Change the structure of the 4-dungeons, maybe?

[Shurrikhan]

And I'm just wondering how many people actually played it.

I haven't been back since it split into wings, and I'd pretty well undermanned or underleveled it each time, so my experiences are pretty biased. I just enjoyed the range of mob pulls, given vanilla abilities, and the differences between the two paths during full runs + the centaur mini-spiral and the portal therein. It wasn't anything as interesting as that first lower-man instance that came out in Stranglethorn Vale, but it was the first dungeon to capture that RPG feel for me, where Deadmines, BFD, and Gnomeregon were fairly fun designs but hadn't yet hit on that... color-palette, honestly. I guess you could consider it like Brayflox normal in that regard. /nostalgia_excuses_over

That said, I personally do not mind linearity. Once you have a goal in the dungeon, you beeline there either way and the nasty part in PUGs is that people might have different goals. One person might want an optional boss/route but the others not. See also: Silver Chests vs Speedrun, Gathering vs Battle in Diadem etc. I like that I don't have to first sit down for five minutes every time and discuss with the group which path we go, only for the healer to bail because he can't be arsed with an emperor run.

What irks me is that the dungeons feel very clinical. You can never jump down anywhere, the arenas feel artificial - Natural cavern systems shouldn't have perfectly round platform arenas all the time. I'd like the illusion that this was an actual place in the world, an area that technically belongs to the overworld but has been instanced for practical reasons, rather than completely disjointed.

And breaking the trash-boss-trash-boss pattern can be a part of that. Sometimes, I'd make more sense to deal with a trap filled corridor, run to safety from a falling ceiling after a boss fight, jump from stone to stone over lava or other things that make it seem a little more alive. Like a section where you ride the rails like in Alexander, except you have to jump and switch rails ever so often to avoid obstacles and dead ends. Or an Arena-style dungeon where you have nothing "but" boss fights coming at you in succession. Or the bad guy escapes after the second boss fight and you gotta chocobo race him for a section before the final battle. I'd gladly take that sort of variety over superficial path choices, truth be told.

I feel about the same way. I don't mind trying to go from point A to B, without much by way of additional paths, shortcuts, etc., so long as it's an engaging, beeline process. I just want the dungeons across that area to be more interesting. One of my design fetishes is that the paths should seem practical — that is to say, to the inhabitants of the area — but I'd gladly bits of that just to have more interesting encounters along the way. Pull trash to door, kill, kill boss, and repeat, is predominantly... trash.

My hopes for path choices, though, are less an organic spatter of analog choices which eventually narrow down to a mere few at best as they are forced variations. Let's say you have an open-looking dungeon, which has different roving packs of mobs around different themed areas the placement of which are slightly randomized. Visualize a section of jungle/canyon ruins, for instance, overrun with tenuously aligned or combating factions. Depending on the day, the weather, or whatever else, those factions will have expanded over more or less area, changing different encounters. Some of those can be particularly troublesome in certain areas, such as birds that can channel knockbacks in an area full of painfully damaging geysers, or charging bipedal lizards that can knock you off cliff paths into swarms of... additional nastiness and potential death. The point, though, is the areas. As a player who's gone through the instanced zone multiple times, you will already be aware of what environmental dangers lie where, but you might not be aware of how effective different enemies can be in those areas for many more runs, or how to deal with them.

Now, let's say each of these factions has a sort of leader mob, the collection of which makes up the bosses of the dungeon, appearing in different areas. You won't necessarily know who's where off the bat, but you can come to guess where to find the bosses based on the factions' presence. But moreover, you can defeat the bosses in order to cause faction mobs to weaken or flee, opening up paths that may otherwise be at least as hard as the boss itself, or use different devices or mechanics throughout the map (one of them being to start slaughtering the last mobs of a given faction in order to force the boss to come to you) in order to reposition the bosses, adjusting those fights too. You might have a path open only by having the, say... bipedal lizard boss charge into a column, toppling it as to form a bridge, or subdue the bird boss in order to fly, as a group, to another location, avoiding traps. These allow you different variations of the original dungeon, but not under the vague hope that people won't cut down to a few given choices; instead, because the viability of each route is shuffled about each time, you're simply forced to experience multiple routes over time, even when aiming for the optimal speed.