Man, you captured my thoughts exactly. Every now and then in FFXI I'd stop and think "Wow, look how far I've come". The world was massive and you were stacked with goals to reach. Every new zone I discovered was exciting. Hell, I remember when I first walked into Ro'maeve and I was like "Whoah, better turn back this place looks dangerous", only to finally come back and get to Sky (which was amazing). In XIV I made it a point to check out the other cities since I assumed it would be like XI where walking from one city to another took you through a collection of different zones and completely new sights, but here it's simply [Ul'dah > walk through one zone > boat > Limsa]. I explored every zone in the game and all I could say was "That's it?".