Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[Shurrikhan]

Looking back I don't think casual started being used by players as a skill tier until WoW started getting popular. Before then Casual and Hardcore just indicated the average time a person spent playing the game and meant nothing in regards to player skill.

Yup. Even by the time players with more hours were more commonly intersecting those of fewer hours in Heroic Cata dungeons, the distinction was generally just between various flavors of "knows their stuff" and "needs to practice a fair bit more", rather than a "casual"/"hardcore" distinction.

...I'd posit, though, that even here, in game, the use of either term is far less prevalent than what the forums indicate, largely complement to the many threads blaming this or that change on X or Y group (sometimes reasonably, sometimes as connected only by painful levels of conflation).

One of the things about FFXI though is that a majority of the game's areas were accessible without having to complete the MSQ story lines. For the most part they only needed to be done to specific points if you wanted to unlock specific "endgame" content. This actually when looking at this title and other more recent MMOs to me feels like a better game design choice falling more in line with open world RPGs like Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, Outer Worlds, Biomutant, FFXV, etc where players were free to wander off to poke at optional content in all kinds of difficulties and level ranges then come back to the main story when they wanted to progress it. It didn't feel obligatory to do in order to progress and do anything else.

At the same time, though, it DOES make sense not to be able to, say, get to the other side of Baelsar's Wall until you actually... get through/across Baelsar's Wall, or to Othard before having taken the ship to Othard. As such, I can't say that any of the restrictions the MSQ places on our travel feel excessive. On the contrary, most of them protect our sense of immersion.

Now, would I ideally allow for better marked (and more interesting, cohesive, and involved) side-stories that'd then be separable from the MSQ? Absolutely. Such becomes increasingly beneficial as those story arcs grow older, but they honestly ought to be future-proofed towards from the start.

The stat squish they say will happen in Endwalker will hopefully slow down the power creep.

Hopefully, but unless that's a specific aim, there's no reason to think it'll happen, sadly. Scaling everything down proportionately, for instance, to the smallest ilvl step possible (and perhaps even collapsing some ilvl tiers across ARR) still will not, in itself, combat power creep. They'd need, purely and simply, reduce the rate of increase across those problematic tiers (e.g., 65+ Stormblood, which accelerates rather suddenly, iirc).