This is why I love open world

[Furball.1236]

I recently decided to replay the core tyria map and found a lot of joy I haven't been able to find in the expansion maps for a long time.

I think this image captures the reason why I love the open world contents: https://imgur.com/a/EJswKw7

Things go like this: You randomly come across a dynamic event. The outcome decides which next events to happen. During the transition between the events, you hear how they feel about the next course of actions, for example, how they hate to ask support from their rival but they decide to do that because there's no other way. The following event takes you to another point of interest far away. In the end of everything, if you follow the NPC, you'll find where they live filled, with details of their life, like this cub sitting on the bed solely to show the life of this NPC.

All of these unnecessary details in this game gives you the feeling that there are lives there and they illustrate the impact of your gameplay other than just filling the progression bar on the right or the mastery bar on the bottom. It gives the feeling of attachment to the NPCs you're helping and to the local region you travel in. I may not remember all the details I saw here or decide to come back to this location to repeat the same dynamic event, but I know contents like gave me attachment to the game itself.

[Randulf.7614]

Such superb map storytelling was the hallmark of the early game and expansions like PoF. 

[Antycypator.9874]

Core Tyria maps have something special when it comes to NPC life and everything happening after/between events. One of my most memorable moments was somewhere after defending a village where one kid came to my character and said something like "one day I want to be just like you". It's really nice to see that devs made certain events feel more rewarding that just tossing random items into your inventory.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

Story telling is definitely good in GW2 imo, but sadly that is overshadowed massively in Openworld by the large swathes of AFK Bot farms that now infest the maps and ANET just simply ignore it even though it breaks map events, spols the map ambience and not to mention the manipulation of unbound, volatile magics which has forever altered the TP landscape and wealth pools by the hoards of cheats in the game.  So yeah going back and redoing story is great but the underlying issues that ANET continually choose to ignore make GW2 less and less fun for me nowadays.

[Bujakaa.1948]

Have to agree with you. One thing that slowly brings back enjoying the world, stories and maps is not using skyscale for me, it is sometimes hard to hold back, but even cruising around with raptor is so much fun
I feel that the use of flying mounts has spoiled us a bit. And now the newest maps fully built skyscale in mind really shows that