Quote Originally Posted by Azurymber View Post
FFXI had the most amazing world of any MMO i have ever played. Not only that, but every zone had tons of cool places with different mobs to level on.

Leveling beastmaster surpassed any experience I have had in any other game. Having to seek out new camps, find secret caves, create my own camps (before they made mobs respawn) and survive, always ensured I was having a lot of fun.

I remember getting to Lufaise Medows for the first time, and how amazing it felt being one of the few on the servers to make it there. Exploring the sanctuary of zi'tah for the first time as a low level whitemage trying to sneak-invis past everything and eventually making it through Ro'Maeve to the hall of the gods. Finding out there are sewers underneath sandoria and windurst, and much more.

In FFXIV on the other hand, within the first few days of open beta I had pretty well gone -everywhere- in the world, including all the atherytes, all the areas with high level mobs, etc. I literally ran around trying to find cool unique things. Meaning i covered pretty well 100% of the world (running to every cave, every corner, etc).

Overall, I was really disappointed. I honestly hope 2.0 captures what FFXI was able to achieve. However, from the pics they have shown it looks like 2.0 will be a bunch of small interconnected instanced-like zones. Which honestly looks really disappointing.
I was BST in FFXI and that was my experience as well. I had a blast. Toraimarai Canal was one of my favorite zones for BST leveling and I remember how much fun it was to do the quest to gain entrance the back way. Such a wealth of little discoveries waiting to be made. Also challenges. Soloing or Duoing certain NMs. All that magic is completely missing in FFXIV, replaced really with one activity - the instance grind. Grind an instance. Repeat. That's all there is. Probably why I haven't played much in the last 3 weeks.