If BC had never introduced flying...

[Lane]

During vanilla it was common to hear ppl complain about slow taxi services wishing blizzard whould speed up the very common theramore-silithus and if-epl flightpaths.

I remember when they finally gave Captains Eo & Placeholder ships. There was some discontent about that too. What used to be an instant teleport became a ~5 minute wait for their ships to dock.

[Daffan]

You're lying. Or at least I sincerely hope you are, because no one in their right mind could be that stupid. No one buys a game for a tacked on feature that you could only get at max level. I could just imagine you seething as you slogged through 70 levels on foot until you finally unlocked the feature that you aspired for.
And even then, flying was ONLY available in Outland at the time. The Isle of Quel'Danas doesn't allow flying. Not even nowadays with it available in the entirety of Azeroth.

Yeah I don't believe him either.

It sounds ridiculous what he saying lmao.

[HitRefresh]

So I see a lot of these flying threads about and I was wondering, what if they had never introduced flying in BC? What if when they were developing it, it was an idea that they had discussed but ultimately for one reason or another had decided against. Lets be honest, it seems like Blizzard thought it was a mistake to introduce flying being as they now gate it behind patches and achievements, but would wow have been as successful if they hadn't? Is it something people would still ask for?

Yet they keep reintroducing ways to obtain flying? Even if it's gated, they don't ever have to make Broken Isles a flyable area. I bet the only reason they are is because they're making class mounts which fly, and they might as well utilize the flying aspect of those. For me, flying will pretty much be fucking pointless to get in Broken Isles since you can so easily use your whistle to get to the nearest flight master and there's flight paths to pretty much everywhere, and you can glide off cliffs and shit.

To answer your question though, if they hadn't done it in BC, they would have done it later anyway.

[Thimagryn]

What I'm seeing is people bitching at Blizzard for what they've already said their intention is and it makes me laugh at the playerbase. Bear in mind the thread is about if flight had never been added to the game, so that's the angle I'm approaching this argument from. If it wasn't added no one would care and all the people who supposedly "only play for flying" would still be playing the game for the real reasons they play it today.

Sure, that may be very true. If flying wasn't introduced, I wouldn't have poured hours into crafting profession mounts, obtaining them through raid achievements, farming boss drops and finding them in the world through sheer luck. It's pretty much the reason why flying is an important feature to keep.

[Super Kami Dende]

We'd not have had BC and LK the way they were, as those two expansions required flying.

Required is a bit of a Stretch. You Could easily just set up portals or bridges between the few places that flying was "needed"

[PowerOfTwo]

you're forgetting the BC team and the current team are veeeeeery different design goal wise. BC and wrath had areas you could NOT quest in without a flying mount, dungeons and raids were not accesible without a flying mount. The entire point of limiting flying for the past 2 expansions was "immersing" (read anoying in the same vein as a cat being offended you don't find it's gift of a dead bird charming) in the open world.... whiiiiiiiile simultaniosly locking us inside our garisons.

I'm sure open world content is engaging to someone personaly i'm a mythic raider and hell even NORMAL raider (ilvl 865 ppl) would not find this content chalanging or engagin in the slightest. Pull 50 mobs and AoE everything down, with the same pasion as swating a musquito on a lazy sunday afternoon. On the other hand aparently the devs saw paragoning your artifact as an expansion long thing when logging in for half an hour and clearing all the AP WQ's nets you 500k-1M AP so ~2 months worth of "farming" wich begs the question who the hell is the game even designed for anymore.....

Hell you can argue flying makes sens from an "i am so above this bullshit" (both figuratively and literarly) RP aspect , i'm just here to do my ghost friends a favor and be on with my day i'm not here for a bearass sightseeing tour...

[Syegfryed]

if i can't fly on my big boss foking dragon, it would be terrible, for me at least