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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
There are MMOs with much lower min PC requirements who manage more open-feeling zones than XIV.
Last edited by Naunet; 01-05-2014 at 02:04 AM.
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.
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.
Last edited by Leowilde; 01-05-2014 at 03:37 AM.
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.
Thank you. I had actually forgot that. Those where the days. *Overcome with nostalgia feelings*(countless LS comments of "zone" so that people wouldn't miss part of a conversation, them were the days).
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.
|
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
Cookie Policy
This website uses cookies. If you do not wish us to set cookies on your device, please do not use the website. Please read the Square Enix cookies policy for more information. Your use of the website is also subject to the terms in the Square Enix website terms of use and privacy policy and by using the website you are accepting those terms. The Square Enix terms of use, privacy policy and cookies policy can also be found through links at the bottom of the page.