Thread: How IMMERSIVE will 2.0 be?

I really enjoyed reading most of the interviews with Yoshi and the dev team recently. Namely the RPGSite interview where Yoshi talks about the community's view on jumping and how he feels it should be in FFXIV (thank The Twelve). The mention of swimming boosted my hopes and ambitions for this game even further, and then I thought what could be stopping them from adding climbing too? These three videos (one and two and three) from the currently in-development game ArcheAge clearly show how it can be done in an MMO.

My worry is that Yoshi has already stated that they will be cutting back the expansive nature of the current maps to a more clearly defined zoned out map setup. I'm okay with this if this will improve what we have now... but he keeps using the analogy of how players don't want to experience the climb of a mountain and would rather experience a set of quicker zoning to the top. I understand why he's saying this but I can't help it feel it will cut immersion down a bit. For instance, the problems he stated that will come with climbing the mountain to get to the boss would be riddled with problems involving narrow paths with hard-to-place enemies, whereas players are then forced to spend too much time having to fight them all on the way up. Or if there were less enemies, then it would simply be a boring run up a huge mountain.

I disagree with the idea that there are only these options in creating a journey up a mountain, which is why I linked the climbing videos. There can be many ways to climb a mountain... not only slim passages. With good level design, one could imagine many ways to do it without popping us miles up each time. Yoshi stated that players just want to get to the boss, but I think players would enjoy the journey more than the end-result if it was designed creatively (i.e. players would go in and out of passages/labryinths/non-instanced dungeons within the mountain containing large cavernous areas that lead back out again to higher views of Eorzea each time we emerge to more bridges and climbing areas).

Now, I'm not against zones either (and I do believe the journey up should be zoned out a bit)... I just want to make sure that Yoshi understands there are more options other than what he's stated as drawbacks to climbing a mountain.