How can we make XIV feel more "RPG-ish"?

[tdb]

I understand it would be a huge strain on the servers so this obviously is outside of question but I so wish we could in fact independently impact the NPCs life/death while keeping the relatively same worldly flow. It would've been great to see other players share how NPC X or Y is doing while they are dead or gone for others.

If the player is given a choice of killing an NPC or letting them live (or equivalently, saving them or letting them die), it usually results in the NPC being written out of the story even if they live. There may be a few offhand remarks about them, but you can be almost certain they won't appear in any cutscenes and there definitely won't be any quests centered on them. The reason is twofold. Firstly, as I said above it would take more development resources to maintain multiple storylines (one where the NPC lives and one where they don't, potentially multiplied if an arc involves multiple such NPCs). Secondly, it would cause backlash from players who kill the NPC and later discover they're blocked from doing some side quest where that NPC plays a key role.

FF14 plays a lot like a classical jRPG and while I love such, (they are my fave!) a little western RPG flavors won't hurt I think. It is an MMO after all.

It will quickly get difficult to maintain a consistent world and storyline if players are allowed to make impactful choices. I suppose there would be some merit in a system like Star Wars: The Old Republic's light/dark side meter; being able to choose my character's motivations and having a kind of permanent record of them made the choices feel meaningful even though they really didn't affect the story at all. It would be difficult to suddenly add that sort of system in a new expansion though.

[MuseTraveller]

Oh, I agree with you.
Like I said, I do understand why such system will be more of a hassle than being worth it but like I said it's what I would like to see, which I'm aware won't be the best thing to implement. I Just wish my choices as WoL had more consequences or that I could have an impact that's not predetermined to fail or win based on what the MSQ wishes.

[Kaiserdrache]

hmm, things that would make this game a better RPG huh?? My Top 10

1) more Emotes, more dances and stuff like that is always good and enriches the RPG flair of a game for roleplayers
2) more music instruments for the Bard
3) Reworking/redesigning towns to seamless towns with lesser loading screens, definetely, if neccessary, destroy the towns with a event to a a reason to let us players rebuild them like with did with Doma or how we are going to rebuild Ishgard in Shadowbringers as Crafters. Loading Screens should exist only for when you switch maps, each town should be one big complete map, where you see only a loadign screen when you either enter it or leave it.
4) Adding a Reputation System, where the things you choose affect you and have consequnces on you, how NPCs react towards you
5) Reworking of the Crafting and Collecting Jobs to make them less grindy and more fun with actually SEEING, how you create the things that you craft, instead of these borign outdated anitions where you see not at all, how you create the item you are making. This deserves absolutely a bit more love in details for the rpg aspect of the game.
6) Especially our assistance NPc should help us much better in gettign the items we need to craft stuff, by lettign them go shopping for us the things we need...or want them to go get for us
7) Alot more things in this game should grant the player experiences, to level up quicker, especially when you have done already all Quests.
If you explore a map or Dungeon/Raid fully the first time, this should grant you a guaranteed Level Up
If you read books somewhere, this should grant you exp, cause you learned somethign new from readign the book, if you beat new enemies for the first time, this shoudl give you an immense exp boost and then subsequently lesser, until a certain minimum is reached.
8) Getting exp from fates, or Quests should partially give also Exp for your Chocobo if they were participating in them...
9) Implement a Hero System, that allows us to form parties in instances like Dungeons with Story Heroes like Lyse, Arenvald, Hien, Yugiri, Thancred or Y'Shtola to come with us as allies, together with Hero Reputation, that if we rise that up, lets us become able to get special Hero Quests from them with that we can earn their equipment as rewards, be it either their weapon skins, or their armor styles, or a special card of them, which exists yet not, like for example New Yugiri Card , all others exist I know, but so far only Yugiri has no Card under her newer dress, while for example Thancred and Y'shtola have cards under their old and newer version , same as like Lyse under her other name.
Form what I heard, Shadowbringers will implement something like that ...thats why they were experimenting with the NPCs to let us play as them lately, and I hope this gets continued as well.
10) Add more repeatable Quests into the game and increase the spawn rate of fates.. some maps are often totally empty of fates for a longer time, because people can clear them all away so quickly now. especially increase the spawn rate of those special fates that give stuff like minis, triad cards or other rewards required to get some equipment traded in for them. People dont want to wait multiple hours, until such fates respawn. Remove Level Scaling from Boss Fates and let these enemies always auto scale to the current maximum Level of players, so that thay stay always up to date and need to be done as party of at least 8 people. Same shoudl be done with any outdated Rank B,A,S enemies that are of level 50 or 60 or currently 70, once Shadowbrigner comes, all these enemies should be of Level 80.
people can outright kill them way too quick now ,due to beign overleveled, that they are absolutely no threat anymore, and in case of rank S enemies, people have absolutely no chance/time to travel to the map and monster location, before they a basically already killed off within seconds!!, because most people are even still in the loading screen, when the monster gets already killed off when a person announced just seconds before its existance in the chat...
Would these enemies get constantly scaled up to current player max level, would they stay always a threat and couldnt be killed in seconds, thus giving people more time to get to them and give them hits, before it dies too quickly...so that they can participate in killing them, until people have to wait on the next respawn

[Kalise]

1) More customization and choices would go a long way towards improving the RPG feeling. Such as making the choices you make in conversations and cutscenes actually make a difference. Or allowing your class to impact options/quests.

In addition, a deeper stat system would also improve customisation. Like, we have materia, something that is renown for its use in FFVII as a customization system for skills and abilities. What do we use it for? Stacking whatever our best stat is... Which also is broken down into usually just 1 single primary stat and then 1-2 secondary stats that actually matter... (Rendering a large portion of available materia completely useless...). More freedom with stats (Such as Agility being useful for all classes because of giving Attack/Cast Speed and Crit or Intellect being useful for TP regeneration and Hit Rate as an example) and more unique materia (Such as procs on weapons or defensive procs when taking damage for armour) in addition to the boring stat boosts.

Role Actions being more meaningful choices too. Like, even before the change to give us all 10 action slots Role Actions were kind of lame, with a few good ones and a lot of very niche/useless ones... What would be more interesting would be having a selection of abilities and traits to choose from. Abilities that have differences based off your job (For example, BLK might get a mana restore that actually works while Fire Attuned vs RDM/SUM who would get a mana restore that synergizes more with their own kit, maybe SUM gets a trait to reduce the CD of Aetherflow or that makes Drain Energy not use Aetherflow charges but have a CD instead) and traits that provide similar utility but to one of your job skills (For example, Second Wind for Bard lets Repelling Shot heal them, while Machinist gets a heal on Blank)

3) Benefits/Deficits of the aforementioned changes, mostly the main deficit is the extra work it would take. Adding in more options, means more work to be done, more time and money spend developing. Which is likely the reason why they will never happen, it's too easy to just to as little as required and thus get the most profit...

Benefits are fairly obvious, more happy playerbase as they will have more fun playing around with the new systems and making their character their own.

4) As far as storytelling with later expansions... I wish they'd stop hyping me up as the "Bringer of Light" that's single handedly saving the world countless times... But then shoehorning me into having to use the Duty Finder to find a random group of people to go deal with a particular dungeon/primal... Like, I'd much prefer if I could just do a single player version just for the story (Especially if I want to continue the story but I'm playing at a strange time of day so queues are much longer...) while unlocking the Duty Finder version if I want to do that instead (Or want to do it later as part of a Duty Roulette).

[Kuroka]

Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I've seen an adequate in-game explanation of why it's mostly adventurers that can use aetherytes.

Actually i only recall the SB fisher quest, where the Guild boss actually says he was in kugane when he was younger and can just use the aetheryte...

[Jonnycbad]

I would like job quests to be more rich and interesting. Problem is, these quests are gate-keepers to your capstone ability for the level cap, so they probably don't want them to take longer than 10 minutes each. AF quest in FFXI were some of the best quests in any FF game (especially DRG), but they only had 1 set of those quest for each job, ever. In FFXIV they need to create 4 or 5 quests for each job and make them all unique, I can see how the scenarios can be watered down.

[Acelyn]

use the world more, thats my main wish, the game has a beautiful environment thats constantly ignored and its sad to ride through it and see no one else, if they could implement some systems or activities that got players moving around the more that would be awesome