“We want you to experience the content on the ground before you can fly”, says Blizz.
In FFXIV, if you want to fly in a zone, you have to find and collect “aether currents” in each zone. Once you have collected all the currents in a zone, boom, you can fly in it.
How does that stop players from just running around collecting them in minutes? How is that fun or engaging?
Well, for starters, you get an “aether compass”. This item will say something like “aether current to the south…” and so forth, but it won’t tell you exactly where it is. 1 or 2 currents are easy to get to, just lying around somewhere. But others require you to explore and jump around the terrain and stuff (some of them are freakingly difficult to get to). Some of them are only obtainable as quest rewards, both from side quests and main story.
Some zones are divided (e.g. a giant chasm in the middle), and you can only access the other half or a certain portion after advancing through quests and levels. For example, there’s a zone in the second expansion that you get to after an hour or so of reaching level 60, but at that point you can only access half of the zone (thus only getting half or less of the aether currents int he zone), since there are no means of going to the other half until you reach level 70 (when you can then get the remaining currents through exploration and quests).
So, before you can actually fly in FFXIV, you HAVE to experience a zone in all it’s glory, and do quests. And if you want to fly everywhere, you have to be max level and played through each zone in its entirety. (It’s not account-wide, so alts need to hunt for the currents aswel).
Isn’t that a wonderful compromise between devs and players?
True, but to be honest I rather like Pathfinder as well. Account-wide Unlock achievement is great and I wish they had it for prior expansions as well. Granted I would not be opposed if Pathfinder was acquired in the way you’ve described either.
I will remind you that FFXIV is not an open, seamless world like WoW. Such a system in Warcraft would simply have you dismount and fall to your death anytime you crossed a zone boundary you had not completed said achievement for.
That only works in FF because the zones are instanced and you can’t free travel between them.
Do you really want to get dismounted because you don’t have the Nazmir flight license and you fly over a corner of that zone on your way from Zuldazar?
There are already zones like Wintergrasp that do that and give a grace timer to land or GTFO. Add a parachute if it happens.
Pathfinder was clearly aiming to do much the same thing, but honestly the FFXIV way sounds a lot more interesting. Though I’d say instead of making you do the whole thing on every alt, maybe call it good at half for all characters after the first on your account.
Sounds like an interesting idea, but you know full well what would happen if they did that in WoW.
“ rabble, rabble, why do I have to find some little collection of pixels to fly, rabble, rabble, I pay your salaries, rabble, rabble, slap in the face, rabble, rabble, solitare with the new card backs is going to kill this game!”
Yeah I’m not really disagreeing with you, just saying it’s not unheard of in this game. Pathfinder 1 should’ve gated it, and it should’ve included something exploratory like that in place of the time-gated rep grind.
I think a lot of the problem is areas aren’t really designed for flight anymore. In the first few expansions you had the lowbie ground zones, and at max level there were entire new zones and sections of old zones designed for flight (this was also how they blunted max-levels from steamrolling lowbies at all hours, the daily areas were physically away from them instead of just having a WQ doing the same thing). These days, flight is the afterthought to get from point A to point B, but the geometry isn’t really designed around it.
“Experiencing the content” should just be getting Explorer, Loremaster, and maybe completing the 100 world quest achievement. That’s it. If the reasoning for Crapfinder is for us to see the content they made, anything else is just unnecessary hoops.
I guess what they really mean is, “we want you to experience the content 500 times”.
Pathfinder only exists out of spite. Blizz doesn’t want to make it engaging or fun to obtain it, they want to make it a tedious grind because it represents a time where they were objectively wrong and had their arms twisted into actually listening to players for once. Genuinely surprised it doesn’t require Exalted rep with all factions to get.
If with that grace period of having to fly down before you fall flat seems bit annoying… I’d rather in this kind of world to have the ability to fly in all primary zones for each expac through 1 account. Wide unlockable achievement and have flight ready for you for when you level alts with.