So while I may have misunderstood your point in the specific sentence in my previous post. This is still the sentiment I am disputing. I don't find FFXII to be any less open than any other FFs. On the contrary, I would suggest it's one of the more open ones. It certainly lacks any sort of optional content (endgame or otherwise) that isn't just more fighting, but that is a distinct issue.
This is another point of misunderstanding though and I fail to see how you make that misunderstanding when the part of my post you quoted in no way conflicts with your opinion here.
Me : "
not as if I'm playing a game where I am railroaded from environment to environment in that same way as the last 3 numbered single-player FF games. "
This says nothing about the nature of the environments - my complaint is specifically about the way in which you transition from environment to environment in the last 3 numbered FF games.
That is to say - that unlike earlier FF games that gave you an abstraction that visually represents travel between locations (the world map) you now have nothing at all (simply jumping disjointedly from one location to the next as you hit a border and a loading screen) or with an even more minimalistic abstraction (the simple overview map from FFX).
I hate this. It severely pulls me out of the experience - especially with situations like the transition from the plains, to Mt. Gagazet in FFX.
This problem is equally true for every FF game after 10, regardless of whether or not each respective map in FFXII was better designed than in the other games.
I'm not sure precisely what your definition of "open world" is, because I don't think I'd quite classify any FF except FF1 as open world. All of them restrict your access to large sections of the world based on plot. Whereas when I think open world I think something like Oblivion or Skyrim. The entire world is completely available to you at almost all times regardless of what you are doing in the plot.
FFVII was decidedly not this way. After you leave Midgar and Kalm, there is quite literally nothing you can do but go through the Mythril Mines and advance the plot. XII was much closer, in my opinion, because often the only obstacle to going to a certain area was that the enemies were too strong.
And if you paid attention to what I wrote, you'd know that I've never classified FFVII as an open world game. I qualified the loose way on which I used to term to refer to the way in which the world opens up in FFVII at the end allowing you to freely travel between previous locations.
Again, all the other FF games did this too - but they, unlike the upcoming remake, all had the distinct advantage of being delivered in one package.
My worry here is that if they're going with the distinctly map by map method of later FF games, they'll have no incentive what so ever to allow exploration of areas cross the various installments of the remake - despite the fact that being able to visit all the different locations again at the end of the original FFVII with the golden Chocobo etc. was a high-light of the game for me.
The issue of making FF like Skyrim is the world is going to necessarily be a lot smaller, in all likelihood. Sprawling, interconnected areas like an MMO allow the world to feel a lot bigger, in my opinion. While I definitely disagree with Square that turn-based combat is incompatible with realistic graphics, I tend to agree that a super-deformed world map really would be strange and, frankly, makes the world LESS tangible, less explorable. Think how much of FFVII's world map is featureless, and could instead be filled with detail.
My problem is that they ditched the world-map long before graphics were so good that it wouldn't have worked.
The world-map worked fine in Type-0, and although it's certainly rougher around the edges, it's not stylistically less realistic than X or XII.
Now we have FFXV with a true open world, which I think is great, but the fact is that a world like that would already have been possible on the PS3 if they'd just been willing to accept a reduction of graphical fidelity.
I'm fine with open-world games. I'm fine with games with world-maps and smaller zones.
What I less fine with is the sub-par middle-road approach of a world consisting of lots of smaller zones and nothing else to bridge the gap between the maps and give the world a feeling of scope and establish clear and logical transitions between locations.
That all said, I have two caveats. One, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to use an abstract world map for airship flying, and simply loading the appropriate zone when you land. But I've never seen this attempted.
They can, but that would still necessitate that each and every location on each installment either exist on every disk (or at the very least the last one), or that there is some sort of HD installment function.
Again, if they're not going for an FFXV/GTA/Witcher 3 style open-world set-up, but rather the "level by level" approach, then it would be much less work for SE to just restructure the game to remove any need to revisit old environments that aren't necessitated by the plot, and just restrict the player to the relevant environments for each part.
However, that sort of restriction at the end-game of the remake, would be the very antithesis of what I look for in an FF game, and that's why that would be a problem to me.
Again, I am not saying that the OG had an open-world set-up similar to FFXV - it decidedly did not.
I am saying that whether the remake chooses that approach or not is likely to tell us whether they game will feature cross-installment exploration or not.
I just don't understand your position that FFXII was less open than FFVII. And I disagree that it is absolutely an inexorable trend when XIII-2, Lightning Returns, and perhaps XV are all less linear than X and XIII.
I don't hold that position.
I hold that the removal of the world-map in all of this games, and the lack of a proper replacement such as an open world similar to that of FFXV has lead to some of the most lack-luster world-immersion in the FF series for me personally.
The central aspect of the argument though is simply that exploring the world of FFVII using chocobo's, Highwind etc. and being able to appreciate the scope of it by seeing the vista from outside of the smaller field environments while being able to revisit old locations at the end of the game has always been a main highlight of the game for me - as it was with all the other pre-X FF games too.
In choosing a smaller map-to-map set-up for the remake, if they do so, I don't see it as likely that the remake will recapture that.
And in that sense, FFXII is no different from the XIII saga, or X.
It has the exact same problem of limiting you to a smaller map (albeit bigger than the average FFX or FFXIII map) and then segueing you to a completely different map where thematic differences etc. have really abrupt transitions, separated only by a loading screen as you hit the map boarder.
I hate that. Sorry. That's just my opinion on the matter.
I'd hate for the remake to have you running from Midgar and then suddenly transitioning you to the much lusher and greener Kalm for instance, with no proper transitional map between them.
That's why the world-map system is so ingenious.
It bridges the gap from map to map, location to location in a way that captures the scope of the journey, and prepares you for what the next location will look and feel like, the same way open-world games in this generation does naturally just with camera work.
The mid-gen games from PS2 and up until now, did not manage to create this feeling because they decided to scrap a perfectly functioning system when they didn't really have a good alternative in the works yet, leaving us with worlds that IMO feel ridiculously small and cramped compared to the older games.
