Azys Lla, wasted zone

[Ceasaria]

In FF14 3.0 where was this war between the dragons? I only saw it between the dragon and me. Everything else looked peaceful, everybody just sat around. There were no invasions, nor camps to protect. It was all in our heads, where are the constant barrage of dragons attacking towns, villages, cities, where the players gathered in that location would have to defend?

Exactly what I think.
I want to add, the real moment when I feel dragons were a threat, it was in 2.55 when we had to fight dragons in Cohertas + the gigantic dragon in Step of Faith : Vishap.
All the remainder and even Nidhogg in 3.XX are a big joke.

[Xenosan]

A tick I have with 3.0 zones is the Wyverns and Amphiteres who are always flying while idle. Think they'd get tired and land, instead of flapping wings endless in a waypoint loop. Granted land-dwelling mobs are no more robust in idle animation, but when mobs are constantly flying when idle, breaks the immersion for me. Southwest region of Forelands, where all the Wyverns are, really obnoxious to me. Add some foraging animations or resting animations to open-world mobs when idle.

They do so for some beast enemies like beastman strongholds. Wish they did the same elsewhere - especially for flying enemies like wyverns and amphiteres.

[Iromi]

I feel there is a lot more they could do with the open world.

In 1.x we had things like beastman strongholds with really challenging NM's / Gate guards and the boss was always waiting behind the final gate. He took an alliance to take down. Dropped extremely useful gear.

We also had these things called "Fraction Leves" which was a very difficult set of leves. The leve would spawn random NM that your full PT (or more, alliance usually) would take down..and then when you turn in the reward, the NPC would offer you a higher tier NM leve with very rare and useful gear rewards.

Such a shame none of this is in the game any more, it would be a great way to bring some use and life to these dead zones. Yoshida had a lot of fantastic ideas in 1.x, and for some reason does not use them now.

[Lone-wolfe-02]

This game is suffering and wants it to be put out of its misery, the sub numbers show that its on a decline. The fact that content has to be extended just to keep the game alive, shows that the content made is only good for a few hours of play.

if 3.5 was any good it would last us until 4.0, but they have to cut it in half and release the other half of it later in march to keep people coming back. Everyone knows just like every patch before, 3.5 will get boring in a few hours, but they have your sub money for that month so its good enough for them.

I'm assuming you have evidence to show the game is on the decline? and if you truly feel this way just unsub what's stopping you?.

[Cyreil]

I'm still waiting to see what happens with the Gration and the new Garlean emperor ever since Shiver froze it's engines. With as much time that has gone by, I would think they have defrosted by now. The whole thing with the Gration was just kinda left behind.

[Rhyku]

Would be nice if sometime down the line, MSQ will involve some time travel back to the past. I'd really like to see how the Allagan empire was at the height of their power.

[Yasuhiro]

Add some foraging animations or resting animations to open-world mobs when idle.

They could probably do that for the XIV original enemies, but since most of XIV's bestiary models are recycled from XI, XII and to a lesser extent XIII they're just doing their animations like they would do in the games they've come from.

But I don't know a thing about game design so they might be able to do something like that regardless where they came from.
In Mobius Final Fantasy for a Treant's (XIV version) break/rest animation they just put its dying animation on loop so its entirely possible.

[DamianFatale]

Honestly it's not just there that got mostly forgotten, they gave us Ishgard, and it's mostly empty. Most people stay in the old cities, and Idyllshire. It's like they failed to keep attraction to certain zones. I hope they learn from that in Stormblood.

[Jetstream_Fox]

I don't see spreading end game items over multiple locations being a better design than a hub. It just sounds like trying to force a population in multiple zones for the sake of making zones look not dead.

More population dispensed over a more broader area, giving each area a special meaning, adding a bit more immersion to the game, that is otherwise overall lacking massively and arguably not even present.

Each area is essentially a social hub, but the issue isn't the fact they're wasted, it's nothing is ever planted in them after we run through it, they could have just made the entire game instanced and avoided this entirely, loosely based off how Destiny handles it's maps. With the addition of PotD being the only thing added that has drawn a crowd in a older dead zone, having special vendors, quests, or even instances, has proven to be effective.

The game could have very easily distributed the crafter/gather aspect of this game out into the open world rather having it inside the main city, this would have given each zone a special reason to go into. Wanna be a carpenter? Go to Quarrymill. A Miner? Little Ala Mhigo.

If you can say you enjoying sitting in Idyll and doing everything from essentially one menu, by all means, enjoy it. But the fact still remains that the 98% of this gamesite zones really serve no purpose what so ever.

[Gumbercules]

With the beast strongholds ive always felt like they coulda really benefited from fate style things like highbridge, but meant to be tackled by at the very elast 8+ ppl. It woulda allowed them to keep their 1.0 spot as leveling hot zones, and resulted in a nice creative use of the FATE system by doing something as simple as chaining FATEs together like highbridge with alternate pathing based on conditions (more random based though since in this case ppl would flock to the optimal path, so maybe affected by time of day, weather, etc) Pretty much taking over N than area "function" but in a way it gave you a choice of "what stronghold do I wanna hit?"