Please bring back Exploratory Zones in Dawntrail

[Fortecael]

You could pull out the relic weapons entirely and I'd still pinpoint Eureka and Bozja as the most rewarding gameplay experiences XIV has ever given me. I was not an old school MMO head -- XIV is my first and only -- but Eureka (at least in its somewhat nerfed state, TBF) made me see the light.

I didn't touch Eureka until 5.2 or 5.3 and it ended up being my absolute favorite content in the game, working though it, leveling up, earning that Baldesion Arsenal clear. Stuff like the sleeping dragons, the near-fatal drops, begging for resurrections -- it's not just different from other content in the game, but different in an actually interesting way. Bojza is similar, not as good to explore (though it does have neat stuff like some areas getting really deadly at night) but the Critical Engagements and having three giant chaotic raids make up for it. I really, really like the chaos, progression, community-led organization, and level of difficulty that Eureka and Bozja provided.

Harder alliance raids like Orbonne have some of the sense of chaos, and world bosses like Chi or Archaeotania offer some of that serendipitous community organization, but just a taste. BLU offers some of the build variety, sure. But this stuff only really all comes together in Eureka and Bozja, and nothing else in XIV scratches that itch. I love that feeling of a huge group of mixed competency players, all of whom only just met 30 minutes ago and will never see each other again, barely dragging each other over the finish line.

In retrospect, Shadowbringers' game design was IMO a step down from what came before but I didn't really notice until Endwalker because Eureka and Bozja were so entertaining. Well, in Endwalker, I feel it acutely, and am losing faith that Dawntrail will be different. The climax of the game's 10 year story carried me joyfully through 6.0 but since then I've just felt over and over like I'm waiting to be won back over. For now I'm logging in because I have a house, but that's only going to motivate me for so long.

There's certainly any number of other things SE could do to make XIV more interesting to players like me (BLU does help, and I'm happy to see the alliance raid roulette problems finally on SE's radar), but AFAICT there's only one guaranteed cheat code to make me fully love the game again: new exploratory zone.

Bless you brother. SE better read this.

[Hazuki87]

In the keynote at the Las Vegas Fan Festival, Yoshi-P announced the different types of battle content coming to the game in the newest expansion, Dawntrail.

However, one type of content that was not mentioned in any shape or form in the slide was Exploratory Zones, the category that Eureka and Bozja belong to.

While they could still announce including it at a later date, its absence in Endwalker makes me worried that it will not return in the next expansion either.

Therefore, I am writing this thread to ask the developers of FFXIV to please include Exploratory Zones in 7.x alongside large-scale raids in the same vein that Bozja did.

This kind of content is engaging, fun and long-lasting. Features such as Lost Actions can bring new ways of playing jobs, which is personally one of the main appeals of it.

If you would like Exploratory Zones to return, please show your support by liking and commenting on this thread: do you want it back and why? What specific things do you think the content does well and which ones could be improved in future iterations?

They already said it coming back, was in the Q/A on Day3

[Xeronia]

They already said it coming back, was in the Q/A on Day3

I thought that wasn't a hard confirmation and a more of a "We are looking into it but no promises."

[ICountFrom0]

I thought that wasn't a hard confirmation and a more of a "We are looking into it but no promises."

More like, "we are working on evolving it into it's next form".
They are also trying to evolve Deep Dungeons as well.

For all we know the two are going to merge somehow.

[Aco505]

More like, "we are working on evolving it into it's next form".
They are also trying to evolve Deep Dungeons as well.

For all we know the two are going to merge somehow.

They're also implementing some kind of combat content "never seen before" but the wording suggests that it's not related, at least directly, to exploratory missions.

Which is why we must keep showing support so that they actually implement a new improved one that also takes the good bits of Eureka and Bozja.

[TaleraRistain]

I thought that wasn't a hard confirmation and a more of a "We are looking into it but no promises."

Yeah they want to continue doing it but they didn't sound like they confirmed anything for 7.0 itself.

https://gamerescape.com/2023/07/29/n...fan-fest-2023/

"In terms of large-scale combat situations like Bozja and Eureka, we still want to do things in that vein as well."

[Supersnow845]

I don’t really care for DD’s (POTD was interesting in its time but the other 2 were just functional carbon copies), however I would be interested if they fused them into exploratory content

Say a fusion of all three
-interact with the “deep dungeon” roughly every time you had a large scale raid in Bozja (so like say 3 sets of 30 floors) then each of those 30 floors unlocks upgrades both within the deep dungeon and in the wider field content zone (like say you could unlock the ability to use lost actions inside the deep dungeon by exploring it, and you could unlock a eureka style fragment system to better progress the external field content zone evoking how BA changed how you played eureka)

This way you could either rush towards the bottom of the deep dungeon (the end of the field content zone) but it would become harder and harder if you didn’t go back and peruse the different areas so you could become stronger, or you could take things super slowly and by the end be as strong as elemental armour makes you in anemos, but you would avoid how grindy the horizontal progress system is in Bozja

Fuse this also into a field content zone that has interesting Bozja style CE’s and wireless amazing map design and you’d have an incredible piece of content

[Moebious]

Agreed.

They could probably make use of Bozja/Eureka to make the current content drought less terrible, simply by giving these zones latest tomes(causality/comedy) from objectives, NMs, skirmishes/CEs, and their respective raids.

Exploratory Zones is what keeps the game alive, SHB felt pretty decent, even when not much content, because of the Bozja/Zadnor zones and raids, when it was present content. It looks making it possible to get the materials for the relics outside the zones, killed Bozja in regards to doing objectives and its raids, when compared to Eureka still being well and alive, having its NMs spawned and raids done, because it relic aren't gained from outside.

If they simply tied EW relics to Varient/Criterion, or even put them in past Exploratory zones, could have solved some problems, like how fast variant/Criterion dies shortly after.

Over all they really need to bring back zones like Eureka and Bozja.

[Raikai]

EDIT: According to Reddit (see here), Exploratory Zones could still be on the table for Dawntrail.

That gives me some hope but we should not stop having our voices heard so that the devs understand loud and clear that this content is good for the game and that there's plenty of players that want it.

So feel free to keep liking and commenting on the thread for visibility!

Honestly, there's still 2 chances for them to announce this. I'd get worried if we didn't see that after JP's Fanfest, as we typically won't get major features like that outside of expansion selling point beacons (Fanfests themselves).

I'm happy that they're considering a revision on the Deep Dungeon formula as well. Maybe they really saw that one of the main points of complaint about Eureka Orthos was it being almost a copy paste of the previous ones.

[Aco505]

Honestly, there's still 2 chances for them to announce this. I'd get worried if we didn't see that after JP's Fanfest, as we typically won't get major features like that outside of expansion selling point beacons (Fanfests themselves).

This is the reason why I made the thread. Since there's still around two years before they'd release a new Exploratory Zone, my hope is that if they hear the feedback now, they will act upon it.

Yoshi-P's reply in the Q&A is a bit hopeful but he could just be talking about 8.0 and having two entire expansions without this kind of content is too much of a loss imho.