No "Zones"

I dont mind zones, what i think would work to everybodies tastes were fewer zones. The lag issues from having one wide open area with no noticable zones would just be horrific. Seperating certain landscapes helps with imagery, but it would proberbly work as an example brought from ffxi, West Ronfaure -> Battalia Downs as one large zone, that sort of size zone would proberbly work better. The wide spread of monster levels and the scope for streamless adventuring would flow better with most people's opinions however, mean that lag wasn't as much as an issue.

If I might reply from the perspective of an MMO developer:

Zones accomplish a number of important things, none of which have much to do with the opinion or gameplay style of the users, so you should stop arguing the question from that point of view right now.

1) Client limitations.

A computer or console's graphics cards only have so much memory. This memory is used to store the textures (that is, the images that are wrapped around a skeleton of a model) that you see. If a graphics card is asked to display a texture it does not have already loaded in memory, (example: a particular set of armor appears on screen for the first time), it has to go out and fetch that graphic from disk. This is a sloooow operation, and kills virtually all graphics performance on the user's machine, making it unplayable.

The answer is to split the world into zones. In each zone, you limit the types of textures you can see. (Example: this is a cave zone, so we're only going to load the cave wall textures and not load any of the grass and tree textures.) You can also design your world such that only 2-3 types of monsters live in this particular zone. (Example: this zone has goblins, so we're going to pre-load them, but it doesn't have undead, so we're not going to load them.) This helps solve the problem tremendously. Without this, your world must necessarily have very little variety in its graphics, indirectly causing worlds to be smaller to avoid any sense of repetitiveness.

The trouble is player avatars. You can't control what they wear, or where they go, which means you have to pre-load the entire set of player avatars and equipment in every zone. This is partially why MMO companies are so hesitant to introduce new equipment graphics -- it's really expensive, you need to preload it in every zone, and some users' computers and consoles have very little video memory.

2. Server Infrastructure

Running a simulation of thousands of people moving around fighting thousands of other monsters is a very intensive operation. There are essentially no known computers (outside of billion dollar supercomputers) capable of simultaneously doing this for an entire MMO world. You are limited not just by processing power, but also by the fact that even gigabit ethernet interfaces aren't capable of switching that much data in and out of a single machine without lag.

Splitting a world into zones, however, lets you break a world out across multiple boxes, with one physical server running a small number of zones. This gives the user the appearance of living in one contiguous world, but every time you zone, you are actually being teleported between physical servers that could be in different rooms, or even entirely different states.

Communicating this teleportation without losing data or corrupting characters is really quite complicated and very expensive. (There are insanely complex race condition and transactional data integrity issues at stake, as evidenced by how nearly every dupe bug in MMO history has involved zoning.) This is why most MMO companies are comfortable with having NPCs unable to teleport across a zone line like players can. Most players take this functionality as a completely intended part of gameplay, using zone lines to escape from monsters, but this was never intended behavior in MMOs and not a consideration in why the zone lines exist.

3. How It's Presented

This reality isn't going away any time soon. The difference is in how you're comfortable presenting that reality to an end user. FF11 was comfortable with presenting it quite literally: there's an invisible wall, and when you hit it, you get a blank screen with a loading message. Your client dumps all its video memory, reloads all the textures for the new zone, the server teleports you from one physical box to the other, and off you go.

Other games don't like this. WoW has something in between -- they get around the texture limitations by keeping their graphics very simple and their textures very lightweight. They keep their continents all on the same server, but you still "zone" if you change continents. Others like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies had actual zones, but they tried to keep them completely hidden and seamlessly transition between them without the user noticing, even if the textures and physical server box were changing out "underneath" the player as you moved. Thus the games appeared "zoneless," with no loading screens, even if they really were.

With the advent of more recent MMO's that take this latter approach, it's unlikely that FF14 will have FF11 style zones. Users simply don't like it. It breaks immersion and results in worlds being designed "around" this notion -- monsters are balanced and positioned such that players can use the zone line to escape, for instance, which is a complete destruction of the illusion of a virtual place. Players in these games come to expect and rely on the hard zone lines as part of their gameplay. The market has spoken and this is dying out: don't expect to see FF11 style zone lines in FF14. How they actually do it "under the hood" though, and how well they will actually be able to pull it off from a user experience standpoint, has yet to be seen.

Ya know... always wondered about some of this but never thought to ask, thanks Jaerik.

So since FFXIV will have much heavier textures than XI or WoW, I guess we can only assume that they'll do it like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies that Jaerik mentioned? Unless they somehow come up with some new fandangled way of doing it :P

Thanks for the geek speak Jaerik, I don't really care how they do it, as long as they at least reduce - if not eliminate entirely - the visible zones as much as possible.