Has WoW gotten "too" family friendly?

[MsSideEye]

No listen,. From my early days of playing JRPG's including many of the FF games themselves, I had it in my head that you level up a character to achieve a goal. There is a story going on in the game and your a part of it. Sometimes a small part, sometimes a larger one. Regardless you did your part and along the way gained experience and therefore leveled up as a result, thus allowing you to do more things in the game and progress the storyline. Once you got strong enough to progress to the end of the story and defeat the last boss(s), or challenge(s), the game had to offer, that was more or less IT.

Sometimes you could of course continue playing from your last save file and finish up some loose ends, etc. Sometimes you could do a sort of new game+ mode. Either way. That was that. With the advent of MMORPG's starting with me when I started playing "EverQuest", the Idea was posed that the quest would never end, and thus you could keep playing indefinitely.

However after doing this very thing for years and years to no end, I have grown a bit tired of just playing a single character for the sake of playing and keep doing new things at level cap. This is why I enjoy remaking characters and going through the heroes journey again. However with FFXIV this is a major time investment. I enjoy playing a few hours here and there on one character then playing a different class/character, then next day picking something else. This is what keeps me entertained.

What it sounds like isn't so much you wanting to play an MMO at this point. It's sounds like you're wanting to play a Roguelike.

You being bored with your character and getting trapped in the mmo style of things isn't a problem of the game itself, it's the problem of what you're interests lies in right now. You say you want to be able to do different things and switch things up... and yet that's EXACTLY what XIV does. If you don't have any interest in being a tank, switch over to DPS or heals. It's just that simple. Same things for leveling. Not interested in dungeon spamming? There's fates. There's quests. There's Eureka and Bozja.

The only thing that's stays the same is your character and the progress you've made on them, and that's something that's also easily changeable for races since there's no race restrictions here.

If anything, by the reasonsing you've given, you should love XIV MORE because it has those options and abilities and WoW doesn't.

[Staremonemesis]

Yes, and so was BFA. As frowny facedly self-serious as that expansion got, they were all in on the Dreamworks Face artstyle WoD had established, which has only further metastasized every year since. The darkest of the empty gratuity, like the vulpera elimination squads and the Forsaken-run death camps, was removed prior to launch for being "too far." The visual design for a dragon-seared corpse rotting at the bottom of the sea for 20 years turned out to be "sailor man is a bit wet and looks sad." The moral takeaway of what was basically the culmination of 15 years of conflict amounted to, once again, "de Horde be a family," now with the addendum of "Sylvanas is our daydrunk wine aunt who needs to go to a rehab," and "the world is our home." God help you if you consider the implications of an orcish veteran of the First War making the latter statement for so much as an instant.

The meme that BFA was "dark," "old Warcraft," "metal" etc because there was a war on, because the factions incurred losses, or because Everquest transplant Afrasiabi had a creative hand in it is just that, a meme. It was the same MCU wannabe Golden-Danuser bilge as anything after, just with a lot more of what it considered "baggage" still left to sort out before they could move on to their real priority as storytellers: https://fairplayalliance.org/wp-cont...-Framework.pdf