Less scripted fights more online engagement

[Daralii]

This wasn't always the case- or not necessarily. There are degrees to which fights are scripted, but the Avatar Savage is one of the least scripted fights in the game.
I still think that fight should be studied on ways to add reactive gameplay to XIV, because it proves that, to some extend, it's possible.

It's hard to design fights around quick reactions when the game has a 100ms delay built in as a feature, not including how much ping people might have. It's likely part of why they decided to make fights so tightly scripted.

[Galvuu]

It's hard to design fights around quick reactions when the game has a 100ms delay built in as a feature, not including how much ping people might have. It's likely part of why they decided to make fights so tightly scripted.

Yes, but that's not the only way to do it.
I'm going to stick to T8S because that's what I was thinking about. The Avatar basically has a bunch of towers with different effects that you need to soak- which gives you a vuln- and mines/adds spawning at timed intervals. The adds can crit with their autos (it becomes a tankbuster, basically). There's also some allagan fields and aoes/enumerations (the missiles), but those only compound on the previous mechanics, so they're not too relevant. Some mechanics are HP % skips, some are timed. So a healer knows an add will spawn, and knows it might do two tbs in a row. Exactly when, if it's one, two or none, however, aren't known beforehand. Because the order in which you resolve the towers (some are aoe, some are healing down, some spawn the add) is up to the group, and because the boss has timed tbs/aoes, you need to work around that uncertainty. You need to either keep a resource for a tb that will never happen, or use them and then reactively deal with it if it does happen. The timing of actually taking the towers, who gets the vulns and how many are also entirely up to the group. Even the same group/strat will see some variation between pulls, and you have a lot of liberty in how you resolve the encounter, being able to tune it to your comp and strat.
So, not only is the way to resolve the mechanics not fully scripted- you can vary how you resolve it- the actual incoming damage has a lot of variability due to crit autos and desync between timed mechanics and HP % mechanics.
The feel of this fight in particular is very different from most modern encounters, and I think XIV would benefit from leaning more into this type of design. It's definitely possible with their current engine because this is an ARR fight.

[GrizzlyTank]

It's hard to design fights around quick reactions when the game has a 100ms delay built in as a feature, not including how much ping people might have. It's likely part of why they decided to make fights so tightly scripted.

Remember dealing with Titan Ex back in ARR. Due to the server placement, if the aoe appeared under you, you were dead.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Remember dealing with Titan Ex back in ARR. Due to the server placement, if the aoe appeared under you, you were dead.

That wasn't exactly true. If you were playing with terrible latency, sure. I don't think I ever got hit by landslides, but then, I also wasn't playing from across the ocean.

[GrizzlyTank]

That wasn't exactly true. If you were playing with terrible latency, sure. I don't think I ever got hit by landslides, but then, I also wasn't playing from across the ocean.

In EU that was 100% true. If you didn't move before they appeared, you were dead.