A request for Endwalker Dungeons (No more Undertuned)

[ItMe]

Deep dungeon's lack of exploration participation isn't because it's leveling content.

People don't explore it because "what's at the end of this hallway" is ALWAYS answered by "a square room with a handful of mobs."

The only new scenery or encounters are experienced through advancing through the levels, which means it's just a slightly fancier straight hallway.

Fair...
Also, those timers can get pretty spicy and exploring can be real dangerous in deep dungeons.

[RitsukoSonoda]

So what I'm getting from this whole conversation is: for content in FF14 to be capable of supporting quality exploration... it needs to both be decoupled from levelling and needs to (somehow) discourage players from running it repeatedly (thus reducing the desire for it to be streamlined).

What kind of content like this would they be able to make?

IMO the biggest deterrents to quality exploration are the over abundance of teleport locations in the overworld that eliminate most needs to actually travel to locations once the story puts you there the first time and the whole instanced duty system. MMO's I'd played in the past lacking these things I would typically find people exploring frequently since people were more prone to have various landmarks and things seen on a map catch their attention when they're actually travelling through the area and not stuck on duty timer with someone screaming "ESPORTS 420 SPEEDRUNZ"

[Roda]

No thanks. I am casual player and I don't want to get stuck in dugeon trying to complete MSQ
Not all of us live in this game. We got life outside.

"Casual" does not mean "person who plays at a less than average level of effectiveness."
"harder dungeons" does not mean you'll need to form a prog group to finish the dungeon. No one is asking for extreme+ level dungeons to replace story dungeons.

But when I can post on the forums between gcds and still call the run a speed run, we've got a problem here. I'd personally like it if dungeons could once again take my eyes off my second monitor for the duration.

And honestly, If they manage to have an ex level dungeon somehow, you have trusts. You will never be blocked from a dungeon complete.

But as someone who has been wanting to have something to casually do in the game when I have some surprise free-time, I'd really like it if my low-stakes instanced content had a bit of novelty to keep me awake and actually entice me to do it outside of extrinsic rewards.

Fair...
Also, those timers can get pretty spicy and exploring can be real dangerous in deep dungeons.

Yeah, and that's the other part of it. Risk can be fun!
But,
when you're doing exploration based content, you kind of want screwups to have less of a punishment to encourage experimentation. (It's a big problem I had with eureka)

IMO the biggest deterrents to quality exploration are the over abundance of teleport locations in the overworld that eliminate most needs to actually travel to locations once the story puts you there the first time and the whole instanced duty system. MMO's I'd played in the past lacking these things I would typically find people exploring frequently since people were more prone to have various landmarks and things seen on a map catch their attention when they're actually travelling through the area and not stuck on duty timer with someone screaming "ESPORTS 420 SPEEDRUNZ"

Honestly, I don't know about that. HW and onward have very few teleports per sq ft of map and how many people have taken the time to explore the tomb of king manfred? Found the hanging dragon in western coerthas? There are some secrets in the overworld, yes, but then what? There's no gameplay with exploration in this game. No secret quests. (or if they are secret, they are VERY well hidden) No environmental interactivity. Nothing. The overworld is just a backdrop for the MSQ, sidequests and fates.

I think SE did the game dirty when they slapped duty timers on eureka and bozja, and had them be instances you queued for. Big openworld content, at least in my eyes, is fun when you can just stumble into it while you're doing something else, or waiting for a queue. Eureka/bozja just will never scratch that itch 'cause they're about fate farming and only about fate farming (and like one siege).

I guess, let me put it this way. I had more of a sense of exploration when I found the magic pot, than I did looking for the magicite that krile told me was ~over there somewhere~ and then it was next to a conspicuously placed wrecked house.

Give me a broken tablet thrown on the ground next to an inconspicuous tree. Make the missing words reappear during a certain phase of the moon with certain weather. Have those words tell me to go to a spot and emote. Have that emote trigger an unmarked fate to spawn. Have the completion of the fate trigger an npc to send me (and all other participants) a mail. Have that mail tell me to meet that npc at a certain time in a certain location and do a emote to them (don't tell the name, give us a visual tell). Have that npc send me on some other random questy stuff, idk write a story, I'm not the critically acclaimed rpg here. Puzzles!

[ItMe]

Yeah, and that's the other part of it. Risk can be fun!
But,
when you're doing exploration based content, you kind of want screwups to have less of a punishment to encourage experimentation. (It's a big problem I had with eureka)

Hahaha especially when Deep Dungeon runs can take so loooong.
That's a very good point.

[Arkdra]

So what I'm getting from this whole conversation is: for content in FF14 to be capable of supporting quality exploration... it needs to both be decoupled from levelling and needs to (somehow) discourage players from running it repeatedly (thus reducing the desire for it to be streamlined).

What kind of content like this would they be able to make?

It doesn't really need to be decoupled from levelling or discourage being ran repeatedly, but it doesn't make sense in a dungeon format because the playerbase for dungeons is a combination of people who don't want to do harder content, for whatever reason, and then people doing doing it for the rewards and in both cases, neither of them are really interested in wasted time in a dungeon scenario.

As for content that would reward exploration, the answer is honestly something along the lines of isle of thunder from WoW/any gw 2 map. Think a zone along the lines of say, anemos or pyros. Something with a lot of weird architecture and nooks and crannies. Fill it with random treasure chests that spawn out in the world, and also rare tough monsters that you probably need to get a group together for. Cram it full of jumping puzzles for no reason, disable flight. Put actual good stuff in the chests and off the rare spawns and there you go. People are incentivized to wander around constantly. Still sounds boring to me and just like in Eureka, I'd sit at the home base afk waiting for call outs, but there it is. Content for the wanderers out there.

If they really wanted to get fancy with it, and god help us they shouldn't because the coding that exists for this already aint great, they could have unique mounts with mobility actions that you'd need to use to get into places, kinda like how gw2 does mounts. So like a glider that you have to do a bit of platforming up a mountain to then be able to glide into a neighboring volcano for example. Or another mount that double jumps which allows it access to a few cave systems that are otherwise unreachable. Hell an underwater mount of some kind that is the only way to navigate currents into buried ruins or something. Make the actual act of exploring the central mechanic and not necessarily the combat you engage in.

They could still populate it with fates or whatever too honestly.

[Shurrikhan]

So what I'm getting from this whole conversation is: for content in FF14 to be capable of supporting quality exploration... it needs to both be decoupled from levelling and needs to (somehow) discourage players from running it repeatedly (thus reducing the desire for it to be streamlined).

What kind of content like this would they be able to make?

I don't think it's necessarily a matter of exploration vs. combat or leveling vs. level-cap content.

Heck, I might argue that all content needs just four things:

1. Minimally divergent behaviors among players doing the specific content.

   Such comes from both (A) internal factors such as in dungeon design and its different opportunities and (B) external factors such as player culture and the content's reward system and its adjacencies.
   
   The more ways of play and reasons to play the content differently, the more conflicts you're likely to have in that content. This is not to be confused with having internally consistent behaviors that are distinct from those common to other content types; such is often precisely what can make a piece of content feel particularly novel (a strong factor in enjoyment to many), so long as depth and breadth of attractors aren't thereby too reduced.

2. Relative sustainability of form.

   If something is meant to be centered on exploration, and yet is meant to be played through some dozen, it must still be centered on exploration even on that dozenth time, even if it trades some aspects thereof for others (such as optimization).
   
   For instance, if Haukke Manor's keys were meant to be an element in and of itself, rather than a sliver of extra flavor in an otherwise standard dungeon, they wouldn't likely drop in the same locations each time and, accordingly, the dungeon layout wouldn't be effectively linear outside of its single obligatory Return and they keys likely wouldn't be visible as directly named interactable. In its current design, that "exploratory" element isn't much even in its first run, and nonexistent thereafter. The same, of course, can be said for every side-room in any existing dungeon.

3. An enjoyable and applicable concept.

   This is the most straightforward. If there's nothing to the content's form people want to do, no particular itches it scratches, etc., the content will be useless unless forced (and arguably worse, even, if it is forced).

4. Commensurate rewards.

   Again, this much is obvious, but keep in mind the first criteria. However, it doesn't seem particularly obvious to XIV when we consider how roulettes rewards—and to a lesser extent, content rewards in general—have been handled. System-level changes (especially to the currently flat roulette rewards, which will tend to seemingly favor the shortest possible content available to a roulette since they skew rewards-per-minute in their favor, especially when the queues themselves are shorter) would help a lot, but the content, too, needs to consider the uniqueness and appeal of its rewards and the efficiency by which they are acquired relative to competing contents (especially those that do not have nearly the same, or far less total, intrinsic appeal).

But, we've seen quite a few ideas like this over the years. Sandpark's Frontiers, Shougun's Airships, alternate Exploratory Missions, dungeons with non-linear routes that can't nonetheless just be memorized and thereby optimized, some—frankly, far better—concepts of Rogue-like content, etc., all come to mind. ...I just wish I still had links to some.

[Boizinho]

If all story content needs to be immediately auto-completed upon entry or else it's "not fair" then why in the everloving hell are these dungeons even dungeons in the first place? Make them solo duties. There's no point in dragging 3 other people along to your glorified story cutscene with zero failure state. It's literally the same thing as queuing for Praetorium. People say that should just be a solo instance, why shouldn't Pagl'than be? If players can never, EVER be expected to put 1% effort into having 1% of the absolute bare minimum level of skill playing the game they've been playing for probably two hundred hours or more by the time they enter a level 80 dungeon, then this is quite literally not multiplayer, co-operative gameplay. You're all just trucking towards the same cutscene. It's the same level of cooperation as getting into someone's Leap of Faith instance. Except Leap of Faith is unironically harder than basically any dungeon in this game.

In my opinion, if we're going to keep getting Matoya's Relict-tier garbage, I would rather them just do away with dungeons as a concept entirely. They've already done away with non-story dungeons, and have been making fewer and fewer over time. I say they go whole hog and delete them outright. The only purpose they serve is glamour, so just put a gachapon in Eulmore and add new glamours to it each patch so people can grind them out without creating an instance and adding strain on the server. They should also go back and give 50000% Echo to the crystal tower raids now that those are story-mandatory. People still wipe to Angra Mainyu. If wiping and learning mechanics is completely and utterly unacceptable for story content, they need to go back and fix that boss ASAP.

[Snorky]

If all story content needs to be immediately auto-completed upon entry or else it's "not fair" then why in the everloving hell are these dungeons even dungeons in the first place? Make them solo duties. There's no point in dragging 3 other people along to your glorified story cutscene with zero failure state. It's literally the same thing as queuing for Praetorium. People say that should just be a solo instance, why shouldn't Pagl'than be? If players can never, EVER be expected to put 1% effort into having 1% of the absolute bare minimum level of skill playing the game they've been playing for probably two hundred hours or more by the time they enter a level 80 dungeon, then this is quite literally not multiplayer, co-operative gameplay. You're all just trucking towards the same cutscene. It's the same level of cooperation as getting into someone's Leap of Faith instance. Except Leap of Faith is unironically harder than basically any dungeon in this game.

In my opinion, if we're going to keep getting Matoya's Relict-tier garbage, I would rather them just do away with dungeons as a concept entirely. They've already done away with non-story dungeons, and have been making fewer and fewer over time. I say they go whole hog and delete them outright. The only purpose they serve is glamour, so just put a gachapon in Eulmore and add new glamours to it each patch so people can grind them out without creating an instance and adding strain on the server. They should also go back and give 50000% Echo to the crystal tower raids now that those are story-mandatory. People still wipe to Angra Mainyu. If wiping and learning mechanics is completely and utterly unacceptable for story content, they need to go back and fix that boss ASAP.

This game may it be for you. The whole point of FF is story.
Um I never said anything about difficulty, bit since people seem to be jumping to conclusions no I don't want more difficult dungeons, more interesting ones yes or rather more engaging ones. This conversation thread has been on every MMO forum since MMOs came out. The devs won't pay any attention to it because they know the player base and the majority is casual. I am a filthy casual but I do like a fun dungeon.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Over all problem is the devs don't care. If in 2.x it was 3 dungeons per patch now it's 1. If I got things correctly in 6.x it be 1 each 2 patches.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

I guess I must play the game in an alternate universe. Players die left and right in dungeons I run through duty finder. If they did up the difficulty it would only chase away the largest portion of their player base. That would be an absolutely terrible decision.

You play the same game.its just how terrible this players are.you some times wonder how they even log in.