idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
IDrownFish of the Seven Seas wrote:
I feel like, more and more, Blizzard regrets adding flying mounts.
Honestly, I've regretted them adding flying mounts for a long time.
Blizzard spends so much time and money developing their landscapes. It's a big asset.
While I agree, what I said above still stands -- they need to design the landscapes to where you can ENJOY them, instead of designing them to where you feel like something exists only to annoy you (steep cliff faces forcing you to travel 5x as far to clear any given distance). They need more roads, more ramps, to get from Point A to Point B without so much annoyance. Again, Timeless Isle. 1 and only 1 way to get up on that Hill and it involves travelling miles, past mobs that stunlock you when you try to ride past them. Nope, you ain't getting no rare that pops up there unless you were already up there camping it.
Oh, and the birds were a hilariously badly designed mechanic. They fly way too slow and it is difficult to control where exactly you will go, and it takes too long to grab one to start the flight. In fact, they were so bad, most people devised other methods (gliders) to get around the sucky mechanic altogether.
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Then they create a system that ensures players never experience any of that. Then they up the speeds to the point where most of the environment doesn't even load for most users.
Leveling to max level without flying is fine. Once I hit max level, gimme a BoA book that lets me teach it to my alts. I experienced the landscape on the ground once, that's more than plenty.
I tend to have more fun with flying than I do without, go figure.
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Now, there's no immersion in zones at all. It's a whole lot of wasted money at that point. Just bad from a branding perspective.
There's that word again.
"Immersion".
You're never going to be fully immersed in a game that has hilarious mechanics, a not-so-serious graphics palette and stuff like magic flying around. It just doesn't happen. You want to be fully immersed in a game? Play a game with life-like graphics and realistic mechanics (look up Gone Home on Steam, for example. That game 99% immerses you into a 1990's world).
And besides, if you REALLY want to be immersed,
nobody is forcing you to use a flying mount. You could just as easily mount a ground mount as you could a flying one. You want this so-important "Immersion"? Well, there you go. Mount a Ground Mound and do everything on the ground.
But you won't, most likely. Why? Because it takes too much time, and presents too many annoyances, and it is too tempting to just mount a flying mount of your choice. If this immersion were truly as awesome and fun as you claim it is, then people would be willingly ground pounding more often.
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And when we're talking about the design of terrain, they've been trying to design with flying mounts in mind, but it still just doesn't work. Think Hyjal - it was essentially a vertically-oriented zone. But you didn't really get to experience the landscape, and you spent way too much time flying into things or off into the distance.
Mount Hyjal was vertically designed
because... I dunno.... its a MOUNTAIN?. Well,
of course its a vertically-oriented zone. For it being on the side of the largest mountain in Azeroth, I found Hyjal to have quite a few flat areas....
And I experienced the landscape plenty -- there were enough quests that required you to travel on the ground, and I could see the landscape just fine from the air.
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To be clear, I don't think Blizz could remove flying mounts now. But I definitely think the game was much healthier without them.
I disagree.
With today's economy, we don't have time to waste. A lot of players are working two jobs, full-time jobs, jobs + college, what-have-you. When they scrape together a few hours to get online, they don't want to have to spend 15 minutes to do a 5 minute task because of terrain and constant trash mob aggro issues.
It is one of the reasons why Blizzard dropped the mega-raids like Molten Core in favor of the split up raids like we have now where there's only 3-4 bosses per wing of a raid. It is one of the reasons why raids are 10, 25 and soon 20 player instead of 40-player (because trying to get 40 people together without AFKs, disconnects, crashes, etc was a ridiculous notion TBH). It is one of the reasons why you level up so much faster these days; nobody wants to grind for hours for a couple bars of XP.
We don't have time these days to spend on stupid stuff, like trying to navigate around sheer cliff faces, ravines, flight paths that travel 5 miles to cover a 1 mile gap, fighting 50 irrelevant mobs to get from the questgiver to the questing area (not to mention the stuff the quests actually want you to kill), blah blah blah.
THAT'S why players don't like being forced on the ground.
Oh, and I paid ~17k now in flying fees. Let's see here.... Wisdom of the Four Winds... 2,500. Master Flying, 5,000. Epic Flying: I forget, 5,000? Something like that? Cold Weather Flying... 1k? Regular flying? 250? Flight Master's License? 500? Something like that?
I like to be able to use what I paid for, kthx.