Flight.

I've seen that some effort has been put into flight mechanics for the game, specifically the flying mounts that are super rare.

I'm curious if flight will be a thing in other ways, and how might the mounts retain their superior quality in spite of other methods of flight being used?

Ideas I had were magical items and abilities of some spell casters (mages and clerics granting the power of flight with a buff, summoners summoning a flying mount, bards poly-morphing into small flying creatures like ravens, and magical items that grant the power to non-magical classes). Travel speeds for flight would be roughly the same as running speed, maybe a bit faster, but far slower than flying mounts.

These powers/items would be higher end, obviously, and should have unique benefits and drawbacks (poly-morphing into a bird means you can be 1 shot killed, but also means you are less noticeable and possibly benefit from stealth).

It also raises the question of aerial combat and air born threats, such as large birds of prey, bats, dragons, and other things. Maybe a key benefit to the flying mount is that they can bypass these threats, maybe a fear aura or something in addition to being faster than traditional flight.

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Dreoh

Dygz wrote: »

"Delay" is a restriction... but more specifically, you aren't "skipping content".
In WoW, flight is restricted until after content is completed.
Just because you define something, doesn't mean it's accurate.
"Boring" is subjective.

("Unrestrained" might be closer to what you're trying to convey.)

Well I'm not going to argue pointless semantics, but other than that..

How is flying past everything, ignoring the world and heading straight to a destination, skipping the content in-between, not skipping content? Even if it's trivial and "you've already done it before" it's still content that you're skipping.

How is "unrestrained" flight NOT boring? You literally just point in a direction and alt-tab until you get there. That's literally as brainless as you can actually get.

If you think it's not boring because "ooooh flight! freedom! I can go anywhere!", wouldn't you enjoy it even more if you actually had to fly actively instead of passively?

WizardTim

Dreoh wrote: »

The way I was defining it is
Unrestricted flight is the ability to fly in any direction or even hover at will forever as if you were swimming but in the air. As if you just simply turned off gravity. It's boring, it's simple, it's too easy and is just a way to content skip in a pretty package.

Restricted flight is having to maintain your flight actively with skill. This is engaging, complex, and forces you to plan out your routes still so that you don't end up landing in a danger zone still.

That definition is poor at best, and assumes way more than it accounts for. I'm assuming your actual experiences are limited here. Your response regarding differentiation between "active" and "passive" flight is also confusing and poorly defined.

By your definition, City of Heroes flight is unrestricted. It's easy, allows you to fly all but indefinitely, allows you to "skip content", and is probably the least popular travel power in the game. It's fun comes purely from a RP perspective, and it's uses are limited to travel only. But it's fun, and allows you to get from point A to point B without mundane hassles (what you seem to refer to as content, which is also apparently very poorly defined by you).

Making some content optional is very beneficial to the core game designs, especially in MMOs. It may seem like a waste of content to create sections of the game that some people can blow past and never experience, but that's pretty much exactly why I'm raising this point for discussion to begin with. The key phrasing here is "optional". I'd consider the methods of attaining the currently described methods of flight for Ashes as purely circumstantial. You must be the right person at the right time and with the right luck to obtain it. It's certainly a deserved point of prestige to obtain, but there in lies the problem I have with it. It becomes wasted content by virtue of it's rarity. Not optional, but out right barred for most players.

I'd have no problems with that if it was just the creme de la creme of flight in the game, but no. Most people seem to think it should be the ONLY flight in the game, and that's the best example of bad imagination I can think of right now.

What I proposed here was to add air born content to the game, to MAKE flight not only fun an interesting, but also open it up to a larger player base. I'm well aware of your concerns and fears regarding it, but have already addressed them.

World size is relative, in every game. Flight does indeed tend to shrink the world, but only if done poorly. City of Heroes has flight (as well as super leap, teleportation, and super speed) as early as level 4, as I've explained before, but doesn't harm the game the way you insist it would. The primary factors that govern world size and how large the world feels is travel speed, terrain changes, and cultural changes.

Travel speed directly affects the size of the world. If you can get to any point of the map in half an hour or less, the world feels somewhat smaller. The worst example of this is long range teleportation, which just cuts out entire sections of the map. Using City of Heroes as the case study here, flight (and teleportation, which the travel power version is incredibly short ranged compared to it's portals) are both designed to travel X number of meters per second. Without going into detail, neither actually makes travel time irrelevant, and both contribute to the size of the game world without making the world feel much smaller.

All travel powers give you far more significant speed and range, but the sheer size of the world still makes you feel very small by comparison. This was well done IMO, because it increases the players freedom of movement, allows them to bypass content that may be just a boring slug fest in favor of what they actually want to do, and still gives them the feel of having to travel a fair distance from point A to B.

Dreoh

Absolutely none of what you said discounts my complaints about unrestricted/unrestrained flight being content skipping and/or boring/unengaging.

Even with the few valid points you gave, it's still inherently un-engaging and adds nothing to the game other than the ability to skip content.

If you consider unrestricted/unrestrained flight to be content, please tell me in no uncertain terms how any "content" that you can alt-tab entirely through is "content". If there's no risk, are you even playing?

wolfwood82 wrote: »

That definition is poor at best, and assumes way more than it accounts for. I'm assuming your actual experiences are limited here. Your response regarding differentiation between "active" and "passive" flight is also confusing and poorly defined.

I explained in simplest terms the difference between the two. It's very straightforward. WoW flight is passive. Any flight that lets you hover indefinitely, or fly in any direction unhindered is passive flight.

Active flight is any form of "flight" that requires you to be at attention or be at risk of falling or crashing into something. It's not difficult to understand.

In a game like Aion, passive flight is fine because the game is made with passive flight as a core mechanic, and as such everything is created with such in mind. You could actually even remove wings and make the game an "underwater" game with just a filter and it would be just fine, because passive flight is essentially just swimming in the air.

In FF14 and WoW (even the later/current content) is NOT made with flight as a core mechanic, and as such it exists separately from everything else and is only a mode of easy transportation. This is self-evident in that you have to play through content without flying before you can unlock it. If passive flying is so great and bring so much to the table, then why is it only available after you complete the actual content?

I haven't played City of Heros, but based on your description I would consider all those modes of transportation infinitely more fun than the flight ability. Sure it's great for RP reasons, but RP is always secondary to game mechanics.

You're never going to convince me that traveling in a Superman open world game is going to more fun and engaging than the Spiderman open world games have been. In fact, there's been so many Spiderman games because his method of travel is so fun, engaging and has risk/complexity to it.

Noaani

Dreoh wrote: »

If you consider unrestricted/unrestrained flight to be content, please tell me in no uncertain terms how any "content" that you can alt-tab entirely through is "content". If there's no risk, are you even playing?

You seem to be looking at MMO flight as being WoW flight.

If there was a large open area of land with no mobs, and you needed to cross from one side to the other, you could set auto-run and alt tab out.

The issue you are talking about is not an issue of flight/no flight, it is an issue of content/no content.

These two things are not the same.

Atama

Dreoh wrote: »

I haven't played City of Heros, but based on your description I would consider all those modes of transportation infinitely more fun than the flight ability. Sure it's great for RP reasons, but RP is always secondary to game mechanics.

You're never going to convince me that traveling in a Superman open world game is going to more fun and engaging than the Spiderman open world games have been. In fact, there's been so many Spiderman games because his method of travel is so fun, engaging and has risk/complexity to it.

I play CoH and it is true, that flight is relatively boring. Here is a Reddit thread where people talk about their favorite transportation powers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cityofheroes/comments/bfhsf6/whats_your_preferred_transportation_power/

Generally speaking, flight was "easy mode" or the most convenient, but generally it's not considered "fun". Jumping from building to building was more fun, or teleporting. Basically the travel modes that required you to think about how to get around and were more interactive.

Dreoh

Noaani wrote: »

Dreoh wrote: »

If you consider unrestricted/unrestrained flight to be content, please tell me in no uncertain terms how any "content" that you can alt-tab entirely through is "content". If there's no risk, are you even playing?

You seem to be looking at MMO flight as being WoW flight.

If there was a large open area of land with no mobs, and you needed to cross from one side to the other, you could set auto-run and alt tab out.

The issue you are talking about is not an issue of flight/no flight, it is an issue of content/no content.

These two things are not the same.

If by MMO flight you mean the "passive" or unrestricted/unrestrained flight that's been defined in all 3 of those ways so far in this thread then yes. Add your semantics to the ever-growing list.

And yes, I agree with you to an extent. Travel without danger is one aspect of the problem.
Terrain traversal is another major component.
When you're walking in a zone, you have to navigate said terrain, even if it is simple avoidance. Terrain traversal, while minimal and seemingly insignificant is a subtly huge component of immersion and gameplay. If you can just fly past a cliff instead of navigating up it, that's "cliff navigation" content that is skipped.
If you can just fly past mountains, suddenly those mountains are insignificant and the world is instantly trivial and tiny.

Now, if you had a mount that could scale mountains or cliffs, but it required skill to do so, then that's a different story. This is what GW2 mounts do, and it's why people laud it's mount system so much. Luckily it seems AoC is gathering inspiration from GW2 with it's mounts since mounts are confirmed to have different abilities, one even being gliding. It's also an MMO, and because of this, I don't think your "MMO flight" wording fits

The world and travel is insignificant to Superman.

People play Spiderman open world games because of the significance of the travel and how he interacts with the world.

You could argue that superman's flight is just to get to the combat and other content faster, but why can't we have both? Why can't we have engaging travel and engaging combat/other content.

Edit:
If you wanted engaging unrestricted/unrestrained flight, you'd have to have stuff to dodge in midair while you're flying to your destination, or even flying mounted combat. Neither of which is really ideal without being a core game pillar.

Noaani

Dreoh wrote: »

If you wanted engaging unrestricted/unrestrained flight, you'd have to have stuff to dodge in midair while you're flying to your destination, or even flying mounted combat. Neither of which is really ideal without being a core game pillar.

As I said in my first post in this thread;

Noaani wrote: »

If you design your game with flight in mind, these pitfalls can be peeled away one at a time.

Adding any system in to a game that isnt designed for it is bad.

A game that only allows swimming on the surface shouldnt add in the ability to swim under water without putting something there. A game that only allows movement on the surface shouldnt allow you to go above that without putting something there.

Flight is like any system - it needs to fit in to the game.

Adding a system where players can build a cart and attach it to their horse is great, but doesnt make much sense in a game without horses.

Adding in furniture for players to put in their house is great, but only if the game has player houses.

Adding in enchantments for gear is great, but only if gear can take enchantments.

Adding flight to a game without adding content for flight would be like adding enchants for gear to a game, but not allowing gear to be enchanted.

Your argument ONLY makes sense if we assume that this is how flight is added to any given game.

As soon as you factor in non-shit developers and management, and realize that if they add flight for the masses they will add content for it as well, your entire point falls flatter than flat.

GW2 opted to make mounts content, rather than a means to get to content.

Some people like this, many do not.

I do not.

Dreoh

Noaani wrote: »

Dreoh wrote: »

If you wanted engaging unrestricted/unrestrained flight, you'd have to have stuff to dodge in midair while you're flying to your destination, or even flying mounted combat. Neither of which is really ideal without being a core game pillar.

As I said in my first post in this thread;

Noaani wrote: »

If you design your game with flight in mind, these pitfalls can be peeled away one at a time.

Adding any system in to a game that isnt designed for it is bad.

A game that only allows swimming on the surface shouldnt add in the ability to swim under water without putting something there. A game that only allows movement on the surface shouldnt allow you to go above that without putting something there.

Flight is like any system - it needs to fit in to the game.

Adding a system where players can build a cart and attach it to their horse is great, but doesnt make much sense in a game without horses.

Adding in furniture for players to put in their house is great, but only if the game has player houses.

Adding in enchantments for gear is great, but only if gear can take enchantments.

Adding flight to a game without adding content for flight would be like adding enchants for gear to a game, but not allowing gear to be enchanted.

Your argument ONLY makes sense if we assume that this is how flight is added to any given game.

As soon as you factor in non-shit developers and management, and realize that if they add flight for the masses they will add content for it as well, your entire point falls flatter than flat.

GW2 opted to make mounts content, rather than a means to get to content.

Some people like this, many do not.

I do not.

oh ok I guess I misinterpreted your argument, it looks like we completely agree

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