Smallest MMO world to date?Follow

I guess it doesn't feel that small to me. It's not a pointless series of tubes like XIII-1 was. And it's not a wide open expanse of empty zones like XI was. It's the happy medium, where there is land you can see on your map that is inaccessible terrain because... not all land is stuff the average person can walk up or climb down. That's a genuine reflection of reality. There's a few places I'd really like to climb up so I can survey the whole terrain, but I recognize that unless they introduce a "rappelling" class (maybe ninja?) it'd be unfeasible to just jump up a friggin mountain.

Fun fact about XI - the draw distance is foreshortened on the PC version by the client because zones seem smaller when you see the distant walls right away. I like to flip on DrawDistance to bring the horizon up because my PC can handle it (PS2 clients could not load the horizons for the whole zone at once) but it does make the world seem smaller. XIV and ARR both have the horizons fully loaded upon zoning, which lends itself to that same illusion. When the city lights are visible on the horizon in most of the starting zones, then they really do feel smaller.

I'd venture to say that a run from North Gridania all the way down to the southernmost points of Thanalan, on foot, would take a considerable amount of time. Running along the coastline of La Noscea too would take forever and ever.

I do wish airships and ferries had a travel time associated with them. That's about the only design decision I disagree with. It actually does make the world feel smaller.

And the world will get bigger. The base game is always relatively small compared to the final results. Heckl, FFXI ran into issues with PS2 memory because it could only have 255 zones maximum and they ran out of numbers. They had to reprogram the entire base game to allow BCNMs to act more like proper instances so they wouldn't need 4 copies of each battlefield.

PS3 won't have that problem, since SE learned their lesson in XI and knew not to program a maximum number of allowed zones. (Maybe there's still a max, but something more like 1024. PS3 limitations!)

ppl complained about the maps being too big in 1.0 but not in XI so clearly SEs big maps in XI were doing something the ones in 1.0 were not

Half-assed expansions, you say?

Like a certain FFXI expansion that launched with 3 story quests that took 4 1/2 years to get any meaningful content aside from one battle event?
Like another certain FFXI expansion that players were asking in interviews when the storyline was going to end 1 1/2 years after it launched?

You're not even trying anymore, these arguments are terrible.

The zones I have visited so far in FFXIV have been breathtakingly amazing. I see a degree of detail that I didn't see in any of the starting/RoZ zones in FFXI. If smaller zones are the price for the jaw dropping landscapes I'm seeing now, I think it's a fair price.

Also, in general, if SE had strictly limited itself to making an improved FFXI to become FFXIV, they limit their opportunity to try new things. If you refuse to change something because most players felt it was an aspect of the game that was good enough, you'll never be able to potentially try a design that's better.

I'd think the argument to "remake XI" would have held more water if XI wasn't still receiving updates on its own. There's still some story they want to tell in XI, and they see no reason to stop telling it in its original format.

Remember, all Final Fantasy games start with a story and then build the game out from there. XIV is an MMO because, after they wrote the base storylines with the Twelve, the Archeons and the Garleans and such, they realized the story itself would best be told in the format of an MMO (as opposed to with a specific named individual and a static party of unique characters.) The problem was that their vision did not match their technology, and the result was the mess of a game that was 1.0. By the time Yoshi P began to salvage the game and fix the most horrendous issues, the storyline that was originally planned out was being released in missions and we got a glimpse of the underlying vision SE had for the game.

That doesn't mean that the games don't change as they develop them. That's why XIII Versus is now XV, for that matter. The story they wanted to tell in Versus turned out to be enough of a chunk that it could stand in its own world, and then someone said "Why does it have to be the same world as XIII at all? Why not Tokyo?" Boom, the first FF game to take place in our world instead of a fantasy world. (Just wish the main character wasn't a Sasuke clone.)

Edited, Sep 16th 2013 12:20pm by Catwho

Agreed on the PS3 or PS4!

"Doesn't count cuz I sez sos! D:"

ok then good now that i now know of MMOs that added new areas through patches and not full blown expansions indeed DO exist/has been done. i now no longer have anything to say on that subject (see unlike most i know how to admit when Ive lost)

I think it'd be kind of cool to have an area that randomly populates itself. Kind of an MMO roguelike zone with dangerous mobs and random chests.

The original Nyzul Isle kind of did this, but I'd like to see it explored a bit further. Might be neat.

I think you're mad because you don't see the writing on the wall, or just refuse to acknowledge it, in a bias to try to turn XIV players against their own game.

The world size is irrelevant. I don't care if Rift had a 'bigger' world at launch. I don't care if ANY game had a physically larger world at launch. Neither do most people out in the world except, for instance, people trying to make an argument against a game and start doing so by grabbing at any straws they can find and expounding them.

How it's taking you 1,907 posts as a three-starred Scholar to figure this out is beyond me. You are walking into a Ford club and telling everyone that Ford sucks and to buy a Chevy instead. Then you're getting mad when the club turns on you. How did you expect people would react?

Posting what you posted in a WoW forum as an argument against XIV would be one thing. Nobody there has a love for XIV. Posting against XIV in a XIV community? It simply blows my mind when people expect not to be lit up on the boards after doing so.


That'd be like me coming to your house and telling you your wife is f'ing ugly. You'd be pissed. You're a liar if you say you wouldn't be.

I feel sorry for your wife.