Innovative ways to incorporate flying into game design, questing, and pvp

Community General Discussion
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So, I posted a little bit of what I’m about to post here.

Just as a start I have a BA in Animation and Game design and have worked for a few small studios.

There is a solution to the “flying” issue. To me, great game design when a marriage between game play and story development.

Instead of making flying a hassle, merge it into questing and pvp. For example: aerial combat could be a great way to engage players and add dynamics.

Imagine you’re in a battle ground. You’re flying and you see the enemy near you. You both get close enough to where one of you jumps to the other mount and both of you unleash your rage on each other. When one person claims victory he could possible chuck the other person to their ground and laugh knowing their opponent is watching themselves fall before they can release. Another possible way to add insult to injury is giving the other person a set time to ride the other persons mount, giving the other dude a serious motivation for revenge. Mounts could attack siege towers, catapults, picking up npcs with their mouth or talons and dropping them to their inevitable death.

While questing, terrain could be designed with flying in mind, npcs could be given tools to bring down the npc, forcing them to engage the area.

My whole point in this is as follows: there are ways to engage the player base with engaging content and allowing us to have the ability to fly. It would be easy to get new enemies, new story etc… and would def be more interesting than it being taken away from us after we had it and then wait until eternity into an expansion to make us grind to give it back…

These are just some examples. I’m sure others here could have equal or even better suggestions.

Any thoughts? I would really like to get a good game play discussion. Not trolling, not hostility, but honest and inventive game design. Yes, I know the flying issue has been brought up a bunch. This is just my take on it.

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Nah just add it - it wasn’t a problem for most of the game until they made it one.

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That is true, but unfortunately that isn’t going to happen. What could happen is to take this as an opportunity to satisfy both parties. Have the developers and artists still feel like what they work hard on is being enjoyed, and giving us a little fun in the process.

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I think we have enjoyed the content on the ground level long enough. I don’t need to explore the environment I got used to week one for 8 months. I would love to see the aesthetics of the art team form the aerial POV because they really are phenomenal and deserve more praise.

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I agree they deserve more praise, they are phenomenal. What I’m suggesting gives them a better chance to show case that talent in future content.

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Just add it bck, it was never a problem. They just know it takes X times longer which lets them rack up time played for the shareholders instead of you just fly there.

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  1. this would be fun af and
  2. there is already a quest in Storm Peaks that has you jump onto the backs of drakes to kill NPC pilots so … feasible to implement also, maybe?

I think anything that utilizes the terrain is fun. GW2 at least makes the attempt. The land around us should be more than scenery and barrier to progress. Let’s chase enemies from tier to tier of land, race NPCs (or each other) around predetermined flight courses, get some special flying mount abilities like speed boosts or close-proximity slows/stuns …

There’s room to make it more fun, even just pulling in skills and abilities we get on other vehicle types in quests. It’s a shame they seem to prefer to kill off the idea altogether.

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exactly what I was thinking.

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What do you do about mounts that weren’t built to hold two players?
Mounts that just don’t have a location for a second player?
Druids who have a flight form and aren’t a mount?
Transformation mounts?
Multi passenger mounts?
Do you allow a paladin to dismount, causing their assailant to fall, while they bubble and drop safely? Mages and priests to do the same with slow fall? Anyone with a goblin glider or who is zandalari or demon hunter?

If Quest POIs can bring down players, how do you design that in a way that doesn’t annoy players long term? People lose their minds now over being dismounted and dazed, can you imagine the anger when people are also falling to their deaths? Does it only reach so high? If so, whats stopping people from flying high to avoid those enemies and go directly to where they want, totally bypassing your solution for increased engagement?

You don’t really have much of an idea worth sharing if you haven’t spent any time at all thinking about and addressing very obvious issues your idea has.

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So. Let’s take a look at this point by point. As someone mentioned. There is a quest in Storm peaks that allowed you to jump on to a mount and do the very thing I’m talking about. One way around that could possibly be specific mounts only usable in pvp, thus avoiding the issues you bring up all together. It’s a thought.

So, let’s go back to the falling. The issue of dismounting during fighting can be fixed with a script to prevent the dismount until the opponent is dead. The whole concept behind the aerial pvp was the opponent fell once dead hence preventing slow fall and bubbling etc…

When you are forced from the air, it doesn’t have to mean instant death, simply that you hit the ground and are dismounted. Yes it can be a little on the annoying side when your dismounted during riding on a ground mount and sure this would be similar.

The height issue could be overcome by designing terrain with that in mind that people can fly said high. Terrain should be added into the game play and not just as a barrier and scenery.

The problem is that Blizz wants us to see the hard work they’re designers put in. I highly doubt it that they’re just going to give it back. If you don’t like my thoughts. Cool deal. But, how would you make it to where both parties are happy?

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Yes there is a quest in stormpeaks like that. However those mounts were chosen for just that purpose and were built for it. You have offered no solutions to how this affects mounts like mimiron’s head, obsidian nightwing, druid flightform, lightforged warframe, etc.

What if you arent using a pvp mount? Will you restrict mounts in pvp? Will people only be allowed you use certain flying mounts when in Warmode?

So you can’t dismount. Can you control your mount? What if you fly it into an area that would dismount you? Such as indoors, or into a quest area that would dismount you?

How can the height issue be overcome with terrain? Will quest mobs dismount you if you are 3000 ft in the air? Yes or no? If they wont, what is stopping someone from flying that high to bypass them? “Terrain can be designed around it” is not a response.

You didn’t address anything here “point by point”. In fact you ignored most of the issues and most of your solutions, no dismounting, only able to use certain pvp mounts, are restrictive in non intuitive ways that would annoy players.

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Hell how does this work for pvp combat in general. It forces 2 players into melee range that cannot be escaped. You even say you wouldnt be able to dismount. How does a mage fight properly without being able to keep their distance? How does a hunter fight without their pet? How does a rogue fight without being able to vanish and break away?

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Even if you say, a ranged class can attack from their mount and it’s their job to not get mounted. Well if they do get mounted, how do they then break away as they would in ground combat? Can they get the person off their mount? Can they break combat, or gain distance in anyway?

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They already do this.

Currently, during a Horde invasion, you can mount up in to a Goblin rocket, in free flight, and go shoot down Alliance gyrocopters or machine gun troops on the ground.

You have all of the “bombing” quests. Remember the one in Stormheim where the mobs would jump on your mount and you had to kick them off? They also had those quests in Wrath, and in Cata where you jumped from mount to mount, kicking off riders.

There’s also all of the shoot down quests. Shooting at bats, wrangling eagles, etc. This is all “flying content”. YOU aren’t flying, but it’s the same thing.

We had flying combat in Wrath (notably Wyrmrest tower), not to mention the stuff in the instances (every one LOVED Occulus).

The basic point being is that Blizzard can do all of these things, make all of this content, and yet STILL not release free form flying to the player base. They can (AND DO!) make all your dreams come true, yet your wishes unfulfilled.

So, you know, be careful what you wish for.

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I don’t really see mounted combat being an actual thing in game however, I think creating the environment made for flying is a great idea.
Like having certain questing areas where you have to fly to reach it. Or even quests that involve flying around in the sky to collect/fly through something. Also, having more floating cities such as Dalaran would be cool.

If there was mount combat I think a cool idea would be to have certain 2+ person mounts that have turrets or guns on them. They shouldn’t be able to do much damage but possibly stun with slight damage. Could make things interesting.

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I hate the npc bringing players down idea. If I want to engage in area I will land there myself.

I think they need to put things in where you need flight to get to them similar to what places like Northrend and Deepholm had.

I like the quests where we fly on dragons and bomb stuff but we don’t have to direct the flying while we do the bombing so that could be a pain - literally because I’d be dying all the time haha.

If aerial combat is mandatory I could see it causing some issues for people who don’t like that type of game play. It’s fun as a side thing to do occasionally but not something I’d want to have to do every time I entered X zone.

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So the point on aerial combat was mentioned in the context of battle grounds, not outside, That would be a whole other ball game to design and balance.

Height restrictions could be implemented as we’ve seen before that can prevent players from flying 36,000,000 miles in the sky.

The whole point of this, is there are other ways to implement flying. These were simple ideas off the top of my head. Obviously these would have to be balanced and would take a good bit to balance.

That being said with the feedback. What would you do? Blizz won’t simply give flying back, so there has to be other though behind this.

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Probably an unpopular opinion but like … so? Why not just make some mounts ‘unboardable’ when the design doesn’t work for it? Make some things better than others. Bring utility back. Give players a reason to want something aside from because they like the look of it. :woman_shrugging:

Player A has an unboardable mount, players B and C fly in on the dual-mount with turret attached to bring down the unboardable mount instead. Sounds like fun counterplay to me. Swarm the skies with different things with different strengths.

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Flying is fine. It just needs to be released from being held captive.

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I agree that it was fine and didn’t need to be messed with. 100%. Blizz disagreed and we were lucky to get it back. They would need an alt way to keep flying in and developing quests and terrain etc… around it would be the only way to strike a common ground. They need a way to keep players from skipping content which is their whole gripe to begin with.