Hail everyone, now that 64b is upon us, allowing for more memory to be used, I see more and more ideas coming up lately. Here's another one. Building bigger and better worlds for all of Norrath Could 64b make it possible to actually make the world feel bigger and more immersive by removing loading times between certain zones? For example, if I look over at the piece of land where you see stuff like Butcherblock Mountains, Greater Faydark, Loping Planes, Steamfont and more, you have a bunch of loading screens when entering a new zone by foot. What if you were to remove these invisible walls and make traveling more... natural and seamingless? Without loading into a zone that is, making the continent a place where you can travel from point a to z without loading in when traveling the lands by foot.
A bold hope, but one I would love to see. They've combined zones before. Freeport used to be four separate zones, and now it's one big City of Freeport. Qeynos got a similar overhaul, but ending with two zones. At least for land-based zonings, simply walking would be a great immersive improvement. Attempting to remove water zonings would likely be more difficult and less immersive anyway (though Tranquil Sea and Phantom Sea make it work).
You don't really need 64-bit for that, there are other MMOs that have had seamless zoning for a long time, they just hide the loading. Given that EQ2 wasn't architected with seamless zoning in mind, I think this would be way too large of an overhaul at this point in the game's life. Beyond the pure technical aspects of it (of which there are a lot), I bet a lot of the zone art would have to be redone in order to make the connections between zones actually connect in a way that would make sense.
