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

[Ayuhra]

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.

[Skivvy]

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.

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

[Jin-]

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

[Sylve]

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

[Genz]

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.

"lol"

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

[kaynide]

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’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.

[Iscah]

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.

[Amnmaat]

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.

[Iscah]

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

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.

[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.