Why does EVERYTHING have to be aggressive?

[Korbash]

I've never played FF XI. My first MMO is Saga of Ryzom, a french MMO. I was accepted into its closed beta, and I got hooked with MMOs since. I've never seen such a beautiful living breathing world such as Ryzom in any MMO, with day and night, seasons, animals emigrating during season, predators hunting and killing preys, animals sleeping, eating and peeing. Most everyone was nice, friendly, helpful, and generous. As for the ones not nice, they'd send me pervert stuff though tells whenever I played my female characters, I never got those when I played my male characters, so I decided to just play a male character. My second MMO is Guild Wars. My third MMO was City of Villains and fourth Lord of the Rings Online, and both had an awesome community of nice, friendly, and helpful people, on Landroval anyway for LOTRO. They both had a good mix of group and solo contents.

[Blackcanary]

I hate the fact the entire open world is a cake walk with zero fear of death. Please SE ignore the OP and actually make getting killed have consequences

I agree with you on this but SE wont do it cause then people will just complain that the game is to hard and blaaa blaaa blaa moan moan moan.

[Blackcanary]

This has been something of a peeve of mine ever since Heavensward was released: why are nearly ALL the monsters hostile? It's not about it being "too hard," but some enemy types, imo don't need to be aggressive. For instance, I could understand if a Griffin, Sanuwa, Endymion, or even a Gaelicat would want to kill you on sight in Sea of Clouds. I don't expect that from a Paissa, though. In anything, it should be a passive monster. The only passive mobs in the HW areas are the elemental sprites and the baby Nankas in the Forelands. I can understand that they want to make the new areas a challenge, but I want it to make sense. All mobs wanting to attack in Churning Mists or Azyz Lla is more believable, because it makes sense from a lore perspective. But I don't see it in some areas, like in Sea of Clouds.

They have just made it so all mobs in HW area get alerted of ur presence by sound, smell and sight. FFXI did this better some mobs would be alerted by smell or sight or sound so you had spells like Invis and spell that would silent ur sound and hide ur smell. This made the game more interesting in my honest opinion.

[Canadane]

The world is a dangerous place. This is as it should be, really.

[Fluffernuff]

I mean. I wouldn't mind there being more "passive" creatures in the world. Actually introduce a believable ecosystem. Actually thinking about it, I find it hard to see every creature is a predator of eachother...

I don't feel everything being aggressive truly harms the state of affairs for the player, though. Not every previously uninhabited land (or recently/barely inhabited) needs to be effectively a giant park.


Though, on this particular topic, I wish there were more towns sprinkled across the world like Revenant's Toll and Idyllshire. "Large" outposts that offer a meaningful pitstop for players outside of major hub areas (and run around mounted in!)

[Vhailor]

As I said, this is a small, almost negligible issue in the long run, but I do find that it impedes overall enjoyment. Does anyone else feel the same way?

Yes, I do.

I thought FFXI did this a lot better. The different types of aggressiveness (low HP, sight, sound, True Sight, True Hearing, magic, etc.) gave monsters throughout the world an extra layer of depth, especially when factoring in the independent linking behaviour. Couple that with the lower monster density and the real risk associated with drawing attention to yourself, and it felt like monsters were aggressive for a reason beyond annoying the player.

In FFXIV, there is very little reason for aggressive monsters beyond player annoyance. Aggro does not seriously threaten a player character, nor are there serious consequences if you do somehow manage to die. There's no variance in terms of how monsters detect you, nothing that helps to uniquely define certain classes of enemy. It's just an irritant.

Also, I think a lot of the reason it felt so rough in Heavensward is that monsters were damage sponges. Despite not feeling remotely dangerous, the average monster also took quite a long time to die (playing as a White Mage).

Edit: Sorry for the off-topic reply, but wanted to address something else.

I'm sorry, but this an extremely overly grossed exaggeration. I played FFXI for around 11years. From NA launch up to near the launch of SoA expansion. I can say for certain, it's the same there as it is here. The key was to make friends, find a good Linkshell, and have people at the ready in order to do stuff. You had to actually communicate and find people with similarities and such, friend them, actually do stuff more than once with them, and then you'd have a group at the ready to do content.

This is very different from FFXIV. In FFXIV, there is no need to make friends, no need to find a good Linkshell, no need to have people at the ready in order to do content (with Savage Raids being pretty much the only exception).

That's not to say people don't benefit from doing these things, but because they aren't forced into it (primarily the fault of the Duty Finder and cross-server parties), it's much more difficult.

FFXI and FFXIV differ in much the same way as in-person office work and working from home. There are benefits to both, and having co-workers or friends to chat with definitely improves one's day to day experience, but it's much less natural when working from home.

[Prestige]

The idea of just making an enemy hostile or increasing its health isn't a fun type of challenge. It is more of a frustration.

What needs to be done is increase the complexity of the enemies. Instead of simple abilities you can dodge causing every fight to be almost a mirror image of the next, perhaps get rid of the ability indicators after the intro levels so people actually have to learn the enemy's abilities (and adding more enemy abilities). Just a thought.

[Araxes]

The environment is supposed to be dangerous even thou it doesnt very much look like it. Maybe its a sort of Immersion thing? Everything wants to Eat you.

[SaitoHikari]

The idea of just making an enemy hostile or increasing its health isn't a fun type of challenge. It is more of a frustration.

What needs to be done is increase the complexity of the enemies. Instead of simple abilities you can dodge causing every fight to be almost a mirror image of the next, perhaps get rid of the ability indicators after the intro levels so people actually have to learn the enemy's abilities (and adding more enemy abilities). Just a thought.

I now have thoughts of an enemy that, at low HP, runs off to summon reinforcements to gank you. The devs do this in early level levequests already.

Then again, some smartass healer is going to abuse that to spawn an army of them, thus crashing the instance. Back to the drawing board...

Now I have morbid thoughts of one of those Garlean Hellsclaw-type enemies having an ability that is a reference to the Legend of Zelda Wall Masters. If you get hit by it, the enemy proceeds to drag you off into aggro range of several other Garlean enemies. (Having it be a direct reference and have it drag you off to the beginning of the zone would be WAY too cruel.)

[Kaethra]

I hate the fact the entire open world is a cake walk with zero fear of death. Please SE ignore the OP and actually make getting killed have consequences

Zones are too small and cramped for that. If we had Zones the size of West Karana in EQ, we could have the Griffons to go with it. I'm not opposed to this. But I think it'd be a limited by our PS4 playerbase.