Open up the world, please! Part I

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Oh man, I loved the tunnel loading screens of 1.0, walk through this canyon for 30 seconds so you dont see a screen that says loading, in predictable areas with players popping in and out of phase as they hit the zone wall. Totally immersive.

[Chiramu]

Oh man, I loved the tunnel loading screens of 1.0, walk through this canyon for 30 seconds so you dont see a screen that says loading, in predictable areas with players popping in and out of phase as they hit the zone wall. Totally immersive.

Don't compare it to 1.0, compared it to ANY OTHER MMORPG.

[Chiramu]

I would love to see how places connect to each other. It was upsetting having the Gatekeep out at the bottom of the Sun Throne, I would've loved to run up that!

[Odstarva]

I don't know how anyone can fight this idea.

It's wonderful, I'd love for the world to be truly open. It would be wonderful indeed.

[BigRed5392]

I don't know how anyone can fight this idea.

It's wonderful, I'd love for the world to be truly open. It would be wonderful indeed.

1.0 players know what happen.

large empty zones with halls and tunnels. Look at 1.0 black shroud.

the bigger the map, the less they can put in it.

[ErryK]

I wouldn't say no to this, really. But I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, either.

[KisaiTenshi]

While 1.0 was not without its problems, it was nice how the world fealt truly connected. It would be nice to see the world reconnected.

I'm not sure about this. Fixing Ul'dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa so they are back to single maps might be difficult, but these are the maps that suffer the most from V2.0's break up into smaller maps, because the loading time with just running back and forth between two parts of the cities is a detriment.

BUT...

V1.0 was far more seamless, you could literately walk in and out of everything without seeing loading screens.

But V1.0 was not SWTOR, SWTOR was pseudo-seamless, walking in and out of instanced areas without seeing loading screens was good, but places were clearly partitioned, and visually walled off if you weren't the right class/alliance. In FFXIV V1.0 none of these partitions existed. In V2.0 we see these partitions along the ground and the sky.

V1.0 was partitioned between La Noscea (where to get to the mainland you had to get on board the ferry which was an instance) and Ul'dah's Thanalan map. It took a very long time to walk between everything. Had they introduced Chocobos and Airships from V1.0 they might not have suffered from some of the initial backlash, since one of the pressing complaints was that the world was just copy-pasta, everywhere. People would have paid less attention to that copy-paste rush job if they weren't forced to keep going through it.

I do recall in V1.00 and the V1.00 beta that there was a loading partition somewhere between Thanalan and The Black Shroud , and it was filled with a lot of low-level mobs, so it wasn't a huge pain to get from one side to the other side, you were just likely to get lost on the Black Shroud side.

In V2.0, the entire Airships aspect feels glued on, why use them when you can just teleport? Why bother with a seamless world when most people aren't going to see it or revisit it. Even the Chocobo Porters, I have never seen anyone use these. I've only used them maybe twice before the getting the Company Chocobo.

In a way I'd say that V1.0 and V2.0 screwed up with how the Aetherytes were setup. Yes Teleports should exist, but they should only have existed as a way to be revived, and a way to get from one end of a city area to the other end. Getting to Limsa Lominsa from Gridania should have required taking the Airships or walking on foot, not selecting them from a teleport list. If you had a personal airship, likewise it should have only been available to use (for free) from the Airship landing points, which I might add there were more places for them in V1.00, outside the cities. That would have at least made the the seamless maps have a point even when you take the Airship. Instead in V2.00 we get a brief cutscene and then we're just instantly somewhere else, it's no different from teleporting.

[JunseiKei]

Black Desert Online is one, giant seamless map...

...And it's so incredibly empty with 0 fast travelling save for how high of a tiered horse you have. The game actively forces you to "enjoy" the scenery (which was truly enjoyable the first couple of times and quickly became a chore). To be frank, unless you want to travel everywhere on chocobo, there's no reason to implement this at all. If a majority of players fast travel, why make the maps seamless?

[Hazuki87]

Hell No! The end!

[DPZ2]

I would suggest taking a look at Remnants of a Realm in order to see just how seamless 1.0 really wasn't ... and realize that city states may not ever be seamless due to development choices required by hardware no longer supported in the game.

Then go take a look at the other videos in this series.

As for games like WoW -- try flying with a friend across a cross-realm zone boundary to see exactly how 'seamless' that solution isn't.