More Playable Map Area Please

[shintashi]

Every new update or so we get a new dungeon. It's this other dimension where we get teleported, leave our big birds behind, and generally get locked out of whatever it was we would be doing with friends who aren't a part of our dungeon experience.

Meanwhile, there's all sorts of interesting places in the backgrounds of existing maps where we can't move, jump to, climb to, etc. There are vast distances visible but inaccessible. Huge chunks of the "map" display areas that are simply not part of our maps.

I would like future expansions of the game to have more places for us to explore. like the castle in Coerthus, or take a boat out on the beach, or climb further in the desert wastelands of Sagoli. So far, the only map expansions I can think of are Revenant's Toll and Housing.

But there's all sorts of "locked doors" and signs leading to no where, I would rather have a new town with some low and high level monsters outside than another dungeon to be honest.

[Ophie-Mio]

I always thought that open map areas and open dungeons would be so much better than what we currently have in this game.

A most recent example of this can be found with Keeper of the Lake. We basically go to the edge of the lake and are teleported inside. Once inside, mobs are everywhere and when you get to the top, you can't even see Mor Dhona anymore. An area that is right outside of Mor Dhona feels like it's in another plane of existence.

It seems silly that in Darkhold or Aurum Vale that you can't just go to the entrances and go down there.

Leaving dungeons aside as well. You do see tons of beautiful things in the distance but they are pictures on a canvas that you can only look at. The Shiva arena exists in that zone alone. You can't actually walk to it and see a beautiful ice kingdom around it.

I wish this game wouldn't have so many instances. SE dev has said that the game can only handle so many instances but they keep making more and more. This MMO needs to be more open world and less instances.

[DefendPopPunk]

I've said this before as well. Every time they make a new dungeon, such as the lost city of amdapor, I think of how it's such a beautiful waste since we can't even explore the area or visit it outside of the usual speed run. I wish that when these instances are added, that they also would add it to the map as well so we can explore it at any time. They could add new places to mine and gather at these places and even use them for new quests. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do these sorts of things but as it is now it seems a bit of a waste creating these awesome looking areas that we just speed on through.

[Emerald_Wyvern]

Now that's something I can get behind. Open world dungeons like in XI were a bit of a headache, but having our instanced dungeons explorable in open world for different reasons could be pretty neat. I'm for it.

[Meier]

Yup, this game needs open world dungeons and such.

[Rhas]

The concept is great... but they would have to redesign the game from scratch... again.... to get rid of fates and hunts.

Imagine the "lag" as the whole server rushes from S rank to S rank. It would make the entire game laggy instead of just the localized "zone". Imagine an S rank pops in central shroud. Every zone that is connected to it would have mobs of people rushing to get their 1st hit on it. Zoning would take even longer than it does for Revenants Toll. and it would grind complete regions into lag.

Is that really the world you want to see? (I'm guessing you never played LOTRO because every time they added something more lag happened, especially zoning. SE is trying to not let it end up like some of its competitors)

[KiiNGKRUSH]

They definitely have to do something as far as more explorable real estate goes. Now I'm not saying this needs to be FFXI as that's been beaten to death. However, the world is way too small and that's ashame because it's a such a beautiful world, I WANT to explore all those out of reach areas. Please SE FFXIV is awesome but we need a bigger world!

[Ryuukishi]

Haven't they said that Heavensward is going to double the size of the current gameworld?

[Ruri]

Please look forward to it. 3.0

[Nutz]

I don't really feel like the world is small. I feel that it's a good size, and honestly when I'm trying to get to the location of certain hunts or maps (or to locate your rank B hunt weekly) it seems pretty big. There is the issue that outside of hunts and maps (and gathering to some extent) there's not really anything to do in this world after 50. I'm not sure that opening up the dungeons would solve that at all. Seems like it would mostly create a headache for people having to spend extra time travelling (compared to now) and every roulette would have to go out the window (or break the rules -- at which point why bother?). Adding more and more space generally means less detail or more overhead and processing. We had sprawling spaces in 1.0 and they were even more vacant than what we have now, less useful, and less interesting to look at.