Open up the world, please! Part I

[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.