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.

[Absurdity]

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.

Pretty much this. ARR zones are tiny compared to the later expansion zones (most likely because there was no flying in ARR) but they are chock-full of "stuff" that makes those zones not only more interesting but also feel more "lived-in". You got several small settlements thoughout the zone that can't just be teleported to, lots of hidden caves, houses you can enter, npcs with small bits of dialogue and just overall "pretty" locations.

Sure the zones aren't massive but they had a lot more attention to detail put into them than any of the huge HW, SB or ShB zones.

[Melorie]

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.

Yes, yes, yes! I enjoy the aesthetic of most ShB-HW zones (especially lahee... as for stormblood, meh), and in some of them I can understand being a bit more empty (like HW snowy zones), but ARR zones are SO much more detailed and diverse. I genuinely enjoyed doing my Zeta because walking through ARR maps, even though it still lacks the exploration aspect, feels so immersive!

ShB zones were better in that regard when compared to Stormblood, but still, they don't really give the same thing.