Lets talk about flying. (Coppied from general)

Argent Dawn
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Recently I watched a YouTube video about “old world” of World of Warcraft (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms) and how it is about time that it gets an update. With time skip and potential Gilneas return, that iconic sword and the rest of the lovely stuff such as whatever the hell is going on in the Westfall.
And it really made me think (I do not do that usually) - flying destroyed WoW. I started playing back in Cata, and I had my episodes of leaving and returning but WoW Classic and IC traveling (RP related) showed me how big and beautiful this world actually is.
I do not know about you, but I had missed so much details of the zones simply because I flew through them. Every new expansion grounds us at first which is good but let’s talk about starting experience: it is pretty bad. If someone came to WoW during Shadowlands, he/she would be pushed into BfA and it would force them to miss out on WORLD of Warcraft.
Experienced players have heirlooms, Chromie and few others tips and trips but as a new player you miss out on 15+ years of great content.
Back to the flying, and now dragonriding - yeah we all love this new feature but it breaks the game. When you die on Dragon Isles you are forced to use regular flying and then, and only then you get to see how big Isles actually are. It makes me wonder how many details did we just fly above and miss out on?
Is anyone else feeling the same? Or am I the only crazy guy who still prefers ground mounts?
Yeah on that note - let’s give Druids button that let’s them use ground travel form instead of being forced into flight form?

I am sharing this on RP realm forum as well since we are usually considered to be caring more about world around us, immersion and lore. RP community really cares about the World part of World of Warcraft. Please share your opinion with me

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As an RP’er. Small zones suck. Slow transport sucks. Compacted sandboxes ala Zereth Mortis and Mechagon with every 2 inches being covered in hostile mobs are all terrible.
I want big, wide zones with tons of places and vistas to visit, but I also want a convenient and fun way to traverse them. Dragonriding solves both those issues in the most elegant way we’ve seen yet in the game.

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I dont want to go back to World of Walkcraft, where you spend more time walking through the Barrens than playing the game. It is fine where it is now for PvE and questing.

On the other hand, we spend almost a month exploring the Walking Shores by foot in roleplay. You can do that as well, join us and get a brand new perspective on the game.

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I really think the way they’ve done zones now is incredible. Flying was never going to go away, and adding increasing hurdles to make it so people didn’t fly past small zones and miss everything wasn’t working; it was frustrating to unlock your own mounts again and again.
I say this as someone who always does the first go of questing entirely without any mount, unless necessary to get around unwalkable terrain.

Dragon Isles has acknowledged flying exists and so given us zones that are decently large, involved and full to the brim with interesting sights and spots, and reducing the mob density means you don’t rush on by because another thing aggro’d you for sitting on some road.
I’ve not got that horrid feeling that has happened before where flying mounts reduce the size and make things feel absurd. It’s fast, it’s supposed to be able to ramp up to incredible speeds, but to me that adds to the idea that this continent is massive. You can only get through it swiftly by riding an animal that can hit 800% flight speed.

It’s not easy to readjust the ‘fly past’ mindset but I reckon they’ve done a good job of getting people into the idea of looking around as they go, of landing and taking it in.
I think, honestly, I’d be pretty disappointed if they went back to ‘small zones, unlock flying’ now. Keep to massive zones built with flying around them in mind.

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Flying in the Dragonflight is miles better than what it previously was. I’ve found myself using hearthstones and flightpaths less because of it, due to the speed that Dragonflying offers. I only use those other two now if I want to look at stuff for a bit, or if I am wrapping up my activities for the day.

Embracing flying instead of trying to handicap people has had the opposite effect on exploration. My guild and many others are flying around and finding small things in the world that make exploration fun again.
I found a female vulpera and her child in Azure Span, just camping, during my exploration. No quest for them, no plot, no dialogue. But finding things out there just by being able to fly around with ease makes exploration fun.

To quote Zero Punctuation:
“A sandbox is only as good as the method by which you get around it.”

The easier and more fun it is to get around a big open world, the more likely people will use that method to get around instead of looking for instant teleportation. I am fondly remembering when I played Red Dead Redemption for the first time. They had fast travel, but the vast majority of the time I spent riding horseback or even taking the train because it was just more enjoyable than sitting on a loading screen for a few seconds.

Dragonflight has nailed the flying and exploration. All one needs to do is focus on… exploring instead of looking at the map for the next WQ marker.

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Question about flying! Can you use older flying mounts in Dragon Isles, or they all work as ground mounts?

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Older mounts can not fly in Isles.

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As an RPer and a DM, flying is a godsend. I just can’t imagine the pain of having to move my NPCs into the middle of a zone on slow ground mounts. Having aerial view while planning my events is also invaluable, as it allows me to notice things I might miss while being on the ground + I have larger field of view because there are no obstructions.

Now in terms of missing content while levelling, squishing levelling is needed unless you want to end up like FF14 where levelling an alt is a huge grind. Not that big of an issue for normal player because you can be every class on a single character, but a pain for RPers who might want to try new concept.

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No.

You know what kills enjoyment the most?

  • Wall to wall trash mobs with aggro ranges larger than small European countries.
  • Daze vs ground mounts
  • Gating actual content behind grinding world quests
  • Gating actual content behind arbitrary real world time gates
  • Mobs being able to shoot you through walls, through the ground, and being able to clear vertical cliffs without pause, while my character gets stuck on an over-large pebble
  • Atrocious storytelling that gives me no reason to care about a zone, making me want to speed through it to either get somewhere I WANT to be, or at least get to the damn level cap which got raised. Again. Because ‘Up Yours’, apparently
  • Random Elite mobs that wander in the most irritating places, are not explained for story reasons, also have mile-wide aggro ranges, and basically act like Point 1 but on steroids

This list goes on. Basically, the TL;DR is that if they ever even thought about removing flying, they would have to make getting around a LOT less obnoxious than it is right now.
Let us fight on our ground mounts or something, fethsakes that tech has been in the game since WoD or even before.

Edit: The most ‘Saying “Woah!” out loud’ moments I have had was when I was levelling many years back (MoP), flying around the likes of Northrend and stopping every two minutes to oggle the amazing scenery, the vistas, the giant constructs, etc etc. It made the world feel so much more stunning, because I could experience it at my liesure and not be harassed while doing so.

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As someone who often plays classes that just aren’t necessarily designed for open world content (was worse in the past but priest still is no evoker or DH): Flying is great.
I love exploring, I love running around and looking at the small corners of t he world. But please don’t force me to go through 40 mobs just to reach a place.

I’ve seen more little nooks and crannies of the post-cata old world post flying than before. The game doesn’t force you to explore anymore, sure. But it’s also not stopping you.
If anything they’re on the right track with adding little side quests and secrets to the corners of the world that reward exploring.

Only ground mounts was okay back in classic because there just was less content to explore. But anyone who ever wanted to run Scarlet Monastery as Alliance will tell you how painful it could be.
There will be a couple people who’re very nostalgic for the adventure that was getting there. But they’re few and far between. Because people just didn’t bother going there unless they really, really wanted to or had to.

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I really don’t get the whole “convenience destroyed x” arguement (in this case WoW but there’s also a weird nostalgia people have sometimes for outdated and clunky technology that is inferior in every way to the more recent equivalent.)

Flying doesn’t make the world feel smaller when the option to roleplay on the ground is always there, and especially when dragonriding still takes a significant amount of travel time to cross from one part of the map to the other. The sense of scale in the Azure Span is still very percievable when you see these absurdly giant redwood trees that you can fly around and in between and (occasionally) over.

If anything the fact you’re moving at almost three times the normal flying speed and STILL it takes a while to go from one zone in the Dragon Isles to another should be proof of just how large the zones are, and they’re not “unfun” to traverse because of that.

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This takes me back. Northrend truly felt like a huge, incredibly wonderous, but also ominous and deadly place. Seeing the scale of Storm Peaks for the first time was insane, or Icecrown, its citadel and the legions of Undead marching below. All only possible with flying.

Just :ok_hand:

DF’s the closest I’ve got to recreating that feeling since!

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They cannot get rid of flying, remember when they tried that in WoD?

Went swell for them.

But also, I like the new Dragonriding, its fun and the zones are fun to traverse with it.

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If anything, zones deliberately made with flying in mind have a sense of scale that those designed for ground travel don´t. And it´s not just a question of technology, as places like Storm Peaks are older than for example Azsuna.

The last time when we got an expansion where zones were open for flying since the start was in 2012, and even there I´d argue that Blizzard didn´t really design Pandaria´s zones for flying. Cataclysm, with Deepholm and partially Hyjal (as it was just a rework of zone from Vanilla) was IMO the last expansion where they embraced flying.

What I´m saying here is that for 10-12 years, we´ve been flying in zones that were created for ground mounts. Of course people might feel like flying is a bad fit for them, that´s how they were designed. Dragonflight is designed for flying and it shows with the massive scale of everything, because finally Blizzard doesn´t have to make everything reachable on 100% ground mount within reasonable distance from nearest flight master.

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I just feel the whole ‘we want people to Experience It Right’ handling with recent content and flying has been lazy as hell.

You know flying is a part of the game. It’s not some big freaking shock, ‘oh heck players can do this thing all of a sudden!’. Design the damn content embracing your own systems, rather than some incredibly transparent ‘eke out as much grind time as we can to boost player numbers/retention because Oh Whoops, Terrible Narrative Again’…

Yes I’m jaded and a bit bitter about things, and given the way things have been for years now I think that’s entirely justified. People claiming that ‘flying makes the world smaller’ or somehow less ‘epic’… well, let’s just say that the most respectful thing is “See your opinions to the bin” and leave it at that.

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With the benefit of hindsight, flying was a colossal mistake in my opinion. It killed world pvp, tarren mill/southshore died instantly. With everyone only landing to kill their mobs before they’re back in the air and safe from a ganking.

And I think it did the same to world RP. The chances of meeting someone in the world massively declined. That unexpected encounter where you’re going north and someone else is going south and you meet and decide to stop and make something of it. That just dried up.

It fueled hub RP and the concentration of RPers in a few spots. And the world is empty outside the hubs. I think that’s bad.

Like the pvpers only landing for their quest mobs before fleeing back to the safety of the air. The RPer only flies out from their Hub for their event before retreating back to safety of the Hub and the comforting sounds of /yell * GUNSHOT *.

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I’ve heard this a lot of time, on many different RP platforms including WoW. It’s an incorrect assumption.

  1. If player / group A wants to reach another place due to time constraints, they wouldn’t stop for RP, or would half-donkey it and get on their way.

  2. If player / group A wants to do travel RP and is open for encounters, they will ride ground mounts anyways.

Do you want awkward ((We are en-route to an event)) or /e rides past without stopping roleplay? Because that’s as much as you’d get, if your presence is even acknowledged.

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Flying’s great

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Those were already dying or dead long before we got old world flying in Cata.
Outside of the odd high level char trying to camp people while leveling there was hardly anything happening.

And speaking for at least WotLK: Roleplayers where often city-bound back then too. Outside of events or established out-of-town hubs. Unless you did a travel event people brought mages and/or warlocks to speed things up.

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The noclip flying of TBC-Shadowlands was a mistake, it functions as a button to not engage with the world and outside of some fairly annoying daily quests in TBC absolutely no attempt was made to integrate it into the world or give it any sort of gameplay at all. It absolutely made the world feel smaller and exploration less interesting, it also limited zone design and the outdoor gameplay in fairly significant ways - it’s impossible to make interesting obstacles if they player can just hover past them. It was a bad decision to introduce it and one which made WoW a worse experience. It’s notable that no successful post-wow MMORPGs have introduced unrestricted flying mounts in the same way - either locking them behind a level of content completion or making them more functionally limited.

It also kinda killed the appeal of PvP servers and made the main way a player experiences world PvP be one or more high level players dropping from the sky to kill you with absolutely no recourse then flying away at the speed of sound before any kind of response can occur, completely removing the potential for the the impromtu battles that could develop in vanilla.

It had fairly bad effects on zone design, pre-cata EK and Kalimdor zones had a lot more room to breathe than later zones, despite often being physically smaller, in part because you couldn’t just safely fly over it so you needed to be able to have some respite areas that weren’t full of mobs and partly because getting around kinda was the challenge and so they didn’t need to pack areas super densely with mobs if they wanted them to be challenging.

They gave up on making flying mounts interesting after the TBC daily quests, everyone (correctly) hated monstrous kaliri and the demonic flak cannons (less correctly) so they just kinda gave up making you ever have to engage with flying at all.

You first. There were and continued to be plenty of ways to get around fast without flying mounts and pre-DF flying was the least interesting of any of them. Literally every one of your bullet points is either fairly irrelevant to TBC style flying mounts being awful or a design decision actively in response to them.

Nah - loads of my vanilla RP memories come from incidentally bumping into someone on the way to something or waiting for a boat, hell the longest running IC rivalry not resolved until the end of TBC came from one of my characters had came from having an argument that turned into a fight on the Theramore docks at level 41, I wasn’t even waiting for the boat, I’d just arrived and had been planning to head to Tanaris. Most of that went away very suddenly with TBC when we all got flying at level 70. It’s not just RP though, it’s a lot easier to bump into people and remember ‘the paladin who saved me from murlocs last week’ or ‘that undead warlock i always seem to meet’.

This was cool actually, I have very fond memories of setting out to cross hostile areas to get to a dungeon.

Dragonflight flying is an improvement in almost every way, it has literally any interesting gameplay to it at all to it and as you actually have to engage with a system to stay in the air indefinitely. It also helps that the zones are actually designed for it and as a result are both relatively bigger than older zones and also actually have places that can be slightly tricky to fly to/through.

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