To pass the time, I recently started a new game on Final Fantasy XII, a personal favorite. In my opinion, the quality of XII is excellent and the localization was the best of any Final Fantasy. It just had so many nice little details that meshed so well together, and I enjoyed that. So as I was playing, I thought about the influence of weather on gameplay. In XII, the accuracy of ranged weapons and the damage dealt by elemental attacks are directly affected by the current area's weather.

This may or may not have been brought up before, and I looked, so here goes nothing. I thought it would be an engaging combat dynamic if applied to XIV. Some players would disagree, of course, and would seem content at having beautiful, if not inconsequential visual effects. I think, however, that making weather more pivotal to battle would go along the sort of "realism" many players are pushing for. The weather could facilitate more interesting and at times more challenging PvE encounters.

So for example, a storm starts to brew somewhere in La Noscea and your party gets caught in it. In this stormy weather, ranged attacks, or physical attacks in general, are less accurate, whereas Aero spells gain a boost in damage. In a different scenario, imagine you are in Thanalan amidst a heat wave. The defenses of your party members are lowered, but Fire spells have increased potency. Or a sandstorm could occur resulting in blindness. In a downpour in the Black Shroud, evasion suffers a decrease, whereas Lightning magics are more destructive. In "perfectly clear" weather, perhaps players may experience some sort of buff.

We could even take a cue from Dodore, and encounter different monsters during different weather patterns. Abnormal weather could summon monsters that are noticeably more difficult to defeat than usual. During a stormy day in Coerthas, for example, high-level, aggressive wind elementals could appear amongst the regular hippogryphs. It wouldn't necessarily be an NM, but just something to take note and beware of as a fledgling adventurer. You could imagine someone thinking, "Oh there's a heat wave in this zone. I better be careful or I might run into some OP bombs."

In short, it's just a little idea about adding consequences to in-game weather that can affect gameplay, particularly with status ailments/buffs as well as the risk of encountering stronger monsters.