Removal of loading screens

[Bright-Flower]

They'd have to do a lot of terrain and map work to remove them.

Almost none of the maps would line up or have good transitions of they just "got rid of the loading screens". They weren't designed that way.

Wow was. Simple as that.

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.

[Sotaris]

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

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.

[raelgun]

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.

Its true Blizzard doesn't ever have to take console into consideration but I think you are underestimating WoW graphics, its way more detailed and has way more textures on just about everything in FF14, FF14 has flashier spells but thats about it.

[Cortawraith]

after they overhauled the graphics in WoW. Back then it looked shittier compared to FF14 (even during the time FF14 was released)

[Fayt1203]

And now we have 2021....
Cheers

Really don't understand why 2021 is relevant in this discussion. there are a lot games that where out this year and the last that has those loading screens so the its 2021 meme is getting really tired.

[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.

[TheMightyMollusk]

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

As someone who was around for vanilla WoW; while it didn't have loading screens between zones on the same continent, there were definite load times between zones. I had a fairly bad PC at the time (I could not run through Orgrimmar worth a damn), so if a zone was busy while I crossed over, I could see things popping into existence. It's also why most WoW zones don't place mobs or other important interactions near area transitions, and why, if you look from the air (both in vanilla/Classic while on a flight path, or after the Cataclysm revamp on your own flying mount), there's a lot of empty terrain in the borders between zones. Blizzard didn't solve the problem, they just used a different work-around for it.

[Shougun]

It's easier to make hyper diverse environments since you can just wave off transitioning terrain, but it would be neat to have a loadless environment in the future (I'm thinking next mmo kind of future, since it could be insane amount of work and potential catastrophic issues when trying to merge our current stuff).

Maybe they can make screen transition effects and move the teleport animation through that to give a similar element to changing water / land (for drives that are fast enough it would appear sort of loading screenless).

[Genz]

Fusing the towns back to 1 area may be possible, since we have big Kugane and Cristarium. It's just the usual problem of "updating old content" which FFXIV devs are allergic to.