Airship

[Sho86]

practical difference

That's the biggest issue right there, not everything has to be practical in a game to be fun, as long as a decent sized portion of the player base would use it for one reason or another. Not everyone goes for the 'endgame' so it makes sense to explore different ideas for different people. In that vein of thinking, randomized exploration isles/coves/etc could be set up over time; designed for any sort of content, battle, gather, lore - and as the OP originally suggested, special FATE types. As for the teleport vs flight, it would be an alternative to constantly spending gil to get places (would've made a perfect inclusion with stormblood and a reason on SE's end to make teleport costs uncapped.)

Lore limitation could easily be placed for inaccessible areas even per person on their MSQ tracker, akin to a certain primal and aetheric disturbance issue. Another one that's been done before many times in the series you already pointed out, the ship at its current state can't land in certain areas (leaves room for upgrades). In game design the only limitations are your own ideas and the willingness to try them out.

The only technical issues I could see for an MMO standpoint would be load per instance of overworld and in-party differences for accessible points available. The first can be solved by either party-only instance or Eureka style, the second could just simply limit based on the lowest MSQ progression in-party at 'take-off' (Example: Dragging a newbie around would limit to ARR zones, letting the newbie enjoy a ride, but nothing more than could be done on foot or 2-man choco).

[Hasrat]

Again, I'd like controllable airships with an old-school overworld, but this kind of game simply can't have one until the very end of its life cycle after everywhere's been developed... and even if it makes it to that point, might not be worth the cost.

Which, in its own way, isn't so far off from the old ways, is it? Quite often wouldn't be given full exploration until you'd already hit up every area you could find on foot.

Mostly, tho, I just feel like world maps were simply a product of their time, and I just can't really see any games wanting to reimplement that without the same necessity. Games are getting bigger, rendering more of the world, instead of walking a generic map from point A to point B.

Plus I think there's also a matter of scale to consider for this game and similar. I've started to kinda feel like the zones we are able to explore are sorta really only meant to be a scale model of the actual areas we can explore. Doesn't really take all that much time to travel from Southern Thanalan all they way up through Dravania. World size and travel speed have always seemed a little bit fuzzy in any of these games.

[Edax]

It would be nice if the airships sent on mission that are already in the game were an actual interactive FF classic mini-game.

[Vexander]

Thing is, even if the Overworld Map idea here was some 2-D or low resolution 3-D map, it'd probably still be fairly successful based off of nostalgia alone.

[NessaWyvern]

This sounds like it would be really cool atm our aetheryte teleports cost 999gil to far places, so places even farther than Yanxia could use the airship to get to instead

[manamoppet]

This seem like a really good idea

Sort of like a mix of FF IX overworld, FF X-2 airship, the sky pirates in the Sea of Clouds, and the theater ship over Kugane when parking/stopping? I like it*

*as long as it's not exclusive to free companies

[Shougun]

Would love to have an overworld map and transportation upon it~ Long long ago Yoshi-P mentioned one (1.0 to 2.0 era) for traveling on NPC airships/boats (like FFXI) but obviously wasn't meant to be yet.

Also really want to see ships/airships as bigger features in this game beyond just the huge nostalgia hit that's the overworld.

I've added this thread and Kalise's nautical ship focused thread (w/housing) to my own airship thread as well - hopefully we get our airships (and ships) in some future expansion .