Quote Originally Posted by Striker44 View Post
This is, frankly, entirely an "us" issue (as in the players). They used to create dungeons with multiple paths, optional side areas, etc.. What did we the playerbase do? Find which path was "optimal" for the fastest clear, and completely ignore anything that was optional. Case in point - every single ARR dungeon I played, the only way I ever got the map completion achievements for them (which involves exploring all of those side paths) was to queue as the tank and insist on going to them. This isn't about SE. This is what we did as players when they created non-linear content. I'm not surprised at all that SE simply started designing the content the way we insisted on playing it anyway.
That's understandable in MMORPG, but people don't meta game single player games like that, especially on the first playthrough. Open world, branching dungeons, elemental resistances and similar systems will be taken advantages of or minmaxed, but in single player games, it doesn't matter, you're not peer pressured, if you find some cool stuff you can do or cool places you can go, then just do it.

FF16 already has those easy mode rings or whatever, and it's up to you if you want to use them or play the game properly. If people truly want to metagame 16, they would just use them, but that's not the case for majority of players, they do want to play the game. Which is why you can't just put FFXIV and other FFs into the same basket, FFXIV has reasons why everything is so linear, and other FFs just don't have any excuses and should do better. After all, what's the point of RPG when you have so little choices? Why won't you make movie or some show instead?