No I am not writing this topic to troll or to be a contrarian.
I genuinely think flying on release is a big mistake for WoW. I think DF has a lot of issues. Like lack of content, bad content (dungeons) and an awful progression system. I do think flying in DF deserves to be discussed though, because I feel having flying on release in the form of dragonflying was a mistake.
Makes the world feel much smaller
Makes you feel less in touch with the world
Slow non-flying mounts are important to add artificial breaks to the game to make you relax. These breaks have been a foundation of WoW since Vanilla. Same goes for stuff like waiting for a boat or flying on the flightmaster. Flying on release adds a GOGO NOW mentality to the playerbase and stresses them out. The breaks I mentioned also help foster social interaction (like Zepplin chat, Barrens chat, guild chat or Discord chat).
World PvP worse for those who enjoy it. They actually added somewhat enjoyable world PvP and made it worse by having Dragonflying in the game.
Dragonflying has also been a massive mistake
The speed exacerbates the above mentioned stress issues
Bad for people with disabilities
Original flying did add a small AFK break at times, you maybe had to fly somewhere for a minute. With Dragonflying, your brain is ´´on´´ all the time, this is bad.
I have always been anti-flying since they announced it in Vanilla, and I honestly understand why Blizzard always viewed flying as a mistake and were reluctant to add it later.
Not really, the zones are too big. This makes the zone feel ok in size, I guess. Although Iâm not good at Dragonriding so I donât use it to travel too far.
I wish the world hadnât be designed around Dragonriding but here we are.
I agree with this. DF has felt less immersive in many ways. They donât feel any more coherent than the SL zones spilt off into their own afterlives. Although this is partly due to me not being any good at Dragonriding so I donât use it to travel around, more as a way hop over nearby hills or other obstiacles.
I use the Flightmaster quite a lot (there are a lot of Flight Points in DF and some are 100 yards from another one.
meh, I donât PVP. Isnât there a boomarang thing?
Although Iâve never understand this complaint. Surely you want to fight with someone who also wants to fight? Or is it fun to attack people who donât want to fight?
but you can eventually fly in FF14 too. I hoped they would allow both flying methods in the game and I am still hoping they will allow itâŚreally soon. I have said it before I would happily crawl across the sky.
I personally like the teleport system they have in FF14 and Blizzard can take a leaf out of their book and start adding more teleports. The arcane teleports in DF seems to be a start but the CD is far too long. They should also add way more these teleporters in every base camp and allow you to simply open your map and click once you have opened the area.
My opinion is that not giving people dragonflying - literally one of the expansionâs USPs - would even exacerbate these issues. Dragonflying has generally been well received, people seem to like the more active approach to flying a lot faster instead of just hitting autorun and watching your character passively float past everything.
From my perspective - and I have expressed this during beta as well - Dragonflight has been released 4-6 months before it should have been. Taking away another thing players enjoy in the expansion would have been disastrous to the gameâs retention.
Dungeons were generally out of tune and especially the new dungeons are basically memes by now with how unfun they are to play. The âI achieved KSM without ever stepping into RLPâ threads on reddit alone are a testament to thatâŚ
Class tuning was all over the place, with large gaps in between class performances
Bugs aplenty
New crafting system was badly introduced. It took the community weeks or even months to figure out how to work with it. Blizzard should have implemented a more intuitive system, or at the very least made the effort to add more information as to how the new system works.
All of this can be boiled down to âunderstaffed dev team that has been given a severely unrealistic release dateâ. If they had been aiming at a March '23 release, most of the issues would have been fixed. But they needed that sweet, sweet Q4 revenueâŚ
In my opinion the world building in FFXIV is leaps and bounds ahead of WoWâs. Their stories pull you into the game a lot better. Blizzard seems to mostly rely on the arts department to create a stunning scenery, then fail to connect the player to it in a meaningful way. I canât put my finger on it, but I still feel very attached to the pre-Cata Tirisfal or Teldrassil zones, or Valley of the four winds. But care very little about Voldun, Revendreth or Bastion. I feel there is something that got lost along the way. And it isnât about flying.
Indeed, there is a real sense of speed with dragon flying, and it still takes a minute or two to cross the zone - time which I am continuously interacting with the game.
If we didnât have dragon flying, Iâd be jumping on flightroutes and going afk a lot more, or using the waygates.
Feels like it makes me appreciate the sense of scale without tempting me to alt tab, both of which are good design decisions imo.
I quite like Dragonflying in Dragonflight. Also from the start.
Sort of.
I still think Storm Peaks in Northrend is the zone that incorporates flying best.
In Dragonflight the zones are all veryâŚstretched.
Blizzard made a big deal out of their size during the build-up to Dragonflight, and how the zones were some of the biggest they had ever made.
But when you play through them you donât get the sense of size, because a lot of it is just land that covers space for the sole reason of letting you fly at high speeds for long periods of time. Not because thereâs meaningful content in all that zone space.
So theyâre like normal zones that have been stretched longer and wider at the edges to accommodate Dragonriding.
I do wish Blizzard would look more toward Storm Peaks though. That zone really managed to incorporate verticality in a way that made it a joy to fly through the zone and discover whatâs around the next corner.
I can say that i like dragonflying more than regular flying. I donât think that DF is really designed for ground mounts when it comes to things to seeing on the way.
I disagree with you about dragon flying. I am so glad Blizzard copied it from gw2. The only thing they should have done better is unlocking flying with 10.0.5. People complain enough as it is.
I disagree with you the most about this point
I suggest Blizzard goes further and replicate the waypoint teleport system from gw2 by replacing all flying paths with it. We already have an Engineer Dark iron dwarf mage add to it all teleporting items. I mean just remove the flight paths all together and replace them with direct ports. It works in gw2.
I think gw2 has the best teleporting system I have seen in a while. In the core game as there werenât mounts at that time yet it is quite dense with teleports. But once the gliders and mounts were introduced the open world gets a balance revamp to accommodate both systems and I like it a lot.
Honestly, thatâs something I like about the new zones. They are more immersive this way. In the real world, there is also a lot of âemptyâ landscape.
I disliked that about SL zones; that you could move from a sanctum over to the enemies zone in a blink, which makes no sense, since in that case those faction should either be constantly clashing or one should have been defeated by the other already.
Also it was annoying that there was no space to just⌠breathe (some wildlife maybe, but no enemy mobs that belong to a faction), no empty space to come up with your own stories taking place there. I really like that about the DF zones, gives you a better idea that, well, without dragonriding, ppl traveling on ground would probably need a day or two (or more) to cross the Azure Span or the Plains etc.
Dragon riding for our âspecialâ PCs was needed, though, otherwise ppl wouldâve complained about too long travel ways.
Ever seen the Steve Martin movie The Jerk?
In it he grows up in a small wooden shack in the countryside. He tells his folks that heâs heading off to get rich so he can buy them a bigger house. He does get rich and buy them a bigger house, itâs just a bigger version of the wooden shack, same shape exactly.
These zones are just old zones made bigger, the mountains are bigger, the lakes are bigger etc.
There isnât more zone, itâs the same zone just blown up like with a magnifier.
If that doesnât sound like Iâve gone nuts.
I agree with the most parts, but as long as they dont remove flying at all, iâll preffer dragonriding instead. At least people need to do stuff when in the air and not just afk flying.
For me is like this : removing all kind of flying> dragonriding >>>>>>>>> normal flying.
Normal flying ruinned the game the most. Dragonriding can be good, but only if they make it less convenient to stay in the air. Its too much air time right now.
Are you for real? Do you know what warmode is? If if you dont want to always be prepared to fight, just dont activate it. Wow people these days⌠I just canât believe it. no wonder they are making wow so noob friendly. You people are so âsensitiveâ about anything.
Also, if you bad at pvp, at least please shut up. Thanks
