>>719776771
NTA, but he's right that the zone designs were ridiculously repetitive. Western Coerthas Highlands was the same as Eastern Coerthas Highlands, maybe just the place of lakes was different.
There was actually few notable landmarks/locations, which combined with no actual quests using these places, it was barren as hell. The first weeks I actually hit all the aetherial nodes too.
Now I personally loved the areas, but ARR switching to smaller zones with variantion between each one was huge. That was the reason the Black Shroud was done first in the Alpha tests.
I vividly remember Yoshi-P commenting in one of the Live Letter that the alpha testers loved South Shroud visually in the alpha tests, cause of how the swap looked.