Flight and Draenor

One of the most controversial statements made in the recent trickle of Warlords info is that 6.0's lack of flying is meant as an experiment - that they might, if they think it works out, just not let us fly in Draenor at all.

I understand where they are coming from. Keeping things on the ground level requires you to navigate the terrain. You have to figure out how to get around that cliff, or find the gate in that massive wall. Cataclysm's late-level zones did sometimes feel a little disconnected - you could just hop up on your mount and move on to the next quest area indicated on your map. You might even do that just to get to the next cultist you had to kill. Dense wilderness was something that you passed over, rather than being forced to cut your way through.

But I don't think that getting rid of flight is a good idea. And I am not merely speaking from a perspective of making things more convenient.

Flight should be exciting, and it should feel dangerous. If zones are designed as one big plain, then yeah, it's not all that exciting to just pass over it. But when a zone is designed with verticality in mind, flight can add to immersion.

There is, of course, a distinction that some make, which is that flight can be seen as a reward for leveling up. Having reached that pinnacle, you then get to fly past the quests that you were less likely to even want to do now, or the areas where you had already completed the quests.

But while I think that this method, rewarding flight at the level cap does work - we've seen in in Outland during Burning Crusade* and Pandaria during Mists - what I think is a far more interesting issue to discuss is how to make flying immersive, and thus make it an attractive tool when designing a zone, and not thinking of it as an afterthought for once you're "done" with an area.

I've made this argument before, but it bears repeating: Icecrown and Storm Peaks were designed around flying mounts, in a way that even the Cataclysm zones were not. In Icecrown, one of the major quest hubs for each faction was an airship. Flight made sense as a requirement, because before you claimed the Shadow Vault, there was literally nowhere in the zone other than a small Argent Crusade fort on the border that was safe for you to land.

Storm Peaks approached flight in a different way, sending us to looming peaks and inside vast Titan structures. We had to fly to fully explore the zone.

In all honesty, looking back, the zones of Pandaria were a little underwhelming geographically. Valley of the Four Winds, Kun-Lai Summit, and Townlong Steppes were all somewhat homogenous expanses. And I think that allowing flight may have made those zones trivial while leveling.

I respect the notion that sometimes, flight is inappropriate. But I also think that Blizzard could make far more impressive zones if they designed them with flight in mind. I wonder why we have never returned to the Wrath model for flight - where flight is achieved during the leveling process - not at the beginning of the continent, but before one hits the level cap.

There are many ways that one can prevent flight from making things feel disconnected. They can do things as simple as sending us into large structures and caves, or they can give zones some kind of quest chain to unlock the ability.

My point, basically, is that flight can, and often is, good for the game. I wouldn't want to see them throw away that tool.

So here's my vote in favor of flight.

*I'll do an upcoming Memory Lane article about the history of mounts and the levels at which we could ride them.