Flying in Draenor to be Delayed Until 6.1

Blizzard has just officially announced that the ability to fly in Draenor will not be available until the first major content patch after the expansion launches.

Blizzard has had a certain sense of regret about the institution of flying in Burning Crusade, as they worry that the ability to simply take off and land elsewhere allows you to skip right ahead to that one enemy you want to kill, making it harder to create a sense of really pushing your way into enemy territory.

We've seen them take steps against this in Mists of Pandaria, first disallowing flight until the level cap, and then making such endgame zones as the Isle of Thunder, the Isle of Giants, and the Timeless Isle all flight-free zones.

While I can sympathize with their attitude, I do think we are experiencing a certain "baby with the bathwater" situation.

I'll agree that questing can sometimes feel disjointed and trivialized when you have access to flight, but I don't know that a complete removal of the ability to fly is what is needed to make the experience better.

BC and Pandaria required you to hit the level cap before you could fly (though Druids got the ability at 68 for some reason.) Cataclysm simply allowed flight from the get-go - there was no area you could not fly except for Tol Barad, the Molten Front, and Darkmoon Isle.

But Wrath was kind of the odd one out. One did gain "Cold Weather Flying" during the leveling process, but it wasn't until level 77.

Northrend, from Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra up through Sholazar Basin, was designed with the assumption that you could not fly. You would have to trek across the frozen wastes. However, upon reaching 77, two things occurred. One was that you gained the ability to fly, and the other is that you got your first quests sending you into Storm Peaks and Icecrown.

Unlike the other zones, Storm Peaks and Icecrown absolutely required flight. Storm Peaks was a vast range of mountains and Titan-built towers and structures. There would be no way to get to the places you needed to go if you couldn't fly. Icecrown also required flight - not so much because you couldn't reach the places you needed to go, but because there just wasn't any safe ground. The Alliance and Horde never really got a foothold in Icecrown - they were instead forced to keep their airships high above the glacier.

While there was a lot of "hop and fight" that you could do in these zones, there was also a lot of indoor combat. The nice thing about fortresses and tombs and those sorts of things is that you can prevent people from flying away without having a blanket "no-flying" policy.

These zones were designed around the ability to fly, and thus I don't think they really suffered all that much. While Hyjal might have been better if we really felt that we were fighting our way down the mountain, and Twilight Highlands may have felt better if we were constantly pushing our way up toward the Twilight Citadel, these two Northrend zones were, in my opinion, a great example of how flying could make the game more immersive, and not less.

Blizzard feels pretty strongly about this, and I respect their design decisions, even if I don't agree with them. That said, I expect this restriction on flying to be a real lightning rod of criticism in the early days of the expansion.

If this is how they want to do things, I really hope that 6.1 comes along in roughly the same timeframe as 5.1 did, or else lack of flying is going to be the new Golden Lotus.