#more specifically I’m thinking about sohm al

[impossible-rat-babies]

first OC thought of 2024 is brought to you by HW we love to see it !

[hasty-touch]

Here’s what I spent all night doing!!!!!!! A map of Coerthas and Dravania, specifically with an eye to reconciling the world maps and zone maps (and 1.0 with 2.0+) in a way that emphasizes information important to me as a roleplayer, like overland routes and rivers.

Was it worth it? ... Probably not. I mean, I did want to draw my own map for Greening Coerthas purposes but I should have just drawn a messy blobmap instead of trying to do this.

Long long rambling commentary below cut:

Rather than have a continuous overworld, FFXIV splits its world up into many separate maps which players load in and out of at transitions. One of the advantages this design choice gives the map design team is that the zone maps they create for us players to run around in do not need to perfectly represent the way the geography of the world “really” is -- zone maps don’t have to fit together perfectly, don’t have to be to scale, don’t need to cover all the “flyover country” in-between points of interest, and don’t need to match up perfectly to world map art, either.

Some disadvantages of this design choice are... well... the exact same things.

My conclusion, based on my experiences playing and especially working on this map, is that the in-game zones we visit are not meant to be accurate representations of Hydaelyn, like... at all. Instead, I believe that the zones are impressionistic abstractions that represent how the Warrior of Light experiences a region. Distances are compressed, points of interest to the WoL are exaggerated, and everything that isn’t of interest -- people, places, details -- is stripped away.

I remember way back when in Heavensward someone (unfortunately I can’t remember who) pointed out that the exteriors of buildings in Foundation and the Pillars don’t correspond to the interior layouts -- window placements differ, for example. Another example that gave me a particular headache making this map is that the Coerthas River, in CCH, flows from a mountain. If you run behind this mountain, you’ll find it to be a lone peak with no way for the Coerthas River in CWH to connect to it. The river teleported.

It’s true I am complaining about this -- not only does it make reconciling the zone maps with the world maps a miserable exercise, but it’s not really to my taste. I far prefer MMO worlds where you can walk or fly over the whole world, with every place you visit embedded precisely within the world geography, every cranny explorable, each region flowing naturally into the next.

However -- I don’t think that FFXIV’s method is a bad design choice. I actually think it’s the most correct choice, for game design purposes. One is, after all, never going to be able to really represent the whole of a full-size, functional world in a game -- even games that let you wander over the whole planet must abstract to some degree, use shorthand and symbols to communicate things about the world it can’t fully represent, and prioritize what the players will seek out and interact with. So by committing 100% at the start to conveying impressions about the world, rather than having to worry about accurate representation or neat jigsawing, the FFXIV devs can focus immediately and wholly upon shaping the player’s experience and perception of the world. Carefully calibrating travel times. Placing quest and hunt mobs. Engineering vistas. No time is wasted on anything that isn’t part of the product they’re designing and selling: your experience playing the game.

Though... lately, more and more, I’ve been feeling like this is something that I don’t really like about FFXIV. It delivers an incredibly polished, carefully controlled player experience, and the devs put out an immense effort to perfect and deliver it exactly as they intend. They make, for the most part, all the right game design decisions, and FFXIV is exactly what it should be. So much so that I sometimes feel it’s... “overdesigned”, though I’m not quite sure that’s the right word. They focus so much on making the right decisions that I feel we miss out on the weirdnesses, the serendipities, the surprises of a game and world where things aren’t always optimally designed. Sometimes, I think it’s a fair trade (we can’t build our own specs, which I think is the right call, when serious players will all use the same spec anyway while novice players will fall into traps). Sometimes, I think the focus on controlling player experience leads to big mistakes (like, I suspect a lot of problems with Eureka may have come from designing it entirely around “how can we make it take exactly the amount of time we want for a player to grind this stage of the relic”). Sometimes I don’t necessarily think it leads to wrong decisions, but I mourn what could have been if they’d been a little less neat, a little more eccentric. Building a fully walkable world is not optimal game design, but I sure do long for it.

It is not possible to reconcile the zone maps with the world map. However, I am not the first person to give it a good try anyway -- and this definitely not the best job of it that has been done! I studied Linaly Hakuyoko's and this Korean-language one (sadly I couldn't find the original creator) while working on mine, as well as the basic Eorzea/Aldenard map and the region maps that were, IIRC, used as backgrounds for in-game maps in 3.x.

The region maps were clearly drawn on top of the Eorzea map, as the coastlines match pretty much perfectly. I decided to trace my map’s coastline from these maps, but some big problems with reconciling them to the in-game zone maps became immediately apparent.

Here are the region maps with the Eorzean transcribed in English, plus rivers traced from the Eorzea map laid on top:

The biggest problem, for my Coerthas-focused map, was the placement of the western highlands and the Dravanian forelands. Those three rivers that drain into the Strait of Merlthor -- the Whilom has got to be one of those, right? But it’s CWH, not the Dravanian Forelands, that is placed just north of them. These maps also don’t feature, or really have room for, the Swiftrun and Coerthas Rivers. There are also issues like the enormous north/south gap between “Foundation” and the “Pillars”, an artifact of this image being a background for a clickable zone map where those are two separate maps. In “reality”, they’d be pretty much directly stacked.

It was very important to me to include the rivers, and I wanted to connect the Coerthas in CWH to the Coerthas in CCH (something my map senpais didn’t do). I was also interested in figuring out what route we might be taking if we’re bypassing Griffin Crossing.

Here is my Attempt #1 (same as above, just a wider view with fewer settlements showing):

Here’s what I did:

Put CCH in the central bowl suggested by the mountains/contour lines in the Coerthas region map. This might be making the zone map too big (maybe it represents a much smaller part of the world, like in the Korean map above) but this choice put several landmarks in intuitive locations (Griffin Crossing is directly on a tributary of the White Maiden, etc.)

Connected the Coerthas in CWH to the Coerthas CCH and then to the White Maiden at the Yafaem Saltmoor.

Changed those world map rivers in Dravania because they didn’t make sense. I have the Whilom bifurcate, then join again, because both branches of the river are called “The Whilom River” in-game.

Adjusted the Thaliak River to better fit the in-game representation but tried to only make minimal changes.

Problems/questions/self-torture for future nights:

Orientations and distances could match 1.0 and 2.0 game maps better...

I’m not sure how/if CCL’s lakes attach to rivers. Same with Clearwater.

I basically just guessed locations for slapping down settlements in the Shroud. I’d need to go study the rivers a great deal more before being able to confidently place them. (That Korean map I linked above has some great ideas but some of it seems a little strange.)

Unlike the Coerthas region map, the Dravania region map doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. I think if I could confidently place Sohm Al everything else would fall into place, but I mostly just guessed here.

If you happen to have any criticism or suggestions, I’d be very happy to hear them! You are also welcome to use this map for your own purposes. A link would be nice for credit but also (and much more importantly) in case I make an updated, more accurate one. The Shroud section in the corner’s reaaaaally basic right now.