Liore of Herding Cats has a nice post about her impressions of returning to WoW. She also points out how she noticed the small UI details in Rift, or quality of life features as I call them, that are missing from WoW.
She also mentions briefly another point, which really stuck a chord with me:
Also, as someone who hasn’t played in a while I’m not sure I like flying mounts anymore. They just feel.. awkward. Invasive? I’m not sure.
When flying was first introduced to WoW as an end-game goal/convenience in the Burning Crusade expansion it was a thing to aim for. Flying mounts were relatively rare at least at first, so they were objects of wonder and envy. By the end of the Wrath era flying mounts, especially dragons and drakes were commonplace. During busier time on our server most outdoor vendors or questgivers in Stormwind are invisible under a sea of overlapping dragons and other giant winged mounts.
Somewhere during Wrath and/or Cataclysm the world part of the WoW game title lost it’s meaning, it became empty of other players and empty of challenge and danger. Flying is part of this decline, since it became so much quicker and more direct to travel from A to B.
Playing other games without any flying mounts, like LoTRO, Rift and now GW2 I feel more connected to the game world. Choices of fast travel destination have an impact still, since I won’t be able to just fly over all the challenges between the nearest stablemaster, porticulum or waypoint and the place I wish to reach. Yes, even GW2 with its plethora of fast travel waypoints still feels more like a world to me than WoW does because I still have to battle to the vista, heart or point of interest through all the mobs that happen to be in the way. With flying mounts you can literally dive bomb your target location and avoid 99% of everything else in the world.
Given the choice, I’d rather miss out on the convenience of flying because it takes too much out of the gameplay and the game world. That’s one “quality of life” feature I can do without!
I’d like to point out another mmo that was planned from the start with rentable flying mounts: Vanguard. In that world, the teleport stones are somewhat further away, but even in the lowest level areas you can rent time limited flying mounts that you control. (unlike the griffs in wow) Obviously, there is a quest chain that will let you to get a permanent one on lvl 50, but it is hard to complete.
There the whole world was planned with those mounts in place, and it feels much more natural to have them. In my opinion at least.
I disagree. Flying probably does have some impact on taking people “out of the world,” as you describe, but I’ll content that instancing, particularly the WoW type of instancing where it’s where virtually all of the actual play happens, is a much, much bigger factor.
@Vagabond: yes I can see it being different if flying was always there. I did try it in Vanguard but didn’t see what effect that had on gameplay overall as it was just the temporary mount.
@Ardwulf: certainly instancing has changed the way some MMOs feel, compared to Vanguard for instance (I never played EQ1). But instancing was always in WoW, people were always going into dungeons and raids at end game even in Vanilla. The dungeon finder specifically with it’s teleport feature does have a big role to play in lack of ‘traffic’, you won’t see people riding to the entrance of dungeons or raids anymore. However the addition of flying in the old-world makeover drastically reduced the chance of encountering other players in the field when leveling, gathering or similar activities. Of course it’s hard to say how much of this is down to instancing, phasing, flying or simply a decline in active playerbase…
Those are all factors, and some of them are very important ones; to some extent at least, it’s not instancing in general that’s the issue but WoW’s current implementation of instancing, with the dungeon finder and all that. Too, there’s the continual process of speeding up leveling with the aim of putting everyone at the cap as fast as possible, where there is little to do other than hang out in instances. Back in the day it was far easier to hang out in the leveling game, and thus in the world, and when you wanted to run a dungeon you had to assemble a group and actually go there, at least some of the time.