Quote Originally Posted by Bluevann View Post
It is a commonly accepted guess, but just a guess. Basically, since there are no zones that could bring to new areas (or does SE intend to just slice off mountains in Coerthas Central Highlands?) the assumption everyone makes is that once in Ishgard, you will get your flying mount, and with it access the other areas otherwise unreachable. "zoning" probably will not work with flying (unless they plan to patch the sky with those blue trails?), so we're assuming that Heavensturn will be more of one large open world, similar to 1.0, with areas on several levels and accessible through flying.
This isn't true though. Coerthas Western Highlands is known to be in the expansion and it lies directly behind Snowcloak where there is already a path through the glacier ready to be opened when the expansion launches. Griffen Crossing in Coerthas is also an obvious crossing into one of the expansion regions; the bridge will just be 'fixed' when the expansion launches and suddenly you can cross into the new region.

All discussion from the devs so far has specified Ishgard as being gated behind the 2.55 story completion. I have seen no mention anywhere of the new regions within the expansion being gated as well. In theory the floating continent and other such regions would be story gated simply because you would need to unlock the flying mount from the 3.0 main scenario to get there, but the terrestrial regions should be open to anyone that has the expansion.

With regards to the jobs I'm not sure how I feel about them being in Ishgard (which is what Yoshi has stated so there's no real discussion to be had about if they will be gated now). For most players it will make no difference but for new players it may be a source of frustration.