Quote Originally Posted by hobostew View Post
IMO if the game isn't going to take advantage of the open world then those resources put to creating them should be moved to creating instanced content. As it currently is all the effort that goes into these zones are largely a waste after you finish the story.
Aside of the non-MSQ activities people have been pointing out, this is still a story-based RPG and it's fine for things to exist primarily to serve the story.

From a lore perspective it makes far more sense for some zones to be deserted anyway. If you're the first mortal to set foot in the ancient ruins in a thousand years, with the special permission of its dragon guardians, why should there be any adventurers there besides yourself?



Quote Originally Posted by Barwara View Post
To add to a previous statement, a certain population of players like me care about story-telling and lore above all, so it would be nice if there was more story-telling to discover outside the msq. There are side-quests of course, but they demand you fetch or gather something most of the time. And if by chance you do all of the side-quests available in a zone, that's it. You don't have a reason to go back to older zones for story-content.
The writers cannot possibly give you an infinite amount of lore to discover in a zone. Whether it's delivered by sidequests or some other hypothetical mechanism, it is inevitable that you will end up with "no reason to go back for story content" sooner or later.

In any case, FATEs also drop some lore tidbits in their events or descriptions.