Quote Originally Posted by CCheshire View Post
I'm a bit confused like FFXIV is an open world where we can do questing outside in areas, fly, hunts, and wander around fighting FATES. The opposite would be like a few town hubs and nothing else, with everything in instances.
A lot of MMORPGs would typically have all the zones connected to eachother like 1.0, so instead of a loading screen, it just progressively loads the map as you move through it, making it feel like a proper world. It depends how they are designed, but it's more immersive when it's done that way.

I do believe that hunts are great open world content and it's just that few people truly understand how the hunt system works. However, a lot of past MMORPGs have had more meaningful content take place in the open world, such as PvP, maps, exploration and mob farming. The difference in FFXIV is that things like maps quickly insert you into an instance shortly thereafter, PvP takes place in instances only, exploration of any sort would be in an instance, and there is little importance to fighting most enemies in the open world as an endgame activity once you've farmed bicolor gemstones/ranks, quests and beast tribes. We have level 1-3 hunt bills and rank B hunts but they aren't even worth the effort, even just for fun.

But technically it is true that there are open world activities: hunts (of varying rarity), maps, beast tribes, fates (of varying rarity), gathering nodes (of varying rarity) - it's just that with the exception of A and S ranks, it's not the sort of stuff that most people regard as fun and exciting.

I do understand why they put everything into instances though. Open World content was always problematic in MMORPGs because they struggled to scale it to the number of players there. Hunts are an example of this even. You can get too few, or too many players, and even if the content can scale it can be too laggy.