Adding Life to the Cities!

[Kailok]

Yeah, agreed, right now I don't care if they have the same character models. With the limited races/hair styles, it's hard not to see the same character models running around anyway. I'm sure they could figure out some sort of random NPC creation program and start placing them in the cities with their own paths. And speaking of 'their own paths', is it just me or does the Battlewardens for Behest really contribute nothing? They just stand there..They should be fighting with us! Or at least give us buffs and heal or something. Some NPCs also need to be more interactive.

[Kailok]

I completly agree with needing more life in cities. Adding roaming npcs is a very good idea, and with shops and closing times they could easily get around having to close shops by simply having another npc take over the store at night. So there would a npc for night shift and day shift. As for the conquest thing, I have little faith that something like that would work right now in the game just because of how bad the areas are spaced. For instanced your never really a zone away from another town ( like how LL connects right to thalan), there is no area between the starting zones for most cities. So it be hard to take an area where the city is in for another city(although in FFXI I was apart of an LS that took a week of killing in ronfaure to take it for bastok for some lols and disrespecting). I guess we could do it on a camp by camp bais though.

I get what you mean that it would be hard to do right now, due to the lack of zones. But to fix this they should just divide every zone up into 5 or 6 different regions or Locations where there would be new quest-hubs. It would help make each area of the map more memorable while at the same time they could overlap a conquest feature to see who is doing the most amount of questing/killing in each area.

[Aver]

I thought of the same thing too when I saw the battlewarden standing there SIGHING while we fought.

At least cheer us on or something.

[Kailok]

I thought of the same thing too when I saw the battlewarden standing there SIGHING while we fought.

At least cheer us on or something.

Lol right? I remember the good ol' Campaign days where there was all-out war going on. You would see a badass Allied Named "Hero" NPC come in and start destroying everything. I want to see more NPCs, ESPECIALLY if an army is about to take the helm in all of the cities. You gotta do it, SE! D:

[Vackashken]

The easiest way to add life to the cities is to get rid of the market wards and the RIDICULOUS fail-leve system in place that so many breeder LSes abuse. If an AH opens and is linked (between the cities) the populace won't be pigeon-holed in Ul Dah. If Ul Dah didn't have the best leves to abuse and fail religiously the populace wouldn't be pigeon-holed in Ul Dah.

Only after that will the cities come to life. You can fancy up LL and Grid all you want but there is zero reason to go there until those two fundamental fails in the environment design are addressed.

[Kailok]

The easiest way to add life to the cities is to get rid of the market wards and the RIDICULOUS fail-leve system in place that so many breeder LSes abuse. If an AH opens and is linked (between the cities) the populace won't be pigeon-holed in Ul Dah. If Ul Dah didn't have the best leves to abuse and fail religiously the populace wouldn't be pigeon-holed in Ul Dah.

Only after that will the cities come to life. You can fancy up LL and Grid all you want but there is zero reason to go there until those two fundamental fails in the environment design are addressed.

I respectully disagree. We're pretty much almost sure they won't be adding an Auction House at this point because I remember in one of the dev posts that they stated they don't have plans to implement one but it's being "looked into". But an AH isn't going to bring a city back to life. People will see it for a couple minutes, get bored and just realize that it's just a more organized MW. You can only entertain people so much with an AH. We need life in the cities. NPCs. EVERYWHERES.

And to be honest, the only reason I picked Ul'Dah in the first place is because it felt more like a city than the other two. I kind of hate Ul'Dah's scenery, a complete barren wasteland right outside. I don't stay and do Ul'Dah's leves because they're exploitable, I do them because they're honestly the more interesting ones. I actually like the area around LL better.

[Morticous]

The illusion of life doesn't come from complex animations nor other Hollywood-tricks it comes from something unexpected happening in the world you live in.

Say you're talking to an NPC on Monday and it just so happens that on Mondays the NPC needs your help with a unique quest or that when you accidentally talk to another guy after that he has some related information to share because you completed a quest for the Monday guy.

A shop might be closed during the night and that NPC is standing in the Black Shroud fishing. He might have a different line of dialogue up his sleeves that let's you have a small peek into this NPCs life outside of potion-selling.

Depending on your rank an NPC might tell you about a quest or initiate an entire quest-line that highlights the history of Eorzea.

But SE decided to go ahead and destroy any chance of immersion in this game by making the "!" marks and then downgrading proper quests into mindless leve-likes.

At least someone around here feels the same way I do. I said the same sort of thing a few months ago. NPCs should show up in certain areas at certain times of the day/night. The people at the tables should actually... TALK to each other.... I like your idea about finding the shop owner fishing on a Saturday or something. Just finding NPCs standing for thousands of hours is lifeless and boring. Oh and the "!".... way to take the fun out of finding a mission/quest (and the argument about just looking them up on the internet is a bad one.... It adds to the search, its a quest of its own). Anyway, there are some pretty simple things they could do to make this game a bit more lively and less dull... maybe they will do some of this in the future.

Outtro.

[Kailok]

At least someone around here feels the same way I do. I said the same sort of thing a few months ago. NPCs should show up in certain areas at certain times of the day/night. The people at the tables should actually... TALK to each other.... I like your idea about finding the shop owner fishing on a Saturday or something. Just finding NPCs standing for thousands of hours is lifeless and boring. Oh and the "!".... way to take the fun out of finding a mission/quest (and the argument about just looking them up on the internet is a bad one.... It adds to the search, its a quest of its own). Anyway, there are some pretty simple things they could do to make this game a bit more lively and less dull... maybe they will do some of this in the future.

Outtro.

I think the "!" is more for the casuals who don't have time to go looking around from NPC to NPC to find out which quest-giver is the right one. While I agree that people could just look it up on the net, I think this is one thing that isn't exactly a big deal. Plus, we know they won't get rid of it at this point. What they COULD do is have secret quest givers that don't have a "!" above their heads to reward those who take the time to find them.

[Morticous]

I don't see them taking it away either, I guess at this point your idea is the best we've got, but thats ok because I like that idea.

[Dreadnought]

i have to say i also kind of liked most shops were closed at night, there was usually one shop open at all times somewhere but if you knew what you were doing getting there wasnt much of a pain, so to me, the immersion was there.