Friday, May 22, 2015

Flight Basically Going Away in All New Content

Apparently, Blizzard has announced that they will not be unlocking flight in Draenor, and will most likely not be allowing flight in any future expansions.

Now, I've made my opinion on this pretty clear (generally pro-flight, though I'm ok with level-based restrictions on it.) I'd also argue that there are some pretty big problems with offering things like flying mounts for real money and then taking it away. Yes, you can technically use the Rylak mount on the ground, but I seriously doubt anyone is all that excited to see their two-headed bird/wolf awkwardly hobbling along over its giant wings.

I'll agree that flight can trivialize some quest content - the tried-and-true "named enemy in a sea of mooks" sort of quests are pretty easy to do when you can just pop down and tag the guy (though given that these quests pretty much always get paired with one that says "and kill x of these guys while you're at it," you'll probably have to fight through the area anyway.)

Still, to me it's all about having a toolkit. Flight opens up things that can be awesome. For example, I loved the gunships in Icecrown (the zone - actually, the fight in the raid was pretty cool too) - in fact, I just generally love the idea of airships as a thing in World of Warcraft. Perhaps my favorite moment questing in Deepholm was investigating the Alliance airship that had been taken over by a Twilight's Hammer mutiny.

Blizzard has said that they could allow flight in particular zones or expansions where they felt that it fit, flavor-wise, but I worry that this decision is more likely to be a pure blanket statement, and we will see any such designs torpedoed due to the reliance on flight.

My hope is that we will one day see new zones that use the vertical axis in interesting ways, like Icecrown and Storm Peaks, but this decision does not bode well for that hope.

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