(12-05-2015, 07:51 PM)Oli! Wrote:(12-05-2015, 02:52 PM)Ryanti Wrote: This design decision was made because Yoshi looked at games like WoW that had flying in the past and realized that introducing flying in the very beginning takes away the feeling of exploration and navigating terrain during the leveling process.
People would just fly in straight lines from point a to point b and never explore, and it would take a very short time to complete quests.
So that's why Blizzard killed flying abd that's why Yoshi made flying unlockable only after the zone has been thoroughly 'warmed in'.
Hope that makes sense.
It makes sense, and I would say he's right regarding exploration, but there is so little to do in many of those zones afterwards that unlocking flying ultimately just seems like a waste of time; if there were some motherload of additional content hiding up somewhere in a flying-only zone then it wouldn't be a problrm. But there isn't.
So now regardless of intention, the concept of Flying in this game just feels like an afterthought. By the time I had finished all my flying quests and gotten all my nodes, I was over leveled for the area and looking for new things to do.
Even if he might have had a reason, it just wasn't done well at all, especially with the story content gates placed on most of them. If they just let you do all the quests and exploration as soon as you entered the zone, it might be a little better, but for a lot of people, as soon as the story quests take them out, they're not coming back.
There's zones that offer a lot more out of flying than others. Sea of Clouds is one. Azys Lla is definitely one because it has no location currents. But yes, I do think that they could have added different layers on content based on surface questing vs. aerial questing. But maybe they didn't have the money to or.. maybe places like the Western Highlands didn't make sense to have floating rocks or whatnot.
Though, places like the Western Highlands instead have some cool landmarks. I remember people struggling to find the chained dragon that was in the trailer, only to find out it was only in a place where you could reach after you learned how to fly.
There's additional content that they're thinking about like having aerial races. But at the end of the day, flying is more of a feature than a core aspect. It's 'cool' to be able to fly, but it's not essential to the game's engine that you need to fly (Aion was like that).
Also, the zones are large, so the additional speed of flying made things much more convenient when I went back to those zones to do things like hunt or level alts.
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