Quote Originally Posted by Naunet View Post
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").