The World: so Big so Beautiful... But yet so empty

[Tsunenori]

Every so often I put a month back on WoW just to poke around and get it out of my system, and every time I do I always find myself marveling at how different the worlds feel. After Stormblood I had this lingering feeling that I just preferred the A Realm Reborn zones, but I wasn't able to quite put my finger on why other than the new zones being less "interactive." It's with the help of some of those WoW zones that I think I can better describe it though.

The Heavensward and Stormblood zones feel artificial. They don't feel like they're alive, they do genuinely just feel like large hubs. So, I'll try to qualify that statement. If I'm going through some random zone in WoW everything has a place. If you're near a river, you'll find a small ecosystem of hostile and nonhostile enemies that make sense, like crocodiles and insects and fish. You go a little further away into the woods and you find inland creatures, like deer and wolves. The world between is sprinkled with little signs of life, like birds and rabbits and whatever else. The birds fly away when you get near, the rabbits are being chased by wildlife, there are packs of wolves with little cubs, dens of slumbering bears, and so forth. Some NPCs patrol around large areas instead of walking back and forth in their designated spot like others. Zones are sprinkled with small settlements, ruins of ancient civilizations, abandoned buildings, and all kinds of little nooks and crannies that have strong visual storytelling to help bring the player into the moment and make them feel like they're a part of a larger world.

A Realm Reborn never exactly did this to an extreme, but it did have a healthy mix of hostile and non-aggressive enemies instead of a world that felt like it just always wanted you dead no matter where you were (which is particularly annoying for gathering imo). Also, because the zones were smaller, it was a lot easier for them to cluster enemies in groups that felt more natural as well, compared to these sprawling zones from Heavensward and Stormblood that look very pretty but feel like a dropper tool was used to place enemies in an area before moving to another to do the same. One example I like to use is the random Jellyfish behind Onokoro hanging out near some pine trees. What's their deal? I'm sure some of it is to try to emphasize that these areas are harsh and war-torn and all that's been able to thrive in such an environment are the most aggressive species, but if that's the case then maybe it's time to diversify the kinds of zone stories we're trying to tell in order to diversify the experience we're able to give players as they quest and level and go through their daily rituals.

A Realm Reborn was also fairly good at giving you a healthy amount of exploration within settlements compared to its successors. If anyone remembers one of the MSQ quests where you had to go into the jail in Whitebrim, and despite it being such a small building on the outside it goes down like 2-3 stories underground. Sure, it's mostly barren stone walls in there, but it's still a neat touch. I've mentioned the Mun-Tuy Cellars before on this forum as well, I think. The connection between South Shroud and East Shroud could have easily been a generic rock tunnel but instead it's this lovely brewery with like 3-4 little siderooms and NPCs doing their jobs, and you can just give it a little look around. It fills in the world more, helps bring it to life.

That's not to say Heavensward and Stormblood are entirely devoid of these kinds of things. I think the Xaela camps in The Azim Steppe are good about this, with all the yurts you can go into and NPCs to talk to. There are small areas in Heavensward I enjoyed as well, like the kitchen in Falcon's Nest or the buildings and stables in Tailfeather, but the inclusion of these kinds of world-building areas has diminished significantly across all zones in a way that I think is kind of unfortunate. The zones truly are becoming more and more beautiful to look at now, I'd just also love to see some of that money and development go into making them feel more alive. As it stands, they've got a case of "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" syndrome.

[Naunet]

<excellent stuff>

You've worded this beautifully and perfectly. Yes to all of it!

[Shurrikhan]

[Good insights]

:: It's but a memory of a memory now, but I could have sworn the guards at the entrance to the Mun Tuy Cellars back when it was a leveling/leve/NM labyrinth area, rather than a mere tunnel, in 1.x had some decent jokes about... life when being a guard at the entrance to Mun Tuy Cellars. I'm glad at least that while the sub-zone was effectively removed, it remained at least a bridge between larger zones. Sadly, I don't think it points out a willingness to detail as a hesitation to anger Legacy players even further (especially after turning Sorrel Havens into a dry well when it was a huge misty river) that extended about the length of the Saghali Desert).

The Xaela camps in the Azim Steppes are actually one of my own core examples of missed opportunity. You get to see these different cultures during the MSQ, but it ends at the point of baiting any interest player. "What now?" An incredible opportunity for meaningful, dynamic daily-like activities just stops there with the completion of the zones quests, which have yet to show any real attempt at interesting mechanics. And, to be honest, given what we know of the steppes... the zone honestly felt far too small to be housing its alleged numbers, much like Doma is apparently a nation with the population of one tiny village and captives that can seemingly only come from one other, now-ruined, similarly small village. It feels... off.

Take a typical tiny zone arc from WoW for comparison. Enter the frey, find maps to leaders (likely keeping the prisoners), free prisoners, use said prisoners to set the enemy camp into frenzy while locating key lore to be used later; return the engineer (one of said prisoners) so that he can build your aircraft to get around cliffside defenses, attack runebinders not only to dismantle defenses and draw out officers but take their items necessary for seeing into the past around ritual bonfires, which in turn makes available new strategies and proposes new plot arcs, dismantle anti-air defenses, set up and defend a flag to move enemies to your position for as long as possible, hyjack the AA guns to take out as many reinforcements as possible before launching yourself out one such AA gun in order to return to your base.

Compare the above to: found sheep, (irrelevant to prior) lit some lanterns, (irrelevant to prior) delivered a letter, (irrelevant to prior) fended off a few bandits, (irrelevant to prior) gathered weeds, (irrelevant to prior) led a guy to someplace where (off-screen) he apparently learned he was good with his fists, (irrelevant to prior) talked to locales, (irrelevant to prior) did some weird gauntlet run for some guy, (irrelevant to prior) killed some bear-things... There's definitely something missing from the idea of quest synergy, not to mention the engagement in quest mechanics themselves or visual storytelling. For all the stock-animation and standard-pan cutscenes in this game, they do a fairly poor job of conveying lore or more immediate story relative to the soft phasing and ingame unlocked cinematics that WoW's been using since its first expansion and have been prevalent since the second (2008).

:: Personally, I'm not as put off by less settled zones of Stormblood and especially Heavensward as I was by the fact that the highly settled zones of ARR lent themselves to expectations that weren't met, from Yellow Jacket guard posts and their observation blimps doing absolutely nothing, to their being no patrol or other reasonable elements in military strongholds (generally beastmen camps), to the lack of any interesting dialogue from the wardens of smaller camps, the limitations of NPC interactions, etc., to even the apparent superfluousness of structures given their having no ostensible function. In Stormblood, the Lochs had a similar dissonance to it. How would a nation never more than thrice Ulduh's population have a city more than twenty times its size, even when one excludes the vast areas of sunken/flooded structures beneath? It took me out of the experience to "well, some zone artist really had fun with this..." By comparison, I found most of Heavensward's feeling somehow more right, simply because they felt historied and like we were arriving in a very specific time and therefore perspective of that area, but they didn't feel contradictory.

tl;dr: Something, something, utility and scale.

[Amaranths]

They need to add outpost to attack and defend so if the mobs win they get the outpost an we cant use mount in that zone or able to teleport or lose other things to it an if we win get get tomes mats etc they don't have to be in the arr zones tho maybe just HW and SB. BAM! zone filled with people!