Over at the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums, Eric Flannum made a post to clarify a question asked by Saosin about jumping puzzles and open world dungeons:
“Do we know if that underwater place was a dungeon? He used the word dungeon but idk if he meant instanced 5-man content dungeon or just an underwater place with a ceiling? I was under the impression that only catacombs was in the last beta, unless of course that was a part of catacombs.”
And Flannum’s response is as follows:
“Basically this place is a puzzle and trap filled “mini-dungeon” that exists in the open world (i.e. it is not instanced). There are a lot of these mini-dungeons out in the world, many of these involve the jumping puzzles that you’ve seen in some of the other videos, and in fact this area has one room that involves a short jumping puzzle. The area shown in the video is a mini-dungeon called the Font of Rhand, access to it opens up after players succeed at a particular meta event chain.”
As we can see from Eric, the open world puzzle that Total Biscuit and Necrobator experienced was, in fact, a mini open-world dungeon that players are able to explore and get through to find a rare boss monster. According to him, there are multiple ones around the world of Tyria that are waiting to be found and figured out. While he does not say exactly how many or if each of these open world dungeons are similar objectives, he does confirm that there are many of them that involve jumping.
He even states that some of the access is limited to particular meta events in the given area. This could possibly mean something along the lines of pirate ships becoming available once you sack their ship.
Personally, I would love to see puzzles that are required to solve before opening a door, similar to lock picking or herding chickens. What about you?