Why 4.0 should have a zone with danger, no ports, no mounts, and a hidden town

[Azurymber]

All that work just so that the majority will completely abandon it after the first few weeks. It'll be left to rot and be populated by the few that want it, only for them to tire of it cause no one is there. Then the FFXIV team will put some part of the relic there to "make old content relevant again" and the forums will self implode with disgust.

Personally, I love lore and exploration and I don't need an incentive or rules to have an adventure. I'm not a fan of this idea because it'd just be a complete bother to try and enjoy it. This is coming from someone that loved the exploration of Xenoblade Chronicles X and sneaking past monsters over 50 levels higher than me and could one-shot me with a slight furrow of their brow.

Simply put, if you want to enjoy the game a certain way, then do it. There's no need to force everyone else to do it as well. Trying to force everyone else to things how only you do them is incredibly selfish.

Like I said it would be optional.
And not meant as a "normal" part of the game
An optional questline, with no relevance to the main game -AT ALL-
Specifically designed for team-play and RPers

I don't get why everything implemented into the game has to have some long-lasting use. Choco racing and Vermillion died, PVP died, Most of frontlines died, etc. If they have the resources to put in stuff like that, why not something that will create a long-lasting emotional impact.

And yes, you can play through the entire game any way you want. But this game still has no real open world challenges. No sense of -actual- danger. And half the people playing this game came from FFXI, a game full of adventure, danger, and consequences.

This would be like one little side ffxi or xenoblade-chronicles X-esque questline, completely separate from anything else.

If you think no one would use it, add in time-consuming but essentially meaningless quests. Like fish up 5000 special island fish. Basically just bonus side-quest content for people who are interested, but nothing important (no special minion or reward).

[Nalien]

All I want from 4.0 is Campaign 2.0. Not shitty FATEs, just a constant series of skirmishes for control of various outposts across the new regions, with the whole server reaping the rewards or cost of the outcome of such battles. Would make the areas actually feel somewhat dangerous too (not to mention alive), since you know, a war would be going on. Something large scale like that can also facilitate that whole Primal Summoning thing we've been promised since forever. Fighting a losing battle in whatever new area? Not to worry, some awesome Free Company just rocked into town with Ifrit and turned the tide of battle. Epic.

Of course, this is the XIV development team... Diadem was meant to be Dynamis or Abyssea or something, and instead we got... Diadem... So if they ever tried their hand at Campaign, I'd expect a significant step backwards from Campaign, probably jumping right over Besieged (which we had in 1.x, it was called Hamlet Defense, they replaced it with FATEs... Yeah...) and off a cliff... Feel free to prove me wrong, Yoshida...

15min ship ride to an island
Told that the ship has no room for mounts (justifies lack of mount use in the upcoming zones)
Chance of sea serpent / leviathan attack on the way
Can fish on the ride
Can play Triple Triad on the ride

[...]

A mysterious train service is set up from an abandoned imperial outpost (using their rail system)
You take a 15 min train ride where ghosts spawn and attack
Chance for a special boss spawning
Can play triple triad with some ghosts
Lots of lore about the mystery of the train

Honestly, stuff like boat/airship rides that we actually ride should just be a thing anyway... I don't get why they were included outside cutscenes as is... If I want to travel instantly from Ul'dah to Limsa, I'll teleport. I have my instant option. Why is the airship instant as well? Why is the boat instant? The boat in XI was fun. Sea Horror was awesome. Pirates were awesome. Just justify it as giving Fishers somewhere new to cast their line; We even have Skyfishing, XI had nothing going on with its airships, here we could actually fish off the side of them...

Seriously, I never got why the boat was cut out. We had that ride in 1.0, it was crap compared to XIs boats (which actually had stuff going on, and plenty of landmarks and wildlife passing by), but they could have improved it. We had no proper airship ride, but the community definitely asked for one, and we got nothing... All under the pretense that "People want to travel instantly", but that is exactly what teleports are for! I really don't get it... Well, I do, the developers are going to have me banned for what I wanted to type here, but yeah...

[Velthice]

What OP thinks will happen:

an adventure to go on with friends

What will actually happen:



So naturally I vote yes on OP's idea because I love seeing people get their heart broken.

[Azurymber]

What OP thinks will happen:



What will actually happen:



So naturally I vote yes on OP's idea because I love seeing people get their heart broken.

Why would that happen for meaningless optional content? Hunts are packed because FFXIV is designed to pidgeonhole everyone into doing the same repetitive tasks to progress.

Want to update your gear fast? Spam hunts
Want to get next relic step? Spam X-efficient dungeon 300 times.

Creating optional content for story, without special rewards, just gives people something to do on the side. There wouldn't be an incentive for people to rush the content. Think Purgonorgo island in FFXI. You went to bibiki bay, took a ship to the island, did some quests, did some clamming, etc. It was never packed, but there were always a few people there playing around, a couple people fishing on the ship, etc.

[Shurrikhan]

This wouldn't be an instance, it would be open world.

Just one thing that I feel needs to be pointed out:

There's very little difference. One you teleport into via the teleport menu. The other you teleport into via DF. (Or, going further, all zones are technically instances as well, and all instances zones.)

In your case, entry by ferry... where there's still an actual ferry involved.

In both cases, any lacking relevance depletes the population.

Edit: To be honest, dailies may well be your best saving grace for that kind of content, along with well-calculated scalability (and consequent rewards) and content-linking (something you can do solo while building a party that has at least some value in that party content you'll be doing once filled or mostly filled).

Hunts are constant; though it varies with peak hours, they never completely lose the necessary speed, nor the bonus thereby given, to reach the mob in time to get contribution. Dailies, due to limited completions, don't have that same aspect. Undoubtedly, there will be morning crews, the EST after-dinner rush, back-from-work surge, etc., with preferred orders for clearing all or the max count of dailies, but as long as there's something worth your time to do between these things, to explore and enjoy that environment, you're good. After that, the dailies themselves just have to be worthwhile enough to be relevant, and tough enough to be fun without requiring long party searches outside of peak hours (again, a matter of scalability).

Food for thought: a fun tidbit I heard was to increase the MB tax rates slightly with the next expansion, and in turn increase market access by way of open-world player-vending, such as when retainers are kept in the estate yard, or by entrusting goods to sale through town vendors, etc, or by selling them directly to NPC guilds... (etc., etc., *steps omitted*) ...with gradual costs increases by the time those goods reach central towns. Essentially has the result of mixing player and NPC economies a bit more, imitating a realistic economy (through movement of goods/locational price variance), and making movement about the world a bit more noticeable in some ways not usually addressed.

[Velthice]

meaningless optional content

Glad we got that out of the way. Let me dig out a picture of a tumbleweed instead, because that's what's going to happen. Not even you are going to want to take a 15 minute boat ride, followed by 30 minutes of traveling on foot tediously avoiding and pulling mobs so you can have a pretty place to afk and do absolutely nothing else of value.

[Khalithar]

I appreciate the sentiment behind the OP's idea. Bringing back that sense of adventure from older MMO's where zones were fraught with danger and you had to trek through them to get to the things you wanted, finding all sorts of hidden things and interesting places along the way. However, for better or worse that sort of MMO design has become obsolete, devs have streamlined games in a lot of cases. They'd rather keep us on a linear directed path with little to no variance to help keep things efficient. Is this better than the old way? I think it is. It saves me the trouble of not knowing where to go to quest, not having to go through random zones until I found quests my level, it's just "go here, then here, then here, then here, then here, hit max level." You lose that sense of exploration but it also cuts down on the frustration of stumbling in to a zone way too high level for you and having no idea where to go next.

Hell, now that I think about it more (and I remember making a similar post about someone making a request for dungeons requiring more exploration), exploration for the most part has largely become a thing of the past in themepark MMO's, game design favors the highly structured linear progression model that keeps you on rails until you hit the level cap, then they present you with a variety of content to do when you reach that point. If you want exploration style gameplay at this point, you're better off playing one of the third person sandbox games (Just Cause 2 or 3, GTA 5, etc.)

[Tanathya]

Glad we got that out of the way. Let me dig out a picture of a tumbleweed instead, because that's what's going to happen. Not even you are going to want to take a 15 minute boat ride, followed by 30 minutes of traveling on foot tediously avoiding and pulling mobs so you can have a pretty place to afk and do absolutely nothing else of value.

Just the fact that you have to worry about not getting killed to get to a place in which you can afk is already more than what FFXIV has to offer so far. I'll take it.

[BubblyBoar]

Stuff

It'll be optional until, as I said, "the FFXIV team will put some part of the relic there to "make old content relevant again" and the forums will self implode with disgust."

You can already team play and RP in the open world now. Take off your OP weapons, stop using your teleports and go on an adventure now. You don't need rules enforced to make it happen. I don't get why it needs its own zone and will be abandoned and wasted by the majority of the player-base. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't need a new zone or area with enforced rules to do this. You cna do it right now, completely willingly, just by imposing rules on yourself instead of imposing rules on EVERYONE.

[Velthice]

Just the fact that you have to worry about not getting killed to get to a place in which you can afk is already more than what FFXIV has to offer so far. I'll take it.

lol What is a monster going to fall out of the sky?

But seriously, I support you guys. Just like the people that wanted 40 man raiding back in WoW. Ask them how that went. Some bad ideas deserve to get implemented so people can realize how awful they are and stop asking for them.