Field Dungeons

[SpiralMask]

Something that I've seen played with in various media (anime/manga/light novels, etc) was the idea of a 'zone' or 'field' dungeons, where rather than traversing a series of linear passages (for all intents and purposes) and fighting packs of monsters, the dungeon was a larger open area, such as a tract of land surrounding a volcano, or a massive ghost ship, or a sand-sunken pyramid, giant cave structures, and so on.

generally "completing" the dungeon is tied to collecting a certain number of keys (such as qarn's stone tablets, most castrums' identification keys, etc ) to open the door to the final boss of the zone--generally by defeating region bosses, or as a reward for completing certain challenges in the dungeon like killing X monsters, pulling levers scattered around (to open gates or raise/lower water levels, etc), pressing switches simultaneously (such as in castrum lacus litore), or navigating a dangerous side-path to find them (platforming puzzles or similar)--where the players have more freedom to choose their path and (if they move carefully enough) potentially skip many smaller monster battles altogether.
monsters and bosses would be located in particular arenas or rooms of the zone, or might wander in a particular region.

usually there are more sources of keys than than required for the final door, to allow players to plan what path they want to take and which challenges to face to clear the dungeon with their party's roles and preferences (or take as much or as little time as they like), or to use extra keys to be spent on more rewards either throughout the dungeon or after the final boss.

for FF14's part, this seems less suited for a proper instanced dungeon (and therefore on the dungeon roulettes, because i could def see drama from people rolling that for a daily and not wanting to do it), but closer to a deep dungeon/heaven on high thing that you and a party specifically queue for, with one larger zone instead of a series of bite-sized floors. i'd say that eureka and bozja (particularly the latter) are too grind-/small-encounter-focused for this--and not to mention mechanically balanced for a far greater number of players--but are sort of steps in that direction?

[ItMe]

These sound great in concept, but I agree that they wouldn't serve as dungeons you could find in a roulette.

I'd love to see something like this elsewhere in game, and a deep dungeon might be the way to do it, but 14 has a hard time with exploration in general because there isn't anything for us to find on a micro level if we do just go wandering somewhere. We might see some neat geography, or a place with lore, but there's little reason to explore when there's little to find.

[Enkidoh]

That was requested way back during the Beta test and Yoshi categorically said "no", and has stood firm with that attitude. So I'm afraid we're not going to see open/public dungeons (1.0 had them, but they were basically just big empty areas of underground nothing, only adding to the big empty areas of above ground nothing that 1.0's zones in general were like, and as ARR's design was guided specifically to avoid 1.0's missteps, public dungeons alas were excised accordingly, and will never be coming back I'm sorry to say).

[ItMe]

That was requested way back during the Beta test and Yoshi categorically said "no", and has stood firm with that attitude.

Has he though?
We're not asking for anything too out of line with Bozja.
Bozja even has a big boss at the end of it in the form of Castrum. If they made a Bozja that was a little more procedurally generated and with different zones you moved to like levels in a deep dungeon...
OPs pyramid idea would be frickin perfect for something like this.

Maybe Yoshi's attitude has changed over the last decade.
Maybe just our idea of an open dungeon has.

[Canadane]

That was requested way back during the Beta test and Yoshi categorically said "no", and has stood firm with that attitude. So I'm afraid we're not going to see open/public dungeons (1.0 had them, but they were basically just big empty areas of underground nothing, only adding to the big empty areas of above ground nothing that 1.0's zones in general were like, and as ARR's design was guided specifically to avoid 1.0's missteps, public dungeons alas were excised accordingly, and will never be coming back I'm sorry to say).

I remember a few being mostly nothing other than say an interesting NM with a drop.
But Shposhae had a pretty nifty key system going on for it. Maybe a little slow paced but it wasn't unwelcome.

While I know we won't get places like that again, I wouldn't say no if Yoshi-P asked if he should change his mind.