A small concern with dungeon designs

[DPZ2]

For the most part, those 'unique twists' might have been a relic of the 1.0 version of those dungeons. Try looking for 'FFXIV 1.0 dungeons' to get an idea of the assets reused from 1.0 in ARR dungeons.

I found references to the fact that FFXIV 1.0 had exactly 0 dungeons at release. Only 1 of the 4 dungeons added later were lower-level (Toto-Rak, if I remember correctly, was a level 25 dungeon. The others were level 50 instances).

[Vyrerus]

The problem isn't even necessarily lack of branching paths.
It's that in ARR there was clearly a lot more care into making the dungeons feel distinct beyond what they looked like or what the flashy shallow set-pieces were. A lot of Lv50 ARR dungeons are very linear too, but they still had some kind of unique twist that wasn't just aesthetic to make them unique.
And they abandoned that once Heavensward came out.

Whatchu talkin' bout Willis? Elaborate.

[Karshan]

Maybe that should be the other way around, if only so the more elaborate dungeons aren't the ones ending up in the Levelling Roulette.

Until a relic step asks of you to grind these dungeons and then you'll be very sorry. Without mentionning Expert roulette 5 times a week for the cap, you want five a 12 minutes highway and not 25 min of roaming.

Leveling at least you'd get more engaging content.

[ssunny2008]

Until a relic step asks of you to grind these dungeons and then you'll be very sorry. Without mentionning Expert roulette 5 times a week for the cap, you want five a 12 minutes highway and not 25 min of roaming.

Leveling at least you'd get more engaging content.

Such quest steps are design flaws in my eyes. SE seems to gave us to cater us with something new or interesting in this way. "Repeat old content or fates" is the way to go. Even sidequests are nothing special. You arrive at a new aetheryt and see 20 quests spawn at once. MSQ is like "You´ve a char, but we don´t want you to play it. Here check out the dawn-gang, isn´t that cool to play 3-key Alphinaud or Estinien?!"

Dungeons could be way more with a little bit efford. And noone would mind to repeat them like 100 times if they would be somehow rewarding, challenging or would slightly change to player decisions. Instead of such stuff they´re there for some XP in daily roulette or to get some endgame tokens. Game-holding system at its best.

[viola_vilgrantz]

I already really was addressing the fact that most people want to blast through the dungeon and not look back, though. What I was trying to say was, make the dungeon the same length as before, with the same amount of time spent, but visually speaking, it feels more diverse and branched off. By the end of the day, in technical terms, you're still doing the same thing, just not walking through a hallway to do it.

The key is breaking format more and adding more interesting things and paths to it, without actually adding on time wasted to do it. I'd even say quite a few Shadowbringers dungeons, later on, do achieve that.