Geographical Landmarks

[Roaran]

I believe the zone design for FFXIV is as follows:

Several key areas within each zone that have their own unique theme/design.

The problem is, they are connected by copy/paste and an extremely boring landscape.

Now, heres the real problem. Many people spend most of their time travelling through the boring parts to get to the interesting parts.

For example, if you travel from gridania to uldah, most likely you will be traveling along the road. So all you see is the same layout of forest for 15 mins then you get to Thanalan, and you spend another 15 mins of seemingly, and often times actually, the exact same landscape.

When you finally reach your destination, you're like WOW this is awesome, but that last 25 mins of landscape was total crap.

So, I think improving the areas along the road and the paths people take to travel should be a priority. And adding special landmarks would certainly be one of many tools that could be used to accomplish that.

[Nilheim]

I believe the zone design for FFXIV is as follows:

Several key areas within each zone that have their own unique theme/design.

The problem is, they are connected by copy/paste and an extremely boring landscape.

Now, heres the real problem. Many people spend most of their time travelling through the boring parts to get to the interesting parts.

For example, if you travel from gridania to uldah, most likely you will be traveling along the road. So all you see is the same layout of forest for 15 mins then you get to Thanalan, and you spend another 15 mins of seemingly, and often times actually, the exact same landscape.

When you finally reach your destination, you're like WOW this is awesome, but that last 25 mins of landscape was total crap.

So, I think improving the areas along the road and the paths people take to travel should be a priority. And adding special landmarks would certainly be one of many tools that could be used to accomplish that.

I don't think the problem is that they lack landmarks, I think the world is just so huge that you never see them. You can actually find really interesting corners of Eorzea (there's a video on Youtube for XIV scenery as well), it's just the average player who only has to go to the same 3-4 aetheryte for leves and has no reason to explore those corners will never see them. I think what they need to do when they redesign the zones is make them significantly smaller.

I agree completely. I rarely find the motivation to visit landmarks because most of them are in the corners of the zones, and they're just so huge it's tiring to get there. Maybe when Chocobos and content arrive it'll be different but I doubt it. Take the Black Shroud for example, it's probably the size of Zi'tah, the Boyahda Tree (plus Dragon's Aery) and Ro'Maeve combined, but what's the use of large zones when they are lifeless? The FFXI areas I just mentioned all had personality and felt alive, and I'd rather have 4 small and varied zones than one big forest that's full of nothing.

PS: That FFXI scenery video is amazing
Sadly it also shows what a poor job Square Enix did when they designed Eorzea, it doesn't even come close to Vana'diel...