No flying in 5.0: Would it be better?

[Solarra]

I’d also love for the overworld to be more active in general

This is the issue, this right here ^

The open world is not largely empty because of flying, it's empty because there is very little reason for the majority of players to be there.
I said it before but it bears repeating, Eureka works because of it's size. 144 people in a small area looks busy (especially since most of them are in the train and therefore in the same place). Grounding everyone alone is not going to populate the world. People won't go to areas if there is nothing to do.

Edit:

Between flight, Aetherytes, and the queue-anywhere Duty Finder, the entire game is built around seeing as little of the game world as possible. There's absolutely no cost to any of these features; flight is free, the DF is free, Aetherytes cost trivial amounts of Gil.

I think the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. As you say, this game is designed to be convenient. We're used to moving quickly and freely and a lot of people like it.
Instead of taking things away or adding costs and artificial difficulties, I think it would be better to look at ways of giving us more incentive to travel on foot and more reason to be in the open world.

[Penthea]

Making it harder to get places is not fun. I like how it is now. You have to explore the map then you unlock the ability to just get places on return visits.

I actually enjoy looking for the aethercurrents. I also like the sort of maps that can be created because of flying, like The Sea of Clouds and The Churning Mists.

I'd like flying to be a bit more meaningful. There should be more places that have some sort of content (like quests, gathering nodes, maybe even access to a special type of content) accessible only by flying.

[KisaiTenshi]

Removing flying can help. I don't think it'll solve the whole problem, given the Aetherytes, but it can help. What I'd also be comfortable with is keeping flying, but imposing real costs on the transportation system. Calling Mounts needs to cost something; running or flying should have some sort of burn rate, maybe Gysahl Greens or some other item, that imposes a non-trivial cost on their use. Flying should cost significant amounts. Teleportation should also be significantly more expensive.

For me, an ideal set of changes would discourage me from ever using my Mount to move between Gathering points, particularly flying. I should occasionally be inclined to choose to run from Gridania to South Shroud, rather than teleporting, and I should always be inclined to travel from Gridania to the Ixal Tribe via some means other than teleportation. Convenience with a meaningful cost is a luxury that gives a sense of options; convenience without any cost simply makes the game world feel shallow.

Mabinogi had a cost attached to mounts/pets (they could only be summoned for about an hour per day, and each had different inventory sizes, so you better not put anything you need all day on them.) However most felt this was an annoyance since a common thing to do in mabinogi was use the pets as a kind of chain-gun (summon all the pets in order one at a time, and unsummon them before they take damage, as they had a CD between use, but if you had at least 10 of them you had enough to keep smacking a boss while playing dead.)

Like the most reasonable thing off hand would attach a fuel/feed cost to mounts to move faster than walking speed. But this adds a road cone that wasn't previously present, thus people would not like any change to how they work. Like the present Gysahl greens for the chocobo is the closest there is in the game to this, and unless mounts get upgraded to combat pets, it would not be justified.

[Mhaeric]

Quite the opposite.WoW's flying mounts can be upgraded into greater speeds than XIV's, WoW's soft skybox (at which point you and your mount start slowly being killed from oxygen deprivation if you remain thereabove) is already higher on average than any XIV zone's, and WoW's mount movement mechanics are absolutely identical, even including their maximum slopes of ascent/descent without suffering the speed penalty of using only the vertical ascend/descend keys -- which are then identical multipliers. Ours is a direct translation of one of WoW's largest, irrevocable regrets.

The only real difference is that WoW now limits flight to the latter half or even the final patch of any given expansion, locked behind a hefty set of achievements. Ours requires only a haphazard once-over of the terrain and quests of the zone in question, becoming useful, generally, the moment our main no longer has use for the zone.

/facepalm.

[Claviusnex]

I honestly prefer the smaller maps from ARR. The HW and SB areas are just so unnecessarily large and barren, making the initial questing prior to unlocking flight in each zone really tedious. Then, once flight is unlocked it honestly feels about the same as walking through the smaller ARR maps as far as speed of traversing the area goes. So for me all flying does is act as a way to artificially increase questing time since you have to travel on foot at a snails pace for a while before unlocking it.

I don’t dislike flying though, but having to traipse across enormous maps slowly on foot before unlocking it just felt like a time waster to me.

I don't find the SB maps large at all. I can easily see from one side to the other which to me ruins game immersion no matter the means of travel. In ARR and HW most of the maps feel and appear larger as they don't appear to be like me looking across some small valley. Even with the shrinkage that came with Warlords WoW still feels larger to me than the more recent content in FF XIV.

Back to the subject, I do not want to see flying go away. I think SE has a reasonable system for gaining access to flying and the convenience it brings after a player has finished the available quest lines. If it were to go away when added with the release of things like Eureka I would have no questions about cancelling my subscription.

[Deceptus]

I would say no.

Once you've let the flying cat out of the bag, there's no going back. Freedom of movement is wonderful.

[Kazgrel]

Pile of masochistic rubbish

WoW and FFXI are that way.

[MicahZerrshia]

Lack of flying would take me out of a lot of activities. For instance, no way am I running all around a map like Coerthas Western or the Hinterlands to find a hunt mark that only gives me a few centurio. It's a drag even with flying. Also the distances to and between gathering points are way to large for no flight, in ARR they were at least closer together. There are also dailies. No I do not want to do something like beast tribes in a large map if I am forced to walk.

I don't mind the lack of flying in Eureka but that is a duty, you have very specific objectives when you enter, much like a dungeon. But plain overworld, yeah its pretty the first few times but after that I just want to go from point A to B as swiftly as I can. I ran everywhere in XI for 10 years and that was enough for me. Honestly if I had to run for 30 minutes to do one of the bland fetch quests this game is filled with, I would likely move on.

You are given the option of not flying if you do not want to. No one is forcing you to use a mount so don't force me not to.

[MilanFrozen]

Sure. If they make the game function better mechanically so zones are less linear and have things to do in them. But I highly doubt they're going to rework the base mechanics so I say just keep flying.

[Vhailor]

Edit:

I think the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. As you say, this game is designed to be convenient. We're used to moving quickly and freely and a lot of people like it.
Instead of taking things away or adding costs and artificial difficulties, I think it would be better to look at ways of giving us more incentive to travel on foot and more reason to be in the open world.

Mabinogi had a cost attached to mounts/pets (they could only be summoned for about an hour per day, and each had different inventory sizes, so you better not put anything you need all day on them.) However most felt this was an annoyance since a common thing to do in mabinogi was use the pets as a kind of chain-gun (summon all the pets in order one at a time, and unsummon them before they take damage, as they had a CD between use, but if you had at least 10 of them you had enough to keep smacking a boss while playing dead.)

Like the most reasonable thing off hand would attach a fuel/feed cost to mounts to move faster than walking speed. But this adds a road cone that wasn't previously present, thus people would not like any change to how they work. Like the present Gysahl greens for the chocobo is the closest there is in the game to this, and unless mounts get upgraded to combat pets, it would not be justified.

I generally agree here, there'd likely be backlash. Still, the point of the thread, as I understand it, is to speculate whether or not a removal of flying would make the game better, not more popular and/or avoid community backlash.

WoW and FFXI are that way.

So? Those games are also, by most any measure, better than FFXIV is, albeit they haven't aged well in a variety of ways, especially in terms of graphics and UI, in XI's case. This is a thread about whether or not a certain course of action would make FFXIV better. Emulating its predecessors in certain ways seems like a reasonable statement to make.

Also, please don't willfully mistake my post. I'm not advocating for limited travel options. I'm advocating for attaching a cost to travel options. If you don't have a cost, players will always flock to the method of travel that is fastest / most convenient, which invariably cuts out as much exposure to the game world as is humanly possible. Attaching costs puts other methods of travel on more of an even playing field. There's nothing masochistic about this, and it's a rather asinine summary of what I wrote.