[dev1008] About Jumping

[Nephera]

A fantasy MMO is supposed to be about adventure. Having the game dictate as to where you should explore defeats the purpose of exploration. Automatic jumping adds nothing and shouldn't even be implemented.

ah ho hum, there's something to think about.

Final fantasy has always been a venue for linear storytelling and the game mechanics are traditionally planned around that.

Buuuut the traditional mmo is more open ended and while you're limited to where you can go by level the choice is pretty much yours, some content can even be bypassed altogether.

XIV feels like it took both of those concepts and mashed them together very poorly, there have been examples of fairly linear mmos (Guild wars and phantasy star online come to mind) that have done very well for themselves. But XIV feels like it cant decide between linear storytelling(why we have a main quest line) and freedom of choice(why our only other option are some rather inconsequential class quests and the recently added quests which offer no sp).

and the friction between the two philosophies manifests itself as arguments about jump.

Terrain is rough and multileveled and has all sorts of paths and coves that feel like they should lead somewhere but they just dont. After an hour of walking you feel like you should see some sort of landmark or something that just isnt there. Off in the distance you can see structures that look interesting and curious but you can never get close to them, a lot of the terrain feels like it was meant to be climbed on (or its deliberately designed to waste your time when you're not on a road so you spend more time leveling, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt here). I cant proclaim to know the design philosophy behind the map, maybe it was a miscommunication or maybe there was more. I hate, HATE going back to using XI as a reference but if you compare the two, vanadiel had much smaller zones that were concise and to the point and when you put them side by side it looks like Eorzea had plans for something more.



TLDR:

The terrain was designed for non linear gameplay thats not currently in game. and is also rather unfinished,clearly.


edit: Also with egregious use of the copy paste tool.

double edit: i edited my post a lot because hurr i'm a durr.