Gaming
World of Warcraft Lead Designer Confirms No Flying Mounts in Warlords of Draenor
Lead designer Ion Hazzikostas confirms flying mounts won’t make an appearance in Warlords of Draenor & may not appear in future expanasions
Warlords of Draenor was World of Warcraft’s most successful expansion in years pushing its subscription base up to 10 million players. It was greeted by rave reviews from across the web that hailed it as WoW’s return to the top of the MMO market. The only things fans felt was missing from the latest expansion was the ability to use flying mounts. Blizzard claimed that removing flying was an “experiment” to create a renewed sense of danger in the game world and encourage exploration.
Obviously not everyone was happy to see their ability to fly all across the map disappear, which is why Blizzard promised to revisit the issue later down the line. This week lead designer Ion Hazzikostas made good on that promise during an interview with Polygon. His answer however isn’t going to appease the fans anger towards Warlords of Draenor or future expansions. Hazzikostas told Polygon that flying will not make an appearance in Warlords of Draenor and it may not appear in any future expansions.
Taking away flying would be a massive change in World of Warcraft’s gameplay, as mounted flight has been part of the MMO since 2007 with the introduction of the Burning Crusades, the first expansion to WoW. In the years after it was introduced Hazzikostas says that Blizzard has seen flying mounts create major problems in the game:
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.
Hazzikostas says that Warlords of Draenor and the rest of WoW feels bigger opening it up to more exploration and immersion with players finding new secrets. He leaves very little hope in the interview that flying will stay an experiment saying that “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.” He admits that Blizzard is considering opening mounted flight to certain areas in future expansions.
Even if they open up mounted flight to special sections in expansions after Warlords of Draenor there isn’t much hope that it will ever return as a main feature of the game. That isn’t sitting well with Warcraft fans, 24 hours after the interview went live the World of Warcraft forums were flooded with responses. 288 pages of complaint threads popped up with fans letting their frustrations loose and some fans are even cancelling their subscriptions.
All of the anger is understandable if you are a long time player, mounted flight has been part of World of Warcraft for 8 of the 10 years its been out. Collecting the rarest flying mounts and being able to see huge areas of the game from the sky is a longstanding part of the MMO. Now all of those flying mounts have been grounded and lost their biggest advantage and that isn’t going to help World of Warcraft’s subscriber base flourish.
Source: Polygon
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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