Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
Having played Black Desert, where there is no fast travel whatsoever. I found it quickly becoming tedious just how much time I spent running from city to city. Nothing about it "immersed" me in the world, which was equally barren. It simply became a chore—making me less inclined to revisit locations unless absolutely necessary. I mean, what exactly is immersive about having to constantly run through The Loches or Peeks, both be amazing zones? Even Azim Steepe, arguably the prettiest location, would feel needlessly tedious if I had to run across it every time a hunt spawned. Heaven help those who get angry about early pulls, by the way.

If you want to feel immersed, don't use a mount. I prefer the convenience.
I have not played BDO, but from what I briefly checked online, it apparently takes 45 min to get across the game's existing maps. However what's not said is if the maps are empty or not. There are also horses in that game. Apparently people play other games while walking to other areas. So there's something broken in that design if it resorts to Skyrim/Fallout3 levels of walking everywhere.

In FFXIV, the point of "fast travel"/"teleport" mechanics is to allow players to jump between areas that they no longer have a reason to walk through (only the jobs really retread back over 2.0 areas.) However if you subscribe to the game for any length of time, you likely received a mount at level 1 just as a reward for subscribing, if not there's still the chocobo. In V1.0 the anima system was actually a good idea, to a point. The existing "gil" cost doesn't scale with the amount of time you are in the game, thus until you have 100,000 gil, you don't waste money on teleporting to areas, you use the mount or walk. Hence FFXIV's existing teleport system is also broken once you have enough money to not care.

How I'd adjust the teleport system is to pull a page from what they did with FFXV, and have you pick a point on the map where you want to go, and either "auto", "manual" or "quick travel". If you select "auto" you board your designated mount and off you go. Go grab a sandwich, no costs as long as you don't teleport. If you designate "manual" you get "gps" directions to where you pointed to on the map. If you select "quick travel" you are given a cost based on how far to and from the aetheryte you are, and the linear distance between the two closest aetheryes from your present location to the destination. So you can either "use closest aetheryte for X gil" or "Fast Travel with Grand Company for X GC", with the latter dropping you off as if you were on a cart like at the beginning of the 2.0 game, to the closest path to the destination.

But the mounts, really, unless we're going to be allowed to use them as combat pets, nothing that can actually be done with them to retroactively apply a cost to using them.

By which I think the mount design in FFXIV is actually less broken than other games. There are some issues (like falling off a cliff, being attacked by enemies, why no party-sized mounts?) that should be addressed better, but the fact that you can basically summon and unsummon them without a cost makes them much more useful to do even stupid tasks like mining and botany. If there was a cost attached to using them, then many of these on-foot activities would take long amounts of time because some people are cheap. Maybe there should be a cost to them moving faster than on foot (eg to run away from enemies), maybe some enemies should be faster than the mounts and and chase players who carelessly zoom past them. Knock players off mounts when attacked for more than trivial damage.

Where flying mounts disturb the game balance is that you can essentially skip everything once you can fly through the zone. The existing Aether currents at least attaches a reward for completing the storyline to unlock them, but at the same time, it also means that several zones had to be impassibly "cut in half" so you couldn't explore the entire map without progressing that far in the story. Likewise, SE thought ahead and locked the aether currents behind storyline quests so that players couldn't just be escorted by their FC to all the aether currents. So in some ways it seems like unlocking flying was a little more over-engineered than necessary.

What i'd like to see is more interruptions to flight, as in weather or flying monsters that give chase or flying monsters that spawn that have to be defeated/despawned before flying can be restored. Flying in a storm could result in being struck by lightning and being dropped to the ground.