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

[Calyanare]

Honestly, that's one thing that really starts to irk me... When every corner of the world feels like its been settled and nature is never anything but a 'bridge' between settlements. :-/

Considering that's how most of the developed world (barring Australia) is and has been for at least a couple centuries now, I doubt most game designers know anything different. I, for one, would find large amounts of wilderness with nothing in it with tiny pockets of far-flung settlement only at the far reaches, very alien, and overwhelming, even unrealistic compared to my own real experiences (yeah, I've been in real wilderness, but after I leave it still doesn't seem real--and at least in the US it is peppered with pockets of settlement, even if only a house or two, in most places). Maybe this is what people want in games, though; I don't know. I can see the appeal of that, but I can also see the appeal of what this game already has, as well: easily-traversable zones that remind one of real life and don't take forever to cross. One of the aims of this iteration of the game was always to be newbie-friendly, and large inhospitable zones are pretty much the opposite of that.

[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.

[Allyra]

I just wonder if it's technically possible to remove Zone restrictions for PC and PS4 versions and just keep them for PS3 version.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but people need to understand this. If the ps3 version never existed we would still have these zone lines.

For whatever reason be it terrible hardware, coding, etc. the game could not run in a seamless world on the pc. This is not strictly a ps3 issue.

The zones helped tremendously in fixing the lag found on the pc during 1.0. And yet, there are tons of people still getting lag issues including on the pc (not nearly the kind you got in 1.0, but it's still not completely fixed). I think we'd find that the zones are kinda at capacity for what all the systems can handle atm.


Now, they may in the future fix w/e it is that is holding the game back from a seamless world, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. At this point, the zones are the least of their worries as it was a fast and easy band aid fix.

[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.

[SolArisa]

Oh, the huge world worked, but the design was awful.

And now we have a small world which doesn't work, and the design is still awful. /duckandrun ;-)

[SolArisa]

If the ps3 version never existed we would still have these zone lines.

For whatever reason be it terrible hardware, coding, etc. the game could not run in a seamless world on the pc.

The zones helped tremendously in fixing the lag found on the pc during 1.0.

Exactly. Most people where not there back then and just don't know. But if you were there, maybe you remember how SE had no other idea to reduce server load in Uldah by splitting it into zones AND moving the inn to a less frequented one... just one example of many. The Duty Finder, and the splitting of so-called "data centers" which are not even separate data centers but just different groups of servers at the same location to reduce latency issues between their interconnects are more recent ones. And don't forget the ridiculous "Make or Buy -> Buy" database concept which caused actions like opening retainers to time out.

This is not a PS3 issue at all. It's a bad infrastructural architecture, probably in conjunction with "Rapid Development" and IT infrastructure cost minimization. Sorry for ranting, but seen this too many times in the real life... I would not even be surprised if the "data centers" would turn out to be non-redudant 64 core boxes with VMware's ESX server running on it, virtualizing each "world".