they found the time and effort to rework the entire classic map to allow flight in old world zones in Cata but flying in Draenei and BE starter zones are “too hard”
But considering you leave those areas before you have flying.
Then once you leave, there is no reason to go back beyond personal
reasons. What would be the point of redoing the maps?
Just so people can fly over them once, which would be the case
for a lot of people. Is not a good reason for them to put in
the hours needed.
It was a slight derail of the conversation, nothing more. And I did say its now an academic point. But when they overhauled the world back in Cata, which included many areas that were also dead zones, they could have also overhauled those two zones.
So does “designed for flight” just mean there is something without a walking path to it?
Flying wasn’t really a part of Wrath leveling. A LOT of people went 70-80 without flight, myself included. Flying was necessary for a lot of quests, but there was beyond an ample number of quests to reach the level cap and then some.
And I wouldn’t call placing crap out of reach of ground transport “designing around flying.” They could easy put a crappy flight path from point A to point B, they just didn’t. No content in this game can really be designed around mounts, since they’re literally just movement buffs. Making things vertical isn’t supporting flight anymore than creating roads or open flat land is designing around ground mounts.
2 Likes
gasp* you have the 100% OPTION to not use a flying mount… CRAZY!! I know right?
3 Likes
Not investing in flying =/= forcing walking.
Forcing walking is just a side effect of spending less money on not making a world capable of flying.
Despite what non-flyers think, the argument is NOT walking vs flying, its investing in a fully developed world instead of a 2d world that looks just good enough for the players that don’t care about the world and leveling.
no, it means you can view it at all angles and it looks good vs only seeing one side.
2D vs 3D.
1 Like
it doesnt directly, but the flying zones take more effort to design than flat zones
Like I’ve said several times on this topic.
The core issue is mobility, and the lack thereof.
Give us good mobility tools, not resource restricted, not class restricted, not expansion restricted, and people will be more tolerant of flying taking longer to return.
Wildstar may have had faults, but it had mobility options out the wazoo. You’d be sent on quests to do things like “explore that mountain!” and you’d have the tools to reach the mountain top, hitting all the exploration points on the way.
And It Was Fun.
Except, of course, that the zones are fully developed and look amazing even after flying is unlocked. They aren’t original vanilla zones where they’re using smoke and mirrors to hide the seams. Argus was like that, which is why they said they’d never have flying there, but other than that the zones are not at all as you describe them.
2 Likes
Flying is the best mobility tool and already in game. Give it to everyone all the time so I can have fun too.
I was recently levelling a toon and found hidden caves in Draenor I missed the first time around. And I was “that’s cool, what’s inside?”
The vast majority of players weren’t raiding.
People were poor and couldn’t get gold. Most went without flying for months upon months.
They are trying to manage their flow. They want a nice compact area with lots of tortuous terrain and herds of worthless trash to keep players busy and pinned down.
They would like a paradigm where they just have to change a few parameters to release another xpac instead of redesigning the whole thing over and over.
I.E. they would like to do less work than they have done in the past without having to pass any savings or economy on to you. In fact, they want you to work harder for them while they do less for you.
2 Likes
Yes. I love flying, but if they gave us a huge battery of mobility options … gliders on demand, grappeling hooks, tools to climb mountains, boats to ride in, scuba gear (of course with reasonably limited oxygen supplies) and I think you’d get far more people being willing to hoof it. Because they’ll see that roadblock Blizzard PURPOSELY put in the way to make us waste time and they’ll go “ooh, what tools can I use?”
They’ll pull out their grappling hook and away they go.
Think of Breath of the Wild. Lots of fun in using tools to get around. And they weren’t limited. Once you had your glider, you could use it pretty much everywhere.
3 Likes
I can agree somewhat to all angles.
2-D vs 3-D?
Do you classify vanilla as a 2-D game?
We have short term models of most of what you listed and you know what? None of them mean or meant a dang thing to me. I didnt find them interesting or fun.
Now I will agree if they fire all of the map designers that make the multi-level maps with only one true path TM to get to where you want to go and I will be a little less adamant on flying.
The current maze design of maps makes flying all that more important.
The bottom part yes through crystalsong. You didn’t get CWF until 77 so unless you were doing every quest, you ended up in Storm Peaks before then.
1 Like
A large amounts of the assets were. Thats why Cata happened. If you flew, you would look down and see how broken it was.
1 Like