What steps could the devs take to better the Open World in XIV?

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Also, to create "meaningful" open world content means it needs to be accessible, which means spawned things (like maps), or random things like hunts (that would get zerged cuz loot)

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A ranks and S ranks are only zerged due to their relative rarity. Drop the respawn timer on A ranks to every hour and you are more likely to see groups of about 8 to 48 hunting them rather than a server and a half.

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And maps of savage difficulty I don't ever see happening.

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Savage maybe not but Extreme trial difficulty should be fine and they could provide similar ilevel endgame gear.

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And for solo maps, they'd have to design the fights for what, 17 different jobs?

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The Mysterious Maps from patch 2.28 had several solo fights which a fair amount of mechanical complexity and they seem to have made the Bozja duels possible to complete by all jobs as long as they have the right actions.

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Otherwise you'd basically have a repeat of potd, with rdm being the only one able to clear.

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Currently Astrologian is the only job that has not soloed floor 200 of PotD.

The major problem with 'open world should be X' at this point in time is ... flight.

Once you have unlocked flight, you can fly over danger.

And no, I am not willing to go back to the days when there wasn't flight. That was 5 years ago, thank you very much.

Flying is a huge part of the problem that I agree with. I also think adding flight was a horrible idea and it is horrible in any mmo and should be removed. Simply because it negates the whole world.

The other thing is the open world is worthless outside of honestly leveling and some vanity gear. It just has no real purpose in terms of gear progression. It is why people play FFXIV as a lobby server game for the most part. So want to make the open world worthwhile. Stop instancing all of endgame and remove flying. If you do not want to do that... the world will only be alive for a few weeks to a month tops after each expansion launch.

So in all These things need to change to fix the world:

1) Add Relevant Top Tier Endgame Content to the open world
2) Remove Flying from the majority of zones. Unless the zone is specifically designed for flying. If it has currents flying should be removed as the zone functions without it.
3) Add some areas designed for groups in the open world. Aka mobs that take more then 1 person to kill. Objectives that reward people to go into those places. Aka Extreme beast quest or something that reward more then a housing item and flying pig. Guild Leve quest/Forced spawned high tier mobs that are boss/raid tier difficulty fights. and so on.
4) Increase rewards for doing open world content to compare with dungeons. Aka add worthwhile leveling gear as Fate Rewards. Atm the xp gained in the open world just sucks horribly compared to spamming instances. So you get gear and more xp in dungeons, why would you do anything else?
5) Fates are fine... EVERYTHING BEING FATES IS NOT. Make new openworld content that is not fates.

Atm there is just no incentive to go into the world outside maby a rare S rank or maps. Games where the world matters have it where the world is a significant focus of the game. In ffxiv atm all the best stuff comes from instances. So why would anyone want to go into the world for anything besides unlocking the instance and doing the main story line.

But lets be honest... FFXIV has been following this path for this long, nothing is going to change. Making the game world a focus sorta goes against Yoshida's philosophy of ease of game play and being able to jump into it and out quickly. The instance model fits his game design mentality a lot better as people can log in press a button do a few instances and log out.

The keys to making a good open world are:
1. No matter where you go, there should be things to do.
2. The things to do should be things worth doing.

This is the conclusion I came to after playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and, more recently, Genshin Impact, which cribs a lot of the best parts of BotW). There's not a lot of point in having a big, beautiful map with all kinds of interesting features if there's nothing to actually DO at those features. Walking around on foot, you shouldn't have to walk more than a minute or two before you find something worth doing; a pack of mobs guarding a treasure chest with useful things inside, for instance, or the entrance to a micro dungeon, or an NPC in distress with a mini-quest to complete.

FATEs and Hunt monsters are a decent start, but not nearly enough - and the places that don't have FATEs or Hunts have a handful of mobs to kill, at best, and killing mobs is seldom worth doing.

Admittedly, though, the effort needed to make the overworld worthwhile would be pretty intense. They'd have to scale back a ton on the instanced content in order to have enough manpower for the job, and they've already scaled back on the instanceed combat quite a bit as it is!

A big problem with FFXIV is the engine;

GuildWars 2's base engine/physics is so much better to allow for interesting and fun jumping puzzles and actual races work, amongst more general things to do in the open world. Even just escorting a ox-cart is generally more interesting than the really slow plodding of the FATE system.

Seriously, the Kugane tower puzzle would be child's play with GW2's engine and proper hitboxes...

...Using what we got?

1) A Bestiary; more kills = more info, ultimately unlocking some kinda of glamour/minions.
2) A generic currency linked to FATEs, with some sort of rotation so the various zones see action in turn. Like a week for all Thanalan, then Black Shroud. (Was mentioned before, but something like Karma from GW2)
3) A general expansion of 2.0 zones (or new zones built off 2.0 zones in an upcoming expansion); Alternatively, add actual functional activities to certain zones. Maybe things to do exclusive to certain hubs (kind of like how you go to Quarrymill to do PotD)
4) Competitive NMs with fairly decent/interesting loot a la FFXI.
5) Future crafting recipes USE OLD MATERIALS. We don't need a NEW variant of cotton. Instead, utilize the old ingredients with maybe 1 new fluff. Keep gatherers moving around current zones and not just new ones.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

1) A Bestiary; more kills = more info, ultimately unlocking some kinda of glamour/minions.
2) A generic currency linked to FATEs, with some sort of rotation so the various zones see action in turn. Like a week for all Thanalan, then Black Shroud. (Was mentioned before, but something like Karma from GW2)
3) A general expansion of 2.0 zones (or new zones built off 2.0 zones in an upcoming expansion); Alternatively, add actual functional activities to certain zones. Maybe things to do exclusive to certain hubs (kind of like how you go to Quarrymill to do PotD)
4) Competitive NMs with fairly decent/interesting loot a la FFXI.
5) Future crafting recipes USE OLD MATERIALS. We don't need a NEW variant of cotton. Instead, utilize the old ingredients with maybe 1 new fluff. Keep gatherers moving around current zones and not just new ones.

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1) You mean a Zerg-fest where every creature in every zone is one-shot by high-level players until they get the glamours and minions and then never, ever, performed again? Think "Yo-kai Watch", and be ware.

2) The generic currency already linked to FATEs is: GC seals! The generic currency on the First is: gems! Once you do all of the FATE dancing on the First, the currency is pretty worthless.

3) Beast Tribes already require this. All such areas are a "do them until you don't" solution. Once all your alts are level 80, why bother with PoTD, or HoH? Once you've reached max level with all the beast tribes, why bother doing them more?

4) Fairly decent/interesting loot in FFXI is different from fairly decent/interesting loot in FFXIV. In FFXIV you do instances, including raids, or do maps, or send out retainers. In FFXIV 'decent/interesting' seem to involve large amounts of gil.

5) There are already players complaining about old materials taking up inventory slots because new recipes require them.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

The major problem with 'open world should be X' at this point in time is ... flight.

Once you have unlocked flight, you can fly over danger.

And no, I am not willing to go back to the days when there wasn't flight. That was 5 years ago, thank you very much.

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Even without flight, danger is easily avoided in an open world zone. You simply go around it outside of its aggro range. That's what players would do in WoW with creatures like the Fel Reaver in Hellfire Peninsula (which actually had a reason to kill it until they took away raid attunements) and the Storm Giants in Howling Fjord (which were pointless to kill).

If there's reason to face it and defeat it, existence of flight is irrelevant. Players will have to be on the ground to enter combat and earn their reward. You don't get rewards by flying over the content.

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Originally Posted by Xatsh

Flying is a huge part of the problem that I agree with. I also think adding flight was a horrible idea and it is horrible in any mmo and should be removed. Simply because it negates the whole world.

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So do teleports. Entire parts of the world are erased from existence when I use them. At least with flying, I'm still seeing the world and can choose to land to interact with it if there's a reason relevant to what I'm interested in.

You have the option not to fly, except for the rare locations that can only be reached by flying. Choose not to fly if it bothers you.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

If there's reason to face it and defeat it, existence of flight is irrelevant. Players will have to be on the ground to enter combat and earn their reward. You don't get rewards by flying over the content.

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This is true if you can fly to your destination, if you had to go through a dungeon like area first which already prohibits flying it would not harm it.

Imagine it in 3 steps.

World, which as flying ... and an entrance to said dungeon like area.

The Dungeon like area which has no flying and difficult monsters that can outrun you and wont lose track of you and alert mobs nearby, this is more or less to prevent a simple, sprint and go.

Final area core of the stronghold or w/e you wanna call it, you can add rare monsters or leaders there, or (omg and i hardly daresay) go the route of FFXI and add a mini trial that can be done to get a loot box of overall decent items and a low rate at a rare ... so ppl would do it ... again and it would not die in 2 weeks.

We don't need a super polished trial, a gimmick mob would do, maybe 1 Version of "Solo" "Light Party" "Full Party" (imagine it like what we currently have a solo duty, a little bit more spiced up), why not a Ixtal that summons birds in a bullet hell style fight ... and if you win you can get a minion, or maybe a key ... and if you had 3 different keys you could do another step for rarer loot. We have to get rid of the "well its not top level so its worthless".

Lorewise ... we have 3 starting areas, you could add an Ixtal Stronghold for Gridania, Amalja (sp?) for Uldah and Kobolds for Limsa. We could totally have a dive into those area, I'm not deep enough into the Lore of those boys, but the areas we have for Amalja ... is basically 2 small camps and a medium sized one ... that's it. Kobolds are loosely thrown into the mountain ... why not have a level deeper? Ixtal could totally have a forest that leads up to a peak (that being said "dungeon" and "core" doesn't always need to be inside a peak for Ixtals sounds reasonable.

And to tack it with a "no you wont bust this at higher lv" smack the dungeon and core part with a job and ilv restriction, the tokens to start the first mini trial could be obtained by doing x amount of levelling dungeons in that area, like 61-69 for SB and 71-79 for ShB.

Get something simple that has staying power rather then polishing something you burry in dirt 3 months later, please add natural ilv and job level restrictions or we will steam roll it 3 months later ... and yes this means ilv 430 for ShB and 290 for SB.

Coil, Alexander, Omega, Soon Eden ... All 50 60 70 and soon 80 raids are pointless once their no longer max level and its a absolute shame.

I had a dream last night that FF14 introduced submarines where you can do missions with friends. Obviously this won't happen and it's probably because of all those space sims I've been playing. I think the battle mechanics of this game are too skewed towards WoW-like content so it can't stray too far from it. I haven't played WoW except for one day when it came out and didn't like it. But I think that whatever good open world content WoW has might be adaptable to this game. They would have to radically change the design of the game I think unless they manage to come up with something entirely new and enjoyable. Maybe lore related secret locations would be nice. I've seen videos of 1.0 having this. Maybe some locations could have enemy guards / traps that are over level 100 making it very hard or impossible to get to, so it just seems like a legend of what lies beyond.

Needs to have items of value. The gems from fates were nice but the rewards havent been updated frequently enough. The open world needs candy we can chase after and new candy needs to come either every patch or every other patch to keep it active.