Something needs to be done about the empty open world

[ReynTime]

I'm tired of making suggestions that will be ignored anyway so I won't.

What I'll say though is that ARR has honestly better designed maps, regardless of size.

They don't have necessarily more content to be played. But they do have a LOT of lore you find/get by exploring. There is just a lot of careful detail all over the place.

Not so much the maps since Heavensward. But it works because the average player sees the huge disney castle in Il Mheg or the one interesting portion of the Tempest that covers like 1/5 of the map and thinks "WOW PRETTY 10/10 world design".


And for all its faults, 1.23 had more open world content.
Leves are now broken (can only share battlecraft, joining a duty means you fail and waste allowances, Heavensward's leves are badly implemented, no leves beyond lv58, allowance still regens too slowly, etc)
Hamlet defences are gone, the FATEs that replace them are far more inconsquential, static, and lack everything that made the defences interesting.
Newer relics isolate part of their steps into a "large scale instance".
Open world dungeons were mentioned a few times as being things one of the level designers was interested in bringing back but were likely cancelled.
Hunts are trivialized by trains and there is no party-reserved alternative of NMs despite the fact there should have been.
Partying is greatly discouraged during questing/MSQ in this game, and aside from hardcore train-for-weeks-to-clear there is a severe lack of content that encourages playing in a fixed party, let alone open world content for such.
Being allowed to fly everywhere completely destroyed the sense or point of discovery that you had from finding hidden points of interest/lore like those ruins "protected" by high level monsters before ARR.
Monsters are not dangerous at all unless you're severily underleveled, but because every monster from lv51 onwards is aggro they also turn into annoying mosquitoes if you try to just explore the map at your leisure as they're haphazardly scattered with no rhyme or reason.