a question for devs

[Sylve]

I was hoping that they would add more areas as well, it seems that the type of areas change far too quickly. Coerthas snow area kind of comes out of no where. They way FFXI implemented their zone changes were nice. It had a build up to the next zone, not just abrupt weather / terrain changes.

Look at the maps. The lines aren't connecting you directly into the next zone with zero space between. The distances between each subzone is actually quite large with the exception of the subzones adjacent to cities. If SE wanted to, they could just place all our zones in the 'open world', cut out the zone lines, and just put long bland corridor roads between each subzone.


All that would do is lag out Thanalan when Odin or Behemoth spawns. Wouldn't be able to control how many people can turn up to those events either, since everyone is playing in the one huge zone. Lower end PCs would also struggle to load in the entirety of the world map in one go. You'd end up with WoW(not the only game, pretty much all 'open world' MMOs have this) style 'fog of war' where everything outside your rendering radius appeared as an impenetrable grey fog, or featureless slabs of color.
I've played MMO's which huge sprawling open zones. Those zones were just huge expanses of copy/pasted textures over generic hills, with the odd quest hub getting a more detailed appearance.

Heres an example of what i mean about bland features for the sake of 'open worldness'

Compare that to the level of detail in Thanalan. Granted, yes the game is older. But that terrain is almost just a color slapped on some rolling hills stretched as far as they could manage it. I've even watched a friend playing through her livestream back when she tried to convince me to drop XIV for XI, and in general, the 'world' looked awful.
There were some awesome looking areas in XI yes, but cobble the great looking areas all together and leave out the wide open expanses of nothing and you have quite the small world. In XIV each of our zones are used throughout the Storyline. You end up traveling the entire length and breadth of Eorzea visiting every nook and cranny in those subzones for your quests.
As we get more added to the game via Content Patches and Expansions, the world we can play in will grow, and no amount of crying about zone sizes will make it happen any faster.