The moment I lowkey knew the game is fcked was when I saw the reception for "In from the cold" quest

I joined XIV during the 2021 WoW exodus. Before EW I managed to pretty much 100% the whole game (outside of hardcore content and professions). I disliked how from ARR (which I liked a lot) to ShB the gameplay to reading/watching ratio went in the favor of the latter, but the story kept me engaged and I had tons of content to do.

I remember how I was impressed when I played this quest. It was the perfect showcase of what games can do over other types of media. Storytelling via gameplay. And then people cried about it. I don't know if it was the majority or loud minority, but it did damage. They nerfed the quest and then we never got anything like it.

During 6.X and 7.0 I realized that I am playing an interactive novel. Something that you can watch on YouTube and get the same experience as playing.

Savage and Ultimate are not for me because they are not reactive, rather proactive gameplay.

The only real gameplay fun I had was Eureka/Bozja and Deep Dungeons solo, but the former can fairly quickly be completed, and the latter suffers from low level tedium after you wipe.

I find it very weird in general how XIV didn't move on from click on something and rare kill something quests. They added a few "vehicle" or rather different character scenarios, but there is like 5 of them, and then the fucking tailing quests, probably the most hated type of quest across gaming as a whole. Guild Wars 2 figured fun quest design over a decade ago and then WoW stole it too.

Hell, they removed any type of "elevation" in the game because of Turn 5.

I now came back to WoW, and I really enjoy the gameplay and all the different content you can push even solo. But the overdesign, dead old expansion content, and insane amount of grinds for every single facet of the game is off-putting.

I wish there was a game that is a mix of XIV/WoW, that takes the best of both.