Blizzard goes through great effort to sculpt the terrains that we use. Flight turns all of it in to the equivalent of the Barrens without those pesky hills.
Just like a movie Director that doesn’t let the actor turn the lights on in the room with the scary guy holding the knife, Blizzard wants to control how you see and experience the world of Azeroth. Free flight takes that away from Blizzard. Free flight gives a spotlight to the audience so they can look in all the dark corners, weather the storyteller is ready for them to see them or not. So, Blizzard hangs on to it tightly as a mechanism of world building, story telling, and exposition.
Even though you may have already seen the story, you haven’t seen the entire story, as it’s not out yet. So they continue to hold flight back from everyone.
Honestly, what players want tends to shift with the wind. When flying was first announced way back in BC, there were many, many people who were against it, saying it broke immersion, ruined World PVP, made the world feel smaller, etc. And for years after, there would be threads about disabling flying on PVP servers, anger that zones needed flying to access the quests, and so on.
All that said, when Blizzard tried to do no flying, in WoD, it was clearly done at the last minute, much like a lot of WoD. The zones in WoD were clearly designed for flying from the get go.
The system they have now, in my opinion, is a good one. Doesn’t cost any gold, you unlock it for playing the game, is account wide, and so on. MMO players just don’t let go of things. We’ll have ‘give us flying’ threads two xpacs from now, even though at that point the current system will have been around longer than the old one.
The system they have now, in my opinion, is a good one. Doesn’t cost any gold, you unlock it for playing the game, is account wide, and so on
…is locked to a one year timegate and subject to change on a whim…doesnt actually GIVE you flight just the promise (sorry wrong word Blizzard doesnt promise anything)… offer of it “sometime in the future, wait and see, we cant tell you when, we wont tell you what you will have to do to unlock it…”
Until we get a concrete date Pathfinder is a worthless “achievement” since we dont have the reward it is supposed to give us…
Without flying the wow world seems much smaller to me. I love the artwork in BFA (and other exps) and would love to see it from height. Cliff sunsets look pretty awesome. As it is, I over use flight paths, hearthstones, mob tether/leash and yes res sickness just to avoid doing things I don’t enjoy. I miss being able to fly, that simple act was present in almost my entire wow lifetime (started just before BC release). I miss devs that were creative and created content that used flying. I also miss the wow that had many things to appeal to anyone, instead of the ‘you must do all of these things and do them from the ground’. I miss the wow sandbox. Now I surf the internet for games, looking for something else, something that has flight as a mainstay.
I feel like the only reason we have Pathfinder is out of spite from whichever dev got so butthurt about their idea for no-flight not being quite as popular as they had hoped.
And the spiteful design continues with flight only being unlocked once a new flightless zone opens up.
Based on their actions since the launch of WoD my vote is on “petulant children”. There is no game play reason for pathfinder to last beyond reaching max level and exploring all the zones. The one benefit, flying while leveling alts, is completely overshadowed by the fact that I won’t level any alts until I can fly, which severely affects how I feel about this game. My opinion, and that’s all it is, is they should go back to flight purchase able at max, or pathfinder fully compleatable at launch, timegated no more than 6 weeks.
Yes, it’s convenient but there’s more to it than that. Flight offers freedom. That freedom in turn not only drastically increases my immersion as I’m not going AFK to wait for my whistle or sit on a flight path, but it also increases my enjoyment of the open world as I’m able to go where I want when I want.
The most annoying thing is when they design terrain to look scalable, but it in fact not possible to climb. Or even stupider, those hills that after riding mount and jumping for ten minutes straight you hit a little toehold that lets you up. They should make scaling cliffs easier.
and BFA like legion for story based end game content is putting these in scenarios anyway.
They reuse the land, wrap it in a scenario. A scenario where flight is usually disabled anyway. Legion even does this. When we have flight, I’d gather BFA will repeat that.
Like the Nazmir feint attack/counter to the feint. They scenario’d this. Its not wide open “normal” nazmir as I recall. Probably because some of these areas in “real” BFA have animals.
technically they want better control of actors in the setup. They wanted 40 horde or 40 alliance…populate in the setup . Done. Now control program the NPC"s.
Stuff like is Horde A fighting alliance B.
Yes.
NPC’s ignore player aggro or is reduced. So you don’t pop an AOE and have all 40 of the other side rush you at once.
Gameplay wise…they probably didn’t want people like me farming our butts off. Large army either side, NPC AI set to attack all hostiles. Let me just keep on aggro’ing the animals, draw them in, have my army kill them and skin away…
Scenario, no animals, no farming. I won’t lie…if animals there like they are supposed to be I’d take hours to run this bit of the story. Hours…more skins than I’d know what to do with would be the reason.
Are you telling me it’s only an opinion that flying can be used to do helicopter questing?
FF14 has flight and engaging content that involves and INCORPORATES flight, and as has been said before…THEY dont have an issue with “helicopter questing”.
![:yum:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/yum.png?v=6" ":yum:")