Desire for WoW: Design Around Flight, Don't Make it an End Goal

I know I've made this sort of argument before, but it bears repeating.

Flight has been part of WoW almost since the beginning. The very first expansion, Burning Crusade, gave us flying mounts. And Blizzard has always struggled a bit to figure out the proper way to let us fly.

In Burning Crusade, it was simply a gold cost at level 70 - then the level cap. In Wrath of the Lich King, you got "Cold Weather Flying" at level 77 - not the cap, but the level at which you gained access to Icecrown and Storm Peaks, two leveling zones that required flying to do all the quests. In Cataclysm, you could get a "Flight Master's License" (though players nicknamed this "Old Weather Flying,") which I think required you to be level 80 (Wrath's level cap,) but allowed you to do all of Cataclysm's leveling zones in the air, and of course allowed you to fly over the "old world." Mists of Pandaria was the only expansion to go to the original model, giving flight at the level cap (then 90.)

In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard sitrred controversy as the first expansion in which you could not even fly at the level cap. For a time, they even suggested that we would never be able to fly in Draenor, but later, they came up with the model for what we have used for the last three expansions: Pathfinder.

The problem with flight, from Blizzard's perspective, is that it makes it too easy for players to just dip in, hit the targets they need for a quest, and then fly away. Navigation is safe and easy, and all the topographical complexity of the environment is rendered moot if you can just fly in a direct line toward the objective.

Now, I'd argue this is more of a problem with the quest tracker, where real exploration is replaced with a GPS-like waypoint. I'll confess I've gotten totally used to this feature since it was introduced in Cataclysm, and it's clear that quest designers have as well, because the quest text doesn't always tell you exactly where to go, which it did in Vanilla through Wrath (something you can experience again in Classic.)

As such, Blizzard has decided they prefer to have players spend a great deal of time on foot navigating the world and then just reward flight to them once they've "finished" all the world questing.

However, I think this robs us of some real opportunities. In the early days of flight in WoW, you had zones and quests designed around flying. In BC, the Tempest Keep dungeons were all flying high above Netherstorm. If you wanted to run them, you had to physically get there, and this was before meeting stones actually summoned a player to the dungeon (even if they did, the stone was down on the ground near Cosmowrench.) Getting flight was a gateway to more content, not a reward meant to trivialize old content.

That, to me, is the key. Pathfinder is designed to come after you've done the major content of the expansion. In Warlords, it was something you only got after you'd exhausted what there was to do in Tanaan Jungle. In Legion, we did get Argus afterward, but we never got to fly there.

In BFA, admittedly, we'll have new content where flight will be useful in N'zoth's invasions of Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but that's likely because they couldn't find a way to keep us from flying in these old zones.

I think there's a missed opportunity for three-dimensional exploration. I'd love to have a zone where you can fly from the get-go, but there are airships and floating islands aplenty with their own quests and NPCs and mysteries to unravel. I wrote a couple posts back that even Antoran Wastes didn't quite hit the same menacing dread of Icecrown, and I think to a large extent that was because it wasn't practical to navigate the zone on foot.

I strongly suspect that, perhaps with a few tweaks (requiring only revered reputation being a welcome one) we'll probably see Pathfinder as the model moving forward. But I do wish Blizzard would consider the potential they unleashed by putting flight into the game, and not just its downsides.