, if they just add more land marks, things might be a little better. Of course we're still limited by areas. XI's starter areas were: Gustaburg, Ronfaure, and Sarutabaruta. Each of those zones lead to another area: La Theine, Tahrongi, and Konschat. 2 of which lead to Valkurm Dunes and the other to Buburimu, and then from there you could get to one of 3 other zones that connected to Jeuno with had another zone connected behind it, Qufim.

What is the seriously messed up part is that Vanilla FFXI seemed to have much more variety since it focused on diverse reasonably sized areas believably connected together, rather than just 5 large areas.

Now both games have about the same number of dungeon areas early on, but really large regions that dont have any differentiation within the zone really kills the sense of adventure and gameplay in general. Thanalan looks more like a savannah than a desert, so i'd expect more areas with decent amounts of rugged plantlife. La noscea should have more random buildings and structures being so close to a port city state. Dont really hang around the Black Shroud too much, so not many ideas there...however the dungeon areas are really nice looking, and need to be fleshed out more.

The small quest campsites and beast tribe villages are great upcoming ideas, and even though they should've been in game day one, I really hope they continue to flesh out the current huge areas and existing dungeons along with implementing new ones before even thinking about adding totally new regions. Of course back in the day, I never thought something like Movolpos would be connected to Gustaburg.

I concur. They need to tell us all to shut up and take a few months and upgrade their engine in many aspects. I'm sure all of us can find something better to do with our lives while they work on that. XD

They've still got to make sure it works fine with the PS3 as well.

Anyway...they've said that they have the capability to redo zones...so I guess the Black Shroud is up first...but as to how that is going to change, i'm still not sure. Especially since the screenshots of the quest hubs show a campsite that looks like its in normal Black Shroud.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/a...7&d=1304316371

And personally it doesnt seem like they should add a campsite and then totally redesign the area...unless the changes will only effect the further out areas of the Black Shroud that have convoluted paths...

[Verecund]

Smaller world with actual meat to it, but in all honestly we shouldn't have to choose ><

[Rentahamster]

in all honestly we shouldn't have to choose ><

Agreed, but it's not a perfect world we live in, alas. There has to be a way we can have our cake and eat it too....