Blizzard trying to take flying away and punishing us with pathfinder has nothing to do with the content of the xpac. Looking at the content that was offered it was good so I do like WoD for that. Having to play it as a xpac oh, there was nothing to do but raid and/or use mission tables to make gold.
Even Blizzard admitted that they stopped working on WoD and put all that effort into Legion. WoD was a quarter of an xpac that we played for time of a whole xpac. It go old real quick and the battle over flying did not do it any favors either.
IIRC, WoD was during the period they were aiming to put out annual expansions. They later had to abandon the idea because they just couldn’t get it done.
To get that done, they would need to be already working on the next expansion as the current is released. Possibly before the current’s release. There’s a lot more work in it than many realize.
But considering how much of a drought there was at the end of MoP and with WoD, it easily appeared as laziness but was possibly due to the “annual expansion” idea that it left WoD bareboned.
To even come close to meeting that plan, content would have to be minimal, dripfed, and timegated. And hence the idea of grounding everyone to slow the consumption of content. But that still exists to this day with pathfinder, timegates, currency limits and caps…
These are very different statements. One implies they left work due to legion, the other implies they didn’t have enough manpower or direction to finish in a reasonable 2-year time period.
Also keep in mind they mentioned specifically one of the reasons WoD was difficult was because they had a ton of new-hires after just laying off/people quitting. So, they didn’t realize the difficulties in training new talent.
They talked about not having flying be a feature potentially during WoD.
There was a lot of backlash from both sides
In one camp, they wanted flying because it was a fantastic QoL feature and expanded the game out.
In the other camp, some people felt that flying diminished the overall experience, etc, etc.
Blizzard eventually switched and made flying an unlock via a large rep grind with pathfinder
Ion wasn’t the Lead Designer for WOD, that was Celestalon (who works on Hearthstone now, and despite the complaints from WoW, is a good dev). Ion took over during WOD.
They told us we were gonna start without flying, but we’d get it in a future patch.
Then, they told us they were gonna “See where it goes when it comes to flying. But don’t worry, the expansion is designed for flight, just requires flipping a switch”.
Then they said “No more flying EVER”.
Then they lost half their subs over a 1 week period (during an expansion that had already lost 5 million players) [they still reported sub numbers at that time].
Then they said “Flying in the next patch!”
Then “Well, it’s coming in the next mini-patch” (because of the invisible walls and fixes to the skybox required for an expansion that was clearly never supposed to have flight).
Then “Bugs!”.
Then “Well, you have flight, but pathfinder is going to be our compromise with you all going forward”.
I remember that. In mop there were a lot of people in trade chat that would complain that flying had ruined pvp. This was almost a daily thing on my server as well, so people used to troll them all the time.
It made the world feel smaller, it make a lot of the level design seem pointless. Questing was just “fly over the village and murder the leader” instead of you know… fighting through the village as intended. PVP was a big part of it too.
(Not defending it, just recalling some of the conversation.)
well, for me, all the classes felt good to play in WoD (some specs more than others, but still!), the zones that were current felt like you needed to be high-level to be there, and the garrisons were a neat idea and the closest thing we got to player-housing (which is unfortunate).
oh! and y’know how i mentioned the classes felt good to play? we had so many abilities you could’nt put’em all on one or two hotbars, and had to pick and choose what abilities you needed. like, i had a hotbar for runnin around doing stuff, and a hotbar for pvp. felt good.
though, a couple specs felt lazy, but in a good way. like, on my assassination rogue, all i had to do was apply poisons, and turn on blade-fury.
now i gotta apply poisons, refresh blade-fury, mash attack buttons, refresh blade-fury again, mash more buttons, blade-fury, buttons, blade-fury, etc…
You know when pathfinder was first released, I hated it, I hated the idea of having to earn flight. But right around bfa, it started to make a little sense to me. Drustvar was an amazing zone, and some of that eerie atmosphere was added because you couldn’t escape it.
And now I’m back to not understanding pathfinder because we already have skyriding, and it makes little sense to lock the old flight.
