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View Poll Results: Have you noticed the repeated use of the same environmental elements?

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  • No and it doesn't bother me.

    71 42.26%
  • Yes and it doesn't bother me.

    65 38.69%
  • Yes and it bothers me. SE are a bunch of lazy Fü¢k$!

    32 19.05%
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  1. #81
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sephiroth View Post
    This. SE shot themselves in the foot by giving people detailed maps. No one even noticed the issue until maps of the other regions were released. I guess it's not as obvious on the La Noscea map.

    That Coerthas map should have just been a large green space without all the features, the majority of people wouldn't have noticed. On any run through a zone you'll see maybe 10% of it.

    Has no one considered that all those crags in FFXI look the same from the outside? Giant features in the starting areas. No one ever complained about those or even cared. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the outposts use the same model too. You could find loads of things the same if you looked for it, but XI's maps are so lacking detail you couldn't use them for it. I don't know why half the player base suddenly became massive whiners.
    Crags are supposed to look the same from a lore standpoint, as they are literally energy-receptacles. They get a free pass.

    Again, my point is that they used the same one model many, many times, and really only flipped them in one direction. They didn't use re-colors, or the same base model with a different texture. They did the equivilant of making a house in the sims, and using the same chair 10 times throughout a house. No matter how awesome that house looks, you're eventually going to ask: "hey, how about some different chairs?"

  2. #82

    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Again, my point is that they used the same one model many, many times, and really only flipped them in one direction. They didn't use re-colors, or the same base model with a different texture. They did the equivilant of making a house in the sims, and using the same chair 10 times throughout a house. No matter how awesome that house looks, you're eventually going to ask: "hey, how about some different chairs?"
    How many rocks are you seeing with different colors?

  3. #83
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    I thought I was crazy when exploring in the same region as the OP. Locations looked familiar, but I never once thought were the exact same terrain cells. It doesnt really bother me personally, it does, however, make sense as to why I thought I had already covered certain areas when exploring.

  4. #84

    Quote Originally Posted by miokomioko View Post
    No and no. I notice repetition of textures, structures, terrain, foliage, etc. in every fucking game I play.
    Texture repetition isn't the problem, it's obviously impossible for each individual squarefoot patch of land in a videogame to be 100% unique compared to the other, but they can take those textures and do different things with them, so even if they are made with the same resources, they aren't used the exact same way.

    I don't know why it's assumed that people who notice the repetition are idiots and/or unaware that games reuse assets over and over, this is about design, not about the technical/time limitations of not being able to render every individual blade of grass uniquely, no one is asking for that and you know that.

  5. #85
    the whitest knight u' know
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kylewhataru View Post
    Texture repetition isn't the problem, it's obviously impossible for each individual squarefoot patch of land in a videogame to be 100% unique compared to the other, but they can take those textures and do different things with them, so even if they are made with the same resources, they aren't used the exact same way.

    I don't know why it's assumed that people who notice the repetition are idiots and/or unaware that games reuse assets over and over, this is about design, not about the technical/time limitations of not being able to render every individual blade of grass uniquely, no one is asking for that and you know that.
    It wasn't assumed that anyone was an idiot, that was extrapolated by you because I said I had basic knowledge of 3D design, which I don't expect everyone does. It is assumed that some people are not aware of the repetition. That has been admitted by a number of people, so I don't think you can argue about that.

    I'll make a comparison to photography, since it's something else I've studied heavily. When you know how something is built, or have an interest in the process, you mentally dismantle what you see to understand it. When I see photos, I see more than "oh cool picture." I see the reflections of familiar lighting equipment in people's eyes. I see the effects of certain familiar lighting equipment on shadows. I see fake backgrounds, I see the shoops, and I can tell by the pixels and seeing plenty of shoops in my day. It's not just a pretty picture or a pretty environment anymore, it's lenses, lights, shooped pixels, etc. or polygons, bumpmaps, MIP maps, lack of enironmental dynamic shadows. It kinda' ruins the magic of something visually stunning when you know how it is built and can identify exactly how they did so and where they cut a corner or decided to not implement a piece of 3D-rendering technology.

    It's not going to dawn on the average player that the "reflections" in water are static images for each zone and don't actually represent the terrain immediately around it and don't even reflect the player, or anything else for that matter. It's not going to dawn on the average player that the environment itself does not cast any dynamic shadows on itself or others while only players/npcs/monsters do to each other. I could ruin the "prettiness" of XIV to some by explaining a number of things they didn't do, or the general process of how they did achieve (or fake) some effects, like depth of field. No one is an idiot for not noticing these things, and while it does not bother me much because I notice this shit in every game (XIII didn't have reflections of characters either), it doesn't make me appreciate the piece as a whole for what it is and how successful they are at creating an insanely detailed world.

    Yeah, "immersion" is lessened for me, but it's still better here than anywhere else.

    p.s. I didn't say textures were the problem, I'm aware that they are the most repeated thing in any environment, I was just making a point as it was simply the first in a list of things.

  6. #86
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Crags are supposed to look the same from a lore standpoint, as they are literally energy-receptacles. They get a free pass.
    Would it make you happier if SE wrote some lore about all those rocks looking the same? I don't know, maybe placed there by an extinct race and manufactured to be that shape? Some rock eating worm? Point being, lore is a good way of cutting corners in design. There's no reason why an energy receptacle can't look different. If you think of it as a piece of technology in the game, it probably only has a few vital components for catching energy, the outside could be designed any way and still work. Kinda like a PC case.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Again, my point is that they used the same one model many, many times, and really only flipped them in one direction. They didn't use re-colors, or the same base model with a different texture. They did the equivilant of making a house in the sims, and using the same chair 10 times throughout a house. No matter how awesome that house looks, you're eventually going to ask: "hey, how about some different chairs?"
    In design you have to compromise somewhere. Would you rather have less of those cool features in the zone just so you can fit more rock models and textures into the rest of it? If La Noscea looked like La Theine in XI, they'd have more resources to give you more rock models, more rock textures etc. But the zone as a whole wouldn't look half as nice.

    It's a matter of whether you want a zone with some great features and some minor ones repeated, or do you want a zone that's average all the way through?

  7. #87
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    Quote Originally Posted by miokomioko View Post
    I could ruin the "prettiness" of XIV to some by explaining a number of things they didn't do, or the general process of how they did achieve (or fake) some effects, like depth of field.
    Semi related:
    I actually think it would be really cool to hear about this kind of stuff... haha. I don't really know anything about 3D at all.
    Semi related related: I took a lot of art and design training, as well as film/storytelling stuff. So there are a lot of things like that I can't unsee. People think I'm really picky about movies, but I can't help it. Once you know how things are put together, and why, you look for them.

    General response:
    I dunno what the big deal is about reusing resources. You pretty much have to, and the bigger your project the more you're going to need to. When deadline comes up and the various teams have been pulling 60-80hr weeks, and you have to choose between using an existing clump of rocks/trees or not having them at all, well... its an easy choice.

    In animation there's a rule of three: Fast, Good, Cheap. You get to pick two, you can never have all three. I'm sure that every industry has to juggle these to some extent.

  8. #88

    Quote Originally Posted by Sephiroth View Post
    Would it make you happier if SE wrote some lore about all those rocks looking the same? I don't know, maybe placed there by an extinct race and manufactured to be that shape? Some rock eating worm? Point being, lore is a good way of cutting corners in design. There's no reason why an energy receptacle can't look different. If you think of it as a piece of technology in the game, it probably only has a few vital components for catching energy, the outside could be designed any way and still work. Kinda like a PC case.
    Those explanations are ridiculous, why would an extinct race care about terraforming in such a mechanical way, and why would they waste the resources to do it? It would cost trillions. And in the time since they've been gone there's going to be earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, thousands of years of winds and decay, all kinds of natural disasters. So it would all eventually be undone and put back in it's random state. As for worms, we have sculptor worms now? No. Nature is random, and it simply makes no sense for stuff to be repeated like that.

    As for crags, you're talking about structures, there's thousands of examples of two structures in different parts of the world being built identically, hell in new neighborhoods/developments there's only 5 or so "model" homes, people chose out of the 5 and the build the neighborhood, so it's basically hundreds of houses and they're all clones of each other, so yes, human kind does that, it's common practice, and perfectly logical and feasible.

  9. #89
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sephiroth View Post
    Would it make you happier if SE wrote some lore about all those rocks looking the same? I don't know, maybe placed there by an extinct race and manufactured to be that shape? Some rock eating worm? Point being, lore is a good way of cutting corners in design. There's no reason why an energy receptacle can't look different. If you think of it as a piece of technology in the game, it probably only has a few vital components for catching energy, the outside could be designed any way and still work. Kinda like a PC case.



    In design you have to compromise somewhere. Would you rather have less of those cool features in the zone just so you can fit more rock models and textures into the rest of it? If La Noscea looked like La Theine in XI, they'd have more resources to give you more rock models, more rock textures etc. But the zone as a whole wouldn't look half as nice.

    It's a matter of whether you want a zone with some great features and some minor ones repeated, or do you want a zone that's average all the way through?
    How many crags existed in the game compared with how many of that same LL rock feature? If you really want to make an argument that... uncouth, I'd simply boil it down to there being a grand total of perhaps 5 crags - with no more than one being in any particular zone, while these FFXIV formations are peppered throughout a single zone.

    In terms of compromise, what cool features in the zone are you speaking of?

  10. #90
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    Probably that areas wouldn't look so damn flat and barren all the time.

  11. #91
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    If you wanna' bring up cloning environment pieces in something like XI that went unmentioned, I'd say... Fei'yin/Tu'lia/Delkfutt's Tower... Every building/crater in Sauromugue. Every cave tunnel. The ____pools in Davoi. Yuhtunga/Yhoator Jungles. The canyons of Attohwa Chasm. The hills of Batallia Downs. The hills of Gustaberg. The rocks/campfires of Sarutabaruta. All of Riverne's crumbling/floating rock details. All of Arrapago Reef.

    I'm trying my darnedest not to mention every single dungeon in that was a network of cloned rooms/tunnels. (Here's looking at you, Phominua.) These zones are like 1/10th the size and there's still repetition if you're actually looking for it. I can't stress that last part enough.

    I'm sure if the zones weren't 99% flat ground with walls around its borders, it would be way more apparent when they duplicated something. No one is going to notice when you clone a piece of terrain that doesn't vary more than a foot. As long as you can walk over it, it goes through everyone's brain without setting off any flags.

    Hell, I'm sure almost everyone can acknowledge the annoying un-climbable little snow ledges that were littered repeatedly all over Xarcabard's landscape. Want to melee that Dynamis demon over there? TOUGH. WALK AROUND.


    To put it in a more understandable scope...

    In XI, to build their zones, they basically had a grid and built separate tiles to fill that grid with an environment. A straight wall, a corner wall, a pillar, a flat tile, a staircase, a secret door wall, etc. It's like building a dungeon in a top-down old grid-based RPG by picking tiles from a set library for the zone. You could imagine just grabbing a stupid Horutoto Magical Gizmo from a side-menu and plopping 6 of them down in a big, square room. That's basically how things were done in XI. If you find any of those large-rendered top-down images of some XI zones (used for dynamis maps), you will immediately see the terrain repetition and the vague grid-like patterns.

    In XIV, however, it is obvious that the scale of things are much, much larger. So, with a similar amount of resources, they built pieces... a library of sorts for their environments to pick from. However, since their zones needed to be 10x as large as any given XI zone, their building pieces aren't just corners/walls/floors/stairs, they are entire clearings, large paths, rivers, bridges, rock formations, etc. You're seeing the same process on just a grander scale.

  12. #92

    Not sure why comparisons are being made with FFXI. Its kinda pointless to point out crap on a game designed on a PS2. Even then you're trying too hard to list examples of obvious repetitions like with what's in the OP. Taking in account the ancient hardware by today's standards, its not hard for me to say that SE did a great job with FFXI's environments. Geometry repetition was the most noticeable type of flaw and that was in dungeons 90% of the time.

    I think another reason why this is an issue(for some) is because these mountains and chunks of land they reused aren't unambiguous like alot of stuff is in most games. They are borderline landmarks on their own due to scale & identifiable features. I'm not surprised some people said they've had deja-vu if they're not constantly watching the mini-map. This stuff is expected in caves/dungeons, but I can't recall anytime where I'd "thought" I ran in a circle on an open landscape in previous MMO's.

    Basically, the question comes back to how much you are bothered by the environmental shortcuts. For me it keeps the overall visuals from being "awesome" to just "good". The landscape/level design is the most important aspect for me, graphics-wise, in an MMO. Again, this is not keeping me from playing this game, the lab rat experiment they have going on with the more important gameplay elements(i.e. exp grind, markets/no ah, point allocation, etc.) is the only reason why I'll be on the sidelines at release.

  13. #93
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    I'm mostly making comparisons to XI because it has the same, exact issues (albeit on a smaller scale) and made by the same company, yet no one ever raised their voice about it. It doesn't matter what system it was aimed for, cloning environment pieces within a zone doesn't save space. Polygons are polygons. Only re-using textures would save space.

    It's like with the simple rendering-technology jump into "next gen" they were somehow expected to have 10x the resources and time for their art/design teams to build the comparatively massive environments.

    Also, I agree that it's simply noticed (at all) because the cloned pieces aren't sand dunes or gradual hills, they are big, jutting, prominent pieces of realistic looking landscapes that demand attention over dull, lifeless, flat areas that you auto-run from one corner to another through.

  14. #94
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    Nah, I never noticed it in FFXI. Ever. Seriously. Not once in my entire history of playing did I run 5 steps and think "Jesus, was I just here?", unless it was in a place designed to be a maze, like the bowels of Garliage or somewhere deep in the Necropolis.

    I noticed it in FFXIV because LL's main traveling areas consist of a single road along a long, winding path, and ON THAT ROAD I can see the same structure facing 2 ways at least 10 times. That's why I can notice it in FFXIV.

    In Gridania, a main thoroughfare, I'm restricted to walking on a single road, and once again, ON THAT ROAD, I will cross the same 2 types of streams at least 6 times, zone-to-zone, and will see the same twisty-loop elevation platform no fewer than 15 times throughout the zone. I am literally forced to look at it, and in a starting zone, no less.

    For me, it was harder to really spot point-blank in the desert, as I didn't play too much out there, so I'll give that one a free pass, but we spent months in LL and I spent just about 85% of my OB time in Grid - main thoroughfares in the game. I didn't notice much in Corethas, because its not a main zone. When I got out there, it was to get shit done, not endlessly run on a road.

    You compare this to FFXI, which is foolish anyway, given that its an old game, but I'll bite. Garliage isn't a main area. The Giddeus isn't a main area. The Dangruf Wadi isn't a main area. When I ran from Bastok to the Highlands, on the main road, I didn't see the same formations over and over. I think the point stands, honestly.

    Its not game or table-breaking, its just strange to see. Do it with cliffs or something - places you aren't expected to be traversing through a lot, but on the main roads? Really?

  15. #95
    the whitest knight u' know
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    I don't understand why anyone thinks it's foolish to compare this to XI. It's an old game now, but it wasn't an old game 7 years ago and the same situation was there, just no one cared or noticed when XI was new... or they didn't bother to make a retarded youtube video to spread the omg panic. The same repetition is going on, just on a smaller scale. Shit like walls/corners/cliffs/rivers/paths/etc. are the pieces that are repeated. And, all the zones I mentioned are pretty major... never once mentioned garlaige/giddeus/dangruf.

    http://www.gamezone.com/images/gamez...27697_pc_4.jpg

    This is more how FFXI was built. With frequently repeated tiles. It's hard to notice environmental repetition in an area when the entire area is built out of 10 different tiles. Sarutabaruta is a perfect example. They had straight river piece, a 90-degree turn river piece, a mini waterfall piece, a T intersection river piece, and a bridge river piece. Just because the river as a whole wasn't cloned and placed somewhere else doesn't mean that the river itself wasn't entirely comprised of repetition itself.

    You can't really compare whole areas being repeated in XI, because it doesn't really happen outside of dungeons. However, denying the severe repetition of 3D environmental pieces is a joke.

    Here, here's one of the maps I was talking about. You can see that the zone was built out of HIGHLY REPEATED environmental tiles. I sure as hell noticed seeing the same cliff/wall details when I played. The same terrain ramps/etc.

    http://deathsquaddl.org/PullMaps/bub...burimuDSDL.jpg

    I can take a series of tiles... a straight wall, an inside corner, an outside corner, and a flat ground... and make an entire dungeon and every room is shaped differently! Wow! So, I didn't use any terrain repetition?

  16. #96
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lucavi View Post
    Nah, I never noticed it in FFXI. Ever. Seriously. Not once in my entire history of playing did I run 5 steps and think "Jesus, was I just here?", unless it was in a place designed to be a maze, like the bowels of Garliage or somewhere deep in the Necropolis.

    I noticed it in FFXIV because LL's main traveling areas consist of a single road along a long, winding path, and ON THAT ROAD I can see the same structure facing 2 ways at least 10 times. That's why I can notice it in FFXIV.

    In Gridania, a main thoroughfare, I'm restricted to walking on a single road, and once again, ON THAT ROAD, I will cross the same 2 types of streams at least 6 times, zone-to-zone, and will see the same twisty-loop elevation platform no fewer than 15 times throughout the zone. I am literally forced to look at it, and in a starting zone, no less.

    For me, it was harder to really spot point-blank in the desert, as I didn't play too much out there, so I'll give that one a free pass, but we spent months in LL and I spent just about 85% of my OB time in Grid - main thoroughfares in the game. I didn't notice much in Corethas, because its not a main zone. When I got out there, it was to get shit done, not endlessly run on a road.

    You compare this to FFXI, which is foolish anyway, given that its an old game, but I'll bite. Garliage isn't a main area. The Giddeus isn't a main area. The Dangruf Wadi isn't a main area. When I ran from Bastok to the Highlands, on the main road, I didn't see the same formations over and over. I think the point stands, honestly.

    Its not game or table-breaking, its just strange to see. Do it with cliffs or something - places you aren't expected to be traversing through a lot, but on the main roads? Really?
    I totally agree. Miokomioko, please leave XI out of this discussion from here on out. You've made your point and a significant number of us disagree. Unless you are going to log into XI and take some screenshots yourself marking up the spots you plainly see, it's a moot point. We all believe XI was much more subtle. XIV has obvious reused terrain cells. SE devs working on environments probably have a nice little palette with pre-made terrain cells they simply drag and drop to assemble a zone. Obviously they have over used certain cells.

    As I have said all along, I'm going to play XIV. I notice the repetition and it annoys me to a slight degree. Nothing will change the fact SE could have done any number of things to prevent some of the retread cells from being noticed.

  17. #97

    Mioko, I think you are leaving out the fact that although the same basic principals are used in level design, the tools should evolve with game engines. I haven't done custom mapping since Quake 3, but I know developers have alot of tricks and simple alterations they can do to change appearance to landscape on the fly. Its hard to believe they are still using an archaic RPG tilework engine in FFXIV. But, maybe they are limited by what tools they do have, and that's a shame, because it makes being an artist a chore and a waste of talent imo

  18. #98

    LADIES AND GENTLEMAN.

    VINDICTUS.











    That is all.

  19. #99
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    Too bad it can be hardly called an MMO. (somewhat like GW1)
    But still quite a fine game for playing on and off.

  20. #100
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    I agree that the industry needs more online RPG's instead of wannabe-online RPG's that recent "MMO's" always tend to become.

    I don't know what it has to do with XIV or any other MMO personally though. I'd rather wait for GW2.