Do you think that there's a lack of focus on our open world areas?

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Originally Posted by Iscah

How is that going to require any less resources? It's still going to need to be modelled just the same, and then they need to support enough individual instances for everyone.

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1. That's not true, they would make game design adjustments where the traveling is reduced and the msq becomes less fetch quest driven and becomes more story driven.
2. Only battle instances require server space, cutscenes do not.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

It doesn't have to be that way, useless I mean, the tools are there, they just have to use them, if they want us to spend half our time in Limsa that's cool ig, but then why bother making interesting locales for us to see during MSQ only to have them go to waste? I'm not an older mmo gamer this is my first real mmo tbh but it's just something I thought weird seeing what the competition does in comparison.

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Well, to be fair. Its your choice to chill in Limsa waiting for a queue pop. You COULD go sightseeing while in the queue. DF works everywhere XD
Not like you absolutely require the conveniences of a city immediately upon returning from a dungeon.

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Originally Posted by Kiurai

It doesn't have to be that way, useless I mean, the tools are there, they just have to use them, if they want us to spend half our time in Limsa that's cool ig, but then why bother making interesting locales for us to see during MSQ only to have them go to waste? I'm not an older mmo gamer this is my first real mmo tbh but it's just something I thought weird seeing what the competition does in comparison.

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"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game," is a famous quote among game development circles. Many open world activities have been optimized to the point that hanging around an aetheryte most of the time is the optimal way for many to participate in those activities.

• Battlecraft Leves - These were one of the premiere open world activities, but quickly became a less than optimal activity compared to FATEs and dungeons. HW's attempt at fixing them didn't succeed and so they were quietly dropped by the devs in StB. Sometimes the only reason they are done now is to spawn S-rank hunt targets.
• Treasure Maps - An activity that should quiet easily lead to pickup groups running around the open world have been optimized into a once or twice per week activity for most player groups that do them due to the 18 hour timer on gathering maps and the time it can take to do the bonus dungeons.
• Hunts - Hunts were introduced as a way to get max level players searching around the zones, but players ended up figuring out spawn timers, spawn locations, and spawn conditions to the point where only a few players need to scout or spawn while the rest wait for an A-rank Train or S-rank spawn call out in their linkshells.

It's like I said before, import Bozja into the 6 new zones of the next expansion. With the last duty being a primal (or legendary) boss fight where it asks the 24 people with the most contribution points into the open world primal fight. Just make sure to have 2 versions that can happen randomly (24 or 48 people) so it's not predictable how many people are doing "Bozja-type fates."

I'll use this thread to voice my opinion about the sightseeing log.

With the old ARR sightseeing entries it's kinda fun to try to work out what the clues mean. However they're really annoying to find as the vistas are quite small and there's no indicator until you're on the spot. And if you do manage to find the right place they're even more annoying to get because of the time and weather requirements.

Starting from HW the vistas have a glowing ball on them which is visible from a decent distance away. However that's the only clue. There's zero indicator in the log entries, aside from the zone, even though the recommendations window lists "sightseeing clues". So you have to guess which things on that zone are worth being included.

Finally, the UX with the log is atrocious. Clicking in the recommendations window does not take you to the correct page. There's no way to list which things from the current zone you have found, other than going through all the entries for that expansion. And since entries get added mid-expansion, the entries for a single zone aren't even grouped together.

Exploration like this is a nice idea but the implementation could be a lot better. If you took the visual indicators from the expansions but added the cryptic location clues from ARR, as well as more varied emotes, and fixed the UX issues with the log book, they'd be stellar. There could even be a daily quest to revisit a randomly selected vista for a small reward.

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Originally Posted by xxvaynxx

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Its almost as if MMOs were originally about expansive, living open areas that fleshed out the world and made it feel like you were actually playing a MMO and not "Instance Simulator Online."

Chalk me up as one of the old MMO players who wants more open world content. It's interesting to see people describe open world content as hollow, because I feel the same way about instancing. when everything important that I do takes place in an alternate reality where only I and 3 to 23 friends exist... it feels removed from the universe that i am playing in... which is suppose is exactly what it is.

But yeah, I get that the open world feels hollow too. But the reason for that is that no one is there.

Back in the day one of the MMOs I played had a fixed number of mobs that would exist on a map at any given time. This meant that if you killed something, a new one would appear to replace it at a random location on the map. Now on the first level of several dungeons in that game there would permanently be a large number of people. All killing things almost as quickly as they spawned, all over the map. This made it quite hectic and exciting as you could very quickly be overwhelmed if too large a number of respawns appeared where you were fighting. BUT because the map was full of people, there would always be others to help you out.

Then there would be people who far out leveled the map just hanging out. Sat in corners, or standing around, chatting with their friends. So newbies in trouble could run and wipe off the adds on them, or get rezzed by them when they died. You would even have characters playing merchants setting up shop in the danger zone, selling potions and what not.

It was anything thing but hollow. But if I go back to that game now, some fifteen years later. Now those maps are hollow. People moved on. There is no one there. Its sad.

So yeah. I miss open world content. Is that just nostalgia? I don't think that's all it is.

For me its about the immersion, you feel less trapped within a zone also having things to do besides fates helps break up the abundance of humdrum A to B fetch quests . Some of the zones are really linear and it feels like im playing a console game most times. ESO does a good job with their open world with tough world bosses with epic drops, hunting, gathering and mining for crafting mats but everything else is a pain.

Someone suggested in another thread how it'd be cool to have Beast Tribes summon Primals where players gather to defeat it.

Honestly Bozja is what the OW should be like in a way plus maybe a percentage of the GW2 style of OW with map completion and meta events with semi decent rewards as incentives to stay out in the OW vs instances like dungeons or raids