My Complicated Feelings on Flight in Draenor

By now everyone who pays attention to WoW knows that Warlords of Draenor will, at launch, not allow flying, even at the level cap. The history of flight in WoW started with Draenor's universe-A doppelgänger, Outland. In Burning Crusade, players who got to level 70 (or Druids who got to 68, those bastards) learned to ride flying mounts. Wrath of the Lich King allowed flying in Northrend at level 77, once you were ready to tackle the final questing zones. Cataclysm allowed flying from the get-go (probably because four of the five new zones were integrated into the original vanilla continents, which had just been updated to allow flying,) and then Mists returned finally to the BC model by waiting until the level cap to allow you to fly in Pandaria.

Flight has been, to put it lightly, controversial. On one hand, it's awesome. I remember after hitting 70 on my Rogue (the first character I got to 70,) I flew over to Kil'sorrow Fortress in Nagrand and landed at the top of one of the towers there, fighting my way down. It felt like a totally badass and very Rogue-like thing to do. Also, because back in BC you actually had to go to dungeons in order to run them, flight became something of a limiting factor, as you would be unable to run the three Tempest Keep dungeons if you couldn't fly up to them (and the meeting stone was down on the ground, with Warlock summons disabled on the three ships.) During Wrath, Icecrown and Storm Peaks were built around the idea of flight, creating amazing vistas and remote locations that would be inaccessible otherwise. Icecrown's major quest hubs were actually constantly-moving airships.

Flight can be used to enhance immersion and wow players.

But it can also really screw up the flow of a zone. The problem with flight is that it's really hard to make fighting your way into a fortress seem like a heroic task when anybody could easily just fly over the walls. Quests are built so that just getting where you need to go is a challenge of navigation and fending off the monsters along the way. Flight, unfortunately, can ruin this. Rather than, say, fighting your way up a tall mountain, you can just hop on your gryphon and float, care-free, to the place you have to go. Is there an enemy general at the center of a heavily-guarded camp? Well, you can just plop right down into the center of that camp and kill him and then hop back on and fly away.

There are certainly areas in Draenor that would simply not work if you could fly around them. Spires of Arak in particular is filled with hidden chests and treasures that you need to carefully jump around and walk along tightropes to access. If you could fly, it would make getting these treasures trivial. Much of that zone is also underneath dense foliage, really reinforcing the idea of a haunted forest where the Arrakoa Outcasts have turned to dark and shadowy magic to survive against their oppressors. Being able to break through that canopy is something the world designers need to have control over for the sake of maintaining the ambience.

Even in wide-open areas, though, flight can deprive you of a potential experience. Consider Uldum. Uldum has always been a flight-accessible zone. It's a really large zone, and there are vast swatches of desert without any real quest significance. Instead, they just reinforce the idea that the zone is a massive desert. Now, flying over a massive desert is its own interesting experience, so I'm not going to just totally write the zone off (the Tol'vir were dull as hell though, which is a shame,) but it might have been interesting if we had had to make our way through the vast, shifting sands, cresting a hill to discover a massive titan-made facility. Actually, it's a real shame that your introduction to the zone is through a rather silly cutscene (and holy crap are there too many cutscenes in Uldum,) as it would have been cool to ride through that massive entryway instead of skipping it so that you could get locked in a cage in the Lost City of the Tol'vir.

Still, while I think we could very well see flying re-implemented in 6.1 or whenever Tanaan gets introduced (though expect that to be flight-free until probably 7.0, if not forever,) I worry that Blizzard might be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I think there are some problems that make flight worse for the game than it might otherwise be. Here are a few:

Flying is Too Safe: Flight in WoW has typically been a way to pause the game. With very few exceptions, if you can get up on a flying mount, even if you're only 40 yards up, you really don't have to care about anything attacking you. It's the fact that you're so safe that makes the old "fly in, kill named mob, fly out" strategy work. The people on the ground can't do anything about you, and once you're in the air, they're programmed to just give up and act as if you disappeared, which is why flight makes things too easy. Basically, there need to be more things up in the air that can attack you.

The Penalty for Danger is Too High: One of the first areas where flight became dangerous was in Skettis, doing the Shatari Skyguard quests (I actually think Skettis in Outland is where the Gorian Fortress is in Draenor...) You'd be sent to bomb the Arrakoa, but you'd be threatened by Monstrous Kaliri (a bunch of BC veterans just shivered a little bit,) who, if they caught you, would dismount you. If you didn't have a parachute of some sort, you were screwed, and would just die. This is the big problem - when flying, survival is just a binary yes or no, unlike almost everything in WoW, where you have some wiggle room if something starts to go wrong (that's what having more than 1HP is for.) Finding some middle ground, where things could attack you, but you'd have some recourse to fend them off, would be great.

Zones are Too Large an Area To Decide on Yes or No for Flight: Icecrown is a zone that's got tons of great stuff for flying. Obviously, the Skybreaker and Orgrim's Hammer are pretty cool - that ominous sense of grim warriors preparing for battle as the motor churns in the background. I swear, there were times in Wrath where I'd just sit below decks on the Skybreaker and chill out there. But while the zone was built around flying, there were some areas where perhaps there were missed opportunities. Doing the quests for Koltira and Thassarian, players would assault the various major gates leading in a big circle around the zone to finally open up the assault on Icecrown Citadel. Yet it never really felt like you were breaking through. The Alliance and Horde armies stopped being relevant to the assault almost immediately (and entirely because of the Horde being failed opportunists.) Theoretically you were weakening the power base of the Scourge, but the fact that you could just fly to ICC anyway (never mind that it would be about a year before you'd actually get inside) sort of robbed the assault of some of its heft.

So what I think is that you could use either quest scenarios like in Warlords to single out areas where a ground assault is what they want you to experience (a climactic event in Nagrand uses a similar tactic, preventing you from using any mount) or make it so that you need to do a quest in each zone to unlock flying. With two-level zones, as they are in Draenor, you could even make these quests require that you spend at least one level there before getting the ability to fly. I could imagine a version of Spires of Arak, for example (that zone is pretty good for talking about flying, as a major part of the story is a group of people who used to be able to fly but now cannot) where you spend a level fighting through the forests and battling your way up to some Adherent stronghold, and then destroying their anti-flight-thingie, and then having a transition where you fly to the various spires and assault the different Adherent positions.

And even if you have flight throughout a zone, you do have other ways of controlling it. For example, there are plenty of places (that minefield in Storm Peaks, for example) where the game violently dismounts flyers. And there's also, you know, the indoors. You could have people fly up to some cliffside fortress, but once they enter it, they'd have to fight their way through on foot.

Draenor is going to be a big experiment in WoW Flight, but I hope that rather than getting rid of this 8-year-old game mechanic, Blizzard instead finds a smarter way to implement it that adds to gameplay, rather than detracting from it.