Anyone Else Feel, That the World is Too Pretty?

[Seig345]

Perhaps, but that doesn't really have the same emotional impact.

Then your complaint is that the game puts you down 5 years after the calamity, and not 5 months. 5 years was plenty of time for the continent to have recovered to the point it has.

In FFVI, god statues were pushed out of alignment, tearing continents apart and ruining the world's balance of life. in FFXIV, one elder dragon attacked. He didn't tear it up, and he didn't come down to destroy the continent, he was imprisoned, and therefore reasonably pissed off, and took it out on anything near by before going wherever he went for that Coil thing; he didn't take a giant elder primal plow and dig up every inch of the continent.

They didn't have to radically change the entire world's layout for 2.0, just explain some of the necessary changes. Gridania's been considerably changed in its layout. Just look at Old Gridania; there's several pathways now filled with rubble. The CNJ and Btn guilds, along with the amphitheater, all used to be accessed by paths that led off from the northwest corner of the city. now the theatre is practically in the center, and the CNJ and Btn guilds have been moved considerably southward.

In fact, the entire Black Shroud area is one giant gaping wound. The fact that you can see the sky at all is a sign of a huge change. It was called The Black Shroud because you were under 100% canopy within the entirity of the wood's borders. When Dalamud was nearing and the imperial airships were buzzing about, you could only hear the noise above, otherwise everything actually looked the same. You could hardly even tell if it was night or day. Gridania was the only place you could see the sky, since there were clearings enough for there to be a gap in the canopy. Limsa and Ul'dah are actual structures, which can be rebuilt or repaired. Trees, not so much, even with the aether, as made evident by the current state of the shroud.