Changing the gameworld?

[Phenidate]

So there was a fairly large outcry about how a lot of the game world is copy/pasted a while back.

If the Devs announced plans to dedicate a portion of later patches to altering the game world (or one large patch to do it in one go), too what extent would you want them to go?

[Obviously this kind of patch would better fit in AFTER the major changes to game play, but the effects of changing the terrain could be significant...]

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I would like to see the early areas revamped first if any changes were to be made at all; I feel the lack of direction and sheer scale of these zones makes starting out unreasonably daunting. A better paced and directed early area could help players get into the swing of things.

Right now, all three zones are just to huge. Gridania would have to be the worst offender; a huge area of 'forest' that just amounts to an overly confusing and complicated mess of corridors ringed in with walls. Ul'dah is a close second with it's expansive fields of annoying to navigate steppes scattered everywhere. Limsa Lominsa isn't to bad as long as you stay near the road, but the unlucky ones who start there know from the storyline quests just how bad the 'way to far out' parts of the map are. (Gotta love that 10 minute walk to the corner of nowhere!)

Cutting out even half of the zone could easily go unnoticed by most players while reducing it's resource footprint.
Granted, these areas certainly look impressive at first with the great wide open vistas or imposing forests and all that. But once you get used to them, it's obvious that most of the zone amounts to a whole lot of nothing; very tiny oases of 'relevance'between repetitive terrain.
Large areas are fine and all, but at some point along the way the scale of these areas outgrew the limits of reason. Even stranger still are those areas where the monster rank doubles or triples and far off corners where there are monsters 1/3 the rank of their neighbors. These empty/pointless areas? Cut 'em out.

After that, some visual detail to the zones would be nice. Right now the 'unique' doodads in the field are extremely sparse and rare proportional to the zone size (with a few exceptions for higher rank zones). Earlier zones need SOMETHING to make it more than just 'desert' or 'coastal cliffs'. Old broken monuments, ruins, abandoned mystical towers, burnt out caravans or the remains of conflicts in the past. Better yet, bring those little towns and forts shoved in the corners of each zone into the zone proper. Heck, replace some of the camps with them! At least then it looks like there's more to the population than tiny military camps and three cities!
Ul'dah would do well to start paving some of the roads in the region considering how wealthy it is and how many caravans it attracts.
Gridania's nice and atmospheric and all, but less wall and more forest would be great, with more open spaces and none of those overly long snaking corridors of nothing between.
Limsa is better off than the other two in terms of design, but still needs to be condensed. The corners of the zone seem to serve no other purpose than to force those on storyline quests to walk for 10 minutes or more to see a lighthouse and a cut scene and then teleport back. Outside of that there is just a massive stretch of nothing but weak sheep far far far out of the way of where any typical player would consider going.

Having done some or all of that, hopefully these zones become trimmer, more focused areas with a deeper connection to their home cities. Expanding the background of the area with some quests and unique features could even do wonders for the relevance, ambiance and history of a zone.

How feasible is all this? Probably a large undertaking on the scale of the game mechanic changes. Hopefully their mapping tools are up to the task or can readily be honed for the job.

tl;dr Give the zones better focus and cut the pointless fluff (reduce zone sizes). Instead of repetitive terrain, focus map resources on deeper and more developed zones through features, towns/forts and quests.

[MattyWS]

I don't mind the size or that they are copy/pasted. What they need to do is make it all different but adding different scenery around the place and make every little space and corner useful, with something to do with something!

[Azurymber]

I'd want it to essentially stay the same and just have new zones added. right now the zones are really creative if you go to the higher level areas. Maybe if they made these alternate camps and then merged servers so there were a lot more players or something.

Like the northern zone in thanlana has all the cool powerplant type smokestacks. And then nine ivies in gridania has the awesome floating rocks where they sylphs are, and then if you go to emerald moss the area north of lasthold and the lake around alder springs are cool. Basically there are a lot of cool places in zones, they just either get unused of have high level mobs. So basically i think they should be useable :]

[Kafeen]

This got quite a large topic here : One-to-Fifty-One-Zone-Long-OP

[Phenidate]

This got quite a large topic here : One-to-Fifty-One-Zone-Long-OP

That thread is dedicated primarily to OPs issue with leveling 1 to 50 in the same zone. I don't mind it so much as you can technically change zones if you wanted. My post is more about what steps people interested in map changes would like to see taken. (though there are a few replies over there that would be relevant to this thread)

In particular, my suggestion is about arranging some of the current 'prominent features' to be somewhere NOT awkwardly out of the way (e.g. every town found out in the field), revamp the appearance of camps or replace them with the towns in some areas, and overhauls to two of the zones bordering the city (Gridania needs to be less a mess of maze like corridors that are too damn long, Ul'dah's field needs to act like its the area around a rich and powerful city)