Blizzard has gone back on its controversial plan to keep flying out of World of Warcraft‘s newest area, Draenor. Kinda.
First, the good news: eventually, you’ll be able to use flying mounts in Draenor. You’ll be able to spread your wings and fly on a dragon or a robot or a different dragon or a different robot. Also, monsters. There’s no exact date, but it’s coming in “the near future.” Originally Blizzard was planning to keep players’ wings clipped permanently, as it felt that flying mounts discouraged people from exploring and enjoying the game’s lovingly crafted war worlds.
Now the news you may or may not love, depending on how you feel about hoofing it across Blizzard’s cartoon fantasyland: you’re gonna have to earn your licence to danger zone by exploring on foot. A lot. Blizzard wrote:
“In an upcoming Public Test Realm build, we will be introducing a new meta-achievement called Draenor Pathfinder. You’ll earn this achievement in Patch 6.2 by mastering the outdoor environment of Draenor — exploring Draenor’s zones, collecting 100 treasures in Draenor, completing the Draenor Loremaster and Securing Draenor achievements, and raising the three new Tanaan Jungle reputations to Revered. Initially, this achievement will award a rylak mount: the Soaring Skyterror, one of the native beasts that roam Draenor’s skies. Players will remain ground-bound on Draenor until a small follow-up patch (6.2.x), when all players who have earned Draenor Pathfinder on at least one character will unlock the ability to fly in Draenor on all their level 90+ characters.”
“We believe this strikes the right balance between ensuring ground-based content lives up to its full potential, while providing players who’ve already fully experienced Draenor’s outdoor world extra freedom to ‘break the rules.’ This also provides a general blueprint going forward for content to come. Players will explore new and undiscovered lands from the ground, and then once they have fully mastered those environments — a notion that continues to evolve with each new expansion — they can take to the skies and experience the world from a new vantage point.”
I’m sure there’ll be some pushback, but it’s a pretty excellent compromise between Blizzard’s goals for WoW and what players demanded. It’s pretty much a perfect solution, if you ask me. Maybe you won’t agree, but I like wandering around, seeing the (oftentimes spectacularly imaginative) sights. I’m glad WoW eventually lets me become a gravity-defying demigod, but it’s fun to feel like an ant on the back of a giant for a while too.
What do you think, though? Are you happy that Blizzard’s bringing back flying? Do you think earning it through exploration is a solid solution to the problems flying presents? And lastly, are you at all worried about what’ll happen after everybody’s unlocked the option to fly (decreased world PVP, etc)?
Comments
21 responses to “Blizzard Finds Perfect Solution To World Of Warcraft’s Flying Problem”
Aka: Blizzard cave and give the whining lazy kids the #1 thing that’ll remove any social aspect of WOD
Good lord I am glad I unsubbed
Taking away flying was not a solution. Nor was just simply paying a pile of gold. It’s a pretty good compromise.
Yes, the ability to fly around the world is #1 most anti-social, not the solo instances people park their arses in 99% of their time.
Also controlled flight is so lazy, not like those click->alt+tab FP’s, those are for the hardcore players.
The only social aspect that not having flight introduced to me was being constantly ganked while trying to do quests. There was nothing social about ground exploration and as far as I can remember; going as far back to BC there never was.
Regardless still sounds like blizzard caved I sorta respected the fact that they had an appearance of a conviction no matter how disjointed it was.
C’est la vie, I guess.
You! Destiny! Yes?
Nah decided to do some backlog for the next few months,(which our time with WoW helped extend X) ) also the idea of doing crucible isn’t appealing at all.
thing is they caved in to extremely small no flying crowd before by not allowing flight once you hit lvl 100. Everyone is fine about not being able to fly right off the bat, but once youve done everything, flying just makes sense. By all right flying should of been introduced in 6.1 like it was originally planned.
(say) two months of work to get flying…….
I don’t play that much anymore
People fought for months to convince Blizzard that flight was more than just ‘a convenience’ but was an essential feature of the game, unlocking new ways to explore the world they built. So their answer is to lock it behind a wall of optional content…
No I don’t agree it’s a ‘perfect solution,’ it’s just another terrible design decision.
its a solution, but not a great one. at least we will get flying though… 2 patches late.
This does not in anyway effect pvp players which I am grateful for 😀
This was a Developer dummy spit. They didn’t want to do flying at all, the players pushed back, so the Devs put the feature behind a huge grind wall. More like sour grapes than “perfect solution”.
If you have a level 100, you should already have done like 80% of this at the very least. It’s really only the rep, not exactly a huge grind wall.
Flying should never have been introduced, and no amount of content wall will fix that. This just makes a long grind mandatory via illusion of choice. It’s better than a gold sink, but they shouldn’t pretend they’ve done any good here.
I am sick to fucking death of the PVE experience being fucked up by catering to what PVPers want.
Heck even the WoW story is now catering to co-operation between the Alliance and the Horde. The justification for World PvP is pretty much moot from a lore standpoint.
Spose that is one way of making sure that players experience the devs vision of gameplay in every minute detail before they fly over and ignore the majority of it.
There goes the best feature of WOD.
If the best feature of an expansion pack is (essentially) the removal of a feature that’s been in the game for most of the game’s life… then it’s not much of an ‘expansion’ pack is it?
Amen brother.
In an expansion with such little content, no flying kind of made it seem a little bigger and somewhat dangerous.
So as far as the “play your own way” mantra is concerned, you can so long as you grind out an entire continent’s worth of questing and crap. I barely play as it is, if it weren’t for the token, I wouldn’t be playing at all. I also hate questing (which is why I don’t do alts). This does nothing for me.
Abandon ship! She’s been taking on water for a good while but I think this is the beginning of WoW’s death throes
I think it is the right way to go about it, but i think they’ve gone too far. Having to grind reps etc is just annoying. If you need to explore the entire continent and do all the quests, not including daily type quests, that should be sufficient for getting flying in that zone. Having the find the treasures as well i can understand because once you can fly alot of them are super easy to get to.