I’m fairly certain there used to be an element of randomness to spawns that is entirely gone now. The exact creatures spawn in the exact place, every time, with no fluctuation or variation.
Is this a temporary issue, or did someone at some point decide this is how it should be? Because it makes the gameplay experience very predictable and monotonous when you know exactly how many hyenas you’ll have to fight on your way home every time.
There used to be a lot more creatures during early access, and I think they roamed around more as well. I believe they cut out half or better in the name of optimization and then the new animations and resting positions keep them from straying as far as they did before.
I concur that it does make gameplay monotonous knowing exactly what you’re going to run into every time you take the same route. Hopefully they will continue to optimize the elements and stabilize the game so that they can bring back more of the spawns like there used to be.
Or at least give us the option of choosing the more dense/random spawns as a setting. I play with a max of 4 people on a private server. My server load doesn’t need to be tuned for casual play.
The problem is so much of this game is spent making trips to and from your town as you gather the materials to expand it. That used to be fun when you had to stay on your toes lest you encounter a nasty surprise. Nowadays you get boringly familiar with every little thing that spawns along the way.
If this was done in the name of optimization, I think they threw the baby right out with the bath water.
I think this was indeed made in the the name of optimization.
And while i agree with you and enyo about the monotony of finding always the same mob at the same spot, i really like the fact they significantly reduced the amount of mobs roaming on the map, especially in the frozen north, where it was everything but no fun at all to travel on the map (for me at least).
Moreover this crazy amount of mobs chasing my character was making my game crash very very often.
But, i can understand your and others’ frustration if you have good enough hardware, so as you mentioned, why not having the possibility to adjust the number of mobs spawning on the map for those who like it.
Personnally, it’s more on the randomness of the spawns that i 'd like to see sthing done than about the amount of mobs.
Random creature spawns, more creature spawns simply do not matter when we’re playing a game that you can simply outwalk every single enemy in the game.
The monotony issue honestly is the fact that once you can get your Vitality to 30, you can walk around the entire map with zero fear of ever dying…except when you get a lag spike.
Yes, the wolves and saber tooth’s up North was brutal and annoying. Unfortunately, when they got rid of a lot of the creatures, a bunch of the thrall spawns were taken out as well, leaving less to choose from. But as you said, more randomness of spawns would be a great compromise. 
As @SirMang says, part of the problem is how easy the mobs are to kill or outwalk. When they changed the combat, they didn’t change the creatures attacks significantly enough to make dodging or fighting them difficult.
Remember about “mother nature” chasing your back 
?
sometimes i was using the vanity camera to have look at the entire army chasing me…it was fun at the begining, untill i started to crash constantly and travel on the northern map frequently.
Yes we lost about twice as many npcs spawns as well, but forntunately we didn’t lose the named thralls placeholders 
Don’t forget we also got some extra spawns near the black galleon too , but i yeah that’s was not that many compared to what was removed on the entire map.
Anyway, i’m fine with that and now my game is NEVER crashing anymore.
So for me it’s one of the good changes funcom has done to the game…was needed untill they can improve the performances even more, but can they actually?
This is true.
But thinking about it, even if mobs could outrun your char, devs would need to adjust the AI accordingly so they can suround your char and bite you while running, sthing they simply can not do currently. and connsidering how brillant the compagny working for funcom has been doing for many months already, well i think we would just be asking them too much here…
So we maybe should not be too greedy in that regard and just be happy with a “descent working” AI at first.
This exactly. There doesn’t need to be a ton of them, I just wish they weren’t in the same place every time.
Another aproach to solve the problem is adding faction patrols.
I would like those also, but I think they should be in addition to, not instead of, random spawns.