I'm not one of those people who insists the game needs to be one seamless world (seamless worlds are nice but hardly essential) but the number of small zones and instances in this game is greater than anything I've ever seen with the exception of a small number of handheld games like Phantasy Star Zero on the Nintendo DS.

Again, I'm not demanding the entire or even each region by one big seamless zone but loading screens while moving around different parts of the same city? In dungeons? Amdapor Keep, Crystal Tower, Haukke Manor and Pharos Sirius, to name a few are all cut up into three distinct zones abruptly separated by loading screens, three! There are games from 10+ years ago that were at least able to keep a single dungeon or city as its own zone, and it's not like any of these places are unusually large.

This isn't about not being "high tech" or "modern" enough, its about a basic sense of place. It's hard to feel a real sense of place when you have to click an orb or walk over a blue line multiple times to be teleported to a separate, discrete zone just over the course of one 45-minute dungeon.


Am I alone, here or does this feel kind of absurd to anyone else?