Level Design - FFXVI's dungeon consist of going in a straight line with no reason to go off the beaten path, no reason to explore and provides no tension or threat. Take the first "dungeon" of Caer Norvent where you fight Benedikta. The boss fight itself is very fun and epic, loved it...but everything leading to that is a bore. You run into easy mobs that you can one shot with endless Eikon abilities and go to the next door. Run up some stairs, then another door. Another room full of easy mobs, then another door. Nothing to explore, all doors are locked, no danger lurking anywhere, or secret items to discover, cool things to encourage you to stray off to another path. And this is where most people will get triggered....are you ready? Let's compare this first dungeon to Stormveil Castle, Elden Ring's first real dungeon. I can already feel the rage of people saying "yOu sHouLdn't bE coMParInG da 2 gAmezz!!!11". Very different games, I know, but XVI could do some stuff similar in a more grounded way to make it more exciting. Hopefully some of us can at least agree on that. A cool castle with different routes you can take, cool secrets to discover, hard enemies and mid bosses to find deep below the dungeon for example that you can fight now or come back to later, rewarding loot to find in well hidden places, shortcuts to unlock instead of the game holding your hand with endless checkpoints.
World / Exploration - Here one example: Star Wars Jedi Survivor that came out 2 months ago... Koboh was fun to explore and was NOT open world. You can leave the small town, find a distant hidden cave, ruins, mines enemy bases, etc enemies to fight, loot to collect and more. There would also be NPC's you find randomly (not constant waypoints on map) that would give you better and more interesting side quests, which afterwards you can recruit back to your base. Some of the explorable hidden areas required light puzzle solving as well to take a break from all the action and cutscenes. Again, I am not asking for open world, just a larger explorable zone with some more innovation than what we got here. XVI's "world" feels very miniscule for such an amazing world (storywise) that they built here. It would have been awesome to see more interesting aspects of Rosaria, Sanbreque, Dhalmekia and more. As it currently stands, it feels like the world map is just a stage selector from an action game.