A small concern with dungeon designs

[Lauren]

Even during ARR, people wanted to rush through the "mini-exploratory" dungeons. There's literally no benefit apart from a kind of crappy treasure chest at the end.

I think the current format + more interesting mechanics for getting from A to B and bosses would be nice

[ReynTime]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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).