For me, dungeons and raids were THE thing that made me want to play WoW. It’s fun working towards a goal with others and there are so many possible encounter designs you can make that would be basically impossible if the content was meant to be done solo.
That said, two caveats:
It’s fun to work with people you trust and like, not randos. So while I do appreciate the dungeon finder they added to WoW in WotLK as it really let me experience the dungeons long before I was able to establish myself with a guild, I do see the ways in which design catering to that system has hurt a lot of content. My favorite period of WoW was actually early Cataclysm before they nerfed the launch dungeons. They were difficult in a genuinely engaging way and at least when I played with guildmates, I was pretty happy to spend an hour or two trying and failing at a heroic dungeon. Unfortunately that isn’t true for most players queueing with randos, so they got dumbed down.
I had a very similar experience to what you described but in FFIV. The leveling experience was pretty heavy on story, which was nice, but for the final part of the story of the base game, you needed to go do basically a big dungeon. Not quite a raid, but more people than the normal dungeons. It was pretty clear that most of the people queueing for this were just there to farm whatever and they were rushing through the place, not even killing enemies, so I just had to run after them to keep up. There were a few mid dungeon cutscenes, but you could skip these individually. While I watched the cutscene, most of the group moved along and they did so so quickly that at some point they would trigger a new cutscene before I had finished the first so that as soon as it was done it played the next one. This didn’t update my position, so even if I wanted to continue the dungeon, after a certain point I just couldn’t. It was such an awful experience it made me quit on the spot.
For me, dungeons and raids were THE thing that made me want to play WoW. It’s fun working towards a goal with others and there are so many possible encounter designs you can make that would be basically impossible if the content was meant to be done solo.
That said, two caveats:
It’s fun to work with people you trust and like, not randos. So while I do appreciate the dungeon finder they added to WoW in WotLK as it really let me experience the dungeons long before I was able to establish myself with a guild, I do see the ways in which design catering to that system has hurt a lot of content. My favorite period of WoW was actually early Cataclysm before they nerfed the launch dungeons. They were difficult in a genuinely engaging way and at least when I played with guildmates, I was pretty happy to spend an hour or two trying and failing at a heroic dungeon. Unfortunately that isn’t true for most players queueing with randos, so they got dumbed down.
I had a very similar experience to what you described but in FFIV. The leveling experience was pretty heavy on story, which was nice, but for the final part of the story of the base game, you needed to go do basically a big dungeon. Not quite a raid, but more people than the normal dungeons. It was pretty clear that most of the people queueing for this were just there to farm whatever and they were rushing through the place, not even killing enemies, so I just had to run after them to keep up. There were a few mid dungeon cutscenes, but you could skip these individually. While I watched the cutscene, most of the group moved along and they did so so quickly that at some point they would trigger a new cutscene before I had finished the first so that as soon as it was done it played the next one. This didn’t update my position, so even if I wanted to continue the dungeon, after a certain point I just couldn’t. It was such an awful experience it made me quit on the spot.