...Except XIV did exactly that. ARR was a deliberate imitation of WoW, according to its own producer/director.
It just apparently lacks more capable coders and/or software engineering foresight, hence the vast difference in systems polish.
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I would personally like something more along the lines of ESO's antiquarian system over WoW's archaeology.
It's not its own job, so you can do it while you do other things. You can level it wherever you want. Bosses, dungeons, certain enemies in the overworld drop "leads" that give you an easter egg hunt to a big dig with a valuable item. Smaller digs drop less valuable but still interesting items. It'd be a fun way to get glamour/pets/mounts and all of the digging could happen in the overworld which would give FFXIV's overworld some much needed additional content.
Hmm, that's actually really similar to how I'd hoped Hunts would work, back in the day. And yeah, that sounds great, so long as it's primarily intrinsically rewarding and established cohesively and comprehensively, rather than being just another reward system by which to push people back towards otherwise undesirable content.
FFXIV... sorta has an extremely basic version of this with Sightseeing Logs. Really if they just expand on that and maybe add in some other requirements (ride a certain mount, be a certain job, use a certain emote, have a certain pet out, if you wanna go real nutty have it be "use an AoE skill at this area at this time of day" or something) to unlock little bits of lore and maybe some basic items, that could be a fun way of getting you back into the world. Heck the emote one is exactly how the sightseeing logs works already!
So the framework is there, SE could do it, it's just whether or not enough people really care.
CHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOOOOOOCOOOOOBOOOO CONTENNTT!! lol
To rephrase, I feel chocobo could do WoW's archaeology but better - it already takes the mount unmount mount unmount pattern out of it and potentially could replace that with a bit more of a fun mini game. Both repeatable content and non-repeatable one time lore (and other item) adventures.
Also I think we could utilize an adventurer's guild w/ museum. Can't remember the thread title atm, but if I can find it I might revive it, well and another on codex. Depending on the depth it could be really quite something, including a really nice marriage to archaeology. Something that has players being able to go out and collect information and wonders in the world, build up a museum, organize their knowledge, for example if they took some of their Bozja ideas this might be the codex for the game. Certainly, potentially, a huge undertaking, but you've got codex in many sRPG that are pretty cool (like most Bioware games, or Witchers).
Definitely some more open world stuff could be cool, I feel besides the games you mentioned taking some of the best GW2 had thought of might be a good reference too.
We may be in a content lull, but we will never run out ofBrothelsto explore on the aether datacenter.
Did I sayBrothels? No I didn't sayBrothels, I said hangouts.