The original uploader took the video down. Luckily, others nabbed it before then, like this channel:
Judging from the Glenikas and helicopters, it would seem Shinra began their manhunt for the party at Kalm, necessitating their escape through a backdoor. I wonder if the arrival of the military will interrupt Cloud's retelling of the Nibelheim Incident.
View attachment 13878
It's hard to make out, but you can see a bit of the badlands that surround Kalm in the upper left of the image below. The map shows that this area will be explorable. A pretty radical shift in "biome" comparted to the grasslands on the other side of the city.
Personally, I would've preferred for Rebirth to utilize zones instead of being one continuous map, that way the world feels larger, but alas. On the plus side, I'm confident that we'll be flying around with the Highwind in Part 3, revisiting all these areas and then some.
View attachment 13879
Man, something that I really like about this last screenshot is how you really get a sense of the way in which the Mako pipelines are delivering power to various locations that directly conflict with the natural landscape. While I think that there's some benefit to zones in making the map feel larger, I think that we'll still get a sense of scale with the different regions of the map being cut off from one another as you start exploring. We already know that certain chocobos are specific to different regions, so I expect that we'll feel that different places have a different level of scale based on how you're able to explore a map like this, compared to the winding maze-like cliffs of Cosmo Canyon. There's an INSANE amount of world, and you always have to balance that scope vs. density of having anything to do there is extremely important to making that an engaging experience to play.
With the way that the load times in
Rebirth are just essentially nonexistent, I think that it's the journey through the story that'll make the world feel large, and by the time you know how many different places there are to go, it won't feel small. After all, the world of the original
FFVII feels large even though it's just populated by a few sparse locations with precious little to do on the world map itself by comparison. While
FFXV has an enormous map where there's a lot of open space, but the exploration there feels purposeful and fits in to the occasionally aimless meanderings of being on a road trip together where it's just about being out in the vast wilderness together, but that wouldn't totally work from
FFVII. I think that it's one of those things where there are moments in
FFXVI where the depth and detail of its world feel AMAZINGLY realized, but then it's completely undercut by the fact that there's not a single goddamn thing to do or a reason to be there aside from just pass through it towards an objective and then move on.
Rebirth seems to be the ideal distillation of size and content so that it gives you a sense of what that whole area of the world is.
Part of the main point of having this level of focus on the world is that I expect that by the time we get to the point of the final game and (assumedly) having access to the Highwind & Submarine, we'll be poised to take on the world map at a slightly different scale that's a bit less condensed than that of
Rebirth. The last game being the section of the story where you've got literal skyscraper-sized Weapons marching on Midgar and roaming the world that you're hunting down, it'll just feel different actually taking to the skies to see it all while still having the underlying experience of what that place was like from the time you spent there.
Again, the first true realization of the Weapons being from
FFXV Kingsglaive helps to show that the scale of this sort of conflict is going to feel REALLY different, and
Rebirth has a brand new Weapon awakening which I assume is going to be a really big part of setting the stage for the change in global scope between
Rebirth and the final title, especially with threats like Meteor and global apocalypse looming.
X