**FFXV SPOILERS** What We Can Expect In FFVII:R From FFXV

SO!

Now that I’ve made my way through 60 hours of FFXV, I wanted to make a thread about how some things (aside from the Midgar Zolom) might work/feel in FFVII:R.



***IN CASE IT WASN’T CLEAR, THERE WILL BE FFXV SPOILERS!***



STORY / THEMATIC STUFF:

• Trail of Blood: All of Chapter 13’s solo, powerless wandering through a quiet horror-like environment evokes feelings of the ShinRa HQ’s Trail of Blood and the talk of all the experiments on the Daemons really connects to the Hojo-like vibe that those moments in FFVII:R should feel like. It’s one of those creep-tastic moments from the game that I’ve been really nervous about, but XV gave me a lot of confidence that we’ll get a fantastic rendition of that atmosphere.

• Relatable Characters: XV delivered really solidly on making the characters feel relatable and more like real people rather than JRPG characters when they interacted. I’m curious how FFVII:R’s larger party size and variable party composition will affect this, but they’ve managed to nail the, “bring a Final Fantasy world to life” in XV, and not just because of the setting that slightly connects to the real world.

• Transportation: Walking, Driving, Chocobo-ing, & Flying all feel really good and different, and I think that FFVII:R will likely push that even further. I’m most curious about the Highwind, and if it’ll be one of those things where it’s a small version flying over a scaled version of the World Map, that you can go aboard, or Fast Travel places, because I can’t imagine the logistics of flying something that size around.


COMBAT STUFF:

• Party Size: FFXV has you running everything from solo, to having your main character and 4 other supporting characters, and honestly… it’s VERY manageable. To add to that though, since you won’t have as much of a “key character with powers and his bros” dynamic in FFVII and each character has their own dedicated weapon sets, I think that the ability to swap which character you have control over in Combat would be incredibly important which means that sticking with the good ol’ Party of 3 might be better. Either way, I’m very open for that being whatever they decide now.

• Wait Mode: Wait Mode works really well. I’m really hoping to have that and the active combat. Depending on if you can swap characters, Wait Mode would be a really good way to swap between characters and manage slightly more hectic combat than XV gives – especially since it’s unlikely that the characters will all have an “instant-engage with ∆” function like Noctis’ Warp Strike.

• Magic: This is where I’d expect a HUGE departure from XV. XV’s magic is all about wide-range explosive magic of three core elements. Crisis Core managed to do Materia solidly, and its magic implementation ought to make FFVII:R Combat feel incredibly different.

• Huge Boss Battles: For things like the Weapons, this is where XV makes me a little nervous, because it has QTE-like things but they’re not really well executed. HOWEVER, CyberConnect2 made Asura’s Wrath an entire game that used QTEs the way that Crisis Core used the Reel system, so I have a feeling that their work on FFVII:R will VASTLY improve those elements from what XV had.


(I’m a bit busy, so I’ll probably poast more updates and edit this thread with more stuff as I think of it. Also, feel free to add in your own thoughts if you’re so inclined). Maybe I'll make an article or something out of this if I can get everything I want worked out with it? *shrugs*


***EDIT: MOAR***

• In-Battle Menu Usage: The ability to reconfigure or reequip your team on the fly based on the encounter you're in is something not in FFVII originally, and seems less "realistic" but it's something that I appreciated MASSIVELY in XV, so I hope that it stays around – especially if enemy's weaknesses, resistances, & absorption of various magic elements is wide and varied.

• MP Usage: MP in this game is really specifically tailored to Noctis' abilities, and with Magic being exceptionally different, it's to be expected that MP and Magic will be vastly different in FFVII:R. What with Materia-based magic generally being targeted (unless it's attached to an "All" materia), I don't really see any potential issue with letting the AI-controlled part member utilize their equipped Materia magic as they please.

• Max HP & HP/MP Regeneration: This is an aspect of FFXV that I thought was exceptionally well designed. It makes items still feel necessary in Combat, and reduces the overall list of Items to ones you care about in those scenarios. Additionally, it makes overworld or free-roam wandering feel less dangerous than closed-scenario (dungeon) wandering because your HP max doesn't regen in those settings. This is something I'd like to see, especially with other part members in FFVII:R having MP that they'll utilize actively.

• Food, Resting, & EXP/AP: Given that the "road trip bros" is a big part of the feel of XV, the mechanics for AP vs EXP, and resting and eating are notably significant components. That being said, FFVII:R doesn't have a need to have EXP not accrue automatically after each combat event, because there isn't an emphasis on day-by-day travel. That being said, I can see Limit Breaks and some other party sync features taking the form of am AP-like grid, though more likely focused on each character individually rather than focused on ability sets. Then that gets to whether or not the AP-like upgrades are best as a single large pool, or character-specific. I have a feeling this is where FFVII:R will feel significantly different from XV.

• Summons: Summons will already be different from the fickle L2 gods of XV. Having them being an MP-consuming Materia is likely something that will be tweaked as well that will set them apart from the original. If anything, I'd assume utilization of summons to be linked to an HP-consuming ability like the Armiger Weapons, so that you'd have to specifically control the character in order to cast it, since the AI would likely be able to use Materia Magic like normal attacks, but arbitrarily firing off Summons in Combat seems less ideal.

• Limit Breaks: I expect Limit Breaks to work somewhat like the Tech Bar system in XV, but where the abilities accrue on a character-by-character basis, and the L1 & Arrows menu can be used to quickly trigger that Limit Break at a target.


***EDIT: EVEN MOAR***

• Town, City, & Outpost Sizes/Population: The little roadstops have a good "waypoint" sized feel to them and manage to have their own personalities shine through even when they're somewhat generic. The bigger towns from Lestallum to Altissia have a really solid Kalm to Junon-sized feel to them that sells the sense of a realistic population. The difference is that in XV, you never really see a fully populated area like Midgar, as you're kept outside of Insomnia until it's a deadzone - same with Zegnatus (though Kingsglaive did deliver on that sense of scale). That being said, you get the sense that Lucis is a world that feels believably populated, even if the fringes are more abandoned (like we'll be feeling with the Mako Generator-drained regions of land in FFVII:R).

• Environments: Leide, Duscae, Cleigne, Altissia, Tenebrae, & Insomnia all manage to have really distinct feelings to them both environmentally & content-wise – even down to how the enemy types roam and where they exist. It'll be really interesting to see if this level of detail is retroactively applied to some of FFVII's more ridiculous and out there monsters to make the world of FFVII:R feel something that "works" from a functional standpoint, rather than a map populated with an enemy type because of reasons.

• "Seamless" Dungeons: Things like the One Eyed Behemoth and other locations that smoothly transition form the world map into a dungeon map do a really good job for quick transitions for unique areas sitting around the overworld (like I'd expect with the Ancient Forest). Because of the HP regen changes that dungeons have, amongst other things, I really like this mechanic as well as being able to do this for areas not explicitly designated as "dungeons" or similar locked-in pathways.

• Change of Scope: XV starts open, moves gradually through bigger and bigger towns, then moves onto trains to finally reach the creepy abandoned science place and then the big mega city – whereas VII starts in the big mega city on trains, reaches the creepy science place, breaks out into the open road and other towns, and then moves into the open world to confront and ever-growing threat. While XV is about Noctis' ever-approaching destiny closing out the rest of the world from him, VII is about Cloud's narrowed (and ultimately false) identity being opened up by his companions and exposure to the world. I've got high hopes for that sense of scale to be managed really well in FFVII:R given the precedent in XV.

• Train transportation: When XV hits its linear stride, you get a LOT of time on trains and wandering platforms, and while they're going to be different from the ones in Midgar in FFVII:R, the way that you feel free to wander, yet also confined was managed really well.

• Save Points: XV almost doesn't have Save Points, but they do. In the EX Dungeons (i.e. behind the locked vaults), on your way down the vast, un-mappable areas, you can encounter a Campsite on the way down that really gave a feeling of a Save Point for the only time in the game. Sure Campsite are OBVIOUSLY Save Points (since those are where you're allowed to use Tent items in FF Games), but designing them for FFVII:R would be neat to use a similar-but-different approach to them. I think that It'd be fine for FFVII:R to implement Save Points along its dungeon or locked-in paths, since there are so many of them early on, but limiting them to long regions of "inner mapped" areas that prevent Max HP Regen. Aside from an ability to save, it makes sense that other functions like PHS could be utilized there at them, which is a MUCH more important facet of FFVII:R given the size of the cast & size of the active party being vastly different. I do like the idea of Save Points being used as meeting points where the whole party can be present in a location and have a chance to chat about it since it'll be much less likely to have fluid party banter like XV does in all places given the aforementioned party/cast size. Those make a natural point to get little hints of things from the characters not in your party. Again – NO idea if they'll implement something like this, but given the way that they're treated, it makes sense to use them like that. Sure it's a little less realistic, but I think that it's something where the advantage outweighs that.

• Temp Characters: Having a team with Aranea or Iris is a blast in XV, and likewise, it'd be neat to have brief fixed sequences early on with Biggs, Jesse, & Wedge to make them feel much more like a core part of your party early on in the game – thus making their eventual fates hold more weight, and also giving a a juxtaposition for the loss of life that occurs around you early in the game to really hit hime with Aerith's death when a party member you've properly spent a good chunk of the game with gets taken from you.







X

After experiencing XV, I feel they can pull off the world map at 1:1 scale in the same way XV did it. XV's map is pretty big, about 25 square miles of explorable area. However other modern games have maps even bigger. GTA V's map is 50 square miles, and the Witcher 3's map is 85 square miles in size.

If VII:R's world map was 85 square miles, the same as The Witcher 3, this is the scale you would get. I dont think its too daunting considering about two thirds of the map is water, leaving about 30 square miles of explorable land



While I would be satisfied with this scale, it presents some interesting problems, like the size of Midgar. However I feel the world map will be redesigned in VII:R to take into account the move from overworld to openworld. I fully expect most of the water to be removed and the 3 continents to be pushed much closer together for a tighter package. Not what I want, but what I expect.

Hopefully we get a highway system like XV. That went a long way to making the world feel much more alive and realistic. It also helps with travel while giving some of the vehicles a chance to shine. Secret Hardy Daytona anyone?

No reason why XV's variable weather or time of day shouldn't appear in VII:R as well. I know certain enemies appeared only in certain conditions, which was a nice touch.

The variety in towns was lacking in XV. I believe there was only 2 maybe 3 towns that consisted of more then the same copy/pasted inn and diner. Square has said in the past devleoping towns in HD was difficult for them. Im certainly terrified of Rocket Town looking no different then Mideel because its too time consuming to build a variety of towns in HD. I mean, can you imagine rocket town being nothing more then a diner, gas station, and a trailer? Thats the thing of nightmares.

And one more thing. Treasure chests > glowing dots on the map. Big difference. At least psychologically.

I don't know if it's that likely that the Remake is going to do a full seamless open world map, especially if being 1:1 shrinks down the size of the continents that much, it stretches the suspension of disbelief that you're traversing a normal sized planet. Like with FFXV you're traveling around large part of Eos' planet, but not the entirety of it. But FFVII circumnavigating the entirety of The Planet was a pretty significant aspect of the game (including traversing over and under aquatic parts of the map). I think a segmented/sectioned open overworld is more likely.

They can definitely pull off an open world for VII. But they definitely won't. Remember this is being released in 3 parts - I think we'll likely see something like wide-linear areas that push you forward and possibly allow for backtracking where appropriate.

MOAR THOUGHTS (Also edited into the OP)



• In-Battle Menu Usage: The ability to reconfigure or reequip your team on the fly based on the encounter you're in is something not in FFVII originally, and seems less "realistic" but it's something that I appreciated MASSIVELY in XV, so I hope that it stays around – especially if enemy's weaknesses, resistances, & absorption of various magic elements is wide and varied.

• MP Usage: MP in this game is really specifically tailored to Noctis' abilities, and with Magic being exceptionally different, it's to be expected that MP and Magic will be vastly different in FFVII:R. What with Materia-based magic generally being targeted (unless it's attached to an "All" materia), I don't really see any potential issue with letting the AI-controlled part member utilize their equipped Materia magic as they please.

• Max HP & HP/MP Regeneration: This is an aspect of FFXV that I thought was exceptionally well designed. It makes items still feel necessary in Combat, and reduces the overall list of Items to ones you care about in those scenarios. Additionally, it makes overworld or free-roam wandering feel less dangerous than closed-scenario (dungeon) wandering because your HP max doesn't regen in those settings. This is something I'd like to see, especially with other part members in FFVII:R having MP that they'll utilize actively.

• Food, Resting, & EXP/AP: Given that the "road trip bros" is a big part of the feel of XV, the mechanics for AP vs EXP, and resting and eating are notably significant components. That being said, FFVII:R doesn't have a need to have EXP not accrue automatically after each combat event, because there isn't an emphasis on day-by-day travel. That being said, I can see Limit Breaks and some other party sync features taking the form of am AP-like grid, though more likely focused on each character individually rather than focused on ability sets. Then that gets to whether or not the AP-like upgrades are best as a single large pool, or character-specific. I have a feeling this is where FFVII:R will feel significantly different from XV.

• Summons: Summons will already be different from the fickle L2 gods of XV. Having them being an MP-consuming Materia is likely something that will be tweaked as well that will set them apart from the original. If anything, I'd assume utilization of summons to be linked to an HP-consuming ability like the Armiger Weapons, so that you'd have to specifically control the character in order to cast it, since the AI would likely be able to use Materia Magic like normal attacks, but arbitrarily firing off Summons in Combat seems less ideal.

• Limit Breaks: I expect Limit Breaks to work somewhat like the Tech Bar system in XV, but where the abilities accrue on a character-by-character basis, and the L1 & Arrows menu can be used to quickly trigger that Limit Break at a target.


Gonna keep cobbling these thoughts together, as I think I have more floating around in my head, then likely get to a proper-type write-up with screenshots and shit later (maybe while I'm forcibly removed from XV by being in Sweden?)




X

• Town, City, & Outpost Sizes/Population: The little roadstops have a good "waypoint" sized feel to them and manage to have their own personalities shine through even when they're somewhat generic. The bigger towns from Lestallum to Altissia have a really solid Kalm to Junon-sized feel to them that sells the sense of a realistic population. The difference is that in XV, you never really see a fully populated area like Midgar, as you're kept outside of Insomnia until it's a deadzone - same with Zegnatus (though Kingsglaive did deliver on that sense of scale). That being said, you get the sense that Lucis is a world that feels believably populated, even if the fringes are more abandoned (like we'll be feeling with the Mako Generator-drained regions of land in FFVII:R).

• Environments: Leide, Duscae, Cleigne, Altissia, Tenebrae, & Insomnia all manage to have really distinct feelings to them both environmentally & content-wise – even down to how the enemy types roam and where they exist. It'll be really interesting to see if this level of detail is retroactively applied to some of FFVII's more ridiculous and out there monsters to make the world of FFVII:R feel something that "works" from a functional standpoint, rather than a map populated with an enemy type because of reasons.

• "Seamless" Dungeons: Things like the One Eyed Behemoth and other locations that smoothly transition form the world map into a dungeon map do a really good job for quick transitions for unique areas sitting around the overworld (like I'd expect with the Ancient Forest). Because of the HP regen changes that dungeons have, amongst other things, I really like this mechanic as well as being able to do this for areas not explicitly designated as "dungeons" or similar locked-in pathways.

• Change of Scope: XV starts open, moves gradually through bigger and bigger towns, then moves onto trains to finally reach the creepy abandoned science place and then the big mega city – whereas VII starts in the big mega city on trains, reaches the creepy science place, breaks out into the open road and other towns, and then moves into the open world to confront and ever-growing threat. While XV is about Noctis' ever-approaching destiny closing out the rest of the world from him, VII is about Cloud's narrowed (and ultimately false) identity being opened up by his companions and exposure to the world. I've got high hopes for that sense of scale to be managed really well in FFVII:R given the precedent in XV.

• Train transportation: When XV hits its linear stride, you get a LOT of time on trains and wandering platforms, and while they're going to be different from the ones in Midgar in FFVII:R, the way that you feel free to wander, yet also confined was managed really well.

• Save Points: XV almost doesn't have Save Points, but they do. In the EX Dungeons (i.e. behind the locked vaults), on your way down the vast, un-mappable areas, you can encounter a Campsite on the way down that really gave a feeling of a Save Point for the only time in the game. Sure Campsite are OBVIOUSLY Save Points (since those are where you're allowed to use Tent items in FF Games), but designing them for FFVII:R would be neat to use a similar-but-different approach to them. I think that It'd be fine for FFVII:R to implement Save Points along its dungeon or locked-in paths, since there are so many of them early on, but limiting them to long regions of "inner mapped" areas that prevent Max HP Regen. Aside from an ability to save, it makes sense that other functions like PHS could be utilized there at them, which is a MUCH more important facet of FFVII:R given the size of the cast & size of the active party being vastly different. I do like the idea of Save Points being used as meeting points where the whole party can be present in a location and have a chance to chat about it since it'll be much less likely to have fluid party banter like XV does in all places given the aforementioned party/cast size. Those make a natural point to get little hints of things from the characters not in your party. Again – NO idea if they'll implement something like this, but given the way that they're treated, it makes sense to use them like that. Sure it's a little less realistic, but I think that it's something where the advantage outweighs that.

• Temp Characters: Having a team with Aranea or Iris is a blast in XV, and likewise, it'd be neat to have brief fixed sequences early on with Biggs, Jesse, & Wedge to make them feel much more like a core part of your party early on in the game – thus making their eventual fates hold more weight, and also giving a a juxtaposition for the loss of life that occurs around you early in the game to really hit hime with Aerith's death when a party member you've properly spent a good chunk of the game with gets taken from you.





X

Lex said:

They can definitely pull off an open world for VII.

Click to expand...

I don't see how they technically can, not unless they massively shrink the planet.

Remember this is being released in 3 parts

Click to expand...

Do you know something we don't?

I think we'll likely see something like wide-linear areas that push you forward and possibly allow for backtracking where appropriate.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm thinking and it's what I want. Open world has its place and they work best for smaller places that you want to portray in full scale and detail (i.e. "this takes place within a single city" or "this takes place within one region on a continent/island").
A seamless world is imo detrimental to making it feel appropriately massive and for lack of a less overused term, "epic".

Tetsujin said:

Lex said:

They can definitely pull off an open world for VII.

Click to expand...

I don't see how they technically can, not unless they massively shrink the planet.

Remember this is being released in 3 parts

Click to expand...

Do you know something we don't?

I think we'll likely see something like wide-linear areas that push you forward and possibly allow for backtracking where appropriate.

Click to expand...

That's what I'm thinking and it's what I want. Open world has its place and they work best for smaller places that you want to portray in full scale and detail (i.e. "this takes place within a single city" or "this takes place within one region on a continent/island").
A seamless world is imo detrimental to making it feel appropriately massive and for lack of a less overused term, "epic".

Click to expand...

I understand your concern, but XV's world was actually very small in comparison to other modern open world games. If VII:R used an open world in which each of the three continents was the size of XV's entire map (about the scale of the image I posted above) then I feel it would be plenty big in scale.

XV's map feels smaller then it actually is primarily due to travel being too easy too early in the game. The regalia is like getting the highwind after leaving Midgar. If that happened we would all most likely think VIIG's world was small. Its simply too easy to travel anywhere at the beginning of the game which makes the map feel small.

In FFVIIG you had to travel by foot and venture through numerous dungeons across the entire world before finally getting the Highwind 25+ hours in. That helped the world feel much bigger then it actually was.

I think you're making the fatal flaw of overlooking how damaging to the narrative an open-world VII would be. To say it honestly, I don't want vast areas of nothingness between my destinations in VII. I don't want the inevitable meaningless sidequests that come with a world that's just too vast. I'm not even saying these things because of XV, but because of every modern RPG that's had an open world or open-esque world in it. They all share one thing in common: meaningless sidequests. It's inescapable. To me it just doesn't work with respect to VII's narrative.

I'm not saying I don't want open world. I'm not even sure what I DO want them to do at this point. I just know for sure I don't want anything similar to XV. It would be neat to look over that ridge and see Midgar, or speed through the canyon to end up seeing Cosmo Canyon embedded in the mountain. But there's no reason they can't do that without having to resort to "open world" as it's known now.

clowd said:

I understand your concern, but XV's world was actually very small in comparison to other modern open world games. If VII:R used an open world in which each of the three continents was the size of XV's entire map (about the scale of the image I posted above) then I feel it would be plenty big in scale.

Click to expand...

In terms of total playable/explorable area it would certainly be big, that's not the point.
The point is, that this all being seamlessly connected in an open world scenario shatters the illusion of it being a planet-spanning journey.
In FFVII I travel across a miniature world map and through abstraction it helps sell the illusion that the world would really be much larger than that.

I can imagine there are probably more populated areas, towns and cities in that world outside of the ones you visit in the story that you never see. In a seamless world, the few towns of FFVII would be all we get and due to the seamless 1:1 scale of an open world it would truly make it look like those nine or ten towns are all there is on that planet.

Three continents would become three islands. If you were to pilot the Highwind across the sea in between them, at that scale you could overlook all three continents - which shouldn't be possible.

There is a reason why open world games generally don't pretend like the explorable map is the entire world and that there is more outside of that, because game designers know open worlds cannot believably portray the sense of scale needed for an entire world.

When I'm scaling Gaea's Cliff, I wanna be able to overlook the mountains and I want them to be vast. I don't want the entire mountain range to be explorable, I want them to be a beautiful background helping to sell me the scale of the world. I want it to look so vast that if this were an open world game, the mountains would BE the open world.

tl;dr FFVII wasn't an open world and thus shouldn't become one and it shouldn't be seamless because sometimes, the seams are needed.

Currently playing The Last Remanent and that's a pretty good description of one of the things that game got right. The large-scale map feels huge which means that the actual locations can vary in size and aren't filled with nothing (except the desert area, but that's kinda the point of it). I kinda wish more games used that map format as it still lets them have an "open area" feel at the correct scale with monsters running around without it taking forever to get to different locations.

Did anyone feel like part of the ice cave that you get one of the armiger weapons closely resembled the layout of the GI cave. Just replace the slippy ice with the river of blood. It even had a slippery bit on one of the 'bridges' between the two walkways that runs across the walls.

Out of curiosity, has anyone managed to make it into the secret post-game dungeon near the Rock of Ravatough? I've tried so many times to land on that little strip of road and crash every time.

I have it on good authority that Lex has.





X

I suck at landing that damn car anywhere, lol. Glad to hear the secret area has a short runway..

I've gotten good at landing the car now.

If you still have problems, I hear landing with Ignis as the driver makes it a bit easier.

I wasn't sure if you could fly with ignis driving, actually

Tetsujin said:

I've gotten good at landing the car now.

If you still have problems, I hear landing with Ignis as the driver makes it a bit easier.

Click to expand...

Wait... you can do that? Goddammit... I've been flying that stupid thing manually this whole time.

Well, you still have to fly yourself. Ignis is a shit pilot.

Some thoughts on the map structure, cities, transportation and stuff, in semi-random order...


Personally, I've enjoyed what I've seen on the Lucis side of things and its open-worldedness. If a similar recipe were applied to FF VII:R, with some modifications, I really wouldn't mind. Vast landscapes sprawling as far as the eye can see, the ability to take roads (or chocobos) to travel are ingredients I would very much like to have in FF VII:R. A few things though:

• Even in FF XV they did place seams. And Lucis doesn't seem explorable in its entirety either. One problem I have with FFXV is that the continent of Niflheim and Tenebrae seemed to have been made with 2 bits and pieces, as if the devs realized that after they finished making Lucis that modelling another continent would push back the release date 4 years later, and they had to make a cut (well, that's probably what actually happened).
• IMO the best way to convey a feeling of immensity AND give the feeling that you travel an entire world is the type of segmentation by zones as they did in FFXII (if all sub-zones could be travelled seamlessly).
• I think there's a difficult issue to tackle when it comes to offer exploration and open-worldness and at the same time deliver on the narrative structure. However, I do not think that the original way of constraining exploration is the right way to go at it. In the original game, exploration was constrained with very cheap plot devices, mostly the lack of transportation method and infrastructures, which is IMO incoherent with the world's background (there's been enough debate about “why the hell would Rufus actually need the Tiny Bronco?”, and that's just one of many examples). In my view, those methods of directing how the players should travel the world are totally outdated. For that matter, one of my gripes with FF XV is that the “story” between chapters 1 to 8 is essentially “we can't travel to Altissia because there's no boat”. Give me a break. One method I would prefer to guide exploration is along the lines of what Bethesda did in Skyrim: you're guided by quest locations. You're given a narrative reason to go to some places.
• Regarding cities: I think that if there were rest stops in FF VII:R like there are in FF XV, that's just fine. I think it gives a feeling of vastness, like when travelling North American roads and you just see a “village” every 80 km which consists of a gas station, a convenient store and (if you're lucky) a cheap motel (only place in Europe which gave me a similar feeling of remoteness was the Scottish Highlands). However, these rest stops should be just that: rest stops, not pretending to be actual towns. IMO most towns in FF VII:R would give a satisfying sense of scale if they were the size of Lestallum. Of course, Midgar would be a thing of its own. What puzzles me though: it seems some studios seem to have a lot of trouble to make genuine cities, bit in in the scale, or the crowds (Bioware seems especially bad at this). Square has some difficulties (Altissia seems great but you can only wander in a fraction of it), and they don't know how to make crowds (when entering Lestallum, some NPCs are like “wow, what a huge crowd, it's like that all the way to the market!” and I was thinking “where is everybody?&#8221. I honestly cannot understand why the devs haven't figured a procedural NPC generation method (I've noticed copied/pasted NPCs time and again), for one thing. I also don't quite understand why they fall so short in rendering crowds or big city environments, while United Front did so well in their recreation of Hong Kong for Sleeping Dogs (and United Front belongs to Square, dammit!).
• Playing as Cloud riding a motorcycle like in the credits of Advent Children? Me wants. Let the other guys catch up with the SA-37 truck.

Yeah, the world is a tricky thing. As all have enumerated, a super-deformed world map imparts the sense of scale, but lacks the intimate familiarity with a world. While what's come to be known as a traditional "open-world" map does precisely the opposite. And both of those things I would consider important, though perhaps not crucial to the Final Fantasy experience.

The MMO approach of FFs 11, 12, 14, the last few Tales of games, what I've seen of Xenoblade Chronicles, etc. are probably the closest you can get to a compromise. And it almost completely precludes actually seeing large sections of the world at once. The other "big" (in size and popularity) recent RPGs that I haven't played are Witcher 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition. How do those handle it? But I bet those still don't entail globetrotting.

And while I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that the sense of scale is paramount to VII's themes...the narrative unequivocally has you traverse the globe, and thus it would be comical to do so on a Skyrim-sized map.

Of course there is the episodic thing. Obviously we don't know how many there will be or how much will be divided, but would even a Skyrim-sized map for each continent be sufficient? That still seems awfully small (Skyrim itself is merely a single country on a larger continent, after all).

If an entire episode is dedicated to Midgar then they could very well just do FF7-GTA but that doesn't really solve the later problems. And I agree that the rest stops would work fine, and a city the size of Lestallum would probably work for VII's smaller towns (North Corel, Gongaga, Nibelheim, Mideel, Icicle Inn, Fort Condor, Costa del Sol). Midgar and Junon (and very likely Wutai too) are obviously much, much larger, and to take Dirge's word (which I think they should), Kalm is quite large as well.

And then even if they manage to divide it all up effectively, you still have the issue of the endgame. How do they tie it all together, if they can at all? While I agree the alternate-scale world map is a bit outdated for traversal, I still think someone should attempt making a scaled map for just the airship and load the corresponding zone when you land. But I'm not aware of anyone attempting it.

Sorry for the rambling stream-of-consciousness...I think an approximation of VII's world might be the toughest thing facing the remake. Do it right though, and you could revolutionize modern JRPGs. VII did it once, could it pull it off again?


One prospect I'm super excited by - the banter. Oh man, it made me like characters I had almost zero interest in coming into XV. Meanwhile I love VII's cast merely by knowing how they act in cutscenes. How great will it be to actually get a sense of how Yuffie interacts with Cid? Or Barret and Red? I'm pretty sure that's one part I'm going to adore.

ForceStealer said:

The other "big" (in size and popularity) recent RPGs that I haven't played are Witcher 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition. How do those handle it? But I bet those still don't entail globetrotting.

Click to expand...

So... Witcher 3 handles exploration seamlessly in a very open-world manner, like Red Dead Redemption if you've played it (very similar since horse riding is the main means of transportation). However, you do not get at all the feeling that you're traveling the world. I'd say you have two main maps (one on the continent and the other one on an archipelago) You get the sense that you travel small countries, but nothing on the "continental scale" (let alone a world-wide scale). However, you get a good sense of continuity between the regions you explore.
DA: Inquisition handles exploration as many distinct zones. Each zone is quite large (a bit more like FF 12 IMO), so there's quite a lot of ground to cover, and the maps have a lot of variety, each zone has its distinct atmosphere. IMO there are 2 downsides in the DA: Inquisition strategy: first, one of the tools they used to confer each zone its specific atmosphere, while being easy on rendering requirement, is a fixed lighting setting. So, no weather, no day/night cycle. It's still very pretty, but personally I like how differences in lighting can change the mood of the same scenery. Second, the locations feel unrelated, or disjointed. You fast travel from one zone to the other, so you don't get the sense of traveling a wide expanse of land at all. That was an aspect very well handled in FF12 IMO, because in each zone you would see the appearance of the neighboring zones on the horizon (like in the Eastersands, you can see Dalmasca, or Nalbina) - giving you a sense of continuity.

Back in the days I was working on a home-brewed FF7:Remake (before the crash with reality that it would actually take me 60 years to make it ), I had drawn a concept of transportation lines between the zone of a segmented world map of FF7, following the various "areas" (like Kalm area, Grassland area, Corel area) of the original game. I also thought of handling the Highwind transportation by having the Highwind fly over a global world map, different from the one you travel on foot, and when you decide to take-off or land you have a 1:1 mapping between coordinates on the "ground level map" (depending on the zone you are located) and the global Highwind map ([insert fancy cutscene of take-off/landing to hide loading times]). We'll just have to see what they come up with.

The biggest thing I learned about FFVII:R from XV is Im pretty sure the game is going to be markedly better then the OG in many areas, but also equally worse in just as many other areas.

Towns. They still dont feel right. I think the core issue is the lack of explorable rooms. VII had myriads of rooms inside buildings to explore, find goodies, talk to people, feel immersed in the world, etc etc.

This image is a good example of a room from VII that made you feel like you were actually in the building.



Obviously a new technique is required in the remake. Perhaps they could try switching to first person view when entering a building to make exploring it more intimate and engaging without the camera's position becoming a hassle. I noticed that XV's interior rooms are all large and open, likely to assist the 3rd person camera. With a first person view you can have a much larger variety of rooms.

Towns like Cosmo Canyon were great because they were something of a dungeon in of themselves. Wall Market was maze like. More importantly these towns werent just big, special events would take place in them, or you would meet important characters there.

In XV towns people never go to sleep. They're up walking around and selling things at 1 AM. Funny thing is almost 20 years ago Brave Fencer Musashi from Square featured a town system where its inhabitants went inside and closed up shop at a certain hour except for the inn of course. I was playing XV today and it was ridiculous seeing a shop keeper sitting on a lawn chair at 2 am next to a highway, in the same position she was in 10 hours ago.

And then theres the people. At first I thought it was cool that nobody would talk to you and you could only overhear conversations but soon I realized I was missing out on so much. VII's world is full of crazy NPCs. They should all have lines in the remake.

^
For indoor environments in a city, well... first, to be sincere I now feel at odds with the idea of being able to barge into any home.

However, for actually getting indoors, I think that simply placing the camera over the shoulder should work well enough.

Then, I wholeheartedly agree with you on the idea that FFXV towns seem a bit outdated in the concept that people never go to sleep, never close shop, etc. IMO that's really immersion breaking (although I know people would complain gameplay-wise if stores are not open 24/7).

What strikes me is that people have managed to recreate the feeling of urban environments in video games ages ago (IMO starting with Assassin's Creed, and improving after that), including the scale, the crowds, the surrounding chatter, clamor, background (Sleeping Dogs did amazingly where the audio feeling in the dead of the night - with lone dog barks and gusts of wind - is just so different from rush hours with people honking and exchanging colorful politeness), and it feels like SE still has quite a bit of catching up to do.
Having a crazy bustling Midgar with plenty of colorful NPCs is definitely possible, but will SE manage to pull it off?

Other than the issue of time, it really shouldn't be that difficult to achieve some combination of what XV and XII did. While we tend to think of VII's world map in terms of how we can traverse it once we have the Highwind, if you think about the way we initially explore it, the whole thing is already naturally segmented by the game's geography to send us down the actually-quite-linear path the devs want us to take.

So, you leave Midgar and let's say it's pretty vast. The area encompassing Midgar, Kalm, the Chocobo Ranch and the marshes could be quite huge -- but it's still segmented into its own area by the mountain range and oceans. The devs don't have to worry about a fully open world to explore from the get go because no matter how much space they give us inside Midgar or for this next section of the game, they're given an enormous short cut for the first few years of development because of these few simple facts:

—They don't have to worry about rendering more than three sectors of Midgar, a couple of reactors, and Shin-Ra headquarters
—They have leaving Midgar and transitioning to the outside world to serve as one seam and then the Mythril Mines to serve as another from the Midgar area to the Junon area
—Similarly, once you reach Junon, there's another seam there with the ocean and the cargo ship. They just need to make this first confrontation with Sephiroth and battle with Jenova particularly epic, then they can end the first episode of the game here

For those of you who have played XV, what do you think? Is the amount of land that can be explored there comparable to what it feels like this first continent should contain with the seams above in mind?

With the next episode, we start off in yet another segmented area surrounded by invisible seams. Costa del Sol and its environs aren't all that large -- ocean seams all around along with Mt. Corel, which will effectively serve the same transitional dungeon purpose that the Mythril Mines did.

For the Corel area, they can take more shortcuts. How much of the desert needs to be shown? The original game wouldn't let us explore it without the buggy anyway, so maybe they just deposit us outside the desert when we get the buggy and won't let us go back in because "too much sand will clog the hover modules" or whatever excuse.

Without a need to worry about the desert, a huge chunk of the space between North Corel and Gongaga doesn't have to be a concern -- and on Gongaga's side of the river, the multiple cliffs and inaccessibility of the Ancient Forest takes another large chunk out of their need to trouble themselves. They then just have to make most of the mountainous area around and leading into Nanaki's homeland a fairly straightforward path with lots of terraced formations that can only be seen rather than scaled, which they'll be doing again soon thereafter with the Mt. Nibel transitional dungeon anyway, as pretty much everything north of Cosmo Canyon on that continent was just mountainous terrain that couldn't be walked over in the original game's overworld either.

So, at this point an enormous amount of the work on the game's second continent has been streamlined while remaining true to the original game and still giving the player a respectable amount of land to cross.

I admit that things could become more of a challenge past Rocket Town. Acquiring the Tiny Bronco means Wutai should become accessible, and so the devs have to decide how much of that continent should be in the open world style and whether additional inhabited locations should be added to it.

Though the player should experience some sense of expanded freedom at this point, in light of what little new stuff other than Wutai the player actually gained access to at this point in the original, I think the developers could get away with cutting out much of the shallow water pathways and associated ocean or continent edges, instead just letting the player cut to the chase in their travels via the crippled seaplane.

Taking shortcuts like this, what often seems like an inordinate task becomes a lot more ... ordinate.

The Temple of the Ancients could maybe have a proper open world forest around it to explore, but when we head past Bone Village on the Northern Continent, things are going to get streamlined again by the Sleeping Forest serving as yet another transitional dungeon kind of environment, and then the second episode could end with Aerith's death. When we pick things up for the third episode, most of the travel across the northern continent was relegated to transitional dungeons and a snowboarding minigame even in the original, and I see no need to change that here.

I also simply have to expect exploration underwater in the submarine to happen in an almost (if not actually) scripted way. The only remaining difficulties become how to incorporate the Highwind (a downscaled map? selecting open world areas to fly around in without being able to seamlessly transition between them by simply flying from one to another? the dreaded point-and-click or dropdown list?) and how to keep all of the previously explored wilderness available on one disc come the endgame (will we need to use up half the console's storage space for the sake of being able to revisit some areas, or -- worse still -- have to do so just to progress in the game?).

There are some very real challenges ahead, but I think the vast majority of perceived issues for the remake come with built-in solutions.