My Exploratory Mission Suggestion

I was thinking about the Diadem recently, and airships in general. I think they’re something of a missed opportunity. With Stormblood having come, I was thinking of a less temporal version of the Diadem, one that can be implemented using the most existing resources. These are my suggestions.

First, I’d like the airships to be more integral to the experience; at present they’re a gateway to the Diadem and an oversized retainer, which seems rather a waste. I would recommend that more equipment be added to them (we’ll get to why later). These would include weaponry, grappling lines, repair modules, pilot (your mammet), et al. Maybe even a sort of below-decks area that works like normal furnished housing so you can actually hang out on the ship (I’ll also recommend a docked airship as a housing style, but maybe later). At the very least, I think there should be a portal in your Company Workshop to the airship dock for that ship (an instance which would simply be an airship dock from the story mode with your airships on it, perhaps even other area’s docks as you dock them in “other nations”). The point being, the airships will be seen and equipment used, so how they function and look will be important.

Anyway, for these exploratory missions you will need to stock them with supplies. Dark matter for repairs, food to supply you, ammunition, essentially things your gatherers and crafters can be working on. I’d recommend enough that four people could, working hard, supply what you need in a night (with the goal being that it would be stretched out in people’s off-time over the course of a week). With an airship freed, and when the supplies are reached to your airship’s capacity, you can get an eight man full party together and start the exploratory mission (whatever it is called).

During the mission, you essentially jump from encounter to encounter in the airship. The typical encounter should be stopping at an island in the sky or sea. The island can be randomly sized, and might be several small islands that are joined by bridges, or one large complex island, etc. The weather can be random, and can utilize any weather from other areas, including some of the boss-specific weather). The airship you use will drop you off and may be docked or provide you air support (whichever is more appropriate, and maybe you can even leave some people on board to work the equipment to help out. What you find will be a toss-up though. A few examples:

Perhaps the island will be full of enemies, and killing them all will spawn a boss to kill (which might be a revisitation of an old boss reworked for an eight man, or a new boss, whatever works as more can be added later). Maybe the airship can provide artillery support on large add groups that the battle group might otherwise not be able to fight. Flying won’t be possible (the air currents are too strong for anything but a full airship) but you can use ground mounts.

Perhaps the island has a few enemies which can’t be killed and function as effective patrols. However, there are resource nodes on the island that can be visited in turn until they run out. Avoiding the patrols, killing the small number of enemies that you can kill, and gathering the resources would be the point of this island style. If you don’t have a particular crafter, you can summon your airship mammets to collect them as if they were players (at a reduced efficiency).

Perhaps you’re waylaid along the way. You may fight a reworked version of Bismarck from aboard your airship, using your grappling lines. Or you may come up against a Garlean airship, and need to fend off their boarding parties while using your guns to destroy key points on their ship (as well as keeping your own repaired with the aforementioned supplies) until you can board their airship. Or you may be set upon by pirates yourself and need to fend them off.

The final encounters of these voyages are to be relatively epic, with the upshot being rewards for completed exploratory voyages in goods, gil, and even gear similar to a 24 man raid encounter. In fact, that would be the difficulty level I would shoot for, making sure it’s shy of an 8 man Savage raid but taking into account that we can expect some coordination. I would also recommend a weekly token drop for full flights that would encourage people to at least set a weekly run for them. The best gathered goods could be found on these flights or taken from enemies.

There is also another possibility, called a Flotilla, which actually would be a 24 man encounter. More akin to a trial (or the current Diadem). You assign eight people to an airship, and can do this with up to three of your airships. You then “queue” waiting for a deployment order. When the queue pops with three ships (which would be instant if you can crew three ships yourself, but otherwise you could simply wait) you join an encounter with three ships. Perhaps everyone gets their own island chain to fight through, or there is one lone epic boss fight or pirate fight. I’d recommend these be somewhat shorter one-offs (as one instance rather than a chain of instances), to give good rewards. I tend to recommend these as daily rewards, like a roulette, as I expect they would be shorter and less necessary to coordination (given the higher probability of working with other random people and groups).
The point is that it is all generated from relatively straightforward resources, many of which might already exist as game assets. You can generate all manner of excellent encounters. Your airships would be visible and could be visited, giving people a reason to personalize their airships and show them off (especially in a Flotilla, where your group’s alliance is referred to by the airship name and its owner’s name, whether personal or FC). And those who don’t own property to own airships can always join those who do, or queue with tanks from the existing dock in Ishgard (which would hopefully populate that dock a bit more regularly). If a full group joins from Ishgard, it generates a full sized ship with a random name and owner. They get the weekly and drop rewards, as well as a sum of gil, but the “owner” of the airship gets to keep all the stuff (so the airshipless are rewarded mostly with gil and token drops). In the case of actual owners of airships, they get to keep all the goods.

I also recommend having certain areas be reachable by airship, so that you can visit, say, a trading post resort far away where airship goods and such are talked and traded by the captains and enthusiasts. Perhaps this could be where much of the airship culture would happen.

In summary, I am recommending:

-Airships be glamourable (already dyable), perhaps even furnishable, and visitable, so that they are personalized and worthwhile to work on

-Exploratory missions begin by having crafters and gatherers stock airships with necessary supplies. They are initiated as a series of encounters, on islands, the seas, or in the skies, involving battle, gathering, etc. This promotes people having well rounded battle and gathering parties. The airships help make up the gaps in gathering and help in battle. They may utilize as much existing assets as possible, from reworking primal fights to using older enemy models. They can be procedurally generated with weather, enemies, gathering nodes, etc. These can always be expanded over time to include other assets and areas.

-The exploratory missions have a weekly token drop of great reward, and also dish out excellent goods rewards per run (making them worthwhile to chain run if you can keep the airships supplied).

-There would also be a 24-man flotilla version, which would be one instance, have shorter needs to finish (just an island or two of battle, if that) which would require three airships and would function much like a 24-man Trial (if slightly longer). Rewards for this would be lesser, but could be given a daily bonus like a roulette.

-That there could be an area reachable by airship which acts as a trading post, vendor, etc. for these airships and may have further rewards and opportunities (such as the Flotilla events or the like).

Hopefully, this would utilize the maximum number of existing assets, allow the team to use otherwise disused assets, cut down on resources, remove issues relating to open world balancing (though the current incarnations of existing exploratory missions could always be retained if it is popular, it could be useful for actually supplying the airships for the missions), and provide airship owners with a reason to show off their airships (and for others to see them). It would still be some work, but being able to add in later encounters to mix in rather than create whole new sets of encounters that then outmode the first would probably be more efficient from a labor standpoint.

Like a procedurally generated chain roulette utilizing all manner of player skills, I think this would be something that would keep FCs and players alike coming back for more, at least more than current exploratory missions did.

Don't know how this doesn't have more responses, save that it's hard to comment on beyond "I like pretty much everything you've suggested here."

All I can really add beyond that is that I want navigation to feel like a thing, if not by simulating an open world space, then at least through some manner of a world map.

Ideally, you could expand upon either by seeding particular areas with x seed factors (heightened chances for x on any iterative island creations in the area, although each player to pass through it still experiences something different apart from that spike in patterned creation), and allowing players to map out this kind of information, or even developing later-patch triggers for when everywhere has been "discovered" (which should take a whole lot of time).

Well, that and (and I'm not sure I've completely understood what you've written) the goods to be loaded only being intrinsically necessary since you're bound to need them for the actual gameplay, rather than as some start-up requirement.

They don't tend to do anything with airships and ferries in this game, it would work well and did work well in XI which was more interactive. Diadem in itself hasn't worked out too well at least twice over.

I would love more interactive stuff like XI had but I just don't see it happening unfortunately.

Your concept is a little light on the details of the battle content, but I like the idea of somehow utilizing airships and I am not opposed to the idea of 'stocking' them as a mechanical cost of entry.

When I read this though I want to see where the fun comes from and I don't see it in your iteration. For me personally, "manning artillery" or watching the ship would be the antithesis of fun (The gun ship encounter in WoW was a great idea, but wasn't actually that much fun to do). That leaves just exploring the procedurally generated islands (a concept I'm ok with). The problem here is how are these mobs a threat or are they just HP sponges like existing dungeons/24 man trash?

I dig the concept of the patrols, but IMO its still not enough to derive compelling gameplay. I do like the concept of fending off Garlean patrol ships by stopping them from boarding you, etc.