Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

It's been pretty divisive I think.. It has a lot of good things, but also made a lot of sweeping changes to core systems and completely gutted a lot of personal expression in favor of streamlining everything. When you compare Heavensward to Endwalker, they're night and day of personal expression and RPG elements. But the same can be said for ARR to Heavensward.

I personally think they should have stayed on the path that ARR was heading, and they could have made the QoL changes we wanted in doing so. It was their own fault for locking critical abilities behind other secondary classes, so instead of balancing things out or making that experience easier - They opted to just destroy systems and put nothing in their place. This was the start of culling player self-expression, build capabilities, and RPG systems.

So, real quick... not a single ARR ability was pruned in Heavensward. Nor did HW prune Additional Actions or Additional Attributes. That all didn't happen until Stormblood.

Moreover, "bad because CBU:III didn't balance them" is somewhat inherent to that particular system. A Fracture balanced for Monk, who needed an additional GCD fill per 18|21|30s (dependent on SkS threshold) and had a 40% damage bonus via Twin+GL, wasn't about to also be balanced also for Dragoon, unless you broke the whole point of the Additional Actions as being... a shared pool of actions (rather than individually job-tailored, at which point you have unique job skills that just occasionally share name, VFX, and animation).

I preferred a more horizontal progression approach and would have FAR preferred the Additionals (Actions, Attributes) be reiterated upon (by very different means) over abandoning the project after a single attempt, absolute. But, in practice, losing Additional Actions wasn't some huge loss to gameplay nor complexity (outside of that GCD gap not being filled for MNK until 4.3 via TK rotations, reducing its GCD speed options). Nor was losing Additional Attributes noticeable to anyone but BLM (from Piety tiers). (For everyone else, they were all non-choices.)

Also the flying everywhere is absolutely egregious. You go from walking everywhere, and sometimes it takes a long time. To flying everywhere and it literally taking LONGER than it ever did walking in ARR. Because the maps are way too large.

Agreed, though possibly for slightly different reasons.

I have absolutely no issue with maps being bigger. I felt most ARR zones were damn near immersion-breakingly claustrophobic. Even the likes of Gyr Albanian's Peaks zone doesn't seem too large, to me -- but merely underutilized.

But, the inclusion of flying, itself, was both jarring and lackluster. Give me a physics-based model of flight with limited Stamina and those 'Aether Currents' being real things that slightly highway the map (especially around tighter canyons, passes, etc.), and I'm sold. But instead we got the most basic form of flight possible, gated by a really jank gimmick (even if I do appreciate the exploration requirement prior to that unlock).