Zone transitions

[Enur]

Disclaimer: I have not played ffxi. Dont accuse me of nostalgia
When i look at the world of Ffxiv i am disapointed. When lvling we visit every single location. There are no secrets. There are nothing that indicates its a world as opposed to a themepark ride. There should be empty expanses. There should be empty places, random caves reachable useless mountain tops. Yes gameplay wise it might be weird from a dev standpoint to make these, but if they make the world feel like a world i think its worth it.

Everything doesnt need a purpose. I want to climb the mountains and explore the seas. Even if they are mostly empty. I want to sail a boat for hours encountering nothing only to get attacked by a kraken. I want to experience the large world the story indicates. In the weeping city its silly. I cant even experience going up a flight of stairs, no theres a loading screen. I want to travel long distances. I want large deserts, reaching as far the eye stretches.

Like the real world, much space is just empty, with a few scattered landmarks. i dearly hope one day ffxiv will reflect that. Although i am afraid it never will.

Empty space makes landmarks special, but if every inch is special, no place is.

[Naunet]

One that is filled with all sorts of interesting creatures and NPCs and other areas that add to world building and detail do make for a fuller world and you don't need more map to have that.

I'm fine with instanced zones when the game actually utilizes them to richly populate the space, create interesting terrain, and make structures accessible. Guild Wars 2, for example, has massive instanced zones and you can pretty much go anywhere in those zones you please. Unfortunately, even in Heavensward zones, invisible walls reign supreme in FFXIV. This is especially painful with flying. Why am I not allowed to land on top of a massive hill or statue or mountain? Why does a cliff that drops into an otherwise accessible region have an invisible wall that forces me down a narrow path? Why can I not cross this shallow river? Invisible walls and noninteractable surfaces really hurt the experience with Eorzea's zones.

When i look at the world of Ffxiv i am disapointed. When lvling we visit every single location. There are no secrets. There are nothing that indicates its a world as opposed to a themepark ride. There should be empty expanses. There should be empty places, random caves reachable useless mountain tops. Yes gameplay wise it might be weird from a dev standpoint to make these, but if they make the world feel like a world i think its worth it.

I agree. There are STILL places I keep uncovering in WildStar, even after playing that game for 2+ years - little nooks and crannies I hadn't thought to wander into that Carbine decided to hide some secret object or landform or just a really nice view. That kind of experience is impossible in this game.

[TouchandFeel]

The invisible walls around Eorzea are actually the accumulation of all the Protect spells cast at the beginning of dungeons that go wasted because the tank or a DPS just took off sprinting as soon as the dungeon started. The aether from these unutilized spells build up in the environment until eventually a giant physical wall is manifested, enclosing different locations like snow globes. That is why teleportation is so prevalent to get from place to place, because that is the only way to move between each encapsulated location to the next. When you "zone" you are actually just hitting the edge of the zone bubble and auto-teleporting to the next through pre-established aether routes.

[Enur]

One of my favourite places is the mining village north of black brush station. Its little. Has no purpose. But it makes the mines beside it feel alive.

But we cant enter the mines, we cant see all the miners work. We can see the hole where the road from C thanalan to N thanalan begins. We cant travel it though. We are ported right through it with a magic telep.... who am i kidding. Theres a loading screen. And we travel for i dont know how long until we reach the hazy blue ceruleum fogs. I wish there was a labyrinth inside, sidequests a la rid the mines of boogeymen. But alas, theres just the floaty stars of teleporting...


Edit:
But even then, its crammed right inbetween mutamix's camp and the cutters cry. Theres no room for the desert thanalan was advertised to be. The largest expanse ingame so far is Sagolii. And thats a very small area for a supposedly sahara like desert. Western coerthas is getting there. its large and expansive, but ultimately empty. Like a big sandbox with tall railings. theres no mountains to climb here.

Forelands had potential. It has the biggest mountain on aldenard. but we cant climb it proper. we cant even land on the uneven slopes. The areas should imo have the expansiveness of HW areas, with much less obvious zone borders and the detail in the landmarks of ARR areas. Designing a big empty desert shouldnt take that much longer than filling a tiny village of smallfolk, buildings etc. We are told the areas are big and take a long time to traverse. But in reality they are small and almost claustrophobic. I fear that in SB they have gone down the same route as the new mab shows othard the size of Aldenard, yet despite this we arent getting much larger zones. Nor more for that matter. it took two expacs to fill out aldenard and they want ot fill an almost bigger continent in one?

[CatStarPrime]

"...for the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky."

It's depressing every time I think about getting to the south end of the Sagolii Desert, and seeing the vista laid out further south - but apparently my highly-capable self is unable to clamber up and over a rough stone barrier only a meter and a half tall.

[Shurrikhan]

Honestly one of the "RPG" components I miss most is the content type, so to speak, of the connective paths between larger zones (here defined as expanses where gameplay takes a turn into a larger chapter, which also happens to be a geographical area, not just something cordoned off by blue dots). I'm not saying I want tunnels, windy mountain roads, etc., ad nausea, but the mere fact that the original Sohm Al was such a path made improved the experience to me, and I would love to see a more open-world variant of a longish, scenic stretch with some difficult enemies, optional or not, in the style of... Thunder Plateau in X, or the hillside path early in The Last Story.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm fine with instanced zones when the game actually utilizes them to richly populate the space, create interesting terrain, and make structures accessible. Guild Wars 2, for example, has massive instanced zones and you can pretty much go anywhere in those zones you please. Unfortunately, even in Heavensward zones, invisible walls reign supreme in FFXIV. This is especially painful with flying. Why am I not allowed to land on top of a massive hill or statue or mountain? Why does a cliff that drops into an otherwise accessible region have an invisible wall that forces me down a narrow path? Why can I not cross this shallow river? Invisible walls and noninteractable surfaces really hurt the experience with Eorzea's zones...

This. Allowing for layers within the open world does exponentially more harm than good, if done right.

But as for the zones themselves, it's not just their size completely fails to deliver on the premise of each zone, making them feel like a pre-settled world where the doodads have little apparent reason for existing (one keep within a quarter mile of another, bazaars with no visitors, "vast deserts" no larger than the yet unbuilt little hilly section of my crowded Southern Californian housing track, cities of hundreds that barely fit tens and whose walls are facades, spire cities of which only two out of some ten levels can be explored, naval cities without a single pathable boat and few even at the docks, etc.), its the lack of utility, the lack of native systems already in place and running regardless of you. And the damn invisible walls (which, oddly enough, have gotten worse in some areas since ARR; I used to be able to port to Central Coerthas and jump off the west wall onto the cliffs and bounce my way up to the ogre FATE that spawns up there, but they have since blocked that path off, apparently as an "exploit").

[Astyrah]

damn invisible walls

i really really hate these things more than the loading screens and the "disconnected world" feeling.

[enthauptet]

The abrupt and disjointed transitions make it very difficult for me to orient myself in the world, to be honest. xD I have a hard time picturing where I am in relation to all other parts of Eorzea at any given time because even when running from zone to zone you basically port across vast swaths of land.

Yeah this is one thing that always kind of bugged me, it doesn't really feel like we are traveling from one area to another we just pop and appear up in a different place. How did I get here? Is there any time or distance? The zones may as well all be named completely different things because most of the time it feels like they could be totally unrelated (some la noscea areas are like the only ones excluded from this since you can see limsa, pharos, etc.).

Yea I don't agree with him on a lot of views and world design is one. I was just linking this to show that he actually said it so people understand.

Its not even zone transitions that bother me its things in the open world that are not to scale that really get me. Dusk Vigil is so tiny in the open world and doesn't even match the instance version at all. Same goes for a bunch of others Saint Mocianne's Arboretum, Lost City of Amdapor, The Wanderers Palace just to name a few.

I like things like that too, just walking around and exploring. Having places to walk to and run around and "discover". It was really disappointing to me when they made maps automatically unveiled, it removes some of the fun of exploring and discovering stuff. Granted it could be better but the exploring part in wildstar was pretty fun, I really liked doing that. Their maps were a lot more fun than the ones we have here. One of the things with this I think is there is such a limited amount of verticality. Like essentially all our maps are just flat with like barely any degree of height difference but in reality there isn't much effect on anything since everything is higher or lower. You can't like go to a low area and climb a tall building to the top and look around and see everything around you.