So, will we ever have a reason to actually leave a city at level 50?

[Aldracity]

The awkward truth of Open World vs. Instanced, though, is that the one with better gear inevitably invalidates the other. If consistent, open-world content provided the best gear in the game, everyone would flock to it, and vice versa for instanced. Most of us are aware of instances invalidating the world, but an example of the world invalidating instances is GW2, where there is little to no reason to spam Dungeons for Exotics, and after a few patches it isn't necessary to spam Fractals for Ascended either.

The closest solution I can think of is for Open World content to follow a completely separate progression route from Instanced content. That could mean anything from being the only way to access certain recipes, farmable loot...hell, maybe even world-specific skills or something. Yes, the side effect would be "forcing" everyone to do everything, but quite frankly after the 500th hour I think most people would be willing to break their routine.

[BlackHaloJT]

This is what led most people to believe it would be a mix of open/instanced battle content. SE showed us a futuristic view of 2.0 when Version 1 was coming to its end. A world full of life and imagination one without boundaries. Instead we got the Candy land instanced lobby cramped world. Certainly not what it turned out to be.

[Djeserit]

This is what led most people to believe it would be a mix of open/instanced battle content. SE showed us a futuristic view of 2.0 when Version 1 was coming to its end. A world full of life and imagination one without boundaries. Instead we got the Candy land instanced lobby cramped world. Certainly not what it turned out to be.

Funny, I see nothing in that picture that specifically shows it as being open world.

I can go into the Chimera fight and pull it out of the cave and get a fairly similar picture, just a different background.

Edit: In fact, you can see a timer on the right hand side, which should have been a clue that it was instanced. IIRC, 1.0 dungeons had timers, too, did they not?

You saw what you wanted to see, and are upset that the end result is nothing that you envisioned. There's nothing wrong with that, but your disappointment is due to your misinterpretation of the image you linked.

[BlackHaloJT]

Funny, I see nothing in that picture that specifically shows it as being open world.

I can go into the Chimera fight and pull it out of the cave and get a fairly similar picture, just a different background.

Defense huddle. You could be right or you could wrong. Looks pretty open worldish to me but I better take off my super rose tinted spectacles. Anyway maybe I should of rephrased the most part and just excluded certain godmode people. When I remember seeing this picture it looks no where shape or form to what we have now. But I will say todays 2.0 is still a Candy land instanced lobby cramped snorefest<< added this one in sounded fun world.

[Pence]

This is what led most people to believe it would be a mix of open/instanced battle content. SE showed us a futuristic view of 2.0 when Version 1 was coming to its end. A world full of life and imagination one without boundaries. Instead we got the Candy land instanced lobby cramped world. Certainly not what it turned out to be.

If only there was a zone which occasionally spawned an open world Chimera .....

[Roris]

This is what led most people to believe it would be a mix of open/instanced battle content. SE showed us a futuristic view of 2.0 when Version 1 was coming to its end. A world full of life and imagination one without boundaries. Instead we got the Candy land instanced lobby cramped world. Certainly not what it turned out to be.

I really wish they could have kept a lot of things from that concept like the titles, the font and font style, the look of the HP bars, LS/FC emblems, assigning roles to party members, even the hand cursor and it also has what looks like a handy distance meter for ranged attacks. Not to mention the blatant bait and switch with the battle system.

As for the battle itself it's obviously what eventually evolved into the Dhorme Chimera, but it could also have been uninstanced and worked like the old Faction Leves since it has a timer and leves have one too, we may never know. I still really want them to do something more like Faction Leves did but maybe using a different same system of allowances, since those also had some unique lore and most of them had multiple steps that took you all over areas of the admittedly copy pasted world, it'd be a great way to use the current open world.

[BlackHaloJT]

@ Doris awesome someone gets the concept and thinking outside the box. Not the boring oh its Chimera and I pulled it outside snore fest reply. But that is what ARR is dumbed down you don't need to think so I expect those answers.

[Tupsi]

I miss not being tied to a GCD and it feeling like an actual FF game. There's very few MMOs that even utilize a GCD..

[Galaxia]

the only problem on the game atm is that SE is locking content with a lot of restrictions and weekly instanced, even if 2.2 if coming out, theres a lot of content that is gonna be locked as well, stopping player progression

[Gramul]

-Get in and out fast because the name of the game is efficiency.

That's just it. This isn't really a world where you're encouraged to interact or take it easy anymore. It's a job.
Why should we be wanting to get through this game as fast as possible? Why do we encourage our play time to be centered around just getting things done.