A thought about flying

Community General Discussion
22

I feel like I need to go and hunt down the most idiotic comment now! Thanks.

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23

It’s a subjective viewpoint. I enjoyed how flying was a thought out point for the expansion. If you didn’t enjoy it, that’s fine too.

24

Ugh this was so frustrating. After a break during Wod I came back after flying was released. So I had a lot of work to do to get pathfinder and I just remember constantly being picked off by Horde swooping down to kill me real quick and fly away.
I am still afraid when I see shadows of mounts flying above me while questing.

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25

Well you know what they say about opinions…

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26

Here is #1 for you.

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27

I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it, it just wasn’t any different than any other expansion. Same “no access w/o flying” areas, they were smaller and I only remember one, but the same concept. The only thing relatively creative was that you had to fly to get to that one drake for the mount.

I always enjoy flight. I just was wondering if I missed something. :woman_shrugging:

28

That awful moment of hearing flapping wings moments before a tauren warrior was tactical crouching on your face after he ganked you from the sky while you were leveling. For the longest time, that was the reason I enjoyed having pathfinder, but now with warmode you can opt out either way.

And if you make it so people need to hit max level once to do it it’ll kinda hamper bots because they won’t be able to gather as fast as legitimate players until they leveled lol.

29

Pathfinder is the worst thing ever, Blizzard please just embrace flying at max level.

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30

For one I enjoyed the nuances in art you got from flying, like the houses on hilltops, tucked away secrets, Easter eggs. Minor art things like that. Showed, to me, they placed things in a way to encourage you to fly around and explore. The lorewalkers scrolls and hidden treasures added to this encourage to explore idea.

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31

Okay. I’ll give you that. There were a lot of creative things from the artists (always are, they are amazing). Not a ton as far as actual content went, but yeah…I totally see the artist thing.

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32

Heh. Old habits die hard :slight_smile:

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33

It’s unfortunate. The loss of flying was so reviled that even the staunchly anti-flying devs had to choke down that crow and come up with a solution. It was a petulant and mean-spirited solution but here we are with pathfinding.

I get the feeling that the current development team still sees flying as just some stubborn anomaly that gets in the way of their work. Like eventually all the dumb humans will forget they could soar and be content to once again founder in the dirt like grubs.

Like if they just ignore it, it will go away.

And they might not be wrong. More people seem to be fine without flying now as if that’s the new cool. “I liked flying once, now I only do it ironically.”

New people are coming to the game and boosting right past flight or leveling through it like a blip. I remember the majesty of banking over Outland and veering out into the twisting nether. I remember drifting over Dalaran and the crystal forest below, gliding across the jagged peaks of Ice Crown.

I remember all that as if it was the best that the game had to offer. Maybe more people just see it as something that happened on the way to max level.

I see pathfinding and the whole ugly matter of doing everything possible to deny you flying as throwing the best part about the game, the most wonderful achievement, straight into the trash. And that too seems emblematic of the current team.

“We will do what we want to do. We do not care what effect it has on the game, our customers or anything else. We develop what we want, you pay up and deal with it.”

And I do. I have been chopping away at pathfinder for ages now and still haven’t completed a single one. I’m pretty close for legion. Eventually I will be able to force myself to consume enough repetitive world quests and copy pasted content to get exalted in all the factions.

But even if I get it. Even once I finish that last quest and get that last point, even when my dragon suddenly remembers how to fly. I will certainly remember how many uninspired and bitter roadblocks were intentionally placed in my way by a dev team bent on punishing me for wanting the best part of the game.

That flight will be stained with the ruthless spite that grounded me in the first place. the devs will have successfully turned something I loved about the game into just something that happened on the way to max level.

The current development direction, spinning gold into straw.

8 Likes
34

This is the #1 most relevant comment on the forums today.

Lots of ups and downs in this thread.

35

Pathfinder is dumb. If you want to make Loremaster a requirement for flight, do that. If you want to make exploration a requirement, do that.

But when you put a time gate on it, that’s a really crappy business practice and anybody at Blizzard who supports that should be out of a job. Honestly, it’s one thing to make people earn something in a game, it’s entirely another to make people continue to pay a monthly fee while they gate you.

This is like GRRM telling you to read the next Game of Thrones book, but then saying you can only read 2 pages per day.

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36

Here’s what I don’t like - you introduce a mechanic (flying) in the first expansion. Everyone I knew then loves flying. You put multitudes of flying mounts in the game that just aren’t that great as a ground mount. And then you go on to sell flying mounts in your store. People spend time and money on these mounts because they are cool and useful.

And then, rather than build on all this, and implement even more fun and unexpected ways to fly in the current content of the game, you unilaterally decide it’s too hard to design content with flying involved so let’s not allow flying in current content anymore. Rather than meet the challenge you take the coward’s way out.

There’s any number of ways Blizzard could have gone with this, but they took the cheap and easy one.

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37

Blizz realizes people have less time for WoW and wanna do other things. Imagine all the time cut out of doing things on ground as opposed to flying. They just want people glued to whatever mediocre content they shelve out.

38

In a way, I understood this when they talked about it, but that’s why i thought at max level was a good enough restriction. Now if people could fly from day one, I could see why they had an issue with quest design.

And speaking from a narrative standpoint, if they really wanted to keep people from swooping on quest objectives I don’t think it’s unreasonable that enemies would spot a giant dragon with a night elf on it’s back and attempt to bring it down. Or add creatures that are scary into areas they don’t want people flying that fit the narrative.

I think at this point, it’s been 5 months and kul tirans/zandalari are just hitting the ptr, I think people could fly now and it’s not going to break anything.

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39

If you truly think that as an idiotic comment you clearly don’t pay enough attention to the forums lmao.

40

Don’t forget about the whole flying race bit when we got to train and raise our own cloud serpents.

By the Gods I miss MoP. :cry:

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41

I’d agree there. WoD felt like Blizzard’s first real stab at world-building where the zones weren’t these weird, mountain-ringed isolation areas that had been the norm since Vanilla. It was necessary from a gameplay p.o.v., to keep players on a line from the 90-92 zones, 92-94, and so on.

Legion was huge step forward, with multiple, logical paths and realistic delineations between regions. It made the Broken Isles be the first content to feel like it was a contiguous landmass.

I hope someday they can go back to old Azeroth and flatten the mountains separating so many places. With world-scaling, there’s no reason people couldn’t go west from Mulgore into Desolace, and so on.

1 Like