Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
A lot of it is because the game world felt like an actual world. You could pick a direction to run in and explore and find yourself travelling across an entire continent. Or jumping off of the side of Teldrassil to see what would happen, miraculously surviving and then spending half an hour swimming around the entirety of it in order to find a way back because you forgot what a hearthstone is.

FFXIV lacks that sort of engagement with the world. You can't, for example, climb to the highest point of the world as a mage and then cast slow fall in order to float across the skies and race a friend. I miss that sort of thing, honestly - and whilst others may not care, it's enough to contribute to a lot of the MSQ's coming across as mindless busywork.
On the other hand, a lot of it was empty space, half-finished concepts, and general time-wasting with no actual purpose. The kind of thing that most people nowadays write off as filler and padding.