The new player experience and how FFXIV fails as an MMO.

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Originally Posted by missTori

I think it does fail as an MMO which is the core problem. if they marketed it as a single player thing like genshin with some aspects of co-op, then people would not expect way more than they do. This is mostly a single player story game unless you want to raid; but even raiding gets boring in this game

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All the "MM" in "MMORPG" means is that there is a large number of players occupying the same digital space at the same time.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

An oft-repeated myth IMO. Sure there is hostility from raiders as is so evident on these boards, but the content itself doesn't put up a wall of hostility. The barrier is one of tedium. Or more generously, it's just a choice.

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I mean there is the tedium if you don't like it, but there is also the fact that it kind of neuters newbies from liking it because it gets inaccessible. CBU3 dumbed down jobs in order to make it more accessible to people to go do Extremes+. but they don't understand that the accessibility wasn't on job complexities but on how they have designed their content.

Or they just straight up lied, and dumbed down the jobs because it was easier to design them that way.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

I mean there is the tedium if you don't like it, but there is also the fact that it kind of neuters newbies from liking it because it gets inaccessible. CBU3 dumbed down jobs in order to make it more accessible to people to go do Extremes+. but they don't understand that the accessibility wasn't on job complexities but on how they have designed their content.

Or they just straight up lied, and dumbed down the jobs because it was easier to design them that way.

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100% agree on that.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

All the "MM" in "MMORPG" means is that there is a large number of players occupying the same digital space at the same time.

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Sure, but the description was created for games where that was a palpable part of the actual gameplay. Outside of the latest EM content and FATEs early in each expansion, that's rarely the case here. You could reach a majority of the game's new-player-facing gameplay in any single-player game that offers drop-in multiplayer through which to replace the core supporting NPCs in content (say, Divinity 2, BG3).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Sure, but the description was created for games where that was a palpable part of the actual gameplay. Outside of the latest EM content and FATEs early in each expansion, that's rarely the case here. You could reach a majority of the game's new-player-facing gameplay in any single-player game that offers drop-in multiplayer through which to replace the core supporting NPCs in content (say, Divinity 2, BG3).

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And from the origin of the genre, "solo play" has always been supported, as outlined by the Josh Strife Hayes video I refer to often.

I would agree that FFXIV for some reason makes playing with others difficult in a lot of content.

If your friend does not like the walking around doing quests and reading dialogue, this game is not for them. Think of this game like a really long movie with fight intermissions in between. This game is a core Final Fantasy game before it is an MMO.

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Originally Posted by tsuchii

If your friend does not like the walking around doing quests and reading dialogue, this game is not for them. Think of this game like a really long movie with fight intermissions in between. This game is a core Final Fantasy game before it is an MMO.

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The only core FF game that has a comparable ratio of cutscenes to gameplay is XVI.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

I think "incompetent" misses the point. In NA/EU I suspect Group 1 is the majority, and I'd suggest their ignorance of one facet of the game (PvE) is a legitimate choice.

Maybe I'm just projecting, but I think a large chunk of Group 1 does know that they can do more damage in a dungeon if they studied one of Wesk's or Caetsu's guides and memorized the optimal rotations. But why on earth would they? PvE does not interest everyone, particularly when it approaches rotation optimization. This is particularly true in FFXIV because the PvE is just plain bad.

I'd agree with you that this is a choice on SE's part. What the game "teaches" you in MSQ dungeons is that if you run out of the bad fast enough and hit the flashy buttons occasionally, everything will work out. Why do you suppose SE has made that choice? It's because they recognize that those interested in optimization are a minority. If this were not the case and the intent, would we not have in-game damage meters? The game is like this because the only optimization SE cares about is sub-count.

As to creating a "more fun and engaging experience," manifestly no. People are leaving because DT has raised MSQ dungeon difficulty to a point that a part of Group 1 doesn't want to deal with.



An oft-repeated myth IMO. Sure there is hostility from raiders as is so evident on these boards, but the content itself doesn't put up a wall of hostility. The barrier is one of tedium. Or more generously, it's just a choice.

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I'm not talking about optimisation. I'm talking about the basics. I don't think the game should allow people to hit level 100 as a WHM with only glare and cure 1 on their hotbars.

In what sense do you find Dawntrail dungeons harder than previous expansions? I think most of the complaints on Dt release were coming from newer players who started during Endwalker and hadn't played a dungeon without being ilvl synced before. Some of the bosses one or two overlapping mechanics but that's fairly normal. Overall I think the dungeons are the easiest they've ever been. There are no interrupts any more. No debuffs that need to be cleansed. There are a ridiculous number of forced single pulls, no big pulls bigger than 2 packs, and tanks have been massively overbuffed again.

I think the dungeons have been at their "hardest" ever. Fast paced DDR everywhere, gotcha mechanics, crapton of visuals cues to keep track of else you get your vuln stack (or potentially die), until they decided it's not working or they don't want to do it anymore somehow with The Underkeep which feels back to the usual formula.
If anything that's why the battle system has been dumbed down so much that it doesn't get in the way, and the tank literally cannot die.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

I'm not talking about optimisation. I'm talking about the basics. I don't think the game should allow people to hit level 100 as a WHM with only glare and cure 1 on their hotbars.

In what sense do you find Dawntrail dungeons harder than previous expansions? I think most of the complaints on Dt release were coming from newer players who started during Endwalker and hadn't played a dungeon without being ilvl synced before. Some of the bosses one or two overlapping mechanics but that's fairly normal. Overall I think the dungeons are the easiest they've ever been. There are no interrupts any more. No debuffs that need to be cleansed. There are a ridiculous number of forced single pulls, no big pulls bigger than 2 packs, and tanks have been massively overbuffed again.

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The fact we don't have hard pulls since time in memorial is such a tragedy to me. Remember in ShB when they dared to put healing down mechanics on some mobs? Whatever happened to that?

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

I'm not talking about optimisation. I'm talking about the basics. I don't think the game should allow people to hit level 100 as a WHM with only glare and cure 1 on their hotbars.

In what sense do you find Dawntrail dungeons harder than previous expansions? I think most of the complaints on Dt release were coming from newer players who started during Endwalker and hadn't played a dungeon without being ilvl synced before. Some of the bosses one or two overlapping mechanics but that's fairly normal. Overall I think the dungeons are the easiest they've ever been. There are no interrupts any more. No debuffs that need to be cleansed. There are a ridiculous number of forced single pulls, no big pulls bigger than 2 packs, and tanks have been massively overbuffed again.

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Yeah what Valence says. It's just too fast with too much visual mess. I find it really difficult to pick off boss tells and remembering cast names is also challenging (possibly because once I've cleared a MSQ dungeon I don't touch it again). I did switch from MCH to WAR to get through the MSQ dungeons with NPCs, but I still found it difficult and frankly unpleasant.

To loop back to the issue of rotations, struggling players like me are told to not worry about doing damage, first avoid the mechanics. Very sensible, but also a massive indictment of fight design. And the less skilled you are, the more the fight reduces to DDR. Why learn what your kit does when you don't have time to use it?

The other huge issue I have is button bloat. If I wanted to use all my kit, I can't because I simply can't create that many comfortable keybinds.

I figure in terms of skill, in PvP I am top 20%, in PvE bottom 20%. A huge chunk of that is that in PvP I don't need to look at either my hotbars or keyboard. And I enjoy PvP.

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Originally Posted by Valence

If anything that's why the battle system has been dumbed down so much that it doesn't get in the way, and the tank literally cannot die.

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I don't think the two have virtually anything to do with each other. Nor are the latest dungeons particularly "harder" than before; the "be here by X time" objectives are merely more visible. Casual content now has fewer and/or more lenient DPS checks, less need for coordination, and generally less cognitive load even before factoring in job kits.

Tanks can't die because the devs decided that people are more likely to play tanks, reducing queue quota bottlenecks, if they can be demi-gods, and healers are 20 shades of excess healing and a skill and a half of anything else because they decided that'd draw the most overall appeal to healers, not because we needed to save cognitive load for the present fights that, on average, take no more or take even less thinking ("monkey see, monkey do" included). When AST was running Sleeve Draw, Spread, and Royal Road and optimizing outcomes under varied conditions and per different compositions, we still had Mist Dragon offering far more difficulty than most Dawntrail dungeons.

I think the new player experience is great for someone that is looking to play a Final Fantasy game, because honestly that's what it is. It's your usual Final Fantasy game but with other players populating your world and helping you on some adventures!
Endgame is not as much of a focus as in other MMOs such as WoW, instead the primary goal of FFXIV is the play and experience the stories offered through MSQ, SideQuests, Raid, A-Raid, DDs, etc as a story-driven game! :)

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Originally Posted by Valence

I think the dungeons have been at their "hardest" ever. Fast paced DDR everywhere, gotcha mechanics, crapton of visuals cues to keep track of else you get your vuln stack (or potentially die), until they decided it's not working or they don't want to do it anymore somehow with The Underkeep which feels back to the usual formula.
If anything that's why the battle system has been dumbed down so much that it doesn't get in the way, and the tank literally cannot die.

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The Underkeep really is a bizarre outlier and I can't imagine what happened in the design process.

I remember going through that wondering when the oh-so-funny gimmick mechanic was going to rise up and kill me, and it never did.

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Originally Posted by BigCheez

The issue is the implications of playing your job incorrectly being normal.

We can't have normal mode content that requires players to actively participate because the majority of the playerbase don't actually have any idea how the game works. And the majority of the playerbase have no idea how the game works because the game doesn't do anything to teach them, or even incentivise figuring it out or using external resources to learn for themselves.

No damage to heal. No mitigation required. No DPS checks. No dispellable debuffs. No interrupts. No stuns. No CC. The game never requires you to do anything except not stand in the orange. The devs have done everything they can to ensure that failure is near impossible.

The game is stuck in a vicious cycle of not being able to have engaging content because the playerbase isn't good enough at the game, and players knowing nothing about the game because the content doesn't require them to learn anything about the game. It makes it very boring for people who do know how to play the game and see all the wasted potential.

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While the difference between somebody who engages with high-end content and someone who does not is like night and day, I do have to say I do appreciate, in a way, the simplistic nature of the normal content.

In my opinion, it all comes down to the person. One who seeks to improve will always actively search for information and will never need a game/somebody to babysit them. The same applies in day-to-day life.

At the end of the day is not the game that should push you to improve; you have to have the desire to push forward. That's why some people are so resistant to advice, because they don't care about playing the game optimally, and that's fine. It's completly OK to suck at the game and focus on the social aspect.

I've been thinking... they mentioned offering a new starting point for new players after Endwalker's MSQ.

But would that would even see the light of day when they are actively spending their resources updating the old dungeon experience?

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I've been thinking... they mentioned offering a new starting point for new players after Endwalker's MSQ.

But would that would even see the light of day when they are actively spending their resources updating the old dungeon experience?

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They mentioned it during Endwalker but quickly went back on it saying that they wish the players to experience the entire story.

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Originally Posted by BunnyBrat

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

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You can in the Final Fantasy XI.

Get real people, the story drives the game but if it was purely a story game, it would have been dead long ago. The game survives by making you stay subscribed for 4 month periods between 6 hours of story. I don't know how people can't understand this.

And yes, as a new player looking for an MMO, they almost certainly wont make it to the endgame unless they bet on a story skip unless they also like 500 long visual novels. If the story was as story driven as you people claim, a monthly sub would not be justified.

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Originally Posted by BunnyBrat

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

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yes.
depends on how much focus they put on the story or what type of quests they contain, mainly in WoW playing and leveling together is also encouraged.
Most quests contain kill xx- amount of enemies, which doesnt even exists in FFXIV

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

Get real people, the story drives the game but if it was purely a story game, it would have been dead long ago. The game survives by making you stay subscribed for 4 month periods between 6 hours of story. I don't know how people can't understand this.

And yes, as a new player looking for an MMO, they almost certainly wont make it to the endgame unless they bet on a story skip unless they also like 500 long visual novels. If the story was as story driven as you people claim, a monthly sub would not be justified.

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Sure, it's not purely a story game. FF14 includes the other critical element common to all successful MMOs.

Fishing.

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Originally Posted by XtremePrime

They mentioned it during Endwalker but quickly went back on it saying that they wish the players to experience the entire story.

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you can experience the story just fine, even if you cut out all the filler crap, there are lot of quests that add no substance to the story and are only there to waste your time, that is so obvious, like all the nonsense of running through the entire dungeon again with your slow mount in Endwalker.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

yes.
depends on how much focus they put on the story or what type of quests they contain, mainly in WoW playing and leveling together is also encouraged.
Most quests contain kill xx- amount of enemies, which doesnt even exists in FFXIV

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I did always find it kind of weird that the hunt logs/bills are basically the only thing that makes you interact with the random overworld enemies for the most part as an average quest typically just makes you go to a designated location that will automatically spawn the things you need to kill for the quest.

ARR is the only part of the game I can recall that fairly regularly made you have to fight said enemies in normal quests.

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Originally Posted by XtremePrime

I think the new player experience is great for someone that is looking to play a Final Fantasy game, because honestly that's what it is.

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That is debatable.
If someone wants to play a Final Fantasy story game I can think of quite a few I would recommend instead.
More focused experiences with fully voiced main stories and not as much pointless filler, while also offering deeper mechanics and combat.

If someone really wants a modern Final Fantasy game I'd tell them to play Expedition 33 instead... and then maybe the VII remake.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

That is debatable.
If someone wants to play a Final Fantasy story game I can think of quite a few I would recommend instead.
More focused experiences with fully voiced main stories and not as much pointless filler, while also offering deeper mechanics and combat.

If someone really wants a modern Final Fantasy game I'd tell them to play Expedition 33 instead... and then maybe the VII remake.

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The 7R series has the issue of being a full series of games that are actually weird meta sequels to 7, which is such a humongous game that I'm not convinced they'll actually get through all of it. Sticking within the IP, I'd recommend the pixel remasters(or even the 3D remakes of 3 and 4) and the PS1 games first and foremost.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

yes.
depends on how much focus they put on the story or what type of quests they contain, mainly in WoW playing and leveling together is also encouraged.
Most quests contain kill xx- amount of enemies, which doesnt even exists in FFXIV

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The Defias questline from Vanilla WoW in itself is better story, storytelling and pacing than FF14 MSQ from start to end. And that's like 0.1% of the game.

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Originally Posted by Kandraxx

The Defias questline from Vanilla WoW in itself is better story, storytelling and pacing than FF14 MSQ from start to end. And that's like 0.1% of the game.

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If you like bad story sure. I take FFXIV MSQ any time over that stupid questline and don't even make me tell what i think about the following of it at Cataclysm.

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Originally Posted by Kandraxx

The Defias questline from Vanilla WoW in itself is better story, storytelling and pacing than FF14 MSQ from start to end. And that's like 0.1% of the game.

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The defias storyline is more a zone questline that is also multimedia, such as with comics, which people do criticize blizzard for when it comes to important story moments that are not within the game itself.

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Originally Posted by BunnyBrat

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

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A good example is GW2 where you can do the entire story with friends. Qing into story instances with them and everything.

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

but a more WoW approach where you can work on the newest expansion early would make a lot of people happy and willing to play the game.

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Yeah, because people don't complain about the story in WoW, how every expansion resets whatever happened before, and it's again Alliance vs Horde.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I don't think the two have virtually anything to do with each other. Nor are the latest dungeons particularly "harder" than before; the "be here by X time" objectives are merely more visible. Casual content now has fewer and/or more lenient DPS checks, less need for coordination, and generally less cognitive load even before factoring in job kits.

Tanks can't die because the devs decided that people are more likely to play tanks, reducing queue quota bottlenecks, if they can be demi-gods, and healers are 20 shades of excess healing and a skill and a half of anything else because they decided that'd draw the most overall appeal to healers, not because we needed to save cognitive load for the present fights that, on average, take no more or take even less thinking ("monkey see, monkey do" included). When AST was running Sleeve Draw, Spread, and Royal Road and optimizing outcomes under varied conditions and per different compositions, we still had Mist Dragon offering far more difficulty than most Dawntrail dungeons.

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Which two? I'm not sure to see what parameters you're referring to?

Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.

There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute. Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?

I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters, that was my whole point. Tanks cannot die, healers are superficial, there is no mana or resource management left on any job, healing tools are through the roof, no more positioning problems, etc, because that's where the bulk of the engagement used to be, and this is also why trash packs that haven't changed unlike the bosses have become just... a bland afterthought. I can see that some people would find it harder because DDR talks to them more, which is fair. My point has always been that I do think however that the old model is superior not because of my own tastes, but also because it allowed to support struggling players a lot better whereas today you can't do much to help someone that is going to keep standing in the bad and die instantly again and again.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

The Underkeep really is a bizarre outlier and I can't imagine what happened in the design process.

I remember going through that wondering when the oh-so-funny gimmick mechanic was going to rise up and kill me, and it never did.

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We'll see how it goes with the next dungeon in august. In my opinion it will be a big tell whether or not they rescinded on their dungeon difficulty changes they brought with DT.

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Originally Posted by Shialan

Yeah, because people don't complain about the story in WoW, how every expansion resets whatever happened before, and it's again Alliance vs Horde.

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WoW's writing isn't stellar but I will say that it does at least know how to maintain a sense of intrigue and stakes in a way that XIV utterly dropped the ball on with EW by opting to terminate as many story threads as possible without actually presenting anything new in their place.

It kind of fundamentally took me out of XIV's setting once I came to the realization that nothing truly major or world-shaking is ever going to happen when we got through a literal apocalypse without any meaningful casualties or visible destruction in places we'd grown familiar with.

OP has a good point yeah.

Instanced battles being solo always felt bad when we were doing MSQ at launch with my friends. I understand some have to be solo, like the famous one in EW, but having multiplayer ones would feel fresher.
Same for Duty Support too, being able to tag in with another player and 2 NPCs would feel great too.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Which two? I'm not sure to see what parameters you're referring to?

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Job kit depth and combat content design.

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Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.

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It is subjective, yes, but for the life of me, I can't think of a boss with above-average difficult outside of the first boss of "Luigi's Mansion", and even that can be easily cheesed.

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There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute.

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• Reduce boss health by x% from start of mechanic, or mechanic continues applying another vuln stack every few seconds, eventually one-shotting, or to end pursuit phase which would otherwise kill someone.
• Kill adds or they explode, wiping the party.
• Kill add in time to create safety zone/launch pad, or wipe.
• Break barrier in time to stun mob and thereby survive heavy damage.
• Kill thing before it seeks down and kills a random target.
• Kill thing before it apply enough stacks, which explode upon reaching 3 for half your life's worth of damage... as an AoE.
• Can stunlock thing and burst it down to prevent tank receiving 40% more damage taken.
• Mob triples its damage after a cast X seconds into the fight and has untelegraphed cleaves that hit tanks for about 30% of their HP before said buff.
• Or, hell, even just actually threatening full pulls +/- environmental mechanics.

...Have these been purged from memory as well as implementation?

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Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?

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Cumulatively, from original, pre-power-creep XIV across to Shadowbringers? CC. Add gathers. Triggering ICDed environmentals. TTK management around DoTs and TP. Baiting out AoEs and other specials to reduce tank damage intake.

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I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters

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I said the opposite. I don't think job kits were unique in being simplified, I don't think encounters now are more complex than seen earlier, and I certainly don't think the simplifications were done just to support the shifts (simplifications towards DDR alone) in general combat design.

The simplifications to job design and content design are simply iterations of the same desire to smooth things down, not end and means to one another. DDR-fixation didn't cost us job kits. DDR-fixation cost us the bulk of what all we used to have in content design beyond DDR, while present smoothed-down job kits cost us what idiosyncrasies --the fun, the meh, and the fugly-- we had available in prior kit iterations. They didn't need each other to have narrowed down as they did. Interdependence between them only so far as caster mobility and the frequency & duration of discrete 'Move!' mechanics, which have been used as much as they have only because... we've apparently forgot how to design in anything else that could be of interest.

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

Get real people, the story drives the game but if it was purely a story game, it would have been dead long ago. The game survives by making you stay subscribed for 4 month periods between 6 hours of story. I don't know how people can't understand this.

And yes, as a new player looking for an MMO, they almost certainly wont make it to the endgame unless they bet on a story skip unless they also like 500 long visual novels. If the story was as story driven as you people claim, a monthly sub would not be justified.

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If the story was more playable with fun instances and you could bring friends in I'd understand, but like... even if Dawntrail's writing was stellar the problems persist. I loved Shadowbringers story, but I didn't redo the story nonstop for the two years of that expansion.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

The 7R series has the issue of being a full series of games that are actually weird meta sequels to 7, which is such a humongous game that I'm not convinced they'll actually get through all of it. Sticking within the IP, I'd recommend the pixel remasters(or even the 3D remakes of 3 and 4) and the PS1 games first and foremost.

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That's why I split it into FF games in general and modern FF games.
Some people can't get into really old graphics.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

WoW's writing isn't stellar but I will say that it does at least know how to maintain a sense of intrigue and stakes in a way that XIV utterly dropped the ball on with EW by opting to terminate as many story threads as possible without actually presenting anything new in their place.

It kind of fundamentally took me out of XIV's setting once I came to the realization that nothing truly major or world-shaking is ever going to happen when we got through a literal apocalypse without any meaningful casualties or visible destruction in places we'd grown familiar with.

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To be fair, both equally dropped the ball when it comes to their own lore. XIV in EW with "everything was always ancients" and WoW with...the entirety of Shadowlands.

But now that you mentioned it, the escalation of stakes became a complete mess in XIV. Up until the end of Stormblood the threat was comparatively small scale, maybe a nation in danger, at most a continent.
Then comes Shadowbringers and we suddenly need to save an entire world, even if that world is basically reduced to a few regions.
And in Endwalker we jump from that to saving the entire universe and all of existence.

New player experience is really good, as is the free-trial player experience pretty good, to be honest... But this is only by virtue of the fact that it masks the biggest issue plaguing this game which is patch and content schedule/pipeline.

Even then to be honest, it's going in the direction of... Not too great, seeing as they've demonstrated a willingness to devalue older content, and this is where FFXIV is not really a good MMO by any stretch of the imagination... Now obviously some people like that, e.g., being able to take extensive breaks and coming returning like you've essentially missed nothing whatsoever.

Generally speaking the game just lacks that immersive feel, and the substance behind the content absolutely sucks because player inconvenience cannot happen in any capacity.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

But now that you mentioned it, the escalation of stakes became a complete mess in XIV. Up until the end of Stormblood the threat was comparatively small scale, maybe a nation in danger, at most a continent.
Then comes Shadowbringers and we suddenly need to save an entire world, even if that world is basically reduced to a few regions.
And in Endwalker we jump from that to saving the entire universe and all of existence.

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It's a really common problem in storytelling. The next chapter has to be bigger and better than the last and eventually everything scales to the absurd. There is a similar problem with character traits that become more and more exaggerated over time until they dominate a character's personality and leave them as nothing more than a caricature of an actual person.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Generally speaking the game just lacks that immersive feel, and the substance behind the content absolutely sucks because player inconvenience cannot happen in any capacity.

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Everyone will have their own opinion but I think part of this comes from the story being so firmly on rails to the point where you can't even visit fluff areas like housing until you get to the point where the story says you can. The same repeated formula where you just so happen to unlock the same number of physical locations in sequential order. While ARR was not my favorite expansion, the ability to explore the entire world from the beginning gave it a sense of exploration and immersion that no later expansion could hope to match.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Everyone will have their own opinion but I think part of this comes from the story being so firmly on rails to the point where you can't even visit fluff areas like housing until you get to the point where the story says you can. The same repeated formula where you just so happen to unlock the same number of physical locations in sequential order. While ARR was not my favorite expansion, the ability to explore the entire world from the beginning gave it a sense of exploration and immersion that no later expansion could hope to match.

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It's a few things really..

Like this is a big one, since it makes the outline of the story extremely predictable, e.g., when hitting new zones, when hitting a trial, etc.,... Now granted, this has been a thing since HW... But it's also where a second point ties into it...

With how streamlined the levelling process is, there's just absolutely no reason to explore the world outside of doing the story, and obviously that can be done anyway, but it's like... When it's that streamlined, where you actually need to make an effort to not out-level the story, then just gets meaningless and hollow.

On their own they are all small things, but when you keep doing more, and taking more away then it just all compounds. It's one of those things where too much Quality of Life just rips the soul out of the game.