To those who played FF11...

[Vhailor]

FFXI's designed really catered to people who had the time and the desire to eat, breathe, and sleep a single MMORPG as their sole means of entertainment for months/years at a time. As a result, the game's world had more depth, was more involved, simply leveling up let alone unlocking new jobs and completing quests all felt like real accomplishments. But if you didn't have the time, or you were someone who liked switching between a variety of games, you'd quickly find yourself left behind and constantly trying to find a new group of players to connect with each time you came back.

FFXIV's progress, in comparison, feels like it has far less impact because it's possible to solo most of it, and finding a party has been simplified into the duty finder system. Because it's far less challenging to actually find a group to play with, each step is far less memorable, but at the same time it makes the game far more accessible to people who aren't looking to devote their heart and soul into a single game.

I'm actually not so sure I agree with this. Because progress was slower, and itemization was horizontal, it was quite difficult to actually be truly left behind. I know I took regular breaks from my end-game LS for months at a time, but when I popped back in, guess what? They were doing the same runs as before - just with different people needing the loot. I always found it quite easy to slip back into things, particularly since FFXI offered far more flexible group sizes.

In contrast, FFXIV's rigid construction of end-game content and rapid pace of itemization make breaks quite difficult. If I quit FFXIV for six months, I'm going to (a) lose my house; (b) no longer be sufficiently geared for Savage / Ultimate content; (c) no longer be familiar with the mechanics in the current batch of Trials and Raids; and (d) likely find my spot filled by someone else if I happened to be part of a static group. That's a pretty stiff penalty for taking a break, much stiffer than anything I can recall in FFXI.

I'd also point out that FFXIV's progress is less memorable for a variety of reasons. Part of that is the solo'ability, and simplified grouping, but the game is overall just too convenient for its own good. The impact of travel conveniences alone is mind-boggling: for virtually no money whatsoever, you can get to literally any point of the world within five minutes. That is insane - and it reduces the scope of Eorzea in a way that never happened with Vana'diel. Then there's the meaningless and trivially easy gear repairs; the easy availability of Gil; the incredibly solid gear gifted to you simply for progressing in the MSQ; the smooth as silk path to 70 wherein you don't have to grind for XP at all - just complete quests. Even crafting, which is an area of FFXIV I well and truly love, is too easy: I can HQ any recipe below 65ish with virtually no effort and no HQ ingredients, and all but a handful of ingredients are trivially easy to acquire, in bulk, within a few days.

All that convenience has a cost.

This game never stood on its own, it's a continuous fan-service lobby with barely any identity. The game's got a good base to shine, but it isn't trying to build itself off that base, but rather move around it and making sure it doesn't stray away, and the result is a stale content cycle where you can pretty much predict what they're gonna add, with different QoL adjustments here and there. Even more so, they've been adding less dungeons than before, and considering that's the most populated type of content, that's not so good of an idea. They get massively lost when they try something new (looking at you, Diadems), and then go back to their safe zone.

Very very much this. I mean, FFXIV event kept the same races, roughly the same city-state theming, dozens of the same models (many of which continue to be introduced today, like Antlions in Stormblood)... it never stood on its own. I will say that XIV 1.0 had its own identity, but it was a bad one.