Dungeon/Cave exploration. How I miss thee.

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Envoyé par Wizhard

but you just didnt go into those with a random group of people, expecting a full clear.

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Kinda why the idea of attuning in this way has fallen by the wayside in recent years. I still have nightmares sometimes of the requirements for Vex Thal, Sleeper's Tomb, and Veeshan's Peak keys in EQ1. Which were actual keys. Oh, and this was a game where you dropped all your stuff on a corpse if you died. Created kind of an awkward situation before they added the concept of soulbound items.
People who want to raid want to get right into raiding. Short unlocks are fine, so long as the raiding can begin and doesn't waste time.

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Envoyé par kyuven

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Hey ya, first off I don't disagree, I have the same general concerns as you do when I think about this. But i know there are ways around it.

Open world dungeons and explorable dungeons have existed successfully in XI for a long time, and I'm sure in some other games... I know GW2 has dungeons that let you take multiple paths all with their own rewards. Obviously some speed runners will want to go X route and such, whichever is quickest... but that doesn't mean pre-groupped players wouldn't explore. But to add reasons to do multiple routes, they could go about it like in GW2, add unique rewards for each route once per day.

They could also do it like Salvage in XI, where each route had specific drops. So think of it like instead of having 5 Coils, you had 1, but each took place in the same zone, and there were different paths you could take in the zone that would lead you to a different final boss based on what you did in the dungeon. Like say, killing all the adds on a certain floor in under 3 minutes would take you to Boss A instead of boss B... stuff like that. You may say "Well people would bclchwhwiuohg", but I mean... XI has about 12 years of evidence that say otherwise.

I think if we look at it from a "Duty roulette" point of view, some of these types of things might be speed run, but maybe SE should stop focusing so much no "Doing sh*t with random people who may as well be NPCs", and more on content that people run as teams... you know, give FC and Linkshells a reason to exist outside of Coil and leveling up. its made worse by the fact the majority of roulettes can't even be run in a group. Its an MMO thats encouraging you queueing for things alone, and frankly, it wouldn't be hard for them to change that.

Give us content that actually makes us want to run with our LS and FC... make dungeons not so worthless as to only be useful for the token "token" system and BiS-30 Vanity armor... These formulas do exist in MMOs, and many of them very successful. They don't have to rewrite the whole bloody thing from the ground up but its not like these things cannot exist in XIV, it would just take more planning.

---- As for open world Dungeons...

I've explained how this could be done in another thread, I don't recall where. Open world dungeons without "Campers" could exist, in many ways. Again I'll draw from both GW2 and XI and even Destiny(omg)

Adding open world dungeons, instead of having NMs, could have randomly located treasure chests you could open every so often... These would relocate after say, an hour, and could be opened by anyone who finds it, not just one person. Chests like this could contain a fair margin of gil, some exp, making some higher end crafting supplies... Materia... Demimateria, Pets, Vanity items unique to the beastmen look (like the ixali gloves), Some seals... stuff like that, it depends on how unique SE wants to get.

As for adding "God"/"King" beings like Beastmen kings/gods in XI... there could be a deep part of the dungeon that, once you enter a certain point the dungeon becomes instanced, and enemies beyond that point appear only to you and your team. In there could be a Beastmen God/Leader, who would be powerful and difficult to defeat... and if defeated, could drop many items... Synth mats, a good amount of gil, and even I.lv appropriate gear (Perhaps Having a chance to drop BiS and BiS-10 I.lv armor)... Once defeated, it will respawn once a week (Like most weekly timers), and if you decide to hunt it with someone else, you will be locked out of lotting items. This would essentially make it an Open world explorable dungeon with an seemlessly instanced Coil-like Boss at the end if you choose to challenge it.

I would recommend enemies you could spawn and fight but frankly a Boring flat Item-level system leaves absolutely no room for creative loot, so NMs couldn't really have a purpose.

Well put OP. Though I wouldn't stop with just CT. I kind of wish there was more exploration available in every dungeon.

But I, to some degree, understand why they couldn't do this right away. Aside from the ease of making dungeons linear, streamlined dungeons take far less time to create and with the limited time that Yoshida's crew had to rebuild the whole game practically from scratch. They did a fantastic job with the little developement time alloted to them, but in regard of exploration well.. they kind of failed to deliver in that department.

Now they have slowly but surely been creating their new dungeons to feel more open and wonderous and in that respect they've surely succeeded (Pretty much every new dungeon, excluding HM ones, have been vast improvements from what was available at launch). However, there still isn't much allotment at all for exploring or free roaming. Everything is still basically one long corridor cleverly disguised with creative mechanics and designs.

I have hope that with the expansion and future expansions that they will bring back that sense of exploration by making actual massive dungeons, be they instanced or open world. In all the older FF games (and most rpgs I played when I was younger, and when I get around to playing them now) I was always the kind of person to try and cover every single room in a dungeon, trying to find that hidden wall/area that I knew had to be somewhere in there. I don't recall ever throwing my controller down in frustration at an actual dungeon/area in those games.

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While I greatly enjoy the CT dungeons as they are, I couldn't help but feel a slight bit disappointed in the whole of CT. I mean, it's this huge.... HUUUGE tower and before that a pretty large labrynth, yet the raids themselves vastly diminish the size of these massive structures in terms of how it ends up feeling. Short. Way too short, and we are able to zoom through them in minutes.

I understand there's this mentality out there with the younger gamers (maybe not all of them) where there's apparently a complete lack of patience. They just no longer want to spend a long time doing something, anything. Now I can understand not wanting to take a long time doing something I don't enjoy, but I play this game and games like it because I enjoy them, so I really don't mind taking a long time doing something as long as I'm having fun and enjoying it.

That's part of why FFXI just worked. Looking back on it people can clearly wonder how in the world someone could ever grind out 75 long, grueling, levels by spending hours in a party killing monsters over and over again for days, months, even years. The answer is because it was fun and people enjoyed it. Something about it just worked. I can't honestly explain it very well, since I can look back at it now and still wonder how that happened. If you look at XI on paper in it's hayday (RoZ,CoP,WotG) it looks/sounds like one of the most boring games out there, but actually playing it, if you could get past the long times it took to do things, it was all pretty fun and felt very rewarding. I mean, there's a good reason former XI players speak so highly of it. I still speak highly of it myself, though I probably couldn't go back to ever playing it again as it hasn't aged well. I dunno, maybe I enjoyed figuring things out on my own and taking the time to learn things in the game (areas, job mechanics, game mechanics).

For me, it was a combination of a lot of things that made me enjoy XI: The music. The huge areas with lots of exploration with a very real sense of danger. The difficulty of things actually made them feel like real accomplishments when you successfully completed them. My server (and I'm sure it was like this server-wide) was a huge community of players, where your actions and reputation mattered (ie. being a gigantic butthead got you excluded from many things, while being a good player opened many more doors and experiences). Also the stories themselves, each expansion had a huge story and it took a good deal of time to actually complete each story. These things turned what might have just otherwise been a huge boring grind into a completely enjoyable and fun experience.

Going to a dungeon area was often an experience that could take several hours depending on what you were there to do. Leveling parties that didn't last more than an hour were often wastes of time. Players actually "prepared" to go do things (stocking up on needed and helpful items). The only things people sometimes prepare for in XIV are the coils, and pretty much just the final coil at the moment. Preparation for most anything else consists of "Does my gear need to be repaired?" "Yes. *repairs it real quick*" or "Nope. Good to go."

Err.. might have veered off topic a tad. But essentially, we do need some vast areas that we can actually explore. (and not just by ourselves, you should want to bring friends with you!)

If its one thing this game lacks its exploration. The dungeons feel like rooms, you enter one room and come out the other room. Its boring and feels very lazy from a design point of view. I too enjoyed all 3 raids, but when I was told about FFXIV by my friends, I was hoping that some of the magic that was present in the single player games, would return to this game.

I dont know if the reason why we have a lack of exploration, is because of budget, design choice, laziness from developers or something to do with the infrastructre of this game. I doubt anything will be done with Heavensward, but I hope with 4.0 they will add more caves, dungeons and please for the love of Hydaelyn, add more open world content that is not FATES or HUNTS.

How hard would be to add "Diablo" style dungeons to a game like this? I mean the random generated type stuff, not the content. I ask that as a legitimate question too, not being sarcastic; because that could add some depth to dungeons and remove some of the tunnel vision.

Because "new players would get confused"

At either rate, I feel all these suggestions would only be used by a small amount of people who really like that stuff while the majority of everyone else will just continue to go on a straight path doing their daily grinds.

They should put a bonus 1,5x soldiery and poetic bonus for full runs.

you know what i dont like about the first 2 ct?
a fucking minute of walking in between each and every little thing