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

[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.