I don't miss it at all. Spending ten minutes walking to a location only to get mob aggro halfway there and die is not my idea of fun. It was fine when I had hours and hours a day to play, but now? Not so much.
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I don't miss it at all. Spending ten minutes walking to a location only to get mob aggro halfway there and die is not my idea of fun. It was fine when I had hours and hours a day to play, but now? Not so much.
And asking for a game to be the same game that you enjoyed years and years ago, aside from the daily life issues a current Gen player experiences, is not selfish. Not because it is financially feasible and actually makes money (because it doesn't. It has been attempted numerous times), but because you liked it back then.
Got it. Want the pot or the kettle with your order?
Do you watch anime Log Horizon, Danmachi and Overlord.
I hope I can have the sense of excitement like in that anime.
Just wait for VR Head set.
Or, yknow, dismount, put the RP walk on and discover all locations like that. Maybe on a lower level gatherer class too.
Change to a sub-50 class and go play in the Sylphlands, Urth's Fount or a Castrum. Problem solved!
This simply isn't true. You couldn't roam through any level-appropriate zone at any level in FFXI without risking death. Even for hardcore players with hundreds of days in WITH raid experience out the wazoo you could easily die at any time while playing. I know Abyssea oversimplified the game and make it incredibly easy, but before that, danger was waiting EVERYWHERE. Depending on your job, you could easily go down against an Even Match.
Individual mobs could be dangerous if you went out of your way to fight them, yes. However, 99% of the time anyone went anywhere they made heavy use of sneak and invisible so how potentially dangerous the mobs were didn't really matter. You weren't typically fighting them so even if they could one-shot you it made no real difference. If you did get aggro you didn't usually fight anything, you just tried to die in a relatively safe spot so you could reraise or get a raise (or just Home Point) and try again. If you can completely trivialize the threat with easily obtainable items or a heap of patience and smart movement the world ceases to be truly dangerous.
A venomous snake is dangerous. A venomous snake locked in a cage no longer poses an immediate threat to you so it's not really dangerous anymore.
Or a better example. You're walking down the sidewalk and there's a snake in the way. He's venomous so if he bit you you'd probably die. That makes it dangerous. Instead of trying to fight it like an idiot you just cross the street and go down the other sidewalk so the snake never even noticed you were there, completely negating the danger. You see where I'm going with this?
Yes, FFXI had a potentially dangerous world if you went out of your way to make it so, but it wasn't truly dangerous because the vast majority of the playerbase snuck past everything anyway.
This is what people tend to forget. We don't have a dangerous world because no one cared that the world was dangerous in the first place due to those methods mentioned. The "dangerous" world was actively avoided all the time because it was a giant time sink that gave no reward and generally was a waste of time (Time sink, duh).
As I mentioned earlier, everyone seems to remember the parts as a whole when it comes to nostalgia, but tend to forget the smaller things that made those parts pointless. Invising/sneaking past everything just made the "dangerous" world pointless and a waste of space. So why spend dev time and money on something that the player doesn't even make use of (Aside from that one masochist that tries to solo everything and raging new players)? That is why we have what we have now. They'd rather take the effort and put it into other things
When people actually understand this, we'll actually get somewhere in these threads for once. "Because XI was like that" isn't an excuse. Two different developers with two different directions. That game is still alive anyway, go play it. Shoo.
Again, look at Wildstar if you want the hardcore "dangerous" open world that people supposedly "crave". People quit rather fast once having to deal with outrageously overpowered monsters and NMs in order to get anywhere (Both exploration and endgame raiding).
Time sink, a word that gets thrown around a lot. In essence, everytime we play a game we are in a time sink. The question is, what is fun during that time sink? Is it more fun to not worry about the world around you and teleport, play mr fed ex man doing errands or figure out a world's intricacies on a way to a destination where you learn of it's intricacies?
You are absolutely right. Why bother making an unknown dangerous world if there are means to ignore it. If the destination is delivering a parcel to someone in a remote dangerous area and it involves back and forth traveling. I could see how that could be annoying. But what if the goodies was traversing the area itself?
So how could fed-ex quests be added in the middle of a warzone and not piss people off? Add immunity to the carrier during the padded back and forth travel.
What kinds of goodies would add relevance to the world? Sightseeing, vistas, jumping puzzles, puzzles, rare spawns, rare materials, rare resources, treasure chest, open world dungeons/public areas, map discovery, hidden tunnels/sinkholes,locked doors,etc.
I play the Souls series for hundreds of hours with no cheating looking stuff up. And there is not a lot of quest. What holds my attention is the world and atmosphere itself. That which requires thought and dedication feels more fulfilling. So if I don't have to think about avoiding dangers or can sneak/invis past them. Then yes, don't bother making the world dangerous.
This so called danger in ffxiv or wow in only based around stats your gear have. Give the ffixiv combat style like in souls series and you have truly immersive fights. Then clearing some savage raid in nothing but loincloth would hold achievment, but these days raids have nothing to offer that requires individual skill its all about team rope jump, what stats your gear have etc. How can ppl dont understand that actual dodging as in rolling trhough attack or parrying attack with actual button presses and not rng based occurance is what todays mmorpg need.
Most people can't even dodge telegraphed AOEs, so what makes you think a Souls styled dodge mechanic would do anything?
You don't really dodge here though just step out of the way. I imagine most people can't dodge due to lag. Frontal, reverse, or conal would be easy to dodge with a dodge mechanic barring lag not interfering. For area wide effect, not so much.
Dark Souls is honestly a bad choice to use as a comparison. The core design of that game is death; the harsh environment and scare resources work since the designers intend for you to die a lot. Learn by dying. That works great in an single player game since you can go at your own pace, your choices impact only you, and there is no (false) sense of needing to keep up. Try to scale that to an MMO, and we know the results. Savage Coil and Savage Alex aren't run by the majority of players.
You underestimate the clutter of UI and sound in mmos, most simple skill nowdays is acompanied with overthetop graphical glow&shine and earblowing impact sound. To me EX primal fights are rainbow feast, devs somehow got into their heads that the more blinding the skill the more awsome it is. How con you notice those telegraphed skill when there is 8 players hissing and executing 'half the screen taken with special effect' skills, they have to keep their track of their UI to time those combos keep track of HP/MP bar. We have such a graphical chaos going on now, imagine what will it be in next expansion, you know they have to add new skills with even more impact, so they are more powerfull. 2 expansion later I cant even see the boss even if he as big as skyscraper, while shooting some heavy arrow buffed through the rough with some ballad or whateva...
I had that wonderful sense of adventurer when HW first came out and I hadn't unlocked the maps or flying yet. It's a great feeling. Unfortunately, SE can't release 9 brand new zones like that every week, so I enjoyed it for the ephemeral treat that it was.
That reminds me of this one time when me and my flatmate were still levelling our characters. We were doing all those level 40-ish side-quests in Central Coerthas, and were talking to the NPCs down close to Snowcloak... And Behemoth spawned. Right on top of us. I'd finished talking to mine, and was standing near that tiny fishing hole to the side, but my flatmate was literally under Behemoth's belly! XD
Scared shitless, we were XD But fortunately, Behemoth doesn't have eyes on his belly, so he didn't see her and we managed to escape without getting caught. But by the twelve... that was scary! XD