Get rid of all aetherytes and flying

[Renathras]

You heard me, get rid of all aetherytes. Even the ones inside major city hubs. Best way for FFXIV to feel like a lived in world and an MMO is to force players to have to travel on foot and use their mounts as the only way to get to places faster. Also make overworld mobs be really aggressive and hard to intice players to be in parties for safety and if theyre not overleveled or are not skilled enough to evade multiple mobs.

Add in airships and boats to travel to most major hubs and have it be on a schedule and also a place where players hang around and interact on the ride and even fish or play some minigames to pass the time.

Kinda half kidding with this because obviously most people would just hate this but to be honest at this point I think FFXIV could use with some QoL prunning (not counting QoL UI ofcourse) if we want for the game to be fun and exciting to play. At least for me

Is this a serious request or...?

Assuming it is:

No.

You can't go from a game with these things to not. Remember when WoW removed flying and had so much pushback they reluctantly re-added it? And it was a game that had not had flying within living memory at the time.

Moreover, even 1.0 wasn't that bad. It had an Aetherite in each zone and Aetherial Gates connected to each one that made fast travel doable, though with that Anima resource (talk to the "guard" NPC near the Aetherites sometime and ask them about how Teleport and Return work for an interesting lore history lesson).

.

Personally, I wouldn't mind and liked that about older games, but I think it's an acquired taste and you can't go cold turkey. Even Vanilla WoW had teleports between capital cities and Mage and Druid teleports and Hearthstones. You're proposing a system even more medieval than Vanilla WoW and FFXIV 1.0. Consider that carefully for a minute.

That said, I think the ship has sailed. FF14 already has a cadence and a pattern it's in, so unless FF14 does a WoW Cataclysm or something, I'd be surprised to see anything like this. Maybe for the next MMO in 10 years tho! XD

Basically this. It would require a complete restructuring of how zones are designed and content is played in this game. It can work in some types of content (e.g. Exploration Zones), though. Imagine if all four Eureka zones were one really big map with new parts unlocked that you had to travel between by boat or airship but they were just mega zones with no aetherites except MAYbe between the basecamps? That sort of thing could be interesting. Granted, the instancing makes it a bit...weird.