Thread: Why did they changed this from version 1.0 ?

Originally Posted by Zezlar

I'll be honest, in my own personal opinion. If they had changed the game world like they promised, and removed the lag. I think the newer version of 1.23b would have been amazing to play.

Obviously that didn't happen though, sadly.

They promised zones for ARR since the first live letter

You lost the point of this thread: we are wondering about why the actual, amazing designed, world is not a big single block without loading screen where you can see ppl running on capitals far miles from the gate, live.

Answer: for both client and server performance reasons, and because it's really not a big deal. Also I don't know of an MMO in existence where you can see people from "miles" away. That would put a mega gigantic strain on servers due to the poetential number of players/objects visible from that distance. Every game has loading screens, even 1.0 had loading screens (teleporting anywhere, going to dungeons, boss fights, starting quests or cutscenes...). This isn't a big deal. Shit has to load. making it seamless takes a ton of work to do right and the benefit is very small.

Even in 1.0 you could only see players and monsters within a certain distance.

Most people won't acknowledge that because it is their "strongest" complaint against 1.XX

Most people won't acknowledge that because it IS the strongest complaint against 1.xx. The difference in use of copy paste between ARR and 1.x is night and day.

Every game reuses assets- This is pretty much inescapable in even the most carefully crafted worlds due to optimization and performance reasons. The difference here is in ARR it is done appropriately and it isn't glaringly obvious. Also it's mostly small assets that are reused and not entire swaths of terrain like in 1.0. It's obvious just by looking at the 1.0 maps exactly how they copy-pasted entire zones- The entire map looks like one big grid with entire squares of that grid copied and repeated over and over. Look at a map in ARR and you won't see that all. Yes, certain objects within each zone are reused in different places, but properly and tastefully. What you and the person you are quoting are suggesting to me is that they are guilty of copypasta if they so much as use the same blade of grass or texture in more than one location in the game.

I miss overly large areas, and I don't care if they copy paste the same ridges at different angles on a map that is 10x the size coerthas is now. I was an explorer,

What fun is there in "exploring" an area where every part of it looks exactly the same? There's nothing to see in one part of the area vs another. Areas should be sized appropriately for the scope of the content placed within. I would NOT want to run around an area 10x the size of central coerthas, especially if they had to copypaste the zone 10 times to make it that big. The bigger it is, the less detail there will be due to both technical and time constraints.

I'm not really sure how you could miss "overly" large areas. "overly" implies excssive, too much. If you admit that it's too much then it's a bad thing. People don't generally like bad things.

You're creating a false dichotomy of options here.

No, I'm not. Any development team has a certain limited amount of resources. As you make an area larger it requires exponentially more resources to create and populate with assets and content (Unless you generate it proceedurally (e.g. randomly), but that wouldn't work for a game like this).

So, you'd rather that "75%" of the area drop you to your death or be able to fall into and not get out? That's why there are walls, both visible and invisible. It is much more difficult to create an area with such great detail and have it be 100% walkable. You're basically limited to rolling hills and bland landscapes (See: WoW) and concentrating details in specific locations.

If the devs fielded these questions, they'd most likely be telling you something very similar to what I'm telling you. Maybe if they had 5 years to rebuild the game instead of 2 they could have pulled off what you're demanding. But then we'd still not be playing a game and I doubt they'd have kept 1.0 running for that long.

Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Words

What I'm saying is that maps now are miniscule and rather pathetic by comparison. Having cut so much of the "unnecessary" area out of the game -- area which I, and others, found necessary -- they should have done much, much more with the smaller areas. It still uses copy/paste -- of course it uses less because it's a much smaller area -- and they are barely big enough to contain the quests within. They are not maps, they are cubicles; ARR does not even approach a happy medium for map size. They screwed up bad.

Worst case in 1.xx if you thought the area was useless you could avoid it entirely, but people who are dissatisfied with the zone size now have what recourse? As I said, all the areas are just lobbies to queue from now. (Yes, after you finish the talk > gather drops > talk quests that WoW standardized.)

What I need to do is keep in perspective that this game wasn't made for me; it wasn't made for people who liked 1.xx. ARR was made to gather subscriptions from people who weren't even FFXIV players or fans. Good business idea, terribly rude to the devotees. For now I keep playing, but not for hours on end like I (we) used to, now it is just "... guess i'll log in to cap for the week." Good thing I have so many queueing zones to choose from