Blizzard despite their “war on flight” builds the entire game around it. It is hurting the game because instead of improving overall one of if not THE single weakest aspect of the game, traversal, they simply design all of the content around the convenience of a traversal system that is so overpowered that if it was in any other game would be literally hacking, or cheating.
They have designed the game, in a manner that lets you turn every zone in the game, into background scenery you simply noclip over. Where is the adventure? Where is the thought put into getting form point A to B? Dragon Riding brings that back somewhat. You have to actually fly your mount. You can’t just auto run to the next engagement metric marker on your map. You actually have to pay attention to your mount’s altitude and avoid obstacles in your way. Making moving around the map more interesting than flying to a specific height, clicking auto run and then arriving at your destination is no better than if they added a flight path to every single Engagement Metric Marker on the map that you could use from literally anywhere.
It also hurts exploration. Instead of figuring out how to get to that cliffside or that flying island. You simply hop on your mount of choice, hit auto run, and bam, you’ve arrived. This has severely limited the amount of interesting challenges blizzard can put into the game. You don’t have to think for a second how to reach a new destination. You can literally noclip there.
It’s lazily implemented, and the adventure side of the game has suffered so thoroughly that the entire end game has been reduced to an endless sludge of daily and world quests for engagement metrics and all noclip flying has allowed is for Blizzard to do the ad nauseam because there is no mechanics in the game designed to make getting to those engagement metric cookies on the map interesting in any way. The game sucks because of this. We finally have a chance to course correct and people are mad because we finally have a way out of Bobby Kotick’s Maze.
I agree with you but it’s their own fault we want to fly.
Mob placement is horrible.
What I mean by that is, you will travel through a field of hostile creatures, OK that’s fine, except.
You will have this bonkers mob placement of like 10 bears in like 2 acres of land, just roaming around, because reasons.
Or you have all these random bad guys guarding an area, guarding what?
You have Fort Knox level security to protect what?
We don’t often have kill quests that go over 10 anymore so there is no need for mob overload on the ground anymore, dynamic spawn rates and shared spawn tags have eliminated the need for such masses of mobs.
Perhaps if they thinned out the clutter of mobs a bit, we wouldn’t be screaming for a way to avoid it all.
Nobody wants to spend 10 minutes wading through a bunch of random, useless trash to get to where they want to go.
It’s funny you should quote Rich Campbell, because he was saying that about another system they tried and failed. Then threw away. Tried Torghast, it didn’t work. Feels like groundhog day at this point.
This. It’s exactly what it looks like is happening. It doesn’t help that I have no trust in Blizzard any longer, and more specifically in Ion, Hater of Flight.
My guess is that “dragonriding” will come to replace the old flight system. So you’ll be able to use your mounts, but only with “new riding”. In that situation, dragonriding basically acts as an extended beta test.
I could definitely get behind more “vanillalike” mob placement where roads are almost always clear with mobs all standing well beyond aggro range of the roads, but I don’t have much sympathy for anybody trying to cut directly across maps ignoring roads.
This isnt any other game. This isn’t even any other kind of game. This is an MMORPG. All the stuff you keep listing belong in side scrollers like pitfall and console game for little kids. In addition, this is a COMPUTER game game. It’s not supposed to have the things you keep saying you want. It got huge by not having any of them…
Who wants thought in travel. Again, I want my travel time to be when I switch focus to tv. I should NOT be focused 100% of my time. MMORPGs have always been this way - sit in a camp in EQ in 1999 where we just talked waiting for spawns.
Nah, I just want to run to a spot to explore - open up the fog of war then hit the quest hub.
Again the kind of challenge you are asking for will make people like me quit because I hate that Blizzard has already gone too far down this path and it frustrates me because the current devs are ruining the game I have played since launch day.
Hit mythic+ or a raid for a mechanic
I guarantee I am going to hit more metrics by watching a few tv shows zoning out while logged into WoW than some guy spending 10 minutes on a puzzle one time that will never be repeated. Mine takes less dev time as well because it’s simply easier to build…
Funny thing is…IF they were more creative they could find reasons to make many of us WANT to wade thru that trash. lol.
such as…lots and lots of mog drops. Im still getting BoEs from classic word trash i dont have the appearances for, lol. Years later and they are still dropping.
There seems to be so few in the last few expansions that hardly anything Im getting is something I dont already have.
You know not what the future holds. Don’t act like you do. It’s hilarious all this doom and gloom when they will likely open up all mounts to be useable on dragons isles eventually.
This mentality is so stupid. Nothing was thrown away. People who got a water strider before the change were provided with free water walking equipment on any character they logged in on for…months? years? Nevermind that you got use out of them the entire time between their implementation and the swap to mount equipment.
Whining and moaning that the devs are trying something new, to make flight something interesting in an expansion about dragon…flights…is also incredibly stupid. If you want to play the same game forever, Classic is over there. Have fun.
And yet, they continue to not design around it, and just complain that it is there. Once again, we the players shouldnt be punished for their lack of vision. I dont WANT to “experience” the land and mobs for the thousanth time. Been there, done that, got the repair bill.
I want more downtime too (it really does do wonders for getting people to actually talk to each other) but leveling and the world used to be a much bigger component of gameplay (especially for the masses who never touched endgame) and I want that back too.
What would designing around it look like to you?
Easy to say the same thing about N difficulties on the same old tired dungeon maps but those aren’t going away any time soon.
This is definitely true. The lack of interesting mogs in Shadowlands leveling content is absolutely criminal. 4 sets that all look exactly the same. Disgusting. Blizzard should be ashamed. If they do the same in Dragonflight I swear to god. Every quest used to give you unique armor only found from that quest.
True. So you agree that we should slow down, and ride a dragon to our destination flying through the trees and not over them, for example. I’m glad we could come to an understanding.
I see where you’re coming from.
I don’t know how much they specifically design for flight or how much it takes away from their time to develop other things. I think they put nearly as much thought into cluttering up pathways with so many random mobs like they did Nazjatar as they do really building for flight specifically.
Maybe the bigger open areas they are talking about in DF will be less of the impassable winding trails of the last few expansions and more like the open spaces of wrath. Although I’m just as guilty of hitting auto-run on a ground mount as I am a flying mount when I need to cover some distance. Adding in mobs to dismount/daze me doesn’t make me any more interested in the area than I already was heading across the zone for a turn in. It just serves to slow us down, with no meaningful interaction.
I’m still hopeful that dragon riding isn’t a cumbersome mess with long cd’s on the ability to take off or things like that. We’ll see once they start letting people in to alpha and beta test. It would be cool if it is interactive and you can really get around like they made it sound.
Also, thanks for giving a reply without any ranting or anything like that. It’s a rare thing to have a useful conversation on GD
