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

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.

Originally Posted by 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!

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.

I have no particular interest not being able to enter Gridania just because the player numbers are a bit higher than usual at a time. You already occasionally have issues to enter parts of the starting cities when seasonal events start. I don't want even more of that. There's a reason those events usually involve more than one zone and that rain is the same reason the MSQ has three different paths for ARR and two for the expansions.

It would be really nice to have this in the 3 main cities! I actually thought they were gonna do this in Endwalker, but next expansion, with all of the upgrades they have no reason not to! It would be really cool to have a seamless limsa for example. The time we'd take walking the corridors to the other side would be similar to the current load screens. I don't know how that would work on Ishgard though, because unlike the 3 starting cities the 2 sides of Ishgard don't seem to be really connected... There are the staircases inbetween the zones but I don't think they lead anywhere.