Mist Exploration maps.

[Artyport.2084]

So my favorite thing about guild wars 2 is the exploration and movement the game has perfectly nailed down. 
 

I enjoy the story maps but sometimes i just wanna wake up and explore. Riding around on my gliders and mounts 

 

so. Mist exploration maps.

Guild wars has shown that they can throw maps together rather quickly but layering them with content is where time is comsumed.

 

Mist exploration maps would be zones that repopulate themselves with themed monsters and rewards at random. They take place in the mist to justify the extreme switching of what happens in these zones.

 

the foundation of the zones stay they same but themes happen at large variables 

 

example:

mist forest zone is the base.

Variables: enemies, weather, rewards, locations of rewards, , bosses

deepening the example:

one month you may be in this forest zone and you are fighting bandits, the weather is stormy and there are tornadoes blowing around the map and you need to explore to find where the treasures has been placed on a map

 

the following month the map will repopulate itself with svanir and its snowing and you have to deal with the effects if frost bite in the cold and need to seek warmth

 

these would provide a way for some of those niche masteries.

 

also letting ai decide what happens in these maps could lead to complete chaos and could make exploration really fun 

 

 

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

 

1 hour ago, Artyport.2084 said:

also letting ai decide what happens in these maps could lead to complete chaos and could make exploration really fun 

Other MMORPGs have maps which were quick-mapped by AI, preferably open land-scapes supposed be crossed by using mounts. GW2 does not use this feature, which is one of the reasons why exploration is actually fun here. The attention to detail is mind-blowing, even in 'empty' areas. 

The only option that could work, which would not end up in a total mess would be how Bioware designed their instanced maps of SW:ToR. What did they do? If you play the game and enter one of the bigger cave-instances, you've basically visited most of the caves in the entire game (core). They used the same structures, cave-elements over and over. Just in different order. Sometimes the downward-ramp is at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes there is none at all  and sometimes it is at the end. The corners look the same, the ambush-spots look the same. Every empire/republic-base is basically the same instance with the same elements in different orders. Sometimes there are more junctions, more rooms, more of this and more of that. They have just created each element once and just sandbox-chained them together as needed. That is what AI could do as well, without messing up too much. 

As a result you would have a three-dimensional Ancient Cave (Lufia 2) or a Bloody Palace (Devil May Cry) with a focus on mapping.

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The repopulation of a static map with different NPCs and weather effects was already tested in LW4. Every map that features Rifts and the Ancestor Tree in Jahai Bluffs. It would work, but not add much to the exploration experience.

tl&dr; nice idea, but looking at how much time and resources this would consume and how little we would get out of it, I'd rather have a few more fractals, preferably with solo-difficulty or a public mode instead.