Eorzea feels like a world with no teeth.

[VisRalis]

Eorzea feels like a world with no teeth.

(I'm sorry I couldn't resist)

[MACEenyo]

MAKE IT HAPPEN YOSHIDA

[chococo]

I was expecting strongholds like davoi, castle oztroja, or even ghelsba outpost . . . .

[chococo]

People said Tanaka sucked. I think given the 2years Yoshida had, 1.0 would have been a much better fantasy game.

2.0 isn't even a fantasy RPG. It's an action thriller.

[Raymeo]

I miss the danger from 1.0... well, from the first few days of 1.0 that is.

I don't miss that 90% of the world was always devoid of players after everyone got their exploration achievements, due to 1.0's open world mobs being even higher leveled than 2.0's bosses. With the exception of Moogle farming, players were never given a reason to go near those mobs, and yet they covered the majority of the world. The majority of the world being dangerous, purely for the sake of being dangerous, only resulted in an empty world. This made for a waste of world development time, a waste of data being tracked at the data centers, a waste of storage space on players' hard drives...

(Elaborating on the problem with 1.0 mobs in the quote box below, but that's in the past. Skip to after the break for the more relevant problems that need to be considered when examining 2.0 today.)

What's more is that the high level mobs that covered the majority of the world in 1.0 weren't just dangerous. They were doom incarnate. The danger that they presented was overkill. They were so ridiculously imbalanced that literally the only reliable way to run past most of them was to mount up as a relatively geared PLD just after blowing all of your defensive cooldowns, making a mad sprint past a small pack of mobs, and then going AFK while waiting for your cooldowns to come back up before repeating. Obviously most players didn't have the patience for this, especially if they died after an hour or two of inching forward in this tedious manner, as was most often the case. Even if you threw an alliance together, managed to pull single mobs away from one these areas, and proceeded to kill them, they only dropped the same old junk that you could farm by yourself at level 12. These mobs weren't put there to be a fun obstacle for players to overcome. They were put there with the sole intention of discouraging players and preventing people from venturing any further. You weren't SUPPOSED to be where they were, plain and simple, and if you insisted on it then you were supposed to feel so foolish afterward that you'd spread the word and never explore again.

This being the case, there could have only been one good reason for these obscenely powerful open-world mobs being everywhere, and that would have been to keep people from going to the areas that weren't finished being developed yet -- Leviathan's Lair, Bahamut's Lair, etc. You'd find places like this everywhere, and it was the same thing every time: if you had enough patience to sneak past mobs for a few hours, then your exploration through the sea of copy/pasta would FINALLY bring you to the entrance to something really cool looking, where you'd only to be met by a disappointing NPC saying, "Sorry, this area's off limits right now. Please turn back around." Whatever you'd find in the world, it was always an unfinished buzzkill, the product of a game released before it was ready. The only reason that makes sense for the devs making the world so impossible to navigate was that they didn't want players to discover that they purchased an unfinished product.

I'm sure that a sweet spot could have been found in 2.0 by lowering the 1.0 mobs' levels to still keep them deadly, but not OHKO deadly at max level, while at the same time making them follow for longer than they do now...

...but even then, the only time anyone goes out into the world alone these days is for gathering, and everyone already complains about the tedium of it. I can't imagine gathering being made more fun by constant death. Trust me -- I used to mine Ifrit's Cauldron in XI for my main income. I did it because on a good day it was insanely profitable, but it was only profitable because nobody else in their right mind wanted to bang their head into such a brick wall of death all day. Let's not even talk about the bad days -- the days when my iron will would only leave me a couple levels lower with nothing to show for it but a handful broken pickaxes and a seething hatred for bombs. Overall it was not what I would describe as a fun way to spend time in a game.

Even traveling in groups today, all that people go into the world for is FATE parties, which people also complain about the tedium of. Throwing in random deaths between each FATE wouldn't make people happier.

Maybe some NMs would be fun to spice things up, but even so, gone are the days of torturous camping, not to mention the loss of the single-party claiming system that actually made the resulting fights a challenge. The focus is now on fun for all with party-free tagging and server-wide cooperation in the open world, with single-party challenges being tucked away in isolated instances -- because less griefing and more players getting loots means more happy players keeping their subs. In other words, any NMs that we see today will just be developed to be loot pinatas and present some aesthetic variety. Gone are the days of even NMs being threatening.

Let's not forget that permanent mounts trivialize the threats of any travel that you'll ever do anyway.

I can get sentimental with the best of y'all, and enjoy reminiscing about the good old days. These things made for some fun experiences. Unfortunately they were short-lived experiences that had a limited shelf life from the moment they were implemented (or in the case of threatening NMs, benefited only a minority of players while alienating the majority who lost out on claims). Developers have learned that those types of short-lived experiences are a waste of resources -- hence the poor quality of seasonal events these days. As a result, I can't imagine these requested features ever coming back. :/

Besides... before tackling this topic, we should be asking for some actual REASONS to travel on foot. This is like arguing about crafting leveling up too quickly, instead of worrying about how pointless crafting has become in the first place. Let's focus on first things first. Once the day comes when I actually find myself surrounded by mobs more often than players, THEN let's talk about how to fix mounts so they don't trivialize the world, how to make mobs threatening (and for more than just the sake of being threatening), and how to do all of this without ruining gathering and FATE grinding. Until then, can we work toward getting an actual reason to leave the market wards and Wineport?

[Edellis]

I started this game in 2.0, but from video footage of 1.0 and years of playing open world MMOs, i really have no love for requests of scale with no substance. Or content with no real reason for adding it. Or random enemy camps littered around the world that can kill you for no good reason.

Randomly falling into a pit or walking into an area and being blown up isn't "good design". It's just nostalgic design, because thats what old MMOs use to do.

Smart MMOs don't do that anymore because it's stupid, and, surprisingly, not many people enjoy that sort of thing.


The 2.0 world of FFXIV is pretty and it's functional. You don't have to travel far to see shit happening. And honestly, it's the only reason i kept playing the game. I have no desire to waste my life watching my character jog across an empty green texture for 7 minutes.

[Dano]

support this, I think it should be done in future expansion when we get bigger areas. Venturing into areas with mobs much higher level than you would make it fun.

[gadenp]

While I am quite casual, I find that FF14 open world is boring at lvl 50. Would like some open areas that provide some challenge to do, both solo or as a party. Maybe with rare mobs that drop rarer crafting loot that a person that get once an hour.

As a casual, too crazy hard mobs are bad but FF14 is the right opposite And worst yet there is no reason to kill them also as their loot is not required most of the time.

Basically I feel that at lvl 50 there is really no reason for the world. I just queue at wineport and/or a town for instances.

[bob13bob]

Interesting world and mobs has nothing to do with casual. Everyone would appreciate it. I 100% agree with op.

[ToraFomalhaut]

I miss the danger from 1.0... well, from the first few days of 1.0 that is.

I started this game in 2.0, but from video footage of 1.0 and years of playing open world MMOs, i really have no love for requests of scale with no substance. Or content with no real reason for adding it. Or random enemy camps littered around the world that can kill you for no good reason.

No one likes insta-death, look at the complaints coming from TitanHM and TitanX, no one also likes needless running for anything longer than 2-3 minutes and I agree huge empty worlds for the sake of saying you have a huge world is pointless. I think what people are most looking for is a world that comes with a challenge and has a purpose outside of being a lobby for the duty finder. The beastmen strongholds in 1.0 were regularly populated with xp camps, people farming the items needed to get into primal fights, AF coffer runs and at a later date the quest to unlock your relic weapon. These zones were hard but not impossible. They were a good example of a useful open world area that wasn't to be taken lightly.

And sometimes, just sometimes you don't need an in game reason to go and risk adventure in a dangerous zone.

There is really no reason you cannot have areas of the map that are populated with enemies that actually pose you a threat and require some careful forethought before you proceeded into their territory rather than just wading in and slaughtering their strongest warriors, spouses and children.

Who are the real monsters in Eorzea?