Break it up with the daily dungeons/raids. Also, ARR is the longest slog to ever have slogged - they cut it down significantly already and it’s still a massive slog.
Take a break, return for the actually good expansions later. It will still be there.
Reason is “Game state is hard”.
If you want to save, you gotta be able to take the current state of everything and serialize it, then read what you’ve serialized and put it back. If you only do checkpoints, you can make assumptions about game state and serialize less.
Generally, it is much easier to develop AI and such when you never have to pull it’s state out and then restore it, because if that is done improperly you get bugs like the bandits in STALKER forgetting they were chasing you after a quicksave-quickload because their state machine is reset.
With checkpoints, you can usually say “right, enemies before here? Dead or dealt with. Enemies after here? they’re in their default state. Player is at this position in space. Just write down the stats and ignore the rest.”
And autosaves just make it one less menu to fiddle with.
Yeah, I have 300 hours from doing all the quests up to ng+ but I couldn’t bring myself to repeat all that. Especially the temples.
…and also I am very impressed by the engine. Fallout 4 would have me running into LOD version of the world if I sprinted for too long, Starfield handles
setav speedmult 500like a champ. Makes exploring a breeze.