Do you think that there's a lack of focus on our open world areas?

I feel like alot if the regions in the game feel under utilized. They have hunts and FATEs but I can't see reasons outside of nice scenery to go out into the world. Do you think that it's something the devs should address at some point or is it not as big a deal to you all? Like to hear your thoughts!

I dont really get the fascination on the overworld people have. It usually just turns into a mess of complaints over spawns and the like. I think I get enough use of it from the story and the bits they send you out to do with the later patches.

I think it's definitely an issue that there are certain spots in a lot of zones that are pretty much never used at all. Like the Feast of Iron in Dravanian Forelands. That said, Gathering and "World" fate bosses usually keep the overworld fresh enough. Due to the nature of relying on Duty Finder and how freeflowing servers are in XIV, an old school overworld based MMO won't ever occur.

What's kinda sad to me about it is that because flying is in every zone now, the whole world is in a fly over state at endgame. They could stand to give us a reason to kill overworld monsters too, outside of daily hunts and sidequests.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

I feel like alot if the regions in the game feel under utilized. They have hunts and FATEs but I can't see reasons outside of nice scenery to go out into the world. Do you think that it's something the devs should address at some point or is it not as big a deal to you all? Like to hear your thoughts!

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I've always felt this way about the open world. It's kinda sad how you used to see people and now... not at all. I wish they made FATES reward more for doing them on a capped character but even that doesn't feel like quite enough. I'd love for them to add something akin to what ishgard's firmament did for a crafter/gatherer fate that pops up and gives you all sorts of seals/items/exp... idk, there definitely is a certain "world exploring" magic to it that is missing, especially with flight in ARR now.

If anything, I feel like all the "ease of access" is kinda what kills it. NPC's and duties can all be found or done within one single town area after you're done with your first play through. Kinda ruins that feeling of going out.

You can enter dungeons alone any time so I don't see what the problem is.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

I feel like alot if the regions in the game feel under utilized. They have hunts and FATEs but I can't see reasons outside of nice scenery to go out into the world. Do you think that it's something the devs should address at some point or is it not as big a deal to you all? Like to hear your thoughts!

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It's not a big deal to me.

"Under utilized" doesn't make sense when talking about a character relative to the world as I don't think my character is supposed to do everything in the world. That one area that my character passes by without a second thought might be important to someone else.

What bothers me the most is how boring the scenery is in a lot of places. It really makes the whole overworld feel like the devs treated it's creation as a chore. The original maps have quite a few interesting locations to explore, even if there's little to no actual content there.

Could have learned a bit from GW2 and made "fates" more interesting.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

I feel like alot if the regions in the game feel under utilized. They have hunts and FATEs but I can't see reasons outside of nice scenery to go out into the world. Do you think that it's something the devs should address at some point or is it not as big a deal to you all? Like to hear your thoughts!

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-shrug- Maybe a camping feature that let you use the marketboard and retainer bell while your in the overworld could make the outdoors more viable?

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

I dont really get the fascination on the overworld people have. It usually just turns into a mess of complaints over spawns and the like. I think I get enough use of it from the story and the bits they send you out to do with the later patches.

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My thoughts exactly.
I'm willing to bet its usually the older gen people that grew up off the grindy classic mmo's where you just farm overworld monsters or something.

Like other than fates, what do people even want them to do for the overworld? I see a lot of demands for open world actives and no ideas.

I think it'd be cool if they introduced overworld events similar to Besieged or Campaign from FFXI. Course that would be hell on the hands. I have no idea where they'd actually implement it at this point. And We're kinda getting something close to it on the Bozjan Front anyway so heh.

One thing that always puzzled me, something they removed....Moving the 8 man raids to the duty/raid finder.

Back in ARR for Coils and HW for Alexander raids you always had to enter the raid via the entrance which was great, especially in ARR as each tier had a seperate entrance - One at wineport, One at Falgourts float, and one at the Ceruleum Proccessing Plant in Northern Thanalan. Alexander simply had one entrance for all 3 tiers, in the Dravanian Hinterlands just outside of Illdyshire.

You might ask what was so great about having to go to an area to enter a raid, rather than the convenience of raid finder? Well, it was not only the sense of the world being alive, with players actually moving around these areas, but it also created a great sense of community. On reset day you'd see crafters setting up makeshift stalls to sell their services to meld materia or sell food and pots just outside of the raid entrance, you'd have people shouting for groups for those who wanted a local server group and i met several friends in these little gatherings every week.

Now? That's all gone, and the only reason to even go in to the overworld is Gathering, Maps, and Hunts but even the Hunts arent a big thing anymore as generally most people just leave them alone and then spend one hour every day or two in a big train killing them all. Gatherers at legendary nodes barely have the time to even acknowledge that other people is there, let alone have an opportunity to interact with them considering the time sensitivity of the nodes and maps are usually done with pre-existing groups or otherwise through the PF anyway.

That leaves just FATEs - SE did try to improve the longevity of FATEs in shadowbringers with the addition of gemstones but for most it was little more than a chore and almost nobody actively goes out of their way to grind fates for a small side feature.

SE has known for years that the overworld is rarely visited for much of substance, but they seem to have no idea how to fix it.

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Originally Posted by VenKitsune

SE has known for years that the overworld is rarely visited for much of substance, but they seem to have no idea how to fix it.

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You'll probably get people disagreeing that the MSQ lacks substance and MSQ is the primary reason for visiting.

Instance capacity could be a concern when it comes to utilizing the open world zones more. Last thing the game would need is high level players clogging a zone so leveling players can't get in to do their quests.

Open world zones already play host to:
MSQ
Side quests
Hunts
FATEs
Leves
Beast Tribes
Gathering
Sightseeing Log
Treasure Maps

What else would you add that wouldn't cause issues for players trying to do those things?

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

My thoughts exactly.
I'm willing to bet its usually the older gen people that grew up off the grindy classic mmo's where you just farm overworld monsters or something.

Like other than fates, what do people even want them to do for the overworld? I see a lot of demands for open world actives and no ideas.

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I'm in my upper 30s (no idea if you're grouping that in the older gen or not), but I love having an active open world.

As someone else hinted at, GW2 does amazing things with their open world. I pretty much stick to open-world content only in that game. They have a ton of various events happening across the map at any given time, some may be simply killing mobs, some will be escort quests, some may be something else entirely. Then you have the big META events which consist of a long string of linked events that lead up to a big finish. There are legendary hunts you can participate in. Also world bosses.

Mount races can be found throughout the day. Repeatable heart-quests that are never just a simple "kill this batch of mobs". One has you helping scientists with research, another has you helping a chef prepare a meal, another has you scaring off groundhogs, then there is one where you are feeding/giving medicine to people in a camp, one that has you boosting morale of an army, one that has you trying to fit in with an acting-troupe, and it goes on.

You can also find challenge courses scattered throughout the world which, like everything else, has a rather wide variety of what you have to accomplish. And can't forget jumping puzzles! There's probably a whole bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting to mention as it's so early, but what I'm getting at is that their open world has a massive amount of variety, and it makes things feel far more alive and enjoyable.

Compare that to XIV where it's open world is not too far off from a glorified waiting room while you queue for instances. Yes, you can gather, do hunt trains or FATES (which are pretty one-note), but there's not much else going on and it feels incredibly lifeless as a whole.


e: The post just above mine added some additional items for XIV, thank you! But the only things that will generally persist after you've completed your leveling/MSQ are the hunts, FATEs, gathering and maps. If you're new, you'll have things to keep you busy for a while in the world, but it soon loses a lot of it's activities once you level out of it.

Common issue in several MMOs. Once you've out level a zone you never really have to return there unless there's something special you need to do there.
That's one of the big reasons I enjoy ESO so much as I do, each zone is always relevant and I constantly see people running around everywhere.
But that game also level sync everything up so you never truely outlevel a zone.
It makes the game world feel more alive instead of having empty zones except a handful of new players / players leveling up alts.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I'm in my upper 30s (no idea if you're grouping that in the older gen or not), but I love having an active open world.

As someone else hinted at, GW2 does amazing things with their open world.

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GW2 was designed from the ground up around those open world events. The problem is that they feel hollow. Kinda like FATEs. As in, you can totally ignore that giant dragon monster in the swamp, it'll just chill there until someone happens along to destroy it. Despite what the event text tells you about this monstrosity ending the world.

Or you could veer into Rift territory, which was a fun concept for the first couple months, but once most people settled into their endgame characters, older zones just got overrun by maximum tier Rifts that took forever to clean out.
And when you did finally clean it out, do your quest and log off, The Rift will have taken over your questing hub again by the time you log back in. So it became a chore. And may the gods help you if a higher level Rift pops open across the map and then travels over to the lower level area and sets up shop.

Speaking in universe, Our WoL cleared out every major threat to every zone we ever visited. Anything trivial is handled by the local Grand Company. Any threat that warranted the WoL's attention would be a one and done quest. Or a Hunt. Which is also one and done, until it spawns again.
We have no reason for those zones to be more 'lively' than they currently are.

You can look at GW2 and say you love just doing all the events, which is fine because lots of them have cool stories and it's always worth clearing each map, however GW2 events are just FATEs but more grandiose. They're not even random, Its the exact same event in the same location every time.

In the olden days, the open world mobs existed to be grinded for EXP or rare equipment drops. That role has since been moved to dungeon mobs in more modern MMOs because staring at a spawn point waiting for your target to respawn all day gets boring fast.
Even in the early days of WoW before the LFG tools came around, endgame was just chilling in a city spamming "LFM X" all day until someone joined you in between bouts of grinding gold off mobs that happen to have lucrative drops. Or material farming for raid consumables.

If you want an MMO to have a lively open world, it'd need to be designed for it from the beginning. Not shoehorned in after the fact.

I mentioned more than just their world bosses though. :X

I imagine every game is going to fall into repetition eventually, and you can't design true RNG as to how events unfold, but GW2 at least gives you a lot of options as to how you can spend your time in the open world. And the nice thing is that it's all still rewarding to do, even after you're max level. You still get XP, which can be funneled into mastery points or shards, and you still get loot, which can of course be sold or used. A lot of XIV's open world content isn't touched again once you've outleveled it.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I mentioned more than just their world bosses though. :X

I imagine every game is going to fall into repetition eventually, and you can't design true RNG as to how events unfold, but GW2 at least gives you a lot of options as to how you can spend your time in the open world. And the nice thing is that it's all still rewarding to do, even after you're max level. You still get XP, which can be funneled into mastery points or shards, and you still get loot, which can of course be sold or used. A lot of XIV's open world content isn't touched again once you've outleveled it.

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The boss mention was just to drive the point that they feel kinda hollow in that there's no repercussion to just ignoring it.

The biggest benefit to how GW2s events work is that they scale rewards to your current level, not the minimum level of the event (Like FATEs do) even though they scale you down to match that lower level.
Thats why it feels like there's more variety to the open world. You're not forced to play in just the level appropriate regions.

Honestly, a rework of FATEs to make them interesting and somewhat challenging from even the earliest level and and averaging the gains on a per zone basis so no one zones FATEs get trained to the exclusion of all else would go a long way to making our open world look a bit more lively.

Imagine starting a FATE train in Limsa and rolling every FATE between Limsa and Ul'dah, moving on every time your train clears out each zone lol. It'd be pretty fun.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

My thoughts exactly.
I'm willing to bet its usually the older gen people that grew up off the grindy classic mmo's where you just farm overworld monsters or something.

Like other than fates, what do people even want them to do for the overworld? I see a lot of demands for open world actives and no ideas.

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Pretty much this. Going into cities in older design MMOs was actually a rare event. You normally stayed outside the cities doing everything for days at a time then would go back if you needed food or potions. ALTHOUGHHHHHH this has more to do with the playerbase then the MMO itself because if you look at how people play WoW Classic now compared to the old days most end up in cities afk'n because the old ways of getting things is inefficient and time consuming.

If mmo devs shut down all the bots I guarantee people would be encourage to leave the cities to level up gathering jobs because material cost would sky rocket.

Yea there is a lack of depth to the open world. Asides from the Yokai event, its pretty quiet. I will see the occasional person here and there but the devs never placed any real focus on any of the open world content such as Fates, World Bosses and such. Once you are done you are done. I mean they we would need to redo the Fates and the rewards system to entice players to go do them but honestly that would work for so long.

THe only thing to do really is more open world events like the current Yokai event going on.

This game's weird gathering/crafting system might be part of it. In most other MMOs you can go out exploring and killing monsters and grab any materials (herbs/ore/fish/etc) you might pass. Elder Scrolls Online, for example, the overworld is full of people swarming around gathering mats or doing guild quests (Thieve's/Assassin's etc)or just fighting hard monsters and keeping eyes out for chests. Or, lately, doing archaeology.

In FFXIV you CAN do all of those things but you have to be specifically going for just one. If you are collecting ore you cannot see herbs and can't fight for example. Treasure chests require a subquest and maps.

I'm not saying that's a problem with the game, mind you. It's just how things are.

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Originally Posted by Sylve

The boss mention was just to drive the point that they feel kinda hollow in that there's no repercussion to just ignoring it.

The biggest benefit to how GW2s events work is that they scale rewards to your current level, not the minimum level of the event (Like FATEs do) even though they scale you down to match that lower level.
Thats why it feels like there's more variety to the open world. You're not forced to play in just the level appropriate regions.

Honestly, a rework of FATEs to make them interesting and somewhat challenging from even the earliest level and and averaging the gains on a per zone basis so no one zones FATEs get trained to the exclusion of all else would go a long way to making our open world look a bit more lively.

Imagine starting a FATE train in Limsa and rolling every FATE between Limsa and Ul'dah, moving on every time your train clears out each zone lol. It'd be pretty fun.

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Ah, gotcha. True - the WBs will just sit there until someone decides to play with them, but I've never personally shown up to a boss spawn and not seen a group there ready to kill it (it's probably happened, just not that I've seen). I don't believe they have too much impact (any?) on the surrounding areas if not killed. I could be mistaken on this...I've not personally done many WBs for awhile now.

I'm trying to think of games where they've been more dynamic, and XI comes to mind with Besieged. If you didn't defend the city when the attack came, you would lose the astral candy (gave perks/buffs) and you could actually lose NPCs entirely due to the beastmen taking them back to their holds. You then had to go and rescue the NPCs in order to get them back in the town.

On a less-extreme scale, they also had a weekly conquest ranking for the city-states that was based on activity. Some NPCs would only sell to you if your city was in 1st place, and so you'd have to go elsewhere for your goods if you fell behind. Little things like that can make a decent impact.

Another game I play has a daily group event where you have to start by building a trebuchet, which requires transporting building materials from the town to a far away field. Once the trebuchet is built, you have to fight off a ghost army with shrink-rays (some good ol' ghost buster action goes on), and then finally it will spawn the bosses. That event, much like some in GW2, do end up being zergs - but it does highlight that it's possible to design overworld fights that are more fleshed out and aren't just a simple 'kill this monster' type event.

I would looove to see a rework to XIV's overworld. Spice things up, add a greater variety of content that is actually beneficial to people at max level. But yeah, I'm not going to be holding my breath on this one. :X

Yes, FFXIV has probably the worst open world areas out of any bigger budget MMORPG out there. Even Classic has more life in them which should not be the case

We already have multi stage FATEs in places, So mechanically speaking there's no reason SE couldn't make more of them.

Any changes to how the open world functions would have to be isolated to only the newer expansion zones. The old world is designed to be static, outside of NPC placement for MSQ/general quest purposes.
It'd be a pretty tall order for them to revamp the entire ARR - ShB open world from a static one to a dynamic one. The reason for the Dwarves tribe hub being moved out of Kholusia is related to data caps for the zone.

Having newer zones be more dynamic (A push/pull zone with Garleans would be really cool) is a great idea, but with how story focused the game is, There would need to be a reason for a zone to be in conflict even after we do the MSQ and clear out whatever threatens the zone.
Then with a foundation system, they could work on making over the original zones bit by bit, a dynamic camp here and there until eventually the Amal'jaa are summoning Ifrit on Ul'dahs doorstep XD

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

My thoughts exactly.
I'm willing to bet its usually the older gen people that grew up off the grindy classic mmo's where you just farm overworld monsters or something.

Like other than fates, what do people even want them to do for the overworld? I see a lot of demands for open world actives and no ideas.

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"lol"

To anyone who think "older" MMOs are just about grinding trash mob in the open world, dont try to post in this thread.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

My thoughts exactly.
I'm willing to bet its usually the older gen people that grew up off the grindy classic mmo's where you just farm overworld monsters or something.

Like other than fates, what do people even want them to do for the overworld? I see a lot of demands for open world actives and no ideas.

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I’d say just generally making the world more active/alive/just have more engaging things to do. Guild Wars 2 does this really well with a lot of roaming fates/fate chains that are usually more than just killing monsters (typical GW “fate” has 3 different things you could do; an example while raiding an enemy base might be killing the enemy, freeing prisoners or wrecking their base infrastructure - food stashes, weapon’s etc.)

GW2 also has fairly intricate jumping puzzles, but FF’s jumping system/hit box for puzzles is atrocious.

Some of GW2’s “fates” are actually races, like legit fun/Mario kart-sequel races, others are coin grab obstacle courses (think parkour)

One thing FF11 did was have pop-able notorious monsters where you had to earn an item, drop it somewhere for a party-only fight..much like treasure chests, but for a specific monster and loot.

Another FF11 thing was to farm a sort of currency from open world beastmen to purchase tokens for specific battles (we’d call them trials, but much less complicated)

To;dr there just isn’t anything to do in the open world; no reason to really be outside after MSQ is done.

The RPG side of FFXIV actually benefits from being alone in the overworld a lot of the time. You're often exploring places that nobody has visited in centuries.

They waste a lot of resources making these 6 zones that never get used outside of msq and hunts. Fates don't serve any real purpose, they're inferior in every way to dungeons, potd, hoh, rouletes, and the upcoming bozja.

In the future they could just make instanced msq areas and it would provide the same experience while costing less resources. Make gathernig a retainers venture, no big loss there.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

In the future they could just make instanced msq areas and it would provide the same experience while costing less resources.

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How is that going to require any less resources? It's still going to need to be modelled just the same, and then they need to support enough individual instances for everyone.

It doesn't have to be that way, useless I mean, the tools are there, they just have to use them, if they want us to spend half our time in Limsa that's cool ig, but then why bother making interesting locales for us to see during MSQ only to have them go to waste? I'm not an older mmo gamer this is my first real mmo tbh but it's just something I thought weird seeing what the competition does in comparison.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

How is that going to require any less resources? It's still going to need to be modelled just the same, and then they need to support enough individual instances for everyone.

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1. That's not true, they would make game design adjustments where the traveling is reduced and the msq becomes less fetch quest driven and becomes more story driven.
2. Only battle instances require server space, cutscenes do not.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

It doesn't have to be that way, useless I mean, the tools are there, they just have to use them, if they want us to spend half our time in Limsa that's cool ig, but then why bother making interesting locales for us to see during MSQ only to have them go to waste? I'm not an older mmo gamer this is my first real mmo tbh but it's just something I thought weird seeing what the competition does in comparison.

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Well, to be fair. Its your choice to chill in Limsa waiting for a queue pop. You COULD go sightseeing while in the queue. DF works everywhere XD
Not like you absolutely require the conveniences of a city immediately upon returning from a dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

It doesn't have to be that way, useless I mean, the tools are there, they just have to use them, if they want us to spend half our time in Limsa that's cool ig, but then why bother making interesting locales for us to see during MSQ only to have them go to waste? I'm not an older mmo gamer this is my first real mmo tbh but it's just something I thought weird seeing what the competition does in comparison.

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"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game," is a famous quote among game development circles. Many open world activities have been optimized to the point that hanging around an aetheryte most of the time is the optimal way for many to participate in those activities.

• Battlecraft Leves - These were one of the premiere open world activities, but quickly became a less than optimal activity compared to FATEs and dungeons. HW's attempt at fixing them didn't succeed and so they were quietly dropped by the devs in StB. Sometimes the only reason they are done now is to spawn S-rank hunt targets.
• Treasure Maps - An activity that should quiet easily lead to pickup groups running around the open world have been optimized into a once or twice per week activity for most player groups that do them due to the 18 hour timer on gathering maps and the time it can take to do the bonus dungeons.
• Hunts - Hunts were introduced as a way to get max level players searching around the zones, but players ended up figuring out spawn timers, spawn locations, and spawn conditions to the point where only a few players need to scout or spawn while the rest wait for an A-rank Train or S-rank spawn call out in their linkshells.

It's like I said before, import Bozja into the 6 new zones of the next expansion. With the last duty being a primal (or legendary) boss fight where it asks the 24 people with the most contribution points into the open world primal fight. Just make sure to have 2 versions that can happen randomly (24 or 48 people) so it's not predictable how many people are doing "Bozja-type fates."

I'll use this thread to voice my opinion about the sightseeing log.

With the old ARR sightseeing entries it's kinda fun to try to work out what the clues mean. However they're really annoying to find as the vistas are quite small and there's no indicator until you're on the spot. And if you do manage to find the right place they're even more annoying to get because of the time and weather requirements.

Starting from HW the vistas have a glowing ball on them which is visible from a decent distance away. However that's the only clue. There's zero indicator in the log entries, aside from the zone, even though the recommendations window lists "sightseeing clues". So you have to guess which things on that zone are worth being included.

Finally, the UX with the log is atrocious. Clicking in the recommendations window does not take you to the correct page. There's no way to list which things from the current zone you have found, other than going through all the entries for that expansion. And since entries get added mid-expansion, the entries for a single zone aren't even grouped together.

Exploration like this is a nice idea but the implementation could be a lot better. If you took the visual indicators from the expansions but added the cryptic location clues from ARR, as well as more varied emotes, and fixed the UX issues with the log book, they'd be stellar. There could even be a daily quest to revisit a randomly selected vista for a small reward.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

snip.

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Its almost as if MMOs were originally about expansive, living open areas that fleshed out the world and made it feel like you were actually playing a MMO and not "Instance Simulator Online."

Chalk me up as one of the old MMO players who wants more open world content. It's interesting to see people describe open world content as hollow, because I feel the same way about instancing. when everything important that I do takes place in an alternate reality where only I and 3 to 23 friends exist... it feels removed from the universe that i am playing in... which is suppose is exactly what it is.

But yeah, I get that the open world feels hollow too. But the reason for that is that no one is there.

Back in the day one of the MMOs I played had a fixed number of mobs that would exist on a map at any given time. This meant that if you killed something, a new one would appear to replace it at a random location on the map. Now on the first level of several dungeons in that game there would permanently be a large number of people. All killing things almost as quickly as they spawned, all over the map. This made it quite hectic and exciting as you could very quickly be overwhelmed if too large a number of respawns appeared where you were fighting. BUT because the map was full of people, there would always be others to help you out.

Then there would be people who far out leveled the map just hanging out. Sat in corners, or standing around, chatting with their friends. So newbies in trouble could run and wipe off the adds on them, or get rezzed by them when they died. You would even have characters playing merchants setting up shop in the danger zone, selling potions and what not.

It was anything thing but hollow. But if I go back to that game now, some fifteen years later. Now those maps are hollow. People moved on. There is no one there. Its sad.

So yeah. I miss open world content. Is that just nostalgia? I don't think that's all it is.

For me its about the immersion, you feel less trapped within a zone also having things to do besides fates helps break up the abundance of humdrum A to B fetch quests . Some of the zones are really linear and it feels like im playing a console game most times. ESO does a good job with their open world with tough world bosses with epic drops, hunting, gathering and mining for crafting mats but everything else is a pain.

Someone suggested in another thread how it'd be cool to have Beast Tribes summon Primals where players gather to defeat it.

Honestly Bozja is what the OW should be like in a way plus maybe a percentage of the GW2 style of OW with map completion and meta events with semi decent rewards as incentives to stay out in the OW vs instances like dungeons or raids