I’ve seen this point regurgitated so many times in threads about dragon riding that I feel like the larger picture for why regular flying is excluded is being missed or deliberately distorted.
Regular flying is not being excluded because it’s a more effective and optimal system. Both systems have trade-offs that do not render the other useless. Regular flying is less engaging but is capped out relatively low compared to dragon riding. Dragon riding lets you travel at a speed unseen in the game before but requires more engagement. Both have distinct benefits that do not conflict with one another. Were they to ever add regular flying into Dragonflight, dragon riding would not be thrown away on the fact alone that it’s a much faster system.
The reason why it’s being excluded is because Dragonflight is deliberately designed with exploration and traversal being intrinsic to dragon riding’s progression systems. If you were to add regular flying back into the game, you would effectively be breaking Dragonflight’s open world design. Dragon riding is an environmental puzzle. Certain things are designed to be out of reach so that you are incentivized to be creative in your approach and subsequently rewarded when you succeed. That meta-game would be pointless and all of Dragonflight’s open world design would lose any and all meaning as it relates to dragon riding if you could just float up to the item that’s been placed at the highest peak in the area.
Whether or not you like that design is at your discretion, but Blizzard excluding regular flying is not some attempt to pull the rug from underneath you because dragon riding is actually worse and they want to keep you from seeing that. It’s because Blizzard has put an effort into making this expansion an actual video game, and the video game part would no longer exist if they allowed a system that overrides everything about it.
A well presented post. All valid points. BUT for people like myself, Dragon Riding is physically near impossible to do. I have finger and hand issues as well as coordination problems. None of which have impacted on playing WoW until this xpac. Back in MoP I was able to do the bare minimum with the Cloud Serpents, and in SL that WQ where you need to fly the Larion through the smoke rings is/was one I usually avoided. Having Dragon Riding in the game is not my personal issue, it’s the fact that it is a core part of the expansion, and so far, appears unavoidable. I have no issue with waiting until normal flight is available, ground mounts while slow in comparison allow you to also view the world around you, and see what sort of effort has been put into the scenery. Last night I came very close to a “rage quit” of the game itself due to my issues with the Dragon Riding mechanics and controls. This is a game I have played since it was released and have been able to manage it fairly easily. Most games that require use of a mouse for movement control are unplayable for me, as much as I might like to.
Again I say, your post is a well presented one, and I hope you’re wrong about regular flying being excluded from the Dragon Isles entirely.
This exactly. I have arthritis in my wrists and hands. Manipulating the mouse to accommodate for activities like dragon riding, or the other examples you give here, are extremely painful for me. I hope it’s possible to complete the basics of Dragonflight and some end game content without dragon riding. If not, I may have to take my first ever break from the game and that makes me sad.
There’s nothing mechanically challenging about Dragonriding to the point where it should be affecting those who have always been playing the game up to this point anyway while having any sort of co-ordination or physical debilitation.
It’s a thinly veiled excuse by those who don’t want to use dragonriding because you can’t just put your character on auto-run and alt-tab out of the game.
Dragon Riding should be the gold standard from now on for any future development to this game.
If someone wants to afk fly, because that is usually the main excuse of people who want a flying mount. Well flight path still exists, so you’re in luck!
I’m not someone who suffers from a physical impairment so I personally feel like I’m not able to speak on the subject matter. That said, I have been quite perplexed by the number of people who have seemingly played this game for quite some time now claiming to have issues with dragon riding. WoW has been a fast-paced game for years now with some normal and heroic dungeons even touting more mechanically involved systems than anything that dragon riding has currently required of me. It’s certainly strange that the physical impairment issue is suddenly a concern.
Not to mention it’s quite healthy for world pvp, you can’t just afk 3 miles above the air and people can knock each other off their dragons with that one skill.
I’m still not convinced that Blizzard is just going to add regular flying without expecting its players to have done dragon riding and its progression systems to some extent unless they want to cannibalize the main feature and selling point of their expansion.
Well, that sucks for you, pal. Speaks more to your inability to make an informed purchase because it was a flagship characteristic of the expansion’s marketing campaign.
It’s basically already confirmed, via a interview in the past. It just won’t be added until time has passed. If they deleted normal flying, they will delete people’s ability to fly who’s hands or coordination problems prevents them from using htis, effectively, alienating a chunk of their population and getting bad reputation.
So I guess when you eat irl you just shove a loaf of bread through your skull like we do in-game because moving through the air with wings seems to not be flying.