Game Design Concepts that the Devs and Playerbase has Forgotten

[Malthir]

Hey, you were the one talking about solo instances and then started bringing up non-instanced combat. I had no idea people consider killing 3 random monsters that die in less than 30 seconds compelling combat gameplay. Especially since if you add it all up it might account for 5 extra minutes of combat compared to the 20 hours of walking, talking, reading and cutscenes that make up the 70% of the game.

To a degree you're right, they really need to go back to looking at how other MMO's do it and mimic it, like they did when they made ARR. Take, WoW, ESO, GW2, SWTOR as examples

• WoW, Your quests takes you to an area with stages of objectives in very mob packed zones where you have to fight, get the next objective rinse repeat. You spend most of the time out in the field not select 3 things now come back for 2 hours more cutscenes.
• GW2, Their world quest system is probably the best style of overworld content and something that FF14 could rather easily incorporate, it's basically a more evolved form of Fates.
• ESO, Small story areas with self contained stories that involve instance and fights and sometimes puzzles.
• SWTOR, They should look at how they handle their MSQ system. You have an objective inside a zone generally filled with enemies you have to fight your way through to get to your objective. An example of how this could be implemented in 14 would be, you must go to this cave, and instead of the current system being the objective 20 foot past the cave entrance you do a cutscene and leave, add more depth a sprawling cave system we can't mount run through where we have to fight our way to the objective.

In part I think the game might be better if they stopped letting use travel to teleport out in the field, as in you have to get to an aether crystal to teleport, keep return which functions as a hearth. Basically how it used to be, it may sound annoying but it's much better for engagement and making the world actually feel engaging.