Eorzea feels like a world with no teeth.

[ToraFomalhaut]

Read what he was responding to. It wasn't that DarkSouls was better to ARR or not, it was that "no one liked falling into a pit and being blow up" and that it was "bad game design". If it was such a bad game design, then that series would have failed. If anything, many people and reviewers say DS is refreshing due to it's difficulty.

I have a lot of respect for the Demon / Dark Souls devs, they didn't insult my resolve or intelligence as a gamer and throw an 'on the rails' RPG at me. They were willing to punish me, cruelly and repeatedly until I learned what to watch for, learned how to survive and then learned how to use those dart traps in my favor by letting the enemies set them off first. As hard as it was the learning curve wasn't even that big. You learned all your basic skills needed for combat in the first 30 minutes, and every creature responded accordingly to those skills. Then you just had to hone your abilities, find your preferred fighting style and then actually be brave enough to explore the still wonderfully dangerous world.

If anything SE's stance at not wanting to 'stress' us out too much or make the game too hard for us to handle has come from a long line of developers continuously dumbing down their games so as to make it more 'accessible' (Yes I'm aware of primalHM and primalX fights, but even those are heavily scripted fights, learn the dance steps and you really don't have much of an issue outside of latency really). This is a insult to our capabilities, our intelligence and underestimation of their players abilities, skills and resolve to want to overcome greater challenges and has only fostered the concept of gamers not willing or be punished to given drastic consequences for messing up.

I don't want to sit in a lobby world and wait for my next DF to pop all the time. Difficult areas in the open worlds are far more dynamic and complex than any static dungeon developers can create because the open world areas have access to one element dungeons don't. The randomness of other players. You never know just exactly what's going on when you're watching them flee for the lives from 4-5 tough enemies, do you watch them get murdered or jump into the fray and turn the odds in their favor.

Or maybe you've been carefully sneaking your way through to the very heart of the stronghold or labyrinthine maze and all that stands between you and your goal is 3 very intimidating overlords, then all of a sudden from the left field comes tearing in a party of elite adventurers decimating everything in their path and freeing up your goal for you. Or on the flip side, perhaps today you weren't as sneaky as you thought you were and you end up as lunch for very hungry kobolds. Who knows? I don't and I like that.