Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
3. Exploration and creativity is not going to get fostered or done well for the rest of XIV's life imo. CBU III enjoys heavily guiding and restricting players to exactly what they want them to do and nothing else.

A giant lobby where everyone just sits around doing nothing after the MSQ and insta queuing to linear dungeons over and over again is really tired imo.
This gradually beat down my hope. I started out as a super fan. ARR was pretty good for a 2013 game done to a rushed schedule with expectations of a much smaller playerbase. The game began to thrive, the playerbase and revenue grew massively, they've had 10 more years to map out its evolution.

Evolution never came. The MSQ chain that started in ARR just continued on forever in much the same manner. Through that we unlock dungeons, they are all formatted the same way with corridor and 3 bosses, worthless loot. We still collect tomes and replace all of our gear each new season with basically the same stuff but +30 item level added. Any new ideas get isolated in side content bubbles so they can't affect the rest of the game.

Games used to only do this in their dying days, the maintenance mode. Maintain the old systems and just plug content into that template. This game has done it the entire lifetime, stick within the rigid walls of the template they launched with, same core content delivered in the same familiar pattern.