Dungeons need some spice!

[Eli85]

What "people"? This is the oldest excuse in book for any content creator.
Let's be honest. It is more demanding and time consuming to create "interesting" stuff and it doesn't sell nearly as well as new glams on Mogstation.

Look, I like many things about FFXIV, but normal dungeon design is incomparably weaker that what WoW or LotRO had 10+ years ago.

Friggin Scarlet Monastery in WoW or Barrow Downs in LoTRO had more challenge and atmosphere than the lifeless corridors of any FFXIV dungeon past lvl 50.
And those were very low level instances, no need to pull out heavyweights like BRD, Stratholme or some Mines of Moria dungeons.

It is one of the biggest weakspots of FFXIV (the other being atrocious MSQ cutscene direction/presentation in ARR).

Just going to pull this quote out to make my point.

In this game, whenever there is non-savage and non-ultimate content released and it's not faceroll easy, the nerf it complaints come out in droves. S-E has tried time and time again, in different ways and means, to infuse challenge into dungeons and ... a lot of people whined about the difficulty, and when they looked at the analytics of wipes vs clears, whelp, that's when the nerfs came in.

Look, I've been playing MMOs for a long time, and I personally loved LOTRO's dungeons. They were long, not easy, and unique. It was great. But we are in a very, very different era right now. There are so many players who, as surprising as this may seem, do not want challenge. At all. Players today would rather quit the game than overcome the challenge. Sad but true. It's the current gaming landscape that we're in.

[Liam_Harper]

Look, I've been playing MMOs for a long time, and I personally loved LOTRO's dungeons. They were long, not easy, and unique. It was great. But we are in a very, very different era right now. There are so many players who, as surprising as this may seem, do not want challenge. At all. Players today would rather quit the game than overcome the challenge. Sad but true. It's the current gaming landscape that we're in.

This is where we could do with the Mythic+ system from WoW, an optional pre-made harder version of current dungeons with multiple levels of scaling difficulty and additional challenges. Those were hugely popular during their Legion expansion. It also means the base Normal mode can be easy for those who just want story.