Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[Deveryn]

That's just as likely to be because it takes them way too long to actually give people concrete answers. Was it on purpose? Maybe. People hyping up Island Sanctuary probably boosted Endwalker's sales.

But if they would've just come out from the start and told people "No, you will not be able to customize your island with housing items. No, it is not instanced housing. You have presets for how it looks and the gameplay is mostly passive resource generation" suddenly expectations would've been tempered and maybe all these people incredibly pissed about Island Sanctuary "breaking promises" wouldn't even exist...but it also would've made Island Sanctuary generate a lot less hype.

The idea that Island Sanctuary, not the closing of this epic saga, boosted Endwalker sales has me rollin'.

Yoshi actually said point blank "It's not housing" The description they gave was simple and accurate, talking about placing buildings, growing crops. At no point did they say you could get into deep customization.

And that is the part that so irritates me -- most content being either only stalely 'reiterated' upon ("I heard you guys like 2 walls -> boss -> repeat") such that a content format becomes increasingly self-similar, left one-and-done, or just ignores assumes any improvement anywhere in a given model will be taken as a hefty net positive (even if other areas fall notably short), with no real communication with players to try to parse out what parts appealed and what didn't (falling back instead of 'was it played' and typically conflating the results of bribes with intrinsic value).

Dungeons became hallways because so many players didn't want to let others explore. I remember it was a good few months before I ever got places like Sastasha or Haukke fully explored. They could see it in their logs that no one was touching these areas, so there was no point in continuing that kind of design.

[Shurrikhan]

Dungeons became hallways because so many players didn't want to let others explore. I remember it was a good few months before I ever got places like Sastasha or Haukke fully explored. They could see it in their logs that no one was touching these areas, so there was no point in continuing that kind of design.

It isn't not as if dungeons are as narrowly designed as they are solely because they decided against room for exploration, of all things. There's a good dozen other constraints there between "a curated environment-delving combat experience that features both bosses and non-boss packs" and what we actually see.

Not bothering with unrewarding side-rooms is fine -- probably even for the best, so long as that design approach doesn't extend into other areas; it's the many, many other ways and degrees of stale design in XIV's dungeons that ticks people off.

That said, it's not necessarily the case that people didn't like X just because they didn't do X when the rewards for doing it just weren't there (especially, in a game that otherwise largely ensures breadth of reward). Siderooms are, by nature of having to backtrack, less efficient. They're also more tenuous, by nature of being less obvious and there possibly being members more pressed for time. If the devs wanted them actually done... they'd need to have given them decent enough rewards. The closest they ever got to that was the unique crafting ingredients, but one could mirror those stats with other recipes just a few levels higher.

[R041]

It isn't not as if dungeons are as narrowly designed as they are solely because they decided against room for exploration, of all things. There's a good dozen other constraints there between "a curated environment-delving combat experience that features both bosses and non-boss packs" and what we actually see.

Not bothering with unrewarding side-rooms is fine -- probably even for the best, so long as that design approach doesn't extend into other areas; it's the many, many other ways and degrees of stale design in XIV's dungeons that ticks people off.

Right, it really comes down to HOW they designed those paths and rooms. Part of the problem was the room design was usually just 1 separated room with 1-2 mobs and a note? Ignore.

Instead, it should have been a fork with a decision of 2 big creatures, 10 little melee creatures, deadly traps and 2 range creatures. So you make decisions based on your comp and tank, and this encourages discussion. Not just for the sake of looking for some dungeon text.

I feel that WoW can be a bit extreme there, but their ability to have variety is way better and refreshing for the most part. We don't even have wandering packs anymore, nothing to avoid or manage. It all just happens, it's a guaranteed hallway and they all do the same exact thing. Even Variant, which they promised well.. VARIETY. Is absolutely horrible at this STILL.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Right, it really comes down to HOW they designed those paths and rooms. Part of the problem was the room design was usually just 1 separated room with 1-2 mobs and a note? Ignore.

Instead, it should have been a fork with a decision of 2 big creatures, 10 little melee creatures, deadly traps and 2 range creatures. So you make decisions based on your comp and tank, and this encourages discussion. Not just for the sake of looking for some dungeon text.

I feel that WoW can be a bit extreme there, but their ability to have variety is way better and refreshing for the most part. We don't even have wandering packs anymore, nothing to avoid or manage. It all just happens, it's a guaranteed hallway and they all do the same exact thing. Even Variant, which they promised well.. VARIETY. Is absolutely horrible at this STILL.

the problem with giving those kind of choices is that as we all know with the community, people will find the most optimal route/strategy to go through so that choice might as well not even be there. And its because of this that forced the devs to respond in kind with how current design works. Its kinda sad, because one we cant fault the players here, but I also wouldnt fault the devs since honestly there's no actual point to the exploration in the old dungeon design we have now.

[Deveryn]

the problem with giving those kind of choices is that as we all know with the community, people will find the most optimal route/strategy to go through so that choice might as well not even be there. And its because of this that forced the devs to respond in kind with how current design works. Its kinda sad, because one we cant fault the players here, but I also wouldnt fault the devs since honestly there's no actual point to the exploration in the old dungeon design we have now.

As one youtuber put it, people are optimizing the fun out it. Knowing this, they go for more of a visual feast in dungeons and leave the more complex stuff to Extreme / Savage.

[Shurrikhan]

Right, it really comes down to HOW they designed those paths and rooms. Part of the problem was the room design was usually just 1 separated room with 1-2 mobs and a note? Ignore.

Instead, it should have been a fork with a decision of 2 big creatures, 10 little melee creatures, deadly traps and 2 range creatures. So you make decisions based on your comp and tank, and this encourages discussion.

Would also allow for more diverse encounters without jobs being too forced on a dungeon-by-dungeons basis.

I imagine that discussion would very quickly turn tacit (or, replaced by automatic expectations for this or that comp or tank that one is expected to know by their third run or so), but having more choices in route allows the dungeons to soften the differences between meta comp picks and the rest without requiring homogeneity of jobs or content, and that is already a huge boon.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Would also allow for more diverse encounters without jobs being too forced on a dungeon-by-dungeons basis.

I imagine that discussion would very quickly turn tacit (or, replaced by automatic expectations for this or that comp or tank that one is expected to know by their third run or so), but having more choices in route allows the dungeons to soften the differences between meta comp picks and the rest without requiring homogeneity of jobs or content, and that is already a huge boon.

Designing alternate paths wouldnt really solve the job homogeny because every mob encounter is literally dealt with the same role comp. No job is going to have any advantage over the other because mobs dont have any sort of weaknesses or tactics like in other rpgs. Literally we'd just be choosing "do we want to take this room with more mobs or less mobs?" Also the lack of gaining exp even makes this extremely moot.

I would instead like to make alternate paths to find hidden extra treasure (that you cant backtrack) or heck maybe even giving alternate bosses. Now this is the reason why we have variant dungeons existing but we'll have to wait till future expansions to see how much progress that content plays out.

[Absurdity]

Designing alternate paths wouldnt really solve the job homogeny because every mob encounter is literally dealt with the same role comp. No job is going to have any advantage over the other because mobs dont have any sort of weaknesses or tactics like in other rpgs. Literally we'd just be choosing "do we want to take this room with more mobs or less mobs?" Also the lack of gaining exp even makes this extremely moot.

Obviously it wouldn't fix the job design, we're dealing with 2 separate problems here, boring job design and incredibly boring dungeon design, both stacking up in for example expert roulette to give a rather unsatisfying gameplay experience.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Obviously it wouldn't fix the job design, we're dealing with 2 separate problems here, boring job design and incredibly boring dungeon design, both stacking up in for example expert roulette to give a rather unsatisfying gameplay experience.

I understand but the solutions provided are still faulty. The only way they could keep it more engaging is to either revamp the combat system to be more akin to what it was before, back when weaknesses, and debuffs and TP judged your playstyle or to go with a more rogue-like experience for dungeons. The problem with these two is that both options wouldnt sit well with the majority of players; with more engaging and complex combat making some of the combat potentially more frustrating for casuals (as it was in the past back when we still had those old systems) or with dungeons having more paths to explore but with the optimized playerbase always going for the most optimal route, those choices wont matter (as seen with old Toto-rak despite being a maze, people always went the optimal way anyway).

[Shurrikhan]

Designing alternate paths wouldnt really solve the job homogeny because every mob encounter is literally dealt with the same role comp.

I didn't say it would solve job homogeneity. But if you have content homogeneity w/o job homogeneity, you're going to have 1-5 jobs outperforming the rest and becoming go-to picks not just sometimes... but nearly all the time. And if you have both content and job homogeneity, imbalances are that much more sensitive to changes, since the jobs generally less favorable for underperforming in raw throughput over time, etc., can neither possess nor utilize any redeeming features.

No, content diversity won't solve job homogeneity. Content diversity merely reduces the likelihood of job design excusing itself deeper and deeper towards homogeneity because it offers new and different levers for diversity in job design to pull differently.

The problem then, though, becomes that without truly stellar design and/or many iterations of polish so that nearly every job can offer to a fight advantages that are distinct but roughly equal in value, you end up then with go-to picks on a fight-by-fight basis. While more diverting and offering objectively more to experience within the game, that can also be more annoying, given the time the game milks from (or to be a) multileveler(s).

You can still get a greater sum of diversity and parity in the meantime, though, by just making it so a given instance isn't as likely to pedestal or dumpster a given job by offering more choices by which that instance can be run, as per R041's example of multiple paths. That's something specific to dungeons, while the likes of trials and raids would need more sophisticated solutions, but we were discussing dungeons, after all.

Tl;dr:
If you want jobs not to play the same, there needs to be a playground in which for them to play differently. There's only so much distinction one can get out of {Pull All Trash and Just AoE it Down x2, Bossx1, Repeat}. Job diversity and content diversity pretty much have to be taken as a leap together.