Stop Asking for Open World Content

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Originally Posted by Alex_Lenderson

I don't see how it could be done well. I really don't. When you have content that you can just throw more people at, content that doesn't require you to actually play your class appropriately, what is the point? It is a zzzz fest.

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Limited participants, like treasure maps (between 1-8 players, not more)

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Originally Posted by Alex_Lenderson

It is always crap. Always. Just look at the joke of Hunts and Fates. When I play a game I want to be immersed in the experience... not be watching Netflix so I don't cry tears of boredom.

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Just because previous open world content is not fun doesn't mean all possible open world content is not fun. Logical conclusion doesn't follow.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Lenderson

It is always crap. Always. Just look at the joke of Hunts and Fates. When I play a game I want to be immersed in the experience... not be watching Netflix so I don't cry tears of boredom.

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The problem isn't that its always going to be crap, its how they implement it that causes it to be crap.

Lets start at XI's Sky for example. A 'raid' pop system actually worked very well in the open world. A Hierarchy system of force spawn mobs, each progressively harder (except genbu). The only problem with the whole system was the initial NM's to gain pops. Mother Globe, Faust, and the others proved to create competition/drama between people.

This same hierarchy system was added again in ToAU with ZNM's. The big difference was how the initial pops were purchased with a currency. Something the XIV team is EXTREMELY fond of. XIV's team could easily duplicate this system in the open world by adding additional GC ranks and allow the pops to be purchased at the max rank with some fairly high amount of seals. Lets say 250k? Nothing to crazy, but nothing absurd. After that just do the same as ZMN's. Make the next teir require a few kills from several of the base mobs, and make the drop NOT 100%. Not 1% either. Maybe 50%?

Boom. Open world content.

And lets face it. A large amount of XIV players use to be XI players. Nostalgia FTW.

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Originally Posted by MrTherm

Lets start at XI's Sky for example. A 'raid' pop system actually worked very well in the open world. A Hierarchy system of force spawn mobs, each progressively harder (except genbu). The only problem with the whole system was the initial NM's to gain pops. Mother Globe, Faust, and the others proved to create competition/drama between people.

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Don't forget CoP; Sea had a similar system.

Still wish they'd take this system and rework it so the initial pop items are found in maps or some other non-competitive instance, like large-scale leves.

Edit: Just saw your mention of making them buyable, that works too for a nice gil-sink!

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Originally Posted by Theplatter

Don't forget CoP; Sea had a similar system.

Still wish they'd take this system and rework it so the initial pop items are found in maps or some other non-competitive instance, like large-scale leves.

Edit: Just saw your mention of making them buyable, that works too for a nice gil-sink!

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Forgot all about the loveable sea jailers. Anytime I think about CoP, limbus pops in my head as I ran a shell for some 3 years, so I forgot all about them. Either way, just another example of how they could create open world content.

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

Actually it will make it feel more real. Also, if an area can be camped then the "Contested" Dungeon failed. Everquest 2 KoS/EoF are a good example of preventing camping because eventually if you stood in the same spot for long periods your group would be overwhelmed. The "regular mobs." in contested zones were as hard as names were, some of them were "names" from older zones as well.

The Average Vampire in EQ2's Mistmoore Castle, would knock you back, drain your life, mezmorize your healer, break aggro and go after your healer and knock them back as well.

Getting Knocked back a little bit, was a death sentence because you had to really watch your aggro. You could only pull 2 vampires max at a time or it was surely a wipe. In a room filled with 100s.

Also, the excuse is and always will be bad. There is plenty of content for "I can only play 30 minute a day Joe".

Nothing is more real then going into a dungeon and seeing other groups there. It makes the dungeon immersive, and also makes it so you can make a huge dungeon with nameds spread all over the place.

Your one of the reasons MMOs are so boring now honestly. Literally shoving everything into instances is killing games. MMOs should have NO instances whatsoever. The only reason it would be cramped is it would be the only contested dungeon in the game because its *gasp* actually fun to corporate and have to actually speak to other players.


In a contested dungeon, you have to speak to your group. You have to make sure nobody screws up and pulls for you or makes mistakes. You have to keep up, you can't be half-afk you have to be paying attention.

That is probably why most people hate it. Nobody likes paying attention or talking to other players. I imagine the average Duty Finder player is watching netflix with a nostromo running a rotation macro.

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Vanguard SOH had a good solution for this, even though the game itself was buggy as hell.

MASSIVE dungeons, with named mobs all over the place, so you'd often run into other groups, however the ultra rare bosses would give you a lockout after you'd killed it once within a set period, 24 hours for regulars, and 7 days for uber raid bosses. You could still see the mob, but it would show up as ghostly and unattackable, as well as non-aggro until your lockout timer expired.

It would respawn relatively quickly too, so it didn't really exclude anyone from content.

Some of our raid nights were literally just going around to different places in the world and engaging whatever raid bosses were up at the time.

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Originally Posted by Callback

There's zero engagement to it. It's a bad combat system. It was bad in and before WoW as well. Fights are all super boring. You aren't allowed to interact with the enemy in any real way which leads everything to be incredibly monotonous. Abilities lack real distinction. The only difference is the effect they apply, but the attack itself is all the same generic point-and-click. It's stilted. Not a single enemy in the game reacts to you in any way.

I knew this from level 1. People told me "get to endgame, it gets better." Well I did and the flow of combat didn't change a single bit since back then. It's the exact same shit with a slightly different skin and a couple more timers to manage. That's it. The core of the combat is the exact same as your level 1 slapfights.

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Do you enjoy any MMOs? That's like getting upset at the Civilization line of game-play because it isn't real time. Or complaining about FPS games being too twitchy. They are part and parcel for the genre.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Limited participants, like treasure maps (between 1-8 players, not more)

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None of the treasure maps require 8 people to do... let alone 8 people actually playing their class accordingly.

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Originally Posted by Alberel

Go check out GW2's dynamic event chain meta events in their newest expansion if you want to see some well done open world content. Just because SE has so far sucked at implementing open world content that does not mean ALL open world content is bad.

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Ya the Meta events in GW2 HoT has been quite fun to get a bunch of people together and complete it. It is a zerg fest but it is a organized zerg fest that requires players to work with everyone on the map. People are even creating Taxi's group to get more people into the same map instance of that Meta content.

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Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor

There is really no adventure to this game. Lol.

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That's the point.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Lenderson

None of the treasure maps require 8 people to do... let alone 8 people actually playing their class accordingly.

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neverless the max is 8.
treasure maps are open world and you can't zerg them with 20 full parties.

It was also only an example of open world content that is not zerged because only 1-8 players can do it together.

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Originally Posted by SendohJin

Treasure Maps aren't crap, they just need better rewards.

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I agree with this, treasure maps were fun solo and group content to do even if they weren't all that challenging. They could give us a set of maps that were actually pretty difficult and required some level of coordination and awareness while also increasing the rewards. It'd be cool if, similar to the minions, there were vanity sets exclusive to the individual tiers of treasure maps.

How SE can build on them:

Different treasure maps, that not only have level and party size recommendations, but also ilevel recommendations to add more different difficulty tiers to them that increase wih the gears ilevel each patch.
As an example buying an ilevel 200 treasure map with eso tomes after all eso gears got bought.
A way to find ilevel 220 maps in 3.2
And so on.

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Originally Posted by Alex_Lenderson

Do you enjoy any MMOs? That's like getting upset at the Civilization line of game-play because it isn't real time. Or complaining about FPS games being too twitchy. They are part and parcel for the genre.

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There's tons of MMOs out there with better combat systems. I feel bad for you if all you've ever experienced are other WoW clones.

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Originally Posted by Callback

There's tons of MMOs out there with better combat systems. I feel bad for you if all you've ever experienced are other WoW clones.

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Do you mean the tabbing between targets? It is more a traditional system. FF XI had it also and nobody would call FF XI a WoW clone.

Not every MMO can have a modern combat system not older than 4 years (the action-combat trend in MMOs started around 2011?).

But what the devs can do is bringing more bosses with multiple target points. Where we have to weaken the boss with attacking specific parts of his body (like attacking the legs so the boss fall down and lying on the ground for a while).

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Originally Posted by Felis

But what the devs can do is bringing more bosses with multiple target points. Where we have to weaken the boss with attacking specific parts of his body (like attacking the legs so the boss fall down and lying on the ground for a while).

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Agreed.

...and In b4 "ps3 limitations" I'd like to point out that White Knight Chronicles1 & 2 on the PS3, which was more MMORPG than most credit it being, had staggers and breaks, so it should not be difficult for SE to implement this kind of thing in FFXIV. Personally I would love it.

WKC Breaks

Here is an example of breaking a dragon's back and tail for additional drops. This is from one of WKCs online quests, and the players appear to have pretty decent end-game gear. First they stagger the draggon by attacking one knee, then hit it's head while it's staggered. It falls over. They attack the back for a bonus item drop - usually a rare one - then the dragon recovers and they switch to attacking it's tail, which also breaks for another bonus drop - also usually a rare one. The specific section I'm talking about starts at about 0:35 and continues through 1:15 or so.

https://youtu.be/C-N1y8ber4o

This is a PS3 game from 2010-2012, so please no one blame PS3 for Square Enix not adding this type of mechanic to their fights.

The problem with open world content is it is made for causal use. But not enough people do it. So DEV make it important to do!. Then Causal content end up getting SPAMMED by EVERYONE.. Causal hate it because it's not causal anymore. Hard core players hate it because it not hard core. The people in between care less because they aren't causal players so the content is mostly not worth it. Yet not Hard core enough to do it. instead randomly doing it when in the right place at right time.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Do you mean the tabbing between targets? It is more a traditional system. FF XI had it also and nobody would call FF XI a WoW clone.

Not every MMO can have a modern combat system not older than 4 years (the action-combat trend in MMOs started around 2011?).

But what the devs can do is bringing more bosses with multiple target points. Where we have to weaken the boss with attacking specific parts of his body (like attacking the legs so the boss fall down and lying on the ground for a while).

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I never played XI so I can't say what type of combat it has, but action combat in MMOs goes back to 2004 and earlier, and has widely diversified since then. Nowadays basically every genre of game has an MMO equivalent. You would think that the archaic point-and-click system would have fallen out of favor long ago with the invention of broadband, but lazy devs just keep on recycling it over and over.

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Originally Posted by SpookyGhost

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Agreed. I have been wishing for a while now that they would do more content utilizing the treasure maps system that was more fleshed out and had more depth to it than what we have had so for, with more complex enemies and encounters being spawned, better rewards and more ways to engage in treasure maps/hunts. Things such as this would be a great addition to open world content as well as potentially being added to future Exploration Missions.

In fact I would love to see an entirely new set of side content like hunt bills but tied to a new group, the Treasure Hunter's Guild (with Locke Cole as the leader of course) from which you can get "leads" on treasures that you can go out and find via the treasure map / hunt system and then get loot and a currency that you can turn in for special rewards same as seals.