All open dungeons being converted into instances?

[Ava]

Sorry, no. There should be no zonelines, anywhere except for instances. A seamless transition is much better than a fade to black and suddenly you're in a completely different place. It makes it too easy for level designers to create impossible spaces (Places that couldn't exist if they were real because their bounds intersect).

This doesn't mean you need "long loading corridors." WoW doesn't have these. You can walk from one zone to the next and there isn't even any corridor at all. Other zones are loaded in advance as you approach them. Other games like Oblivion do the same thing. The world is broken down into giant tiles and at any given time, only the one you're in and each of the ones surrounding it are loaded at any given time. when you move to a new tile, no-longer-adjacent tiles unload and new ones load.

No "copy pasta" action is required, either. You don't get copy pasta action because of seamless transitions. They have nothing to do with eachtoher. This happened in FFXIV because they were forced to reuse assets heavily to fill a large space in a short time constraint.

Loading screens stink, and there's nothing more to it than that. If they can be abolished in an elegant way in as many places as possible, they should be.

Wow isn't cross platform.

Console only single player RPGs don't need to load a billion different equipment configurations for every human player in the zone you are loading into, along with random monster data, etc. This has all been explained before so I'm not going to go into detail. But it's not the same.

Zone lines are better in FFXIV's situation. We already have zone lines, they are just wearing a disguise.

[Preypacer]

Wow isn't cross platform.

Console only single player RPGs don't need to load a billion different equipment configurations for every human player in the zone you are loading into, along with random monster data, etc. This has all been explained before so I'm not going to go into detail. But it's not the same.

Zone lines are better in FFXIV's situation. We already have zone lines, they are just wearing a disguise.

Actually we have invisible zone lines in the form of the long "loading zone" corridors that, frankly, take longer to get through than it does for a loading screen.

We also have actual zone lines when you're leaving one region into the other. So, at this point XIV has both.

Further... I've never quite understood why people are so against zone lines and argue so much for streaming/seamless worlds. It's not like in a seamless world people are suddenly running long distances on foot (mount or otherwise) because there's no zone lines. They're teleporting around... which requires a loading screen. They're taking flight-paths which either require a loading screen if it's instant travel, or are sitting on an auto-pathed mount if it's not.

Even in FFXI, the zones are large enough where it's not like you're hitting a zone line every 5 minutes except in a few very specific places.

I've always found all the ranting against zone lines to be a bit over-baked, personally.

Edit: That's not to say I don't understand the appeal of a fully seamless world where areas blend more or less smoothly into each other... It gives that sense of continuity. I can appreciate that. I just don't know why so many people seem to argue for them as the solution to loading screens... considering loading screens are just as prevalent in seamless worlds, due to the reasons I mentioned above. It just seems a bit odd to me.