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GW2's odd version of flying . . . Why can't your mount, like Just. Fly.??


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One thing I want to comment on. Some posters are claiming that flying mounts creating problems for WoW is a fact. This, actually, is not a fact, but an opinion. I, too, am guilty of just passing off my comment as fact in my previous post, so I'm not making excuses. Just wanted to clear things up for those who may not have played WoW.

Flying mounts in WoW let players skip some enemies on their way to their objectives. For players who believe being grounded results in just the right amount of combat and engagement, flying mounts are a problem. However, for players who believe that they're fighting too often while grounded, flying is a solution. For former players, yes, flying mounts are a problem. But flying mounts being a problem isn't a fact because it is these players' opinion that the amount of combat they encounter while grounded is acceptable and flying results in too little combat.

To explain another way, imagine if they increased WoW's aggro range so that grounded players must fight all enemies within render distance. Would these players still think flying over these enemies is a problem? No. So if the aggro range is reduced little by little, at what point does flying over enemies go from a solution to a problem? That's an opinion that varies by player and no one player's opinion is any more right than another's.

I'm sure some anti-fliers will say flying broke more than just skipping enemies in WoW. But again, that's just an opinion because for pro-fliers, flying created an immersive experience and new design that can't be mimicked by being grounded. No matter how some people claim their side as fact, it is not a fact.

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@Kabuki Theatre.9752 said:

@Trise.2865 said:Three words: "fly-over zones". You play WoW, so you know what that term means, and why GW2 should avoid it like the plague.

Please explain to me in plain words,how a bird,behaving exactly like a real bird,is somehow artificial?

It isn't.
. But that's not the point. The point is
players
being able to fly is a bad thing for the game.

But if you insist on this line: It's because they're lugging your heavy butt around, messing up their aerodynamics.

Especially if you play a Charr. ? Love my Charr but she looks so ridiculous on mounts.

Why would you possibly say your character looks "ridiculous" on anything?

That's self-judgemental that doesn't help you , or your character, at all.

Your character looks no more ridiculous than any other GW2 looks on their mounts at allYou undoubtedly look fabulous on your critter.Good for you.

The others were right, you are a TROLL.Your opinion on how my charr looks, which you have never seen before, is as ridiculous as it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter, she's not real, it's just a game.Bye.

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@"BlueJin.4127" said:One thing I want to comment on. Some posters are claiming that flying mounts creating problems for WoW is a fact. This, actually, is not a fact, but an opinion. I, too, am guilty of just passing off my comment as fact in my previous post, so I'm not making excuses. Just wanted to clear things up for those who may not have played WoW.

Flying mounts in WoW let players skip some enemies on their way to their objectives. For players who believe being grounded results in just the right amount of combat and engagement, flying mounts are a problem. However, for players who believe that they're fighting too often while grounded, flying is a solution. For former players, yes, flying mounts are a problem. But flying mounts being a problem isn't a fact because it is these players' opinion that the amount of combat they encounter while grounded is acceptable and flying results in too little combat.

To explain another way, imagine if they increased WoW's aggro range so that grounded players must fight all enemies within render distance. Would these players still think flying over these enemies is a problem? No. So if the aggro range is reduced little by little, at what point does flying over enemies go from a solution to a problem? That's an opinion that varies by player and no one player's opinion is any more right than another's.

I'm sure some anti-fliers will say flying broke more than just skipping enemies. But again, that's just an opinion because for pro-fliers, flying created an immersive experience that can't be mimicked by being grounded.

Just going to point out that while what yousay on the opinion of players is valid and that players will view it as either good or bad based on their standing. FLying mounts are inherently a game design issue. By giving your players a solution, even more so a low effort solution that makes level design and game design redundant in many ways. What your essentially doing is providing the expectation that many of your players will bypass the world around them.; This of course means it is wasted effort to create interesting content for such environments making the open world stale and a chore. This is why the faction of players who like the mount to skip content exsists because of such lazy design. At this point you have just created a cycle of stale world content.

Also on the consideration of the mechanics of flying themselves. Is the endless flight in any of these games really any interest? Sure there is a novelty to first flying that lasts for about 5 mins but this form of flight is passive and lacks engagement. Both the griffon and the skyscale require engagement from the players and to essensially fly endlesly on the griffon requires some amount of skill. At the end of the day for somthing to be "Fun" it needs to engage the user and passive mounts that not only negate other mounts but also negate a great deal of game design with no engaging elements just result in the usual mmo tactic of afk traveling.

TLDR

  1. Makes the other mounts redundant.
  2. Makes interesting level design redundant.
  3. Makes open world content not worthwhile when it is easily ignored.
  4. Straight flying is not engaging and therefore not fun..
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First of all, I was talking about WoW in the post you quoted. I agree, I'd prefer not to have flying in current GW2 maps. But, again, I'm not talking about GW2. :smile:

Second, again, you're comment about flying is not a fact. Flying is not a design flaw. It is not an issue to level design. It's not a redundancy. Flying is no more of a flaw than a 3D game is a flaw compared to 2D games. Flying simply results in different types of game design and experience. A game world designed with flying is not redundant because of flying. It creates an experience that simply cannot be mimicked by just being grounded.

While WoW didn't have much gameplay mechanics that took advantage of flying, it still created an experience for some players that cannot be mimicked by being grounded all the time. Also, players could already skip enemies* in WoW without flying. Flying simply increased what players could skip. Flying was a flaw in the opinion of players who believed that you should only be able to bypass (to use number as a scale) 2, but it was a solution to others who wanted to bypass 4. Neither side is right, neither is a fact. They just have different preferences on the same scale.

*I don't think WoW had any actual mechanics you could skip with flying. It simply allowed you to skip more enemies than you would if grounded, and let you move around faster. I think they do have some jumping puzzles and stuff now, though.

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@Kabuki Theatre.9752 said:

@yusayu.3629 said:In WoW mounts are glorified speedboosts. It's one of the amazing designs in GW2, that all the mounts feel different, and you actually have to do something to stay in the air (the griffon can permanently stay in the air with all the masteries). WoW mounts are incredibly boring.

In WoW, there are Many mounts that require work . . .blood, sweat, and tears,to master.To become really, really good with them.

Please don't generalize about things that are false.Many WoW mounts require a LOT of work to master.The fact that you did notdoes not mean they are boring.It means you did not do the work to master them.

What?

The only work a WoW mount requires is crafting/dropping it. I've played WoW (at least until WoD), mounts in WoW didn't even have abilities iirc. You just used your mount, activated auto-run and waited for a few minutes and you arrived where you wanted. Also, ALL the flying mounts are exactly the same. They are literally just different skins with exactly the same functionality.

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@yusayu.3629 said:

@yusayu.3629 said:In WoW mounts are glorified speedboosts. It's one of the amazing designs in GW2, that all the mounts feel different, and you actually have to do something to stay in the air (the griffon can permanently stay in the air with all the masteries). WoW mounts are incredibly boring.

In WoW, there are Many mounts that require work . . .blood, sweat, and tears,to master.To become really, really good with them.

Please don't generalize about things that are false.Many WoW mounts require a LOT of work to master.The fact that you did notdoes not mean they are boring.It means you did not do the work to master them.

What?

The only work a WoW mount requires is crafting/dropping it. I've played WoW (at least until WoD), mounts in WoW didn't even have abilities iirc. You just used your mount, activated auto-run and waited for a few minutes and you arrived where you wanted. Also, ALL the flying mounts are exactly the same. They are literally just different skins with exactly the same functionality.

Yep, almost all wow mounts is absolutely cosmetic. Theres nothing to master in the glorified speedboosts.

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And in other games, like WoW, every expansion after TBC which introduced the flying mount, the developer has sought to restrict if not remove flying completely.

You're not going to get the answer you want here. If you want a pure flying mount, uninstall GW2 and move back to WoW.

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Since you are talking about making mounts behave like real birds, I'll give you one reason why GW2 mounts do not fly: biology.Birds that fly (gracefully) have massive wings, compared to their body size, which is why they can fly as they do. In contrast, the Griffon and the Skyscale have very large bodies compared to their wingspans, making it realistically impossible for them to be able to fly like birds. Furthermore, real birds have aerodynamic bodies, developed over millions of years to excel at flying. The Griffon and the Skyscale aren't built for flight, they have huge legs that can cause lots of drag.

I don't care how most WoW mounts look like, but if they fly like birds while looking like our GW2 mounts, then they should be using magic, because realistically they shouldn't be able to fly, only glide.

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I agree with earlier posters that realism isn't that important here, but I do think it's interesting to compare the flight we have in game with what would be realistic - inasmuch as that's possible, given that griffons and skyscales don't really exist. (Also the OP's main objection to flight in GW2 seems to be related to 'realism', not gameplay.)

Contrary to what the OP seems to believe, birds are not actually capable of unrestricted flight. Hummingbirds appear to come close, but they're pretty unusual, and other birds have much greater restrictions on what they can do. Added to which, birds really do fly through a combination of flapping and gliding (and, in the case of smaller birds, bounding - folding their wings against their bodies to make themselves more aerodynamic) - there's not really such a thing as "just flying".

I haven't played WoW since well before they introduced flying mounts, so I watched some videos, and it seems to me that the WoW devs have simply taken their flying mechanics in the opposite direction from ANet. Neither of them is 'wrong' (unless your criterion for being wrong is 'doesn't resemble actual bird flight with 100% accuracy', in which case they're both wrong), they're just different. Implementing 'realistic' flight isn't really possible (and, arguably, not even meaningful), and the WoW devs have opted for a flight system that is (way) less restricted than actual bird flight, whereas ANet have opted for a flight system that is more restricted.

Personally, I actually find the GW2 flight mechanics more convincing than the WoW ones, particularly those of the griffon since the way flapping and gliding work seems to correspond to actual physics (which is not to say that it's realistic, as such) - but of course, 'convincingness' is subjective, and clearly someone else (such as the OP) might find flight in WoW more convincing.

On the subject of whether a flying mount could carry a rider, here's a photograph of a weasel flying on the back of a woodpecker! A green woodpecker weighs about 180-220g, whereas a weasel can weigh up to 250g (although they're often much lighter than that) - so it's possible that this woodpecker was carrying more than double its own body weight.

@"Kabuki Theatre.9752" said:Flight by bird-like beings has been around for Billions of Years.

While I realise this isn't relevant to your argument... birds have been around for about 121 million years - much less than a billion, let alone billions. Pterosaurs came into existence around 228 million years ago, and in fact, animals have only existed for 665 million years! (Sources: the obvious Wikipedia pages.)

The Raptor mount is a perfectly realistic example ofa prehistoric animal, pretty much portrayed realistically in"Jurassic Park" movie.It was at least based on archeological evidence unearthed by scientists.based on skeletal reconstruction.I can accept that perfectly.AND, very well done.

The raptor mount doesn't actually resemble real raptors very closely at all...

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@"BlueJin.4127" said:Second, again, you're comment about flying is not a fact. Flying is not a design flaw. It is not an issue to level design.-snip-*I don't think WoW had any actual mechanics you could skip with flying. It simply allowed you to skip more enemies than you would if grounded, and let you move around faster.

From a polygon article where they talked to Ion Hazziokostas, a WoW Developer, back in Warlords of Draenor:"Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realized that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways," Hazzikostas explains. "While there was certainly convenience in being able to completely explore the world in three dimensions, that also came at the expense of gameplay like targeted exploration, like trying to figure out what's in that cave on top of a hill and how do I get up there."

-snip-

Originally, Blizzard took out flying in Warlords of Draenor as an experiment, and Hazzikostas says he would have bet "slightly better than even money at the time" that they were going to bring it back eventually. But as they played the expansion and watched others play it, they discovered that they liked the game better without flying.

"The world feels larger, feels more dangerous," he says. "There's more room for exploration, for secrets, for discovery and overall immersion in the world. At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We're not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that's kind of where we're at going forward."

So, yeah, there are design issues when it comes to true free flight, and that's coming from the developers themselves. This isn't a random comment on a random forum by a random player, this is from a still current WoW developer. Talking about it from the point of view that only the players have differing views on it ignores the fact that the developers themselves have issues with flying as a mechanic, and preferred the game without flying (yes, they did later allow flying, but only after tons of player backlash, which is why they have the pathfinder achievements because they want players to experience the content from the ground before they are allowed to fly).

To reiterate, the devs are making these points. The devs themselves think flying is an issue, and they still design around the fact that they don't think flying should be allowed from the beginning of an expansion (i.e. the pathfinder achievements).

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@"BlueJin.4127" said:

Second, again, you're comment about flying is not a fact. Flying is not a design flaw. It is not an issue to level design. It's not a redundancy. Flying is no more of a flaw than a 3D game is a flaw compared to 2D games. Flying simply results in different types of game design and experience. A game world designed with flying is not redundant because of flying. It creates an experience that simply cannot be mimicked by just being grounded.

Someone posted a Polygon interview above, with the then lead designer of WoW, detailing the reasons for flight being absent from WoD. Here is an a expert :

"Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realized that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways.While there was certainly convenience in being able to completely explore the world in three dimensions, that also came at the expense of gameplay like targeted exploration, like trying to figure out what’s in that cave on top of a hill and how do I get up there."

Granted they had to go back at it, because you can't introduce convenience and then take it back, it never works that way. Although they made sure it was behind a huge grind wall.

The interesting part though, is that if you now go and watch the GW2 guild chat part, where our devs are commenting on unlimited flight, you will see many similarities. There is a pattern in how the devs of these games see flight affecting the worlds they make.

You could still dismiss these, as simple points of view, albeit a developer's this time. Is it really though? When the people who create these worlds, and have all the metrics detailing player behavior in-game , are telling you this is not good for the game, that might as well be a fact.

Edit : Castlemanic's comment, which I agree 100%, appeared after refresh.

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This is their current direction as a team. However, not all devs on their team agree with this because “flying being an issue from a design point” is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Some devs wanted to take advantage of flying by designing around flying. Devs at Blizzard. Devs working on WoW. These devs just cannot individually say this out in public because they’re not allowed to say so.

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This is their current direction as a team. However, not all devs on their team agree with this because “flying being an issue from a design point” is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Some devs wanted to take advantage of flying by designing around flying. Devs at Blizzard. Devs working on WoW. These devs just cannot individually say this out in public because they’re not allowed to say so.

Fair enough, but even some developers seeing issues with a feature makes their opinion more of a fact then the blank statements that flying causes no issues.

Wanting to build around a mechanic is not the same as the mechanic causing no issues. The very fact that you have to create content around something IS the issue.

For everything else, the Polygon Article as well as the summary of the WoW issue was posted by me further up.

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@BlueJin.4127 said:This is their current direction as a team. However, not all devs on their team agree with this because “flying being an issue from a design point” is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Some devs wanted to take advantage of flying by designing around flying. Devs at Blizzard. Devs working on WoW. These devs just cannot individually say this out in public because they’re not allowed to say so.

Can you provide evidence of this? If you have an article or something where the devs have stated that they don't think flying is an issue please share it.

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as much as I'd love to have actual free flying, I can understand the reason to no have it. many times i participate in events just because i happen to find them around while walk, id i was flying I'd probably skip them, unless it was an event I'm actively looking for. this would mean a lot of people would get less help in events they need because most people would also only participate in events they are interested in, and less participation in random events. also I feel ike flying already makes maps a bit too easy to travel. free flyin would just mean to be able to safely and quickly traverse them without any issues, and that could make some people bored.

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@EmmetOtter.8542 said:When you think of a magical flying beast strong enough to carry a fully armored Knight into battle, you do expect that it magically has unlimited stamina capable of soaring into the stratosphere and flying around the entire globe.

Skyscale falls way short of that.

If 8 tiny wingless reindeer can pull a fat man's sled around the world non-stop in 1 night, you'd think a dragon could do a little better.

Actually... If you assume certain aspects of mythology to be true, and consider Santa Claus to be Fae, he'd totally kick a dragon's ass in a race.

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@"Kabuki Theatre.9752" said:And how Exactlywould it "ruin the game."?Seems to me other MMOs have not been"ruined"by having flying mounts that act just like real birds.

actually Blizzard has acknowledge that the worst thing they did is adding flying mounts, they now have to work even harder to make maps not hide certain stuff.GW2 can get away with it because they are small maps, WoW is a true open world so flying, no matter how handy it is for players, trivializes zones.Anet already kept that in mind, the maps are already small, making you able to just fly over everything trivializes the maps entirely.

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