[Updated] Yep, We're Still Talking About Flying

[6.10.15] - Blizzard announced that flying will be coming to Draenor. So this post is now dumb.

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I know. I'm sorry. It's happened so I may as well just out with it.

This post doesn't try to convince you what's wrong or right, good or bad about the fact we won't see flight in Patch 6.2 or beyond. It's more about how I went from praising the removal of flight with open arms to biting my nails in shock when the truth was realized: flight is really gone. And then how after more thought, even though I'm quite concerned about the ways this might change the game for me personally, I have a faint feeling that this will truly be better for all of us...once it all plays out.

When I learned that flight was not a guarantee at max level this time around, I was in the welcoming party. It'd be a refreshing change, even if we've been leveling up without flight since Vanilla (sans Cata). No flight at max level for an entire patch, possibly more? The world will be more alive, as they say, just begging to be explored. Treasures, zone events, hundreds of rare spawns, players out and about! Danger danger!

But I look now at the number of guildies online, and the number of friends in-game through Battle.net and I notice two very interesting things: both numbers are much, much smaller than they were two months ago. Secondly, oftentimes half or more of those online are in their Garrison while half of those don't stay logged on for much time at all. A lot of people simply aren't getting out.

I think unconsciously I must've expected that, eventually, flight would come to Draenor. Perhaps an unconscious thought that was further reinfornced by leveling this expansion. Don't get me wrong---I loved it! While made to be explored, Draenor is definitely rugged, unforgiving terrain, something we did know going in. Somewhere in my noggin it just made sense to me that, come time to level alts, the journey would be made easier by being granted greater freedom on the z-axis.

I've now come to realize I wasn't really OK with the idea of no flight ever. I was OK with the previous status quo of leveling without flight. There's been a lot of discussion for and against the removal of flight; the one thing I can say is that, if you're of the disposition that you've never seen a convincing argument from the other side, you should probably open your mind a bit and/or look harder. And remember, convincing doesn't have to mean satisfying. We can agree to disagree while we all get to keep our heads.

Talking to @Eliot_Lefebvre in work chat, he says "If a design choice makes the designers happy and the players unhappy, it's a bad choice."

— Mr. Borophagus (@MatthewWRossi) May 22, 2015

Everything with a grain of salt.

You Can't Fix What Ain't Broke...

In the wake of this announcement, and without being privy to where Blizzard's planning to take us next, this is the bit I'm struggling with the most. To me, it seems Blizzard had the whole flight deployment thing figured out, if prior expansions are any indication. I know we cannot always rely on the past to properly inform the future, but the system that awarded flight at max level seemed the perfect answer. Hell, they even teased players for a bit in Draenor with the notion that flight could be added in a future patch. 

But it's come down the pipeline official, as it has before, that the ability to fly doesn't mesh with the vision Blizzard has for Warlords of Draenor---and apparently all expansions moving forward. The problem is, Blizzard has been piss-poor at articulating this vision. I've seen "sense of exploration" tossed out again and again, but by and large players don't seem to be swallowing that.

At the end of the day, I can't agree with Blizzard's vision here solely because they haven't offered me a coherent one. I won't even lump an imaginary group of players in here, but I bet they're out there. If you'd like to see PR speak justifying flight removal, Exhibit A.

The World Didn't Get Bigger, Only More Hostile

Imagine, for a moment, that flight did not exist in Mists of Pandaria. Seriously. Take a moment, go over those zones in your head: Valley of the Four Winds, Krasarang, Townlong Steppes, etc. Think of the rare spawns, Warbringers, and the like. Think about how, if at all, the lack of flight in Mists of Pandaria would've affected your approach to the game. 

It's this thought exercise that helped me realize that flight is inherently tied to how I enjoy this game, even if I don't fully understand how. What I do know is it allows me easier access to do what I want to do when I'd like to do it.

Psychologists probably have a better idea, but we don't have the time or money for that. But from what I gather, it's a risk vs. reward thing, or in this case, time/energy vs. reward. Draenor holds the same sort of content MoP did in terms of rares, treasures, achievements and the like. It's just that now, it takes a significant amount of additional effort to chase after it.

It's not that the world gets bigger when you remove flight, but rather, it becomes more hostile. Hostile in the sense that it's all of a sudden going to take a significantly larger amount of time and effort to get to that dig site on the other side of the continent than it did previously. And that seems to go against the process they've undertaken since the beginning: that of easing access to content, previously seen with heirlooms, group finder, LFR and oddly, garrisons.

This world may be hostile enough that a lot of players simply aren't bothering, and instead staying in the safe, cozy walls of their garrison with resources aplenty to be gathered, and no game play or interaction to be had. At least there it's easy to measure risk vs. reward. 

But Flight Was Always Optional

This was the argument I was the most tired of hearing from the pro-flyers, initially. "For those against flying, you never had to fly. You always had the option to travel by ground." In other words, YOU don't have to use it, but that doesn't mean it should be taken from me!

But let's be real here: did anyone, after learning flight for the first time at level 70, really say "ok but this breaks game immersion for me so I'm not going to use it?" Would anyone truly look at traveling the distance between Hellfire Peninsula and Shattrath City by ground once they had the ability to traverse the distance in a fraction of the time, and as the crow flies?

We do know players who deliberately challenge themselves above and beyond what's considered normal, such as a player who level-caps without harming anything, or a player who level-caps without leaving the Pandaren starting zone. But those are few and far between. The vast majority of us, I'd argue, will favor the path of least resistance when it comes to open-world PvE content. After all, I'd bet those who weren't hot on the idea of flight back in the Burning Crusade, but not upset enough to quit, have favored their flying mounts over ground travel since.

Was the introduction of flight nearly ten years ago truly a mistake? If it doesn't currently fit their vision for Draenor, just how does that vision differ from the vision they had for Pandaria? And once again, I want to know more specifically why the existence of flight kills that---because clearly, with Aviana's Feather, Goblin Glider Kits and the like we can still fly almost everywhere in Draenor. It seems like persistent, at-will, controlled flight is what's at issue. And that makes interpreting their vision no simpler for me.

If air dropping into a camp to rescue a prisoner vs. fighting through the camp for the true experience is trumped by flight, that's not flight's problem. That's a problem for the quest designers. At the end of the day, I think this was a bad decision. Unless they've got something better planned...

But You Can Stand on the Shoulders of Giants...

Old habits die hard. It's like if I had to drive six miles every night to play soccer, and then I lose my car. Now I'm faced with the prospect of biking. I'll likely cut down on the number of nights I'll play soccer, just to save time and energy. So it is with flight for me, I've realized. I've been conditioned to lean on the ability to take to the skies when it comes to how I interact with damn near everything in game. It's a practice I've been utilizing fully for nine years. That's a long friggin' time.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." or similar is often attributed to Henry Ford

— Russ Petersen (@nite_moogle) May 22, 2015

Then I saw the above tweet and had to take a step back. For argument's sake, friends, let's say we're split 50/50 on this. Why would Blizzard choose to remove flight, something that deeply upsets half of us, and makes the other half shrug? It doesn't seem wise...unless they've got something better planned. Improving upon existing systems or ideas is something that Blizzard is famous for. They've got the shoulders of their own giant, World of Warcraft, to stand on, in addition to the slew of other MMOs and RPGs that have come and gone (and remained) since.

As much as I really don't agree with this choice right now, I'm eager to see what they're going to do next. I really don't think we're looking at the removal of flight anymore; I think we're looking at the replacement of flight.

At least, I really hope we are.