No flying in 5.0: Would it be better?

[Claviusnex]

.... or coming up with some new form of currency.

Please not another currency. It seems like every update SE adds a new one of one type or another.

[InkstainedGwyn]

Part of the issue also is that this game is very streamlined (as are a lot of MMOs these days). No random chests, secret caves, clickable lore, monuments, 'rare bosses' (A and S ranks don't really count since they're really just an event), mobs never drop anything other than the same crafting materials (so no rare recipes or items), etc.

On the one hand, this means that nobody has to complain because they farmed a turtle boss in Evendim for 14 hours straight to try to get one shard to make a bracelet. Or for 14 days because it never dropped. The most 'rng' elements you have are the few items that drop only from treasure maps or 50/60 dungeon chests - and those don't require exploration, because the maps take you to at most a standard 15-20 places.

On the other hand, it means there's no reason to actually explore, because your nodes are going to be in the same place, there's no reason to kill any mobs you don't need, and you know that one pile of rocks is going to be much like the next pile of rocks.

Adding more mobs like in Eureka wouldn't even fix that to me, because there's nothing beyond those mobs that's going to warrant me going through and getting killed. It's going to be another random pond with a pretty view, water sprites, and a few [zone appropriate] mobs that drop leather or whatever.

I'm sure botters are one reason they don't have open-world chests and loot and the like, but I do miss it. I loved going into Diadem and hunting for chests. I miss games that have clickable lore objects, or things like the datacrons in SWtOR, even if I wouldn't want the jumping puzzles to be quite so brutal.

Sightseeing points are nice, but the ARR ones are so obscure in time and weather that it's annoying, not fun.

/shrug emoji

[Ghastly]

Are there any technical people here who can explain if the lack of richness in 3.0/4.0 areas is because more because of flight or is more because of the size of the area? Eureka's a pretty big place and it still has a lot of richness. Would it lose a lot of it if we could fly? Another thing I notice is denseness, I don't think we would have a lot of trees or tunnels in eureka if we could fly there.

[Critical-Limit]

Part of the issue also is that this game is very streamlined (as are a lot of MMOs these days). No random chests, secret caves, clickable lore, monuments, 'rare bosses' (A and S ranks don't really count since they're really just an event), mobs never drop anything other than the same crafting materials (so no rare recipes or items), etc.

On the one hand, this means that nobody has to complain because they farmed a turtle boss in Evendim for 14 hours straight to try to get one shard to make a bracelet. Or for 14 days because it never dropped. The most 'rng' elements you have are the few items that drop only from treasure maps or 50/60 dungeon chests - and those don't require exploration, because the maps take you to at most a standard 15-20 places.

On the other hand, it means there's no reason to actually explore, because your nodes are going to be in the same place, there's no reason to kill any mobs you don't need, and you know that one pile of rocks is going to be much like the next pile of rocks.

Adding more mobs like in Eureka wouldn't even fix that to me, because there's nothing beyond those mobs that's going to warrant me going through and getting killed. It's going to be another random pond with a pretty view, water sprites, and a few [zone appropriate] mobs that drop leather or whatever.

I'm sure botters are one reason they don't have open-world chests and loot and the like, but I do miss it. I loved going into Diadem and hunting for chests. I miss games that have clickable lore objects, or things like the datacrons in SWtOR, even if I wouldn't want the jumping puzzles to be quite so brutal.

Sightseeing points are nice, but the ARR ones are so obscure in time and weather that it's annoying, not fun.

/shrug emoji

It's for the fun of it. I like MGS cuz the way I sneak pass people, imagine if you could just fly pass everyone, cuz they don't usually drop anything of real importance. But it's still fun. I like the sense of danger it gives me endorphins. Is that not enough?

[Claviusnex]

Are there any technical people here who can explain if the lack of richness in 3.0/4.0 areas is because more because of flight or is more because of the size of the area? Eureka's a pretty big place and it still has a lot of richness. Would it lose a lot of it if we could fly? Another thing I notice is denseness, I don't think we would have a lot of trees or tunnels in eureka if we could fly there.

I don't think the difference has anything to do with flight. I suspect it had to do with support for the PS/3 that was finally dropped with SB. Dropping support allowed SE to no longer have to work within the PS/3 constraints.

[InkstainedGwyn]

It's for the fun of it. I like MGS cuz the way I sneak pass people, imagine if you could just fly pass everyone, cuz they don't usually drop anything of real importance. But it's still fun. I like the sense of danger it gives me endorphins. Is that not enough?

To me, it's not - but that's a personal opinion (which is why I said it wouldn't fix it 'to me'). If that's the sort of thing that would make you enjoy maps again, then that's cool! I was just representing another point of view.

[alimdia]

Eureka is pretty small actually, it only feels big because they force you to slog through it with mounts at the slowest speed and because it's more detailed, but you can probably go from north to south in eureka faster than some ARR maps.

[Riardon]

I don't agree with the removal of flight.
It will not happen. Flying and Swimming are here to stay.
It's not flight's fault that you got less detailed or bland maps.
Flying has nothing to do with this. Ask for better and more detailed maps.
I just don't get why you blame something completely irrelevant for the less detailed maps.
They also need to drop completely the 32bit support. XIV uses only 2GB RAM and tries to load things in such small RAM despite most users having way more. (8GB is the mainstream now with most newer systems having at least 16GB).

[KisaiTenshi]

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.

[InkstainedGwyn]

As long as the game has time-based events (FATES, hunts aka pull asap) I'm going to be strongly against anything that makes it harder for me to get places.