Removal of loading screens

[Payadopa]

I'd already be happy if they put all 4 initial city states back together. Gridania is okay, but Ul'dah not so much. I know why it's there but that loading screen that interrupts the main street is not to my liking.

[Larirawiel]

Blizzard don't have to take console into consideration, and it's not like wow is a graphical monster compared to 14, granted 14 has some terrible textures.

They could keep the loading screens on old consoles and remove them on PC or on modern consoles.

This.
They disguised it as narrow pathways that blocked the line of sight of the old and new area and while you ran there the game was loading in the new zone while phasing out of the old one outside of the players field of vision.

A GPU can also discard non-visible objects and skip rendering them as long as front-to-back-rendering is used. That's also the reason for such line-of-sight-optimizations. But this is difficult in MMOs because most of them are open world and there not many opportunities to do so.


Cheers

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

They could keep the loading screens on old consoles and remove them on PC or on modern consoles.

This wouldn't work. Because of console <-> PC crossplay, any changes to the zones and worlds needs to be reflected on both ends since its a persistent world. To give loading screens to Consoles and not PC, they would effectively have to have 3 versions of Limsa and segregate the instance based on what platform you're on:

-'Full Limsa instance', only accessible by PC players
-'Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks', only accesible by console players.
-'Limsa Lominsa upper decks', only accessible by console players.

Which would not only be cumbersome, but also just plain hindering for the game as a whole since it would be effectively one step away from console exclusive servers. If they're going to stitch zones back together, they have to do it for all. But that's besides the point; PS4 is hardly a chokepoint for the game these days. There's still lots of players who play the game on very outdated or lower end hardware that even the PS4 is stronger than. I know plenty of friends who play on PS4 still that outside of hunts don't have issues ever playing the game.

Personally I'd like to see the cities stitched back together. Ul'dah would feel a lot nicer without the main road being cut by a loading screen. Kugane & Crystarium both show how incredibly big they can make the cities these days, a re-combined city shouldn't be an issue technical wise. though it's likely an extremely low priority thing for them since there'd be little playoff from it, dev wise. Especially since the recent loading screen change they did, you can load into zones at like <1s if you have a good SSD.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

Seriously, Blizzard solved this problem already in 2004. You had loading screens when you made a continent switch or when you entered an instanced area. But those situations were very rare. In FF14, which is younger than WoW vanilla you have loading screens everywhere. And now we have 2021. I cannot understand that it is still in this game.


Cheers

It takes my PC longer to load between covenant zones or in a WoW HS than it does FFXIV to load a new zone when I teleport.

FFXIV zones are supposed to be a bit of travel between them- it's not suddenly you're in a forest, suddenly you're in the tundra thing- those load screens represent a bit of travel between biomes.

I'm not sure when loading a new zone takes under 5 seconds nowadays how it's an issue to have the split... and if the load takes longer for you due to your PC, it'd take longer even if they made them 'seamless', it'd just be masked in a different way.

[Genz]

Might be more of lot of ARR runs on 1.0 code and they don't want to intentionally break something in the legacy code base.

"lol no"
(only sensible answer to "1.0 code" and other tin foil hats)

[wereotter]

I'm not sure that the city maps work to integrate them into one large zone... doing a look at the maps of Ul'Dah, the Chamber of Rule would overlap over the top of the Ruby Road Exchange where there's currently sky overhead.

Ultimately this would be a lot of work for the developers to merge the two zones and make them work as they ought to but little to no benefit. Having the original cities as singular zones won't attract more players to justify the man hours needed to make it happen.

[Sotaris]

"lol no"
(only sensible answer to "1.0 code" and other tin foil hats)

What do you mean?

[Hyperia]

Yeah. Making even just the two halves of the older cities fit together would quire a good deal of additional work for little actual payoff. Let alone outdoor zones even in the same region.

It'd be nice but the devs have new zones to be working on, not worth the time and resources it would take compared to doing new areas.

And in EW things are way too disconnected geographically so even if they 'were' at a point they could say, put all six of an expansoin's zones into one instance, which I doubt they are, they wouldn't be able to do it in 6.0 either.

Right now, Gridania is so busy that I am lagging. Having them split is a lifesaver. I don’t even dare zone into Limsa.

[Absurdity]

Hi, i have heard this from various people, that the code base of the game is messy. Is somewhere a reliable source for this?


Thanks


Cheers.

We don't have an official source on this but it is quite evident when you think about the 2.0 developement. The engine had to be cobbled together within an extremely tight timeframe, it needed to include some of the absolute disaster that was the 1.0 code because all the 1.0 characters with their 1.0 items had to be transferred to 2.0 (they did not wipe out everyone's character and made them start from scratch) and it had to run on the PS3, which had 256 MB of RAM.


Further evidence are the obvious technical limitations that we are already experiencing right now.

-They can't add more inventory space because it either breaks the game or takes way too much time investment to not break the game, so they have to redistribute our already existing inventory space in "creative ways" like the removal of belts.
-We can't have a glamour log because the engine can't handle it, we may not even get more space in the glamour dresser.
-Even expanding the Armoire seems to be a big task every time they add new event outfits and mogstation outfits can't be placed in the Armoire at all.
-Zones are quickly running out of memory space, someone already mentioned Kholusia and the fact that the Dwarf beasttribe had to be placed in another zone to not break the game.
-Damage and Health numbers are getting too big for the game to handle, hence the stat squish with Endwalker.

[van_arn]

Zonelines are one of my favorite additions to 2.0. I hated how much space was wasted in 1.0 with featureless loading corridors; I’d rather have a well-edited zoneline that takes me directly to the interesting part.

For example, if I have a fight on top of the crater of a volcano, don’t make me spend ten minutes climbing that mountain every time I want to see that fight.

That philosophy could have worked in the sandbox genre, but it’s tedious in an age of duty finder and zonelines.