Final Fantasy XIV

As the next MMO release is perpetually one year away, I decided to give one of the latest released MMOs a try. Latest being 2010, so almost 1.5 decades ago now, but sadly, that's the state of MMOs these days. I'm talking about Final Fantasy XIV, which I got a bunch of my friends to try out using the free trial.

I'm going to be brief, and just say that it was just about the most disappointing experience I could have had. If I had to name one unique thing about this game, where it showed innovation that MMOs before it didn't do, then I couldn't. Not only was the level up process, questing, exploration, combat, and everything else I could think of, as generic as possible, it was also downright bad.
We started off in a "recommended" server, which doubled all our experience gain. This meant we were always overlevelled for all content, making every encounter in the game trivial all the way up to the end of the trial. An exception was cases where our level would be brought down for doing the content, removing some of our stats and skills, effectively nullifying the point of leveling up in the first place.
The quests were not only very basic, only being "go there and talk to that guy" or "kill X monsters", but they were also placed in the most incovenient manner, where you couldn't even go gather all the quests in an area and then go do them. Most quests were locked behind other quests, and the amount of running back and forth between empty swathes of land (or trash mobs you had no reason to kill) seemed as if it was purposefully done to inconvenience players. Without exaggeration, about 80% of the game was not "gameplay" by my definition. It was running from place to place and reading/skipping dialogue.
Exploration felt nonexistant. No secrets, no collectibles, no areas of note as far as I found. There was no reason and nothing to be gained from running to an area that you weren't asked to go to.
Combat, what should be the most important part of a game like this, was also laughable. Not only was it outdated, it was already outdated in 2010 when the game released. Animations were not synced up to damage, everything just hit air in everyone's general vicinity, abilities couldn't even be queued up, and there wasn't much strategy in selecting which skills to use. Just run through your standard rotations and apply buffs as you can. There was also no customization to your character, as all skills were gained through levels (or quests locked behind levels), allowing no option to specialize in one skill or another. All equipment just gave stats, not requiring any thought what to equip.
And finally, of course the multiplayer was nonexistant. Players are segregated for hours at the start, depending on the class they choose. Content would frequently force you out of your party for some instanced content. Open world content had little reason to be played together, and dungeons, while requiring a party, could also be done with NPCs.

I didn't go in expecting anything I would have actually stuck around with, but I wasn't prepared for how dated the experience felt. To me, it seems like it was around the early 2000s that people realized that the... well... everything this game did, was not a good way to build an MMO. Every other popular MMO I've played that has released around the same time (Tera, Rift, Guild Wars 2) has been way better, and I'm genuinely surprised why FFXIV has been the one to stand. This is not even counting MMOs that have dared to do something different like Runescape or Mabinogi, which were way better. Anyways, not that I could recommend much any MMOs anyways, FFXIV would be just about my last pick, if I absolutely had to pick something. Support innovation instead, and support MMOs doing something different than what they've done for 20 years now.