Realm Reborn had way more content when current expansions

[Miguel85NYC]

In Realm reborn we got over 30 dungeons, 5 beast tribes, Events were way better, Leveling was a lot more fun..

WTH HAPPEN??

Now all we get are 13 dungeons 3 beast tribes and OMG leveling is boring AF.
Did SE lower the budget for the game or something? How can YoshyP be proud of this?

[NegativeS]

This has been a trend since Heavensward.

[Vedauwoo]

Um.... "ARR" was essentially the base game....all the others are add-on content.... makes perfect sense.

[Miguel85NYC]

Um.... "ARR" was essentially the base game....all the others are add-on content.... makes perfect sense.

Not a good reason to have leveling this bad now

[Jeeqbit]

In ARR, they had some dungeons largely done (from 1.0) and just reworked them. A lot of fights, including with the first few primals, side dungeons like Dzemael Darkhold and Aurum Vale, and many of the Bahamut fights were based on things from 1.0.

In ARR, they got almost everyone in Square Enix to work on the game - pausing their work on all their other projects, which is not the case now. This was a temporary, emergency thing they did to save the game and remake it in 2 years. A large amount of this was work on the engine and converting their new Single Player engine into an MMORPG engine.

Despite all of that, ARR was mostly a simple story, constantly showing us history flashbacks of 1.0, and creating a story to salvage and "connect the dots" of the random stuff that happened in 1.0, such as explaining the Echo, the mysterious hooded thugs that we call Ascians, the circle of knowing, Midgardsormr, Gaius and all these primals and beast tribes. So despite almost everyone in Square Enix working on the game, they still just barely squeezed out a simple story that cleverly salvaged 1.0's lore somehow and reused a lot of assets. But I think figuring out how to salvage the lore the way they did was probably very challenging, especially when that lore eventually had to continue to be salvaged up through Endwalker to give Ascians all this depth.

So you see, base ARR is just 14 dungeons but if you exclude the side ones reworked from 1.0 it's less.

Now what about the PATCH dungeons? Well, we didn't have a wide variety of dungeons back then which made it poor competition to an MMORPG like WoW, so they decided to make 3 dungeons per patch. Now that we have around 100 dungeons, there is no need to make so many, so they reduced the amount they make.

To say there was more content in ARR is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, we lost 10 sidequest dungeons from patches, but we gained 3 variant dungeons, 3 criterion dungeons, a deep dungeon, normal raids (normal/savage didn't used to be split), a field operation (ie. Diadem/Eureka/Bozja/Shade's Triangle), a Chaos Raid, misc content such as the Masked Carnivale and Exploratory content (ie. Ishgard Restoration/Island Sanctuary/Cosmic Exploration). The closest you could say it had to Ultimate was a savage version of coils, but there are even 2 Ultimate fights now usually.

Now, there was more in the way of grindy stuff like relic weapons in ARR and HW that weren't nerfed to the point of, say, spending 1,500 tomestones. But this was making you do stuff like FATE farming and leves - the sort of stuff people on these forums would complain about being forced to do anyway because they don't like FATEs. And in any case we will get such a grind with the Field Operation.

[Hypnotic13371337]

I miss having all of the optional dungeons to help pad out Expert roulette ._.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

In Realm reborn we got over 30 dungeons, 5 beast tribes, Events were way better, Leveling was a lot more fun..

WTH HAPPEN??

Now all we get are 13 dungeons 3 beast tribes and OMG leveling is boring AF.
Did SE lower the budget for the game or something? How can YoshyP be proud of this?

Leveling was more fun? Didn't people just spam fates because dungeon exp was so poor?
Also, there was the same amount of raids and ex fights. There was no other content but dungeons. So no, arr didn't have more content.

We have far more content now than we ever got back then.

[TheMightyMollusk]

People have also been complaining about ARR's extremely long post-game for years. We don't have that problem any more.

[Miguel85NYC]

People have also been complaining about ARR's extremely long post-game for years. We don't have that problem any more.

reason why we get crap content now...

[Krojack]

In Realm reborn we got over 30 dungeons, 5 beast tribes, Events were way better, Leveling was a lot more fun..

WTH HAPPEN??

Now all we get are 13 dungeons 3 beast tribes and OMG leveling is boring AF.
Did SE lower the budget for the game or something? How can YoshyP be proud of this?

When they cut back on dungeons YoshiP literally said they were AND why they were. I'm sure you can find him answering your question when he gave it before ShB release.