World of Warcraft players are, in a very literal sense of the word, grounded. Many of them don’t like that one bit.
Hoping to hit up a WoW forum or comment thread to chat about raid issues or how weirdly detailed male orc butts used to be? You might want to wait a bit. People are almost exclusively talking about one thing right now: flying. It’s out of the picture, and players are pissed.
Ever since World of Warcraft‘s second expansion, Burning Crusade, players have been able to obtain flying mounts — usually after seeing much of each expansion’s new content on foot and hitting the new level cap. However, Blizzard’s decided to change that for the most recently released expansion, Warlords of Draenor, and likely WoW expansions to come. Speaking with Polygon last week, lead designer Ion Hazzikostas explained:
“Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realised that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways. While there was certainly convenience in being able to completely explore the world in three dimensions, that also came at the expense of gameplay like targeted exploration, like trying to figure out what’s in that cave on top of a hill and how do I get up there.”
“The world feels larger, feels more dangerous [without flight]. There’s more room for exploration, for secrets, for discovery and overall immersion in the world. At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”
Despite the fact that Blizzard plans to make automated, taxi-like flights between major locations as convenient and plentiful as possible, players have not exactly given the change a resounding “zug-zug” of approval. Flight, after all, is something they have in other areas, and many of them have spent heaps of gold on rare flying mounts. Many players are downright infuriated:
Some have even envisioned ways to make flying work better in WoW, in hopes of addressing Blizzard’s seemingly unshakable concerns:
Not everyone hates the idea of footing/hoofing/sprightly dancing (in the case of blood elves) their way across WoW‘s endless vistas. Or at least, they’re willing to be constructive about the idea:
Some players, however, will tell you that flying is only a drop in a near-bottomless bucket of grievances, and this explosion of general anger at Blizzard seems to suggest as much. Flying, in some ways, seems like a focal point for diffuse rage against the most recent expansion, a lightning rod smack dab in the center of a brewing storm.
Blizzard isn’t blind to players’ debatably sighted rage, but their responses so far have been piecemeal at best. They more or less reiterated their previous statement on the subject in a forum post, adding that, “We appreciate everyone who has taken the time to weigh in on this topic. You’ve provided some great insight and feedback, and we ask that you please be respectful of one another as you continue to discuss your thoughts and experiences.” Blizzard will also be doing a fan Q&A about flying… on June 6th, nearly two weeks from now.
Current and former WoW players, what do you think about the flying issue? Even when you couldn’t fly until you hit the level cap, did you feel like it discouraged you from exploring, from finding pleasant surprises you couldn’t see from your celestial steed? Personally, I didn’t feel like that was a problem, but I do think there’s something to Blizzzard’s assertion that flying makes their worlds feel smaller, even less intriguing. After gaining the ability to fly, I stopped feeling a sense of wonderment. I started viewing the game world more as a series of points (A to B, C to D, etc). I witnessed less life, less activity, less PvP. I’m undecided on the issue overall, though, and I haven’t played the game in a bit.
What’s your take?
Comments
61 responses to “World Of Warcraft Players Are Pissed Their Characters Can’t Fly”
I enjoy flying, but really it makes a game more like connect the dots than an adventure
the flight paths are even more connect the dots than flying. and the only reason why flying was not part of WoD was due to a very small minority of players who didnt like flying at all.
The thing that makes this and even bigger issue is the fact that this news came out late on friday afternoon US Pacific time before a 3 day long weekend.
The reason flying wasn’t part of WoD was stated clearly by several devs during development. It bypasses content, removes the need to consider your movement and turns the game into a disconnected series of “drop in from the sky” areas with otherwise no relationship to each other. It harms the ability to give zones an ongoing narrative and trivialises everything except the precise areas where the quest requirements reside.
You may disagree of course, many people do, but the decision had nothing to do with players at all, the decision was made entirely by the dev team as part of the overarching directive to try to recapture the feel of vanilla.
I’m pretty sure that every Xpac besides Cata you couldn’t fly for your first time through the quests so I don’t see how any of that stuff applies.
Also they aren’t going to recapture the feel of vanilla by giving you no reason to ever leave your garrison. At least when we had neutral capital cities people would hang out there and you would actually see other people.
The garrison needs to do a better job of pushing people out into world activities than it currently does, I agree.
The are problems with the” Adventure/exploration” argument.
1. With data mining sites and wikis and fans sites, the sense of adventure and exploration is diminished.
2. The immersion of running around on the ground vs flying to the objectives breaking immersion is no less immersion breaking than riding a gryphon that can only run on the ground.
3. Do people doing quests for the second, third, fourth time care that that character is immersed?
What’s frustrating is that point 1 and 2 can be done by players choosing not to use flying mounts. Instead of just doing that, they’re making everyone else play by these players rules.
Locking it to cap is fine, something I enjoy working towards, being able to revisit hard to traverse areas. Having it removed from all current content is being given a computer that you can use once you finish homework and have your parents deciding to only let you use it when you finish the year, then to disallow you again after.
#3 is my biggest issue.
ive level all my 7 alts to 90 in the last xpac. but now i really cant be stuffed cos its takes forever get from A -> B
It feels like the game is being reduced down to f2p (and pay to win, of course, now that tokens have been introduced – wait for it). If that’s the case, then I call bs on Activision – a games publishing (read ‘destroyer’) with a seedy past and bad track record for bleeding good games dry and destroying them.
This is the only thing I can think of to explain Blizz devs increasingly bad decisions and lack of content since Activision barged in back before Cata. They (Activision) want it all done on the cheap (hence, firing talented staff and replacing them with cheap labor – they’ve done it before to other game companies in the past).
Blizz never needed to sell out their publishing to an unsavoury and questionable business like Activision. Please, Blizz, get rid of them and go back to publishing WoW yourselves. Everything you did before Activision, was flawless.
Get. Rid. Of. Activision. Please!
I can understand where they’re coming from. Flying mounts reduced the bulk of the games content to nothing more than empty space to auto-pilot over. In a sense World of Warcraft stopped being a world with flying mounts and started being a bunch of disconnected points on a map. Nobody with access to flight really goes out into the world. There are other reasons for that too, but a flight is a big part of why even when they drag players out of the hubs the world remains empty.
However that said without flying mounts travel time dramatically increases, and right now they’re already asking players to do a fair bit of traveling every day. It could seriously increase the amount of time it takes per day to do your busy-work. The padding it adds isn’t going to be particularly engaging either.
I’m torn on it. They’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Hopefully it will at least serve as a cautionary tale to other developers about the dangers of blindly following the natural progression of a feature without looking at the long term impact it will have on how players process new content.
Even getting me to explore the world isn’t working. I leveled engineering for the wormhole. If it is on CD, I usually log off and do something else. I think the biggest issue is that the content isn’t as engaging. I remember WotLK and even with flying, I would still be out in the world more than what I am now.
The thing is the content is probably more engaging now, they’ve made some serious leaps and bounds on that front post-Wrath, you just process it differently because you’ve been there before. Even when it’s new you have at least a rough idea of how it works. Even if you force yourself to read quest text before hitting accept, stop using things like WoWhead, turn off quest tips on the map, etc you still sort of know the mechanical side of it. You know that when it says to get the Wiggleroots from Ogres in the cave it means Ogre Mages not Ogre Arhcers or Ogre Mystics.
Once the illusion is broken you can’t stop seeing enemies as loot tables, objectives as cast bars instead of actions, quests as just a half dozen tasks stacked differently, etc. I wish I could go back fresh and start again not knowing anything. It’s really ruined the entire genre for me.
This isn’t intended to sound snarky, but can you not simply focus on the story and scenery instead of mentally breaking things down into game systems?
For my part, I’ve been playing since the original beta with very few breaks in between, at various times I’ve been in progression raiding, I’ve been raid leader, class leader for several classes, combat advisor for a few guilds where it was my job to know how the game systems worked inside out, and with some game development experience as well I consider that I’m probably in the top half-percent of players in terms of understanding WoW’s game systems, but I found I was still able to just go in to WoD appreciating the storylines and zones and seeing the whole experience (including the combat and general questing) in that light instead of mentally pulling it all apart.
For me at least, it’s not true that “once the illusion is broken you can’t stop seeing enemies as loot tables” and so on, it just requires putting that stuff aside in mind, the same way you might go into a movie you know is going to be B-grade crap but still enjoy it because you made sure your expectations were reasonable before you went in.
Do you find you just can’t do that at all with the MMO genre?
I’m a mechanically minded guy. Once I understand how it works I can’t just ignore the cogs. Maybe if the story and world weren’t so thin they’d be able to cover it, but they’re generally built to deliver everything with versatile but simplistic scripts so it’s all right there in my face all the time. There generally isn’t much diversity between what you encounter. The same things with different skins. They populate the world with numbered enemies and quests, numbers on absolutely everything, so it’s hard to ignore that you’re doing something (at least in part) because your level aligns with it.
That stuff is hard to avoid. I’ll admit that World of Warcraft specifically does better than most when it comes to hiding it and mixing things up, but I can’t force myself to ignore the machine.
I can play and just hang out with friends and I can enjoy the scenery, and World of Warcraft is one of the few fantasy IPs that I actually like so I can even get into the story, but when the game gives me a half dozen quests I’m always going to break it down into a list of objectives and attack it efficiently. When it pushes me out of a main hub I’m not going to go on foot and have a picnic (in those cases I’m usually in an even bigger rush to do the daily busy work it’s pushing me to do ASAP so I can get on with my day).
You know, instead of making a section where you can fly, and a section where you can’t.
Why not just open up flying in all areas. and just chuck in a whole bunch of very high level (I’m talking end game level can’t do with less than 10 people in a team) kind of monsters as anti-aircraft weapons.
Then just let the players decide. The sky’s dangerous. You willing to risk it? ^_^
That’s actually a pretty good idea, if nothing else it would certainly force you to may more attention than just auto-pilot.
In a general sense I agree with the devs that flying (or their implementation of it) detracted from the exploration of the world in much the same way that Fast-Travelling in Skyrim did. I think the best setup they had was in BC (as with a lot of WoW) when you had to finish levelling, and grind a fair bit before you could go back and explore with flight.
I just can’t get motivated for anything in WoW anymore. I have been trying like hell this expansion, but the AH isn’t what it used to be, professions aren’t what they used to be and even my guild dropped away into nothing. Alexstrasza used to be one of the busier servers and now, I barely see anyone. Just is starting to feel empty and I am not just talking about the population.
Exactly, it’s a double edged sword. The game isn’t what it used to be, because of all the changes that have come along the way.
In some way, the changes are necessary to advance the game, but at the same time, a lot of what made the game what it was back in the day gets lost.
Things that seem like the make the game better on the surface don’t always.
Like flying mounts. You think wow, that makes it WAY better. I can get to places a lot quicker, do quests quicker, and everythings a lot easier! But are those the factors that make the GAME better? Maybe on the surface, but I think on a subconscious level they dont.
I can see why Blizzard chose to do this. But I can also see why people are upset – after 8 or so years of flying around, not being able to do so anymore would be pretty drastic.
Just like Diablo 2 vs 3. Diablo 2 had a terrible skill system that everyone hated, because choices were permanent and there was no respeccing. but it also made players frequently reroll characters to try new things. In Diablo 3 you can respec on the fly – and it got rid of the need to reroll characters. Same can be said about the loot/trade systems between the two.
It’s because everyone is in the garrison. Plain and simple.
It takes guts to make a hard decision like removing flying. The game world is better without it, and I’m impressed blizzard has made the decision to stop flight. It adds inconvenience but I feel the improvements to thegameplay experience are worth it.
First expansion… Which is really a major part of the problem IMO. Flying has been in the game for about 8 years of WoW’s 10.5 year run, with people like myself enjoying it and collecting more mounts for it (not to mention paying all the gold and/or cash for mounts/training) along the way.
To simply announce it’s removal now (yes I know it’s not ‘removed’ but it’s only available on irrelevant continents) just feels like a slap in the face, especially when just a week ago another flying mount was added to the cash store.
There’s also the whole joke of their reasoning ‘we want the world to feel large and dangerous’ while at the same time they continue to not actually add any content into said world – other than instantly repetative Apexis Dailies that people already said they hate and more things to the Garrison…. how is sitting in a solo instance more dangerous and immersive than flying through the world that they’ve built?
Oh but we can still use flight paths… the wonderful invention of ‘click now and alt-tab for a few minutes.’ Such exciting content.
tl:dr – Unsubbed a while ago expecting to come back with a decent patch, lately they’re just making me lose any respect I had for them though.. Going to just stick to Final Fantasy XIV personally, they’re actually adding content (like flying mounts! lol)
Flight paths will forever be toilet/dinner/break timers. hell even before burning crusade i use to use the flight from moonglade to theramore as a dinner break because it took near 30mins bak then to complete that journey by flight path
Now that was a staple of vanilla, running past a flight path and seeing 10 people idle at the dropoff point!
The “This will cause the biggest sub drop in history…” posts are hilarious.
It is the vocal minority complaining, nothing more.
Forum users are not, and will never be, an accurate representation of an entire player base. The vast majority of players simply don’t care to post on forums or the likes for their respective game, and are quite content with keeping to themselves even if they don’t particularly like something.
And if the situation was reversed the result would be exactly the same… You’d have the vocal minority from the non-flying crowd up in arms when they re-implemented flying.
You’re right about the forums but, considering last quarter had the biggest sub drop in history (following a quarter with the largest sub spike since IIRC Wrath), it’s not exactly impossible..
I mean what has there been since last quarter?
-6.1 with it’s twitter and selfies (I think that might’ve been Q1)
-6.2 details which is a raid, more garrison nonsense and 15 minutes worth of quests (I’m not even joking). Also hints that it will be the final patch of the X-pack.
-A new mount on the cash shop
-Confirmation that flying will not be returning, ever (probably).
Not exactly big selling points there.
Its not that big a deal though, they plan to make up for the sub shortfall by making high level gear purchasable for gold and then selling gold for real life money.
I cant believe that we have finally reached this point…
I think you’ll find that ‘high level gear’ being sold for gold next patch is lower level than pretty much all the raid gear that will be available in the new raid.
Interesting how people like to leave that little detail out.
Its higher level than LFR which has the highest participation rate, they are obviously targeting selling their gear to the casual player.
Up until this Xpac you couldn’t buy gear for gold and its pretty obvious why they made the change.
LFR is pretty much the non-raiders raid. It’s there almost entirely just so people can see content.
When they start selling gear that is on par with Normal or higher tier then people can worry, but right now though the cries of ‘The end is nigh!’ are just absurd.
Also, if the gold price of those items remains the same it’d cost you quite a chunk to buy everything just for a single character. Paying that much for gear you will likely replace very, very quickly with minimal effort is just stupid.
I am perfectly fine with them capitalising on anyone stupid enough to do that, because the simple fact is they’re simply not selling gear that is overpowered in any respect.
Oh, and if we’re being blunt… You completely forget that the AH exists. There wasn’t masses of bitching and moaning that people could trade WoW tokens to buy gear off the AH… But the moment Blizzard puts in a vendor, everyone loses their fucking mind.
Hey, I have been moaning since they added paid for cosmetic gear! Why would I stop moaning just because nobody cares?!
Its freemium stuff in my full priced game!
High end gear that sits just below current tier raid has been purchaseable for gold since Wrath, it’s just typically been locked behind reputation walls. One of the biggest complaints in MoP was that the reputation grinds were too essential, forcing people to do them when they didn’t want to otherwise, so this change is more about removing the reputation wall. Everything else is the same as it has been for the last 3 expansions.
As for cosmetic gear, does it really matter? Nobody’s forcing anyone to buy it, it makes no difference to your experience in the game, what difference does it make if someone else buys it?
@zombiejesus
Lower tier gear used to be purchasable for Justice Points, not gold which would require you to actually do some sort of content to unlock it, same with heirlooms which are now also purchased for lots of gold.
Also the reason cosmetic gear is annoying is because they constantly make excuses of why they cant put more content in to each patch yet somehow manage to come out with content if they are charging 25 dollars for it.
If they just said we don’t think the game deserves more content than this for your 16 dollars a month then that would be one thing… but to say stuff like “You cant just hire more people to create more content” and to then justify selling in game items by saying “We hired this person as an extra just to make this content” is pretty insulting.
@piratepete
It wasn’t just JP gear, most of the reputation-locked gear in Wrath and onwards had straight gold costs, or sometimes used faction-specific currencies like mushrooms. Sons of Hodir revered gear was gold-bought, the same ilevel as Naxx10, but blue quality instead of epic so slightly worse in stats. Other factions have similar stories.
Aside from that, JP has been earnable from solo dailies since Wrath, only Burning Crusade had JP dailies restricted to “kill dungeon boss X”.
They’re not constantly coming out with cosmetic gear, they’ve made 3 pieces in total through the whole history of the game. How much content do you really think got cut from WoD because back in 2013 their artists made three pretty ugly looking helms?
If you’re including mounts and pets, around half of the current ones were added for charity drives, which I think is a perfectly reasonable use of their time and I support that. Of the rest, you’re really looking at less time to make all of them collectively than it would take to make a single boss room of a single dungeon.
I understand your line of thinking, but I think you really overestimate how much time actually goes into making these collectibles and underestimate how much time it takes to make other content.
@zombiejesus
I know that the pets/mounts don’t take nearly as much effort but when you look at it you think, we used to get 5 man dungeons in content patches and from MOP we just stopped getting them.
The subscription stayed the same and they found more ways for you to give them real money.
With the rumours of this being the last major content patch of this xpac its hard not to be jaded.
WoD was also 10 dollars more than previous xpacs.
There’s no big mystery there. Content updates are paid for with subscription money. That’s a set amount of funding. The cosmetic gear is a separate investment but they know it’s ok to make that investment because they’ll make their money back selling the cosmetic gear. Like most DLC it makes sense on a spreadsheet and if it couldn’t be sold separately they simply wouldn’t made it. It’s like suggesting WoD would be a regular content patch if there was no way to sell it as an expansion.
That’s not to say you’re not allowed to find the practice ugly. Personally I find cash shops in multiplayer games to be distracting and annoying. I just really doubt they’re cutting content from patches in order to sell it off separately. I mean given how much profit they must make from cash shop mounts I’d say the opposite is true. Money from cosmetic item sales almost certainly spills over into general funds and results in higher quality subscription content.
I don’t disagree that the content after WoD’s launch has been less than stellar.
But flying going away isn’t just something that suddenly happened out of the blue either like the crying would have you believe… It’s been gradually occurring for a long time now. Starting with a few areas in Mists, then a lot of talk before WoD’s launch.
And to be fair it was NEVER confirmed to be actually coming into WoD. They merely said they had initially intended to put it in one of the patches, statement of intention is not confirmation.
Got to give you props for acknowledging sub increases too. Most people love talking about WoW losing ‘X’ amount of subs this or that quarter and then completely ignore the fact they went up the quarter before. There’s a lot of plain leveling out that occurs.
Unsubscribing after 10 years because not being able to fly? I call bullshit.
In fact most of these assholes on the forums think that dropping the “unsub bomb” will provoke a response. The zones are not even that big and the prospects of a world PVP opportunity are far better than accommodating some pricks distaste for going on auto pilot for 3 minutes.
It’s better for the game, JUST SAIYAN.
As someone who plays primarily for PVP, ground mounts has made world pvp mad fun.
I dont play anymore, I dont have time
If Blizz is concerned that it ruins exploration and immersion, why not make flying the reward for getting the Explorer and Loremaster achievements?
Explorer requires you to visit every part of every map and Loremaster requires you to do “almost” every quest in the game
That’s actually a really nice idea.
But they’d likely never do it because of PvP servers. It’d make it mandatory just so you didn’t have a massive disadvantage in World PvP.
So naturally there’d be crying because it wasn’t easy to get.
I played from vanilla through to mid wrath and came back for WoD. In my experience no flying mounts was one of the best things about this expansion. I unsubbed again shortly after hitting level cap and imo wow has plenty of problems and not being able to fly is not one of them.
I thought leveling was fun, but once you hit level cap it just isn’t much fun. Gearing through LFR put me off raiding and i never enjoyed wow pvp. After that if you don’t really know anyone, all that’s left is a facebook game in your own solo instance.
Flying was single handedly the worst thing they added to the game, no questions asked. It may have seemed cool with BC but it had major ramifications to how players interacted with the world. Good riddance, even though I don’t play any more.
What gets me here is that this isn’t even news – people have been bitching since November.
I don’t mind the lack of flight, it sure does make the world seem a lot bigger.
I wouldn’t mind if they do add it in, even if only when the next expansion hits.
It’s news because they only just announced in that interview it would never be coming to Draenor (until now they’ve been saying maybe. .who knows) and probably not any other expansion.
Ah, missed that then.
Get out there, enjoy the world. Thanks Blizz… I’ll be sure to search desperately for anyone who’s not sitting in their phased-off Garrison, waiting for the queue to pop.
The problem with flying in WoW is not that it make some game elements trivial. It that there is zero risk when flying. If there was the danger you could be dismounted and plummet to your death, then people may rethink. BRING ON AERIAL COMBAT!
That druids forum post though.
“I’ve been continuously subscribed to WoW for over 10 years,”
2920 Achievement Points.
You’d think they would have accidentally gotten more than that by now, huh. Most of my long term player friends are in the 8000 range, I’m at 16000 and I feel like I’ve slacked off on them.
Yeah easily man, I am only just about to hit 10,000 now but there is still a ton of stuff I have not done.
I thought everyone posted on alts now, to disrupt the Armory Game of “You’ve only got Tier X shoulders, you don’t get an opinion”?
I thought achievement points are shared across all toons in your account.
I’ll have to ask my brother, he’ll know. It’s been a while since I played.
I am fine with the way Flying worked in the previous ~8 years of WoW: No flying in an expansion until you have completed a bunch of the content and your alts can have it earlier since you’ve already seen it on your main.
I am really enjoying WoD, but I don’t think the world has been enhanced by no flying. In fact, I just don’t bother going out into the world, it’s too tedious to traverse on the ground.
When I do have to travel somewhere for a quest, I go as directly to that area as possible, stealth my way into the target area, kill what I need to kill and get out of there. No different to if I had flying, except that I have to go in the completely opposite direction on a flight path first rather than just landing in the area and proceeding.
What annoys me most, considering the “immersion” card that they keep pulling as the reason, is that it’s only players who can’t fly. All the NPCs don’t seem to have a problem with it. Nothing like doing a garrison campaign quest with a bunch of Druid NPCs, they all shapeshift into flightform (which I have on my character as well) and fly off… but I have to mount up and ride on the ground for some reason.
If they’re going to make it no flying, at least make it consistent with the “lore”.
I think a lot of lays with the lack of creativity by the developers.
Back when flying was introduced in BC, there were specific areas, dungeons and raids that could only be entered by flying mount. However, you could see these areas from your ground mount, giving you a reason to grind the gold to buy the flight license. Wrath did the same thing, with some areas, raids, dungeons and daily quest hubs only being accessible by flying mount. Creating content the needed flying as a mechanic made the experience exciting.
Then once Cataclysm happened, the development team just didn’t seem to care as much about designing content that worked with the game, it just became a rush to get content out to the players. So with this rush came a drop in creativity. Couple that with the changes in mount levels (starting at level 20, flying in Azaroth at 60) and things became watered down and way less exciting. It went from “I want to fly to see these new areas” to “Here’s flying because we can’t think of a reason”.
Flying used to be a reward, something you got at max level so you wouldn’t have to spend all day dodging mobs as you ride from one place to another. It was also a way to find and explore new areas that were hidden from you on the ground. Now the developers just can’t be bothered rewarding players or being that creative.
Not to mention, I’d be happy to explore WoD content, if only it wasn’t so poorly created with either invisible walls all over the place or impossible mountain ranges blocking everything off at every turn. Every area in WoD is blocked off to self contain each area with only dev approved holes allowing access to other places (Anyone trying to get an Alliance character to Frostfire Ridge will understand)
I like no flying while leveling your first character to max level in a new expansion. But after that, I don’t give a flying fuck about being immersed and experiencing the content; especially when leveling alt #3 or 4. By that stage, it’s time to allow flying and convenience to take over…. A mix between the WotLK and MoP methods is the clear winner.
I don’t play WOW, but I can say even in something like Farcry I just go for the gyro to head where I want to go, skipping over half the game unless something draws my attention below. I also skip a whole lot of climbing puzzles by just flying straight to the top, even with the climb ceiling, it’s not too hard to get close to the top usually, or to just force crash/land into the side of a mountain above the ceiling.
What gets me is Blizzard said that flying will be released in a later patch release and now to turn around and say its not happening because they don’t trust the players to play the game the way they want is BS. I agree that it needs to be earned after you reach cap to make things a bit more balanced so make it like the old Lock Mount quest say get x from this raid boss and y from this one and farm so much of z from drops and for advanced flying do it in mythic.
I think no flying for new expansions is great. Brings everything back down to earth, literally.
However, i think every time Blizzard releases new expansions, the previous expansion should allow flying. That way, all my flying mounts can be still useful. 😀
Well that’s a kick in the pants for many players. I don’t play wow anymore, but still to have something taken away just like that … I will be guessing a lot of people will leave WOW now but they will be back next expansion.
The thing about ground mount “immersion” is that you can always CHOOSE to ride your ground mount. You don’t have to fly. Removing flying altogether from Draenor is removing the ability to CHOOSE. It’s a nerf. It’s like if someone took away your car and forced you to ride a bicycle. The RPG aspect of an MMORPG is about making your character stronger. Progression. More levels, better gear, etc. Getting hit with the nerf bat isn’t fun, especially adding more of a time requirement to an immensely time consuming game like WoW. In the past, they have had ground only zones like Wintergrasp and Tol Barad… that’s all they need to do. Leave Ashran as ground only, maybe one or two other zones as flying… and give the people what they want with the other ones.
The other problem is that there are MANY jumping puzzles which have been designed in Draenor which would be instantly trivilialized. Oops.
Dear god… please dont take the vocal minority to be the voice of the entire wow community. I’m over that. most of us are fine with and prefer the no flying.
I haven’t played WOW since WotLK came out so I don’t know what the current state is but the verticality introduced by flying mounts was really fun, they just never went anywhere interesting with it. That’s why it feels like this is Blizzard saying “We’re too lazy to put any effort into designing content that takes into account flying mounts so we’ll just try and distract you with excuses.”
As many people have suggested, making the skies feel like they are part of the world would be a simple and effective start. Warcraft has plenty of lore surrounding flying creatures and anti-air weaponry so it’s not like they have nothing to draw inspiration from…
I’m really disappointed at this decision. My own feeling is that Activision didn’t want to spend the extra time/money to make the world so realistic from above. Flying opened the 3-D wonders of the world to me.
Meh – it’s really no big deal. You either see it as just another achieve and get it done, or you bitch and moan about it.
Couple of weeks ago, a guildie and I completed Dreanor Pathfinder in 4 days, from start to finish – that’s all we did, day and night, until we got the damn thing.
Once you get the achieve, it feels so liberating, you’ll never take it for granted.