Removal of loading screens

[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.

[Jeeqbit]

There's no point in removing loading screens when we just teleport everywhere. Removing loading screens wouldn't affect teleporting, it would affect walking from one zone to another which other than in a city, you only do while questing at the start of an expansion.

Even in a city, you can teleport around with the aethernet so we would still have loading screens. It's already been pointed out how fast teleporting actually is with an SSD, even by SE themselves who have a video of the load time on a PS5.

[Catwho]

I've been on an SSD drive for years and I honestly don't even pay attention to the load screens any more. Now I'm on an M2 drive and it's more of a "teleport successful!" message than anything else. Literally takes 2 seconds to teleport to most zones; Limsa took me 4 seconds. Of course, teleportation isn't the same as a fully connected zone.

But seriously - take a look at how far apart some zones are on the overworld map. Those used to be tunnels in 1.0 and if they were to connect the zones into a seamless, walkable path, it would be 5-10 minutes of jogging to get from Middle La Noscea to Eastern La Noscea. If we could fly, much faster, but it's still extremely boring terrain with no reason to bother including it. The loading screens are comparatively a mercy.

The only argument I agree with is recombining the cities, but if having them as separate active zones lets them stuff twice as many objects in each zone, I'm still okay with that as well.

[Cortawraith]

Instead of demanding that SE wastes their precious resources on something like the removal of loading screens, I'd rather have work on more pressing matters:

-adding difficult light party content (Savage-dungeons if you will), ppl have been demaning stuff like this for quite some time.
-limited Housing needs some fixes (more housing servers, higher item-limits)
-getting the occasional DX11-Crashes fixed for quite a number of gamers (even livestreamers have those and FF14 is one of the very few games that crash sometimes on my PC (even on my old PC's, have tried several with different hardware))
-increase the overall content in between the patches, again (they've cut the numbers of dungeons per expansion for example)
-either improve or scrap PvP for good.
-get the "currently" popular demands done really really really fast so that they can allocate the resources back to actual content, again instead of being stuck on a new gender for races or adding the dead-on-arrival Umbrellas that like 1% of all players actually use...I swear almost nobody uses them at all, haven't seen one in months and I'm online like 99 of 100 days (don't really want to know how much resources that stuff took from other possible contents...)
-Deep dungeons (for the majority, again ppl have been asking why there wasn't one in Shb (pre-covid-era))
-1-2 new ultimates (for the minority, if must be)
-Hildibrand quests (been a long time)
-crafters have been complaining that crafting has gotten too easy (I'm aware they were going for accessibility)

there are quite a bunch of other things but I'm sure most ppl will agree that loading screens aren't really a priority

[Lanadra]

Some people don't quite seem to get that it's not as simple as 'just remove the transition barriers and load screens and let me walk that distance between maps', as some have said, the 2.0 maps really weren't designed for seamless zoning. They aren't the 1.0 maps imported into 2.0. All of the 1.0 areas, Thanalan, Coerthas, La Noscea and Black Shroud were completely rebuilt from the ground up, this is also why getting the 'missing maps' from Coerthas and Black Shroud is not that straightforward.. because they'd have to make them. The way these 2.0 maps work is by design and they're not designed to interconnect, which means that it would require considerable work to 'glue' these maps together into one whole in a way that doesn't feel half assed.

The towns.. the city states, I suppose one could argue there.. as all three are in essence mostly the same maps from 1.0, I dare say you could probably return Ul'dah and Limsa to single map city states with a degree of effort that would be within reason. Gridania I'm not sure about.. Gridania had these really lengthy tunnels in between what is now Old and New Gridania.. I suppose it depends on if they're entirely intact and just inaccessible.. or simply not there at all.

Personally doing away with the duo zone cities from 2.0 and 3.0 is really something I want.. as there really is no reason for it to be that way anymore.. as Stormblood and Shadowbringers have shown us. But that means putting dev time into turning for example Ishgard into one functional city that flows seamlessly from Foundation into The Pillars.. rather than putting it into new content.. and that's always tricky.. it's always easier to justify making a new shiny than it is to polish up the not-so-shiny old stuff.

[znushu]

The towns.. the city states, I suppose one could argue there.. as all three are in essence mostly the same maps from 1.0, I dare say you could probably return Ul'dah and Limsa to single map city states with a degree of effort that would be within reason. Gridania I'm not sure about.. Gridania had these really lengthy tunnels in between what is now Old and New Gridania.. I suppose it depends on if they're entirely intact and just inaccessible.. or simply not there at all.f.

they're all basically the same map but they're just trimmed, shrunken down, and even warped abit but it's all there even ingame today but admittedly they removed a good portion of stuff with gridania taking the hardest hit

Here take a look:

Limsa Lominsa

Gridania

Ul'dah

Ul'dah's Aetheryte location was in the same spot as it is today

[Canadane]

Back in the 1.X Version(s) of the game, the world was 1 huge area, without "real" loading screens. In later 1.X versions, the game's major cities were divided into separate areas via loading-screens. This was mainly because of the PS3.

I'm sure someone may have mentioned this already but that was done in 2.0, not a late 1.x patch.

[sauc]

They still design their game like it's on ps3 even though it was dropped before shb was even out

[enthrage]

Complaining about loading times in FFXIV is like complaining about it taking too long to fill up a glass with water.

[Tint]

Complaining about loading times in FFXIV is like complaining about it taking too long to fill up a glass with water.

That's why I am drinking directly from the bottle.