[Update: No flying ever, apparently. Remember when WoW had sane lead designers?]

Has the lack of flying in Warlords made the world feel larger?

Like a surprising number of people, I occasionally forget that there isn’t flying in Draenor. I have only really noticed the lack here recently due to two factors: leveling my druid (now level 89) and trying to do Archaeology on my main. And it was really the latter situation that reminded me of why I always say that to make a world feel larger, you simply put more things in it. This is opposed to the current design, where you simply make everyone move slower.

Does anyone actually feel like Draenor is bigger than, say, Pandaria? Or Northrend? I only recently activated my second WoW Token for this expansion, but I have long since ran out of reasons to care about the world. Questing is still in tightly-packed hubs, so the ground-mount limitation only means the time between quest pick-up and quest turn-in is longer, not any of my actual gameplay. Hitting up resource nodes is a massive pain, but Garrisons really cover that anyway. If for some reason I feel compelled to do the Apexis daily, they might as well have teleported me there, because I immediately Alt-Tab out of the game while on Flight Paths.

If anything, I would argue that the lack of flying has actually resulted in less gameplay, not more. As I mentioned before, I was trying to do some Archaeology on my main the other day and barely managed to get through two digsites before logging out in disgust. Archaeology is already a time-sink of incredible magnitude, but I’m not about to waste even more time traversing asinine landscapes specifically designed to thwart shortcuts/exploration. I can attack 30-foot tall Old Gods, but that intentionally annoying 5-foot slope is impassible.

Don’t even get me started on how being limited to ground mounts has driven me to exclusively use the Water Strider mount. When all other mounts are functionally identical except for two which allow you to bypass all water hazards, it becomes dumb to use anything else. I spent five years farming the Raven Lord mount, actually acquired it two weeks ago, and only ever use it inside my Garrison.

I can empathize with Blizzard’s desires here. They want a guided experience, and to know that a player will experience this particular vista at this time at this place. But it’s bullshit. You still get that by limiting flying to the level cap. If you want us with boots on the ground, how about giving us a reason to have boots on the ground? Like, I dunno, daily quests?

I feel like this entire expansion has been a long string of comical blunders achieving the exact opposite of stated goals. Remove flying to make the world feel bigger? The world isn’t bigger, there’s just more empty space inbetween points of interest. Nevermind how Blizzard “made the world bigger” but somehow ended up putting fewer things to do in it.

As I mentioned before, I just turned in my second WoW Token. Unless I really get sucked into PvP though, I can’t imagine myself turning in a third one. My prior plan was to stick around into 6.2 long enough to cash in on the whole Felblight deal and set myself up nicely gold-wise for the next expansion. Given how rapidly I am depleting my WoW Bucket List however, I’m not sure I’m going to make it.