Exploration?

I'm sad to say, but by turning every cave, crypt, and creature hole in the world into an instanced dungeon, they've kind of screwed the exploration aspect of the game. Exploration was honestly better in 1.0 I feel.

Yes, ARR makes a lot of improvements over the previous, but now the game kind of feels far too arcade-y. Queue up for a dungeon, get thrown in a group, fight stuff for an hour, get loot. Rinse, repeat. I know this has become a staple of MMOs as of late, but those other MMOs still had places to go that weren't instanced dungeons.

It's not even just dungeons. NMs have been reduced to repeatable FATE missions now also. What happened to just chancing upon unusual critters out in the wild?

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The game still has the second best crafting system I've ever experienced, and combat can be entertaining, if not repetitive at times, but the world...the world has majorly suffered. Its beautiful, and succeeds at giving a great sensation of your immediate environment's scale, but it's so structured now that it fails to trick the mind even a little into believing it's not artificial.

I think I have the exact opposite opinion of the game's exploration. More than any other MMO I've ever played FFXIV's world feels alive to me. Quests, story, and the like all play a role in this, but the way the world is built is the key. I love to explore and find the game provides me with plenty of opportunities. It seems like your only complaint is that there are no huge underground places to explore that aren't in a dungeon? But since when has exploration been limited to what's underground? And why wouldn't dungeons count as adding to the exploration?