ZAM Question #9: Seamless zones are being eliminated in Version 2.0. Many people like seamless zones, which weren't in FFXI. What is the benefit to having zones with transitions?

Yoshida: "One of (my) favorite games lately is Red Dead Redemption, and they did the seamless world really beautifully. If you could make an MMORPG that fit in that size of a world, then seamless would be the way to go. For a large MMORPG, you have to have a lot of content, and when the map becomes too small, then you don't have enough room to put all that content in. For example, you have a battle with Garuda, and you want to have that on the top of a mountain, a very big mountain. But in a seamless world, people are going to have to get to the bottom of the mountain, and then climb up this whole mountain to get there. Unless your MMO is called Mountain Climbing Online, it's not something that most players are going to want to do. Yes it's seamless, but do players really want to spend 30 minutes climbing the mountain before they get to the fight.

"If you do have, for example, a small road leading up there, then yes, you can have monsters on it and have it a challenge to get up there. But if it's a seamless, open world, then you're just going to have this big mountain, and players are just going to be running up this mountain and that's it.

"You can make the game so you have that road up, make invisible walls and make that road up to the mountain and have it filled up with monsters, but that just creates stress for the players. Yes it's seamless, but there's that unwanted stress, when players, what they want to do is fight Garuda. Even though you take away the seamlessness by having the zones, you can still make the experience similar. For example, once you get to the top of the mountain, you can still look down and see the bottom of the mountain and have this wonderful landscape in front of you, but without having to actually go up that landscape. You can go there, fight your battle and still see the beautiful scenery without having to go through the pain.

"The one benefit of going beyond seamless is you can make things more dynamic. If you want to do something dynamic, yes you can make something dynamic in a seamless world, but you have to do everything in between there as well, which takes a lot of time and effort and can be a very challenging thing. By removing the seamlessness, you can make each area be that much more dynamic and add that much more content to it, and so that's the exchange that we're offering the players. Yes we're going to be moving to this zone type of system, but each area is going to be that much more original and that much more dynamic."