Does Flying Kill Immersion?

[TheUltimate3]

As a long time player of WoW, flying can ruin immersion of the game world if implemented poorly or stupidly. Using my example, in The Burning Crusade it was hella expensive to fly faster than a epic ground mount, but it was needed to access certain areas. Overall it was cool but nothing to get pissy about (unless you were a world pvper. But that is another story). Flying in Wrath of the Lich King pretty much followed that as well.

Cataclysm was an example of flying done poorly. By allowing flying in Azeroth they allowed flying in all the new zones, which essentially turned them into giant "Go here to pick up quest, fly over everything and land here, do quest, rinse, repeat". That took the immersion out of almost every new zone in Cataclysm because there was no real point to them. Add to the fact that there was no clear path that one could follow if you didn't want to fly and you end up with large zones that serve no purpose at all.

Now how does this relate to XIV, XIV skirts really hard between both these extremes (in my humble opinion). Each zone requires you to at least explore the zone before flying, but the zones are clustery from the ground that you'd be crazy to ever want to run through it. Judgement on how they handle it from here is the real question.