Add Critical Engagements to the open world

[JudgeRAW]

Critical Engagements in Bozja were a fun update to FATEs that were more akin to mini raid bosses or dungeon bosses than your standard FATE is. I think this could be a fun way to implement something new and exciting into the open world in FFXIV which desparately needs reasons to revisit open world areas. In addition closing off a small area of the map means you could add higher level FATEs and content to older open world zones in order to give reasons to revisit them.

[Mandudez]

Critical Engagements in Bozja were a fun update to FATEs that were more akin to mini raid bosses or dungeon bosses than your standard FATE is. I think this could be a fun way to implement something new and exciting into the open world in FFXIV which desparately needs reasons to revisit open world areas. In addition closing off a small area of the map means you could add higher level FATEs and content to older open world zones in order to give reasons to revisit them.

I like the idea but the only problem is the only way those worked was by limiting the number of participants that could join. The initial rush of people would get super pissed if they had bad RNG and couldn't join any of them right away.

[Sazuzaki]

I like this idea. I would love for them to focus on more open-world stuff since I never really do any combat outside of instances anymore. FATE bosses are real jokes as well, casting maybe 1 AOE every 30 seconds that only takes like 5% of your health. It's kind of insulting tbh.

[DrWho2010]

they literally can't program FATES to act like CE's in the open world.

[kevin_satron]

this is a great idea. tired of 200 people in the same area and everyone killed it in just under a minute (looking at you, Chi)

[Bugodin]

I love Fates!! Wish they could move Eureka and Bozja to the open world! I hate dungeons as they have to many mechanics to learn and my play time is far to limited. More fates more fun!

[Kyrj]

they literally can't program FATES to act like CE's in the open world.

If I had a nickel for every time an MMORPG company said they couldn't do something and then 3-5 years down the road they add that very thing...

[Hasrat]

Even if it were possible, it'd be very unlikely they could add any to ARR at the least, due to map size. Wouldn't want a locked region of a zone conflicting with a new player's quest objective, and there's an awful lot of those scattered around.

[Jojoya]

If I had a nickel for every time an MMORPG company said they couldn't do something and then 3-5 years down the road they add that very thing...

Sometimes technology improves (or minimum system requirements are changed) so what wasn't possible at the time asked becomes possible a couple of years later. PS3 support in ARR and Heavensward is a good example. Because the game had to be playable for those using PS3, there were some things they could not do. Once PS3 support was dropped, they started implementing some of the features that had been held back.

I don't think that's the issue in this case though. Critical engagements have the potential to end up disruptive to the other content already part of the open world. Compare that to Bozja where most of the activity in a zone revolved around getting the critical engagements to spawn. They're not going to remake the open world for the sake of critical engagements.

Players would also end up less happy if at most there was only a single critical engagement per zone to do. That would get stale quick.

Finally, what sort of reward structure would be implemented? There is no mettle/Resistance Rank to be earned for the open world. There are no Lost Actions so no use for Forgotten Fragments. You can't use a currency like Bicolor Gemstones that already exists. The majority of players would opt for doing easier content that already rewards those things, leaving few interested in continuing to do the Critical Engagements after the initial novelty period passed and those few would be split up into different zones all trying to get a critical engagement to spawn.

Critical engagements work in Bozja because you have a large number of players from multiple worlds funneled into a single instance for that exact purpose. It's not going to work if you have the same number of players split up over multiple zones on multiple worlds.

[Rufalus]

Critical engagements have the potential to end up disruptive to the other content already part of the open world.

It's basically just a big fate like archeotania with some mechanics. The only difference between existing big fates and CEs is difficulty and putting up a wall to limit the number of participants. Actually you could be right, now that I think about it. People might be on a hunt train when CE pops and there's an argument about whether to ignore it or pause hunting for the CE. That's only if CE is rewarding enough to make people care.

Critical engagements work in Bozja because you have a large number of players from multiple worlds funneled into a single instance for that exact purpose. It's not going to work if you have the same number of players split up over multiple zones on multiple worlds.

Due to registering for entry it can have difficulty scaling to the number of participants.

they literally can't program FATES to act like CE's in the open world.

Is there a reason it's impossible? They've been asked about making fates more like bozja before and the answer was more a resource thing than technical limitation. They don't have time to design mechanics for a lot of fights in open field zones so that's why there's so much burn-down-the-trash fates. But that was talking more about skirmishes, not so much the CE system.

Well we could just forget the whole CE thing and instead improve the existing big fate model. Fights like Chi can't seem to be triggered very often and aren't very rewarding to people after they have the mount. To improve open world, the actual fights with mechanics could be up more often and have some ongoing purpose to their tokens.