Open up the world, please! Part I

[Naunet]

So you're asking me to choose between long tunnels to act as loading between zones or a black screen with the name of the zone splashed on it? I'm going to choose the black screen.

Personally I prefer when zones are completely seamless and you can freely cross over borders - a la WoW, Rift, TERA, WildStar, etc.

I'm not against instanced zones, per se, but you have to make use of them well... Guild Wars 2 zones are absolutely massive and rich. FFXIV zones are stifled by invisible walls and feel very isolated from each other. It's especially bad in the ARR zones, but even HW and SB zones suffer from this. It feels like we don't really get any of the supposed benefits that come with instanced zones.

[KisaiTenshi]

Personally I prefer when zones are completely seamless and you can freely cross over borders - a la WoW, Rift, TERA, WildStar, etc.

I'm not against instanced zones, per se, but you have to make use of them well... Guild Wars 2 zones are absolutely massive and rich. FFXIV zones are stifled by invisible walls and feel very isolated from each other. It's especially bad in the ARR zones, but even HW and SB zones suffer from this. It feels like we don't really get any of the supposed benefits that come with instanced zones.

No games aside from minecraft and similar clones are actually fully seamless. Minecraft and similar are procedurally generated (and often awful, if not unrealistic looking) and these games are very-very-very empty other than a few choice prefabricated biomes that appear in places.

Games that have lore and storylines actually need to have "baked" scenery, at least as far as the places the storyline takes you. However the need to do gathering/hunting for crafting is another reason why zones are fixed a certain way.

I'd love to see a game correctly use procedural landscapes (Landmark was actually a non-ugly minecraft if you believe it or not) but it was also just a bunch if tiny instanced procedural, morphable, self-healing, landscapes rather than anything with lore potential. Also it turns out that letting users create buildings/dungeons, just has them create a lot of dead-ends for people to get stuck in.

The thing in FFXIV V1.0 was that Ul'dah was one map. It wasn't a north and south section. Likewise with Gridania. You frequently end up having to do quests that cross the zone boundary, and even if you play the game from SSD, the fact that you have to wait several seconds to cross it, and then have to cross it again later feels jarring. Like, for some reason they decided to put the crafting sections in one half of the map and the Central Aetheryte and GC building in the other half. It's especially annoying in some quests where you repeatedly cross the zone boundary. It might only take a few seconds for me, but someone playing on a laptop probably sits there for 30 seconds.

I could see the developers try to restore the single-map versions of the cities, as I don't really see any point, to how they're broken up. There's never 200 people standing in one spot except when new content places a new NPC (as was the case with RDM) and even that didn't matter because it was the solo-instance that bottle necked it.

[Kalocin]

No games aside from minecraft and similar clones are actually fully seamless. Minecraft and similar are procedurally generated (and often awful, if not unrealistic looking) and these games are very-very-very empty other than a few choice prefabricated biomes that appear in places.

Seamless generally refers to the loading screens not permanent world space. For instance there is no loading screens outside of going underground in Shrines for Breath of the Wild. Yeah there's a giant low poly mountain model in the distance you can't get to but there's no loading in what you CAN get to. That's seamless, which makes it feel more like a world rather then a series of "maps" or "boxes". There are immersive elements in every game as much as there are in movies (in game emotes and animations are immersive elements for instance), seamless borders is just another aspect of it.

That being said, WoW alone had to remake their world just to allow flying in it, and that is a game with seamless borders. FFXIV would be a nightmare by comparison. I think it's a good idea moving forward to have bigger zones (Kugane is a whole city compared to Ishgard), hopefully they can improve on it for future zones.

[HPDelron]

I get where people are coming from but for me the seams actually lend some immersion to the world.

When I'm playing something like WoW and I walk from say Ironforge to Menethil Harbor, I literally walk the whole way. I see every inch of the journey from doorstep to doorstep. However the two places are really not so far away. It's seriously like a 10 minute walk, that is the entire journey. I saw the entire thing with no interruptions.

If I'm going from Ul'Dah to Gridania I pass through several loading gates between zones. There's space "Missing" on the way. That 10 minute walk is no longer the entire journey and instead it's just the interesting bits. It leaves my brain some place to allow for some abstracted distance. I can imagine a carriage leaving Ul'Dah and having to stop to camp overnight on the way to camp drybone. I can't imagine anyone even stopping for lunch between Darkshire and Stormwind.

In both these games space is highly compressed. "Big Cities" are scarcely a football field across, and there are enough houses for all of a dozen people. However this smallness is less obviously pronounced with they're more loosely sitched together.

In this way I kind of find the loading screens more immersive, if only because they give me just a touch more room to ignore the silly, video-gamey scale of the video game.

[Naunet]

No games aside from minecraft and similar clones are actually fully seamless.

You know exactly what I mean; there's no need to play semantics. Go play any of the games I mentioned. You can run through mountains from one zone to the next without a loading screen. The only loading screens happen when you cross ocean to get to another continent (or when you're making use of some form of teleporting fast travel).

Like I said, though, instanced zones are fine so long as they're properly taken advantage of. That's not something SE has done so far; instead we get narrow, rigid zones tightly limited by invisible walls that feel claustrophobic. We get cities that feel more like just walking down a single boulevard and window-shopping rather than experiencing a city (go check out the capital cities in GW2 - Destiny's Reach, for example). SE can and should do better.

[KisaiTenshi]

You know exactly what I mean;

Yes, and a truely seamless map experience requires abandoning the concepts of zones, and instead take a page from sectorized cellular networks. One server controls either one really large, sparsely populated area, or it sectorizes and your game client is always in contact with the three overlapping sectors. No loading time because the load is always spread over three servers and manages smaller and smaller areas as places get congested and other servers spin up to spawn off them. Should something crash, that sector goes offline and the neighboring sectors "escort" remember where your character is, so you can continue to move through the sector, but anything interactive in the offline sector is frozen until it comes back up.

There are ways of creating seamless experiences, and it largely comes down to making the maps loaded dynamically as you move through them. Where you start noticing the lack of seamlessness is on a mount that can traverse the map quickly. In a sectorized system you'd get handed off between each sector as you near it's coverage area, thus you could go as fast as possible through the area and not hit a "loading" wall. Flying mounts are especially bad about breaking seamlessness because they typically fly 2-3x faster than a land mount, and the land mount is typically twice as fast as walking.

I was actually a little disappointed that they sped up the land mounts, there was nothing wrong with their original speed. What they should have done was give all mounts their own "sprint" command, along with a "horn" command (eg make the mount growl, roar, laugh, chirp, etc), and made it so that mounts sprint ends if the mount takes damage instead of being able to literately outrun everything.

[Naunet]

Yes, and a truely seamless map experience requires abandoning the concepts of zones

What's your point? My post had no confusion about what SE might have to do to improve their zones - only my opinion on what I prefer and examples of games that managed zones differently. GW2 is a perfect example of exploiting the benefits of instanced zones to its fullest. You can walk around the entirety of Divinity's Reach, for example, up and down alleys, through markets, winding in and around multi-leveled neighborhoods and parks - and go inside a huge chunk of the buildings. Compare that to a city like Ul'dah or even our more recent Kugane and it's obvious how restricted things are.

[DPZ2]

GW2 is a perfect example of exploiting the benefits of instanced zones to its fullest. You can walk around the entirety of Divinity's Reach, for example, up and down alleys, through markets, winding in and around multi-leveled neighborhoods and parks - and go inside a huge chunk of the buildings.

Not exactly the 'entirety' of Divinity's Reach. I cannot get to a certain Inn there, or a certain orphanage, for example, without entering a separate instance with those specific features -- and by features I mean alleys, markets, neighborhoods. Same in several other residential districts within the other major cities, places where major plot happens.

The other thing about that lack of 'seamless' ... aetherytes are a big method of moving about in the cities these days. If I am at the Fishing Guild in Limsa, I don't run up steps to get to the Aftcastle, I use an aetheryte.

[Naunet]

Not exactly the 'entirety' of Divinity's Reach. I cannot get to a certain Inn there, or a certain orphanage, for example, without entering a separate instance with those specific features -- and by features I mean alleys, markets, neighborhoods. Same in several other residential districts within the other major cities, places where major plot happens.

You're talking about the player character's "Home District" - that's instanced off because of phasing for story things.