Problem with XV is that travelling between locations is often stated to be 4 miles here, 5 miles there, meaning that the whole of the main continent feels like it’s only like 30miles2 (squared) at most. Which is hideously underwhelming if you’re trying to sell an “epic.” It’s like me dropping off a friend in north London before returning home to the suburbs in the South. So what? It’s the ultimately irony and paradox of these vast landscapes of nothingness, when really it’s an absolutely tiny world. Even for just a continent.
How they circumvent this in VIIR has me stumped.
Well, to give some more context to game world vs. real world sizes for a good idea of what open world means for a number of games, and also what those sizes feel like compared to one another:
So, some
Final Fantasy XV Map Size Comparisons to that, since
there are several maps in the game & we've been discussing zones.
• Altissia ~10.5 km² (~6.5 mi²)
• Main Map ~230 km² (~143 mi²)
• Niflheim ~661 km² (~410 mi²)
• Ocean ~40,000 km² (~24855 mi²)
The other point here is that the purpose of the World Map in FFVII is a little bit for exploration, but it's mostly for annotated travel. It's not like FFXV where it's meant to capture a roadtrip feeling, which is why I've literally never used fast travel while playing the game. I always just autopilot to wherever, and enjoy the scenery.
in fact if you have to travel in anything even REMOTELY resembling real-time it'll be just astronomically laborious for something that's completely not worth it. Keep in mind – the biggest map shown in that video was the Daggerfall map for Elderscrolls 2. That map is ~161,600 km² (100,413 mi²), AND it came out in 1996. The World Map is FFVII is a slightly more fleshed out fast-travel mechanic that's primarily in place to help you understand the sense of scale when dealing with a threat to the entire Planet. You start out slow, blocked my mountains and rivers, then you get a car to help you get through the rivers, then a shallow boat lets you around some continents with effort, then you get a submarine to cross continents, then an airship, then rockets on said airship. Chocobos exist as a loose parallel to match what accesses you get from your vehicles.
What the World Map needs to do is make it so that there is a journey that's connected to reaching the locations that helps inform your scale of the world, and understanding of everything around you. Midgar is massive and ridiculously dense. Junon is also insanely large and dense built over an existing town, meant to be a juxtaposition to Kalm as a small town and the wide open Chocobo Ranch.
I'd assume that how you accomplish this is by using zones in the same way that the original did. Upon the first time you go to a region, you have to leave the world map and traverse through it. The best example I'd say is making your way to North Corel on the way to Gold Saucer. You bypass the train tracks and canyon trip basically any time after that – but you HAVE to go through there the first time you reach it. It's acting as a bottleneck to control the pacing of the story to get you to spend more time in an area that isn't content dense like Midgar. From a design standpoint, that's all the Midgar Zolom and the Mythril Mines are – they're literally a bottleneck to get you to spend time at the ranch and develop a set of feelings about that place.
With the Remake's World Map, you want to chunk content blocks the same way, but you might be able to just do it as a "region" where you can world map wander anywhere, but you'll encounter little borders that appear when you approach them. Some can be optional (i.e. wander through a forest in real scale, or just breeze on through it), while others will require you to go through it the first time, and subsequent times can be optional.
The reason I'm thinking that this approach works well is that we also have to consider that the game needs to have the Diamond Weapon confrontation. You have to go set up as it approaches and try to stop it (much like the first scene with it in
Kingsglaive)
This is something that
needs to be done in the 1:1 scale, and not as a minimap encounter like the original game because THIS is where the new scale of the Remake can really shine in some utterly mind-blowing setpieces. Something like that could be a gathering point, but I think it'd be FAR more interesting to have to you rush back to Midgar via the world map, and enter the region, and watch the approach in full-scale potentially with a timer to set up your party members doing different things before it makes landfall.
Given that the post-Midgar remake has to account for all these things, it's almost certain that the map design is still going to have tons of detail put into various regions and spaces all over the world, the same way the original game did with anywhere it forced you to explore / traverse.
(Which means that
@Vyzzuvazzadth will likely have enough content to scour over until the heat death of the universe)
X 
) - my bad, I probably could’ve made that clearer.
, or to be precise, how you should link them up correctly. 
I'm sure many of you already discovered these points and I'm wasting my time, BUT I REGRET NOTHING! It's too much fun anyway! 
