How come we can't see the Floating Continent behind Ishgard yet?

[RyuDragnier]

Why couldn't we see that ninja building in Eastern la Noscea before patch 2.4?

It was built during maintenance of course! What do you guys THINK the NPCs do when we're not looking?

[Obysuca]

It is a ninja building. It was stealthed! :P

Exactly, it's always been there, always

[hairpinlegs]

1/ heavy snow clouds
2/ does it matter?

pick one =)

I just found it really strange that there's these distinct floating masses with no clouds covering them in the distance behind Ishgard. However, the fact that the skybox hasn't been updated with some semblance of a floating landmass is a little strange when June 22nd there will be nothing to be seen, and June 23rd suddenly there's floating islands in the distance with no sort of event accompanying them.

[aerialrave]

There have been many "Ninja" changes (no pun intended) to the overworld / background / maps since the game started.
If they do any changes to Coerthas it will be ninja'ed in later. Or they might be lazy and just leave it the way it is, and say they're not visible from there.
Or if you want to be creatively lazy, you could say that since Ishgard has magic force fields they are able to keep the place from being visible much like the way you can't really see what's inside Turn 6.

[OMEGA_HACK]

There is an update coming this tuesday, maybe they will retcon them in during that update. (doubt it but never know)

[Omegakiyohime]

The concept of even adding floating islands was determined after 2.0 and the current Ishgard model were added? For what it's worth, the Steps of faith look nothing like what we actually traversed on in the trials and even the current Coerthas model for Ishgard is pretty different from that we see in the opening, even after you factor out the polygon count, it seems just similar in shape. I'm hoping that they will update the model with Heavensward release. Floating continents are probably higher up above the clouds lore wise or that was just a stylist flourish to point out that heavensward has floating islands.

[Limecat]

Heh, one thing that's kind of been bugging me is the perspective there by the gate. The bridge doesn't look nearly long enough, nor Ishgard far enough away. On top of that, given the distance it looks far smaller than it should based on the area walkthrough videos we got a few weeks back. Like, castle/cathedral size, but definitely not a massive city.

[OMEGA_HACK]

To be honest, none of the maps fit together take Old and New Gridania if you try to place them together at the same scale it wont mesh, the southern map of gridania is too big. Also just looking at Central Shroud and Gridania maps you might notice the lake which the city-state sits along is different in shape on the two different maps! Furthermore, those two maps won't fit nicely as the Eastern most entrance (White Wolf gate) doesn't sync/touch up with each other when the Western most entrance (Blue Badger Gate) is syncing/touching. Its one of the problems with forced perspective I guess in MMOs, the scale just isn't real.

The only set of zones that sync well with each other is the La Noscea zones, because they honestly did not change much from the 1.0 structure.

[tjw]

To be honest, none of the maps fit together take Old and New Gridania if you try to place them together at the same scale it wont mesh, the southern map of gridania is too big. Also just looking at Central Shroud and Gridania maps you might notice the lake which the city-state sits along is different in shape on the two different maps! Furthermore, those two maps won't fit nicely as the Eastern most entrance (White Wolf gate) doesn't sync/touch up with each other when the Western most entrance (Blue Badger Gate) is syncing/touching. Its one of the problems with forced perspective I guess in MMOs, the scale just isn't real.

The only set of zones that sync well with each other is the La Noscea zones, because they honestly did not change much from the 1.0 structure.

You're wrong actually. The reason why the Old and New Gridania maps don't connect is because we don't traverse the CORRIDORS that link the two maps together. I combined the two together using the same scale; the corridors that link the two fit.



You can compare that map with 1.0's Gridania. You can see they eliminated the corridor just north of the archer's guild (Popler Avenue), the corridor linking the Knot and the fineries, and the corridor linking what was then the aetheryte plaza and what is now the Conjurer's guild with the Adder's Den.



It's the same reasoning as to why Central Shroud doesn't fit with Gridania. Because you actually access Gridania over bridges, which we don't traverse on the explorable map; they are now merely 'zoning' areas. But in the 1.0 Gridania map shown above, the bridges are clearly outlined, and fit the general shape of where the now-Central Shroud exits are.

[Seif]

They're hoisting it up as we speak!