This is not a veteran overland thread, but it might as well be somewhat related.
If you want a casual experience without committing to the game in its entirety, that's cool, I'm not here to take that away from you.
So many times there have been people asking for an easy mode in dark souls which seems rather normal considering how not everybody has time to git gud... but when people start asking for hard content, there's certainly something wrong.
So to the main topic, this game is about 70% story content, you're questing for various NPCs who ask for generic tasks, you don't have any choices other than who gets to die, and the writing has been so canned and lazy, it's insulting, it makes your character sound like a braindead amnesiac person (which is fine considering you lost your soul I guess).
We don't get any choices for dialogues other than asking for information, because it's "too risky" to tell eveli she looks bad in the dress, because it means the writers will have to write an additional line of dialogue for that choice even if it doesn't alter the story at all.
The worst part, there is a version of the blackwood story that's made for players who are NOT part of the brotherhood. So why are we FORCED to confess that we are part of them? What happen to our choices? Why am I forced to ask Eveli to remind me what's going on even tho I just played the prologue a few minutes before the main story? Why can't we have a choice to continue instead of forcing our characters to live with the curse of Alzheimer?
So at this point, I doubt we'd be getting better writing anytime soon until people start caring for story content, the problem is, players don't care for it anymore because there is no roleplaying in this MMO-role-playing-game, so it's easy to skip all dialogues, and because of that, writers don't bother with making any significant dialogues because players will just skip it.
So what's the last resort we have to get immersed in the story? Gameplay of course.
And then there's the ludonarrative dissonance completely ruining it.
I've seen so many people saying you can make final bosses a challenge by equipping bad gear, which is fair... But then, what's the point of grinding for the best gear?
You only farm dungeons for dungeon gear so you can keep doing other dungeons (or PvP, or trials, basically you do it for other challenges which are not part of the story).
The dreugh at the end of fungal grotto I is way more intimidating and challenging than Molag Bal.
We spend so much time in the story with NPCs ramping up the power of the main antagonists, hyping up to the moment of the final battle...
And then they just die while you hold back on your rotations just to be able to listen to whatever dialogues they have to say.
In the end we're left with no dialogue choices, forced choices, and ludonarrative dissonance.
It's such a miserable thing because the stories are legitimately entertaining and can be better if it could actually commit to do at least one thing right. Either giving us more dialogue choices for the sake of roleplaying, allow us to skip useless dialogue choices that only make our characters seem stupid, but the one I really want is to allow us to make story missions in veteran mode... this way the final bosses they ramp up so much will actually live up to their reputation, AND it would make sense to actually grind and farm all that gear in a way that matters.
I mean, the storyline of the vestige and the companions is already solo and instanced, how would a veteran mode of that affect any other player?
FOMO? Maybe allow us to repeat quests (or just do what we've been doing all the time and make alt toons).
Rewards? We don't need anything new, just reward with purple and gold gear instead of green and blue. And maybe slightly more gold. Nothing else is needed.
The stories are awesome (well, I prefer more politically oriented ones like wrothgar, brotherhood, thieves guild, stuff that doesn't involve deities that can destroy the world, because it makes the disappointment of final bosses be more believable)., but they have been losing potential on what they can be... (to be fair, the whole game is losing its potential with the direction they've been taking on so many things, I already had a rant about support roles and tanking on another thread).
TL;DR
This game's vast majority of content is story, but we're presented with poor writing, forced dialogue choices, and excessive ludonarrative dissonance. I think allowing us to go through the quests in veteran mode would get rid of the ludonarrative dissonance and make sense of all the OP gear we can grind for and also settle the whole veteran overland argument (no need for that, just story, not all overland). But at the very least, some dialogue choices would be nice to have.
NefasQS made some valid points on the same subject of ludonarrative dissonance here
https://youtu.be/WtjuxrYjGFQ?t=338