Underleveled, can't catch up

Here are just a few possible things to spice up routine exploration:

1) Add triggers to spawn higher level named monsters on the map (ideally this is randomized in some way). Triggers can be anything - defeat such and such, walk through the waterfall and place something on the altar hidden inside, whatever.

2) Give a "map/monster clear" reward (perhaps EXP, a respec point, a currency item, or something else entirely).

3) Add NPC's in more areas than just towns. Create incentives for interacting with them, and make their placement either random and/or triggered by doing something that can be randomized. For example, to make NPC X appear you must defeat any of 5 named monsters located throughout the map - which one needs to be beaten is randomly determined and unknown until you do it.

4) Secretly assign a number of otherwise normal monsters to be "easter-egg" monsters. Killing these produces a hidden tally. If your tally reaches a predetermined number, the final kill has 100% chance to drop a currency item that randomly can become any other currency item upon use (or something else that has more potential unused than average value once used). This gives a reason not to let anything slip past you on one hand, but also sets the odds in your favor that any given monster is OK to ignore on the other hand.

5) Set points in areas like The Ledge or others where you can force a path that can be activated after only if nothing lives between the point and the map entrance. These points then increase EXP and/or MF rate by 1% for the rest of the map, encouraging you to do more than just run past all the monster you see on the way to the end.

6) Etc. There are probably more bad ideas than good, but I'm sure that plenty of good ones exist to encourage more than simply rushing zones (yet don't outright prevent it).

I really like some of these ideas posted in the last page or so of this topic.

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zeto wrote:

Putting in unique landmarks and special things randomly within large zones will help break them up.

Otherwise I don't understand the mentality that large zones are bad.. to me, small zones are bad.

The game lacks a motivator to branch out laterally, which would fix exploration.

I guess I don't like the big zones because it reminds me a little too much of mowing the lawn. If you don't want to feel like you're skipping content, you end up methodically running up and down the map.

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Nate_Prawdzik wrote:

Here are just a few possible things to spice up routine exploration:

1) Add triggers to spawn higher level named monsters on the map (ideally this is randomized in some way). Triggers can be anything - defeat such and such, walk through the waterfall and place something on the altar hidden inside, whatever.

2) Give a "map/monster clear" reward (perhaps EXP, a respec point, a currency item, or something else entirely).

3) Add NPC's in more areas than just towns. Create incentives for interacting with them, and make their placement either random and/or triggered by doing something that can be randomized. For example, to make NPC X appear you must defeat any of 5 named monsters located throughout the map - which one needs to be beaten is randomly determined and unknown until you do it.

I second these suggestions.

Perhaps some forms of "altars" (I didn't want to call them shrines) which grant temporary buffs to the caster would be interesting. Friendly NPC's fighting monsters, or monsters fighting monsters would also make area's feel more interactive.