What happened "area based" PvP?

[Nalien]

Probably dropped it like the many interviews they had about being able to summon a real primal in a boss fight.

That's still in the works, actually. They're just not releasing it until it makes sense within the story.

But yeah, dropped. Non-instanced content? In my FFXIV? Madness. Given PvPs tendency to randomly 90k us, that's probably a good thing, too.