I don't feel like i'm playing an mmo...and I know why

[Dreamer]

To put this in perspective...the absurdly, ridiculously small zones in this game are smaller than both WoW and City of Heroes, both of which were launched a decade or more ago.

[Naunet]

I agree whole-heartedly with you, OP, and I'm just gonna leave this illustration of my thoughts right here:



I've posted it before, but the image remains relevant. Open up the zones. Stop funneling us from one quest location to the next and give us the entire zone to explore rather than just narrow canyons and small clearings. And stop with the utterly arbitrary invisible walls. There is no reason this rock should not be climbable when I can run all the way around it on the ground and it has a perfectly reasonable slope. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to enter a river or cross a river by going down into it.

oh you fell off a cliff? Too bad you're dead.

Yes, this, too! It infuriates me that I'm not allowed to jump to my death. I know that may sound strange, but damnit, remove the bumpers; I want to play a real game of bowling.

The thing is, when an MMO comes out with all these classic MMO features ( gigantic open world, open pvp, super grindy leveling system)

Uh, I think you're 1) misrepresenting what causes MMOs to "flop" and 2) grouping completely unrelated things together to try and make your point. I can't think of a single MMO that failed because its zones were "too big".

If you look at the min PC requirements for 1.0 vs 2.0, you can see that they made it so.

There are MMOs with much lower min PC requirements who manage more open-feeling zones than XIV.

[Ildur]

Corridor worlds seem to be a common thing in the East, or at least the few eastern games I have played. Some manage to disguise this better than others, and even ARR manages it in the area around Drybone and the Sagolii Desert areas.

I reject the idea that we have to give them time to grow. Open-world areas aren't something you change after releasing them unless you want to pull a Cataclysm thing...which we did already. 2.0's zones are like they are because Dalamud went kaboom and changed the landscape. No, this areas were designed like this, probably for some weird technical limitations (insert senseless blaming of the PS3 here!) and because Squee missed the point about what was wrong with 1.0's areas. Sadly, this is not something they can solve easily. They'd have to redesign some areas, and the most they can do right now is take away all the annoyingly arbitrary invisible walls that serve no purpose, like this previously mentioned rock.

[Leowilde]

I'm giving you an enormous like, OP. I made a thread a couple of days ago concerning much of the same dilemmas:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-just-dungeons

And like others have already said, it bugs me a great deal that there are houses, settlements and NPCs literally everywhere. There is no wilderness whatsoever, not even Sagolii Desert - you can see the nearest aetheryte very easily.

Edit:
I don't mind having to see the loading screen in between zones, the zones themselves are what troubles me.

[synaesthetic]

IMO, the problem isn't the zone lines, it's that there's so little actual space to go. The world isn't very big. FFXI had zone lines and they were much more annoying than the ones in XIV (countless LS comments of "zone" so that people wouldn't miss part of a conversation, them were the days).

The problem is there aren't many zones, and once you get to the level cap you don't really go anywhere except major cities and Wineport. It stops being so big and becomes somewhat like a hub-and-instance game. I don't want to make everything open-world, but I would like to see more zones.

[Amberion]

(countless LS comments of "zone" so that people wouldn't miss part of a conversation, them were the days).

Thank you. I had actually forgot that. Those where the days. *Overcome with nostalgia feelings*

[Millimidget]

Someone mentioned corridoring... maybe that's it.

It's bad, and it's disappointing that the genre has taken such tremendous strides backwards on this (wtf why do developers copy all the crappy things WoW does wrong, but not the handful of things they did right).

But it's not SWTOR bad.