I have a simple hope for 8.0: The return of single-zone starting cities! (+Ishgard?)

[Xbob42]

Once the PS3 support was dropped, we no longer needed quite so many zones in cities. So we went from the two-zone structure of the starting cities and Ishgard to single-zone cities in every subsequent expansion.

One thing I've continued to miss from 1.0 is that cities were just big areas to explore, and the zoning kind of shrinks them and makes them slightly more confusing to navigate. Now another thing is just running from the city to the neighboring zone but I understand that will probably never come back.

However, I would be quite happy if we got our original single-zone cities back! It wouldn't actually change navigation via aethernet or anything, you could still zip around, but it would just make them feel like more cohesive places to visit and explore.

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I just a relic of the past?

[Hezhi]

I never got to visit these 1.0 places, but less loading screens sound great, especially in cities!

[Enkidoh]

As a 1.0 player who remembers only too well how 1.0's cities were, it actually wasn't great at all, having the cities as single areas ended up as just a laggy mess that actually broke things because of the high resolution (and it had nothing to do with 'PS3 limitations', it was just being too ambitious for the technology available).

Ul'dah especially had the worst of it, you couldn't even run through the main gate but had to deviate around through side passageways to allow the game client to break the zone up into more managable 'chunks', to say nothing of the Inn Room being broken due to so many people congregating in the Quicksand they had to put a backdoor away from there to enter the Inn just to stop the server crashing.

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

Nostalgia for 1.0 aside, things really are better now than they were back then.

[Arzalis]

The starting city zones are actually pretty small. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be an issue performance wise if they combined them. It'd likely just be a development focus issue. You mention the Crystarium being empty, but that's just a conscious decision. Kugane is super packed and it's similar in size.

The only zone I think could be an issue is Ishgard. It's significantly bigger in both zones compared to the starter cities. Plus I'm not entirely sure how they connect together.

[Xbob42]

As a 1.0 player who remembers only too well how 1.0's cities were, it actually wasn't great at all, having the cities as single areas ended up as just a laggy mess that actually broke things because of the high resolution (and it had nothing to do with 'PS3 limitations', it was just being too ambitious for the technology available).

Ul'dah especially had the worst of it, you couldn't even run through the main gate but had to deviate around through side passageways to allow the game client to break the zone up into more managable 'chunks', to say nothing of the Inn Room being broken due to so many people congregating in the Quicksand they had to put a backdoor away from there to enter the Inn just to stop the server crashing.

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

Nostalgia for 1.0 aside, things really are better now than they were back then.

Uhh. The entire game was a laggy mess. The PS3 limitations I mentioned were in 2.0, not 1.0. The game doesn't lag/drop frames by an excessive amount when we have 200+ people fighting an S-Rank (dependent on your personal hardware of course, but I've never experienced 2.0+ performance anywhere near as bad as 1.0, and 1.0 rarely had many people gathered at all), it's not going to lag because there's 50% more people in Limsa. The engine and modern machines are more than a match for rendering the entirety of any of the cities because all modern zones are tremendously more massive than any starting city.

Know how I know this? Because the entire point of my post is that new expansions have single-zone cities.

It kind of reads like you have a very limited understanding of the subject and are just making sweeping statements that don't really jive with reality. The engine and modern systems are totally capable of handling an entire city.

Finally, it has nothing to do with "nostalgia" and everything to do with coherent map design. Split cities are weird and feel bad. They're antiquated and unusual in the genre and provide a benefit we no longer need.

[Enkidoh]

Uhh. The entire game was a laggy mess. The PS3 limitations I mentioned were in 2.0, not 1.0. The game doesn't lag when we have 200+ people fighting an S-Rank, it's not going to lag because there's 50% more people in Limsa.

Know how I know this? Because the entire point of my post is that new expansions have single-zone cities.

It kind of reads like you have a very limited understanding of the subject and are just making sweeping statements that don't really jive with reality. The engine and modern systems are totally capable of handling an entire city.

Except it was also a conscious choice by Yoshi to make ARR's cities broken into two to make them easier to manage and to cut down lag for the reasons I mentioned (and because 1.0 players were complaining about it - it was one of the major player complaints about 1.0).

Having said that, as Yoshi has gone back and redesigned several dungeons based on player feedback, I guess changing the starting cities back to single zones may be possible, but really, you're not actually going to gain anything - modern Gridania still would require travelling down those stupid long corridors between New and Old Gridania again, or leaving the gates out in the Black Shroud - all the current arrangement of split zones does is skip all that, cutting out the pointless and dull padding.

Restoring them to single zones will not suddennly make them on par with the Crystarium or Kugane in size I'm sorry to say.

[Xbob42]

Frankly I don't even think we're having the same conversation here. The point was never that I wanted them to be the same "size," I want them to be coherent places. And yes, 1.0 players were complaining about it, because 1.0 ran like warm butt and the entire game was about slowly running around to get to places and using your limited Anima for the occasional teleport. It was incredibly inconvenient. This would change the convenience factor by pretty much zero (hello, aethernet?) but would dramatically improve how it feels to be in a starting city. Just watch new players trying to get around a starting city sometime. The layouts are confusing to new players with or without zones, but the zones just add this extra pointless layer of frustration that makes it harder to parse where you are and what leads to what, since of course there are multiple entry points to the other zone. I would argue it's poor design and was clearly there so that the PS3 wouldn't explode the second you got to a city, considering the system was so overstressed that they couldn't add TP gauges to the party bars because the system was maxed out.

At this point in time, the starting cities are just strange vestigial design choices from a long gone era that put a damper on the starting player experience, but also don't do much for veteran players either. You want to walk upstairs in Limsa? Enjoy this loading screen! Going to the Inn? Another! Leaving the Inn? Enjoy a third! Going back down? Have a fourth! This would at least lose half those loading screens if someone were walking, and would be literally no different if someone were using the aethernet.

[Enkidoh]

Loading screens are only an issue if you're still running the game on a HDD - with a SSD though zones load up extremely fast (I reinstalled the game with Win 10 on a SSD a few months ago and was blown away by how quickly zoning is, so making it moot).

As for your comment about them being "coherent places", what exactly do you mean by that? The three cities are full of players regardless - so, why is this an issue? Please help a kitty out here!

[Lihtleita]

And even Gridania and Limsa weren't immune - their entrances were just lonnnnnng empty corridors that you trudged down for like hours. And considering the newest 'single zone' cities are... pretty much empty spaces (look at the Crystarium), I do not see SE going back to the bad old 1.0 days.

i wouldnt be surprised if they kept zone dividers up but surely rejoining (lol) the segmented cities wouldnt be that taxing? it feels weird looking down at limsa aetherite from the upper decks and seeing it deserted

[Xbob42]

Loading screens are only an issue if you're still running the game on a HDD - with a SSD though zones load up extremely fast (I reinstalled the game with Win 10 on a SSD a few months ago and was blown away by how quickly zoning is, so making it moot).

As for your comment about them being "coherent places", what exactly do you mean by that? The three cities are full of players regardless - so, why is this an issue? Please help a kitty out here!

Loading screens being fast are still loading screens -- an interruption of gameplay for technical purposes. The less you have, the more coherent (that is, unified, whole) the experience is, the more coherent a city is. It feels like one continuous place that exists as that place. Like Lihtleits above me says, looking down at the lower decks from the upper decks and seeing it completely empty when it's most certainly not is just this weird layer of abstraction that makes the city feel less alive, and less like a real place. And by real place I mean a physical space that makes sense within the game, not a real-life place.

It's the same reason why being able to run right out of Limsa right into La Noscea in 1.0 was cool. It makes the world feel bigger, more connected, like it has a sense of scale, like monsters exist right outside the city gates and could get inside and thus guards and stuff make more sense, there's both big and small reasons why I like it. But I also fully understand, as I said in my original post, that something like this probably won't make a return, and without being able to mount to leave the city quickly, would probably just slow the game down for newer players. Zone transitions that move you a great deal of distance are more sensible than arbitrary ones like in the cities. And I'm fine with that, I don't need a return to it since it would likely be a big undertaking. I only want it for the cities because it still feels like a hold-over from the old days and does not match the modern design of other cities in the games.

Even just atmosphere, seeing folks in the Upper Decks doing stuff during a Halloween events would get me talking to them and make me curious, little stuff like that is important to me.