[Dev Suggestion] Ideas for spicing up the open world.

I wanted to bring up a suggestion to the Devs that I felt might be a cool way to improve the open world of FFXIV. Currently when we get new instanced dungeon a shiny aura portal thing appears that when clicked on opens the Duty Finder which whisks us away to a new place/region. In a way, this is a bit jarring

What if you could instead have a “staging area” before each new instance? For example, the new Weeping City of Mhach appears to be located in a currently unreachable area of the map that boarders Coerthas and Mor Dhona. While I know this content is yet to be released, it will no doubt be a shiny aura portal thing that appears after some quest in an airship hub/town that opens DF window and ports us away to this new region. Kind of breaks the immersion a bit. While I understand that is just the way this MMO has been created, I feel like there is a way to spice this up a bit without creating too much additional development cost.

http://i.imgur.com/uvxEwnA.jpg

What if instead it was possible to visit a small area “outside” the instance, this area would just use assets that have already been created for the actual dungeon, so shouldn’t really create any new burden on development costs, but it could be an area just for exploring and of course, for the shiny aura DF portal thing to appear for when you are actually wanting to flag the content. The area would be accessible via a newly discovered zone line like in Mor Dhona/Coerthas that regionally would make sense as a foot path to access this area. There doesn’t even need to be battle content in this “staging area”. Maybe make this just an area to visit where some fishing might be available or some botany/mining. It could even just be an alternate location for gathering items that are available elsewhere in the world already, which might even make gathering those items slightly less tedious since we have options where to gather.

Right now we have this big open world, but it’s becoming stale because there are no new areas to discover, outside expansions. Everything is instanced which breaks the immersion a bit. Building in these little “staging areas” outside new instances might be a way to refresh the old and new open world areas and keep the discovery going in between expansions. I would love to visit the Yafaem Saltmoor or the old defrosted Camp Glory from 1.0 (Which I assume is the area being used for Fields of Glory) just to see this part of the world, maybe even hear some of that old 1.0 music where appropriate, but I don’t want to have to do it with a raid group every time I want to visit. Obviously not every instance needs something like this. Alexander kinda has a front door you go in in the Hinterlands that makes sense, same with Crystal Tower etc.

At any rate, I wanted to throw my ideas out here to the community and maybe also see if these ideas could be relayed to the dev team?

Its doable i think. There's already a waiting room type area before the story mode ifrit and garuda fights.

I thought there would be more interest in something like this. A lot of threads here talk about exploration and even entering areas after they have been cleared and the like.

I'd be on board. If nothing else you could even add some gathering nodes and such. They don't necessarily need to have anything totally new, just be a new area to acquire things in.