Posted by Lethality in Blue Milk & Cereal | 24 Comments
Blue Milk & Cereal: Would You Like Atmospheric Flight In TOR?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
Over the last week or so, I’ve found it interesting to revisit some of the original Blue Milk & Cereal questions which were asked well before Star Wars: The Old Republic was released. It’s interesting to see if players’ votes have changed now that they have had time in the game (so far, they haven’t). We recently re-did the dual-spec thing, and yesterday was advanced class swapping. Today, I thought we’t tackle atmospheric flight.
For me, there is nothing more important in an MMORPG than freedom. And nothing gives you that freedom like pulling a mythical winged lion out of your backpack and heading into the skies. Being able to fly from one end of a continent to another, albeit a 20+ minute ride, really gives a sense of place, especially after you see the beautify scenery pass below. Indeed, videos like this aren’t possible without the ability to traverse the atmosphere. (Editor’s Note: If you’ve never played World of Warcraft, you should give those videos a look.)
Flying mounts also allow for some interesting content design. Look at Nagrand or Deepholm in World of Warcraft. Tell me you wouldn’t like to bop around Coruscant or Nar Shadaa in your very own speeder and explore the heights of some of those skyscrapers!
But there is a dark side to all of this freedom (sorry for the pun!) With human nature being what it is, and gamers being what they are, atmospheric flight is also a way to bypass some content. No longer did you have to trudge through armies of mobs on foot and “play the game” to get to your quest objective. You simply flew above the area, plop down when you find it, and go on about your business. No fuss, no muss. I never did this – it cheapened the whole game. I had a rule for myself that I had to explore an entire zone on foot before I was use my flying mount, and even then, always did quests as intended. Then, there’s the argument that it killed world PvP. I dunno.
Anyway, I’d like nothing more than to see free-roaming atmospheric flight in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Exploring planets like Tatooine from the sky would give a whole new perspective. When we spoke to Daniel Erickson at E3, he mentioned that the worlds weren’t designed with atmospheric flight in mind, so our hopes might be thin. Then again, the original World of Warcraft wasn’t designed that way either.
Where do you, fine reader, stand on this topic? Would you like to see free-roaming atmospheric flight in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Vote and discuss!
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For the sake of exploring the worlds, I would absolutely love to be able to fly around and look at things.
From a gameplay point of view, I think it would be nice to be able to have flight, but only allow landing to be in designated areas such as where the existing taxis are right now. By allowing either take off or landing to be done only at a questing hub you no longer kill world pvp, and you allow the exploration/shortcuts that flight is most useful for. I’d say take off from anywhere, but only allow landing at questing hubs (or else datacron hunting becomes pointless).
The taxi rides are annoying on some worlds, such as Nar Shaddaa where you have to bounce back and forth between 3-5 nodes to get from one area to another, where your own flight would give you the benefit of a shorter trip from A to B.
That’s an excellent potential compromise I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere… only land on the landing pads, etc.
I agree completely. This is a great idea, only landing on landing pads. I would love to be able to more freely explore the world.
I’m shocked (although I shouldn’t be) that BioWare didn’t design the game with flight in mind. It just shows how BioWare was designing an MMO for 2006, not 2011. They’ve ignored so much advancements that were made.
Well they did start making the game in 2005 or something like that. If they were designing for 2011 standards then the game would be out in 2014.
I think this shows a divide in the minds of some players. What you see as a detriment and a sign of poor design by BioWare, others (like myself) see as a positive and reflects excellent design by BioWare. Atmospheric flight isn’t something like guild tools and features where every player can agree on them being useful and important.
It is a divisive issue and something that requires a great deal of planning to implement. This poll clearly shows that. So to do it right, it needs to serve a purpose and provide more of a positive experience than a negative one.
Wouldn’t datacrons get significantly easier with atmospheric flight? I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
Yep.
I’d say it’d be a game breaking mechanic when it comes to many of the datacrons.
I really wish they hadn’t done it to WoW. As enjoyable as flight is at times, flying over deep dark forests from objective to objective just breaks the game. You lose the feeling of cresting a hill and seeing an amazing view, you lose the fear of a treacherous ravine, you lose the fear of game mechanics.
It just doesn’t work well all the time and is one of the things that WoW has done that although initially cool, has been one factor of many contributing to the latest expansion just being a bit blah. I mean now that you’re allowed to fly even inside capital cities means that even city raids are purely hit and run affairs.
Yeah there are good implementations of it, but I just really don’t feel it’s a good fit for SWTOR unless it’s implemented in a scenario basis such as say a specific pvp scenario that involved vehicles limited to a certain area (aka a Hoth scenario or some such).
Actually no it would only make a few datacrons easier to get to but overall it wouldn’t affect much.
Its for this reason more than any other that I doubt this would happen (or if so not for many years). They seemed to put a lot of effort into hidding and/or making datacrons difficult to reach. Open world flight makes these no challenge at all.
YES! YES! YES!
Especially on Taris.
@Radicool: To be fair, Datacrons are pretty worthless. Then ones I’ve come across have simply been “+3 Aim” or whatever.
Datacrons are not even close to worthless. The matrix shards can be combined to create an excellent relic and getting 10 datacrons averaging +3 Aim is 30 aim which is a significant stat boost.
On the other hand, if you don’t bother, it doesn’t matter in the long run anyway. Just busy work in the mean time :(
I’m one of those folks who will scream “NNNOOOOOO!” Darth Vader style from the rooftops about this issue.
I played WoW from Beta through to the end of WotLK, so i’ve experienced this first-hand. When Burning Crusade launched, i was really excited about flying mounts. When i got my first one, it was amazing. It opened up entirely new areas to explore and changed my view of the game. And in Outlands, it was great.
Then WotLK launched and we got our first taste of a zone designed like the original world but with flying mounts. As soon as you unlocked access to it, everything became just hopping from one point to the next. No real exploration anymore, just flying over everything and considering it explored. You could jump from point to point. Farm materials like a giant toad leaping from one place to the next. And anyone competing with you without a flying mount was just SOL.
I saw what it did to world pvp. To the resource gathering game. To every aspect of the game. And it just makes so much design and content absolutely pointless. Planets in TOR are designed beautifully, though sometimes they can be a bit frustrating to navigate, they are crafted for someone to run and speeder through, not to fly over.
The compromise above about taking off and landing only at certain pads could work. It seems a bit silly to do so much work (i’m sure there are a lot of areas with holes in them that would need to be fixed graphically before allowing atmospheric flight) for something that is essentially an enhanced taxi service. With everything else in the game that still needs refinement or work (color matching, prototype gear becoming custom, the Legacy system, competitive pvp, etc), this just seems REALLY low on the list of priorities.
I would like it, but only if it didn’t come at the detriment to some other features and neccesary bug fixes etc.
I have to agree with some of the other poster, it’a huge no for me. I’m holding back from writing a novel here, but in my humble opinion, flying mounts (this is where I agree with the above) are in part a contributing factor in the loss of interest in WoW for many MMORPGers. I for one hope to never see flying mounts in SWTOR. We have our Ships for travelling from planet to planet with beautifully albeit a tad time consuming space ports when we land and dock at a new planet, we have speeders for travel on ground, what more do you need? And really, think of how much beautifully designed content you’d miss out on if you just flew over it.. I say NO.
Atmospheric flight, if it is free-form, will do more harm than good. In WoW, no matter how expansive the zone is, it is rendered smaller by the fact that you can pass through it in a matter of moments… from above… overcoming every bit of terrain.
That said, some constraints on flying could be fun in SWTOR. Imagine low-orbit or atmospheric space battles in areas specifically designed for them. Heck, imagine the famous Hoth sequence, with one side piloting snowspeeders and the other in walkers — or something very much like this, to keep with the timeframe the game is in. I’d love to see something like that… a combination of on-terrain fighting with air support and the like.
Plus it could give birth to free-form space combat, ala X-Wing/Tie-Fighter, in, say, a Warzone setting.
Yep. I’d love to see Scenario based atmospheric flight.
I mean what is the point of atmospheric flight most of the time in SW? It’s either landing pad to landing pad or combat related.
I’d love to fly my ship against other ships in an atmospheric warzone/large scale zone (a la Wintergrasp). But I think there is little point to utilizing free flight otherwise.
I think all of you guys that are agains this and answering with “it killed PvP’ or “I just hopped around to the content” are misdirecting your disgust. It’s the player’s fault, not the game’s, for those things happening.
No need to cut off our nose to spite our face – free-roaming flight adds a lot more to the experience and far outweighs any perceived negatives.
I have to disagree. You can only blame the players so much when it comes to the tools that a game gives them. Developers have to plan for the actions of players. That’s why zones are designed in various ways. There’s a reason BioWare designed it so a level 50 Imperial character can’t go to Tython. They planned for player abuse and just made it a non-issue.
With something like atmospheric flight, everything in the game from that point on has to be designed with it in mind. If the developers ignore it, then the game suffers. You end up with bunny-hopping by players because it was never addressed by developers and it becomes the easiest/best way to play.
To cite WoW, Burning Crusade was clearly designed with flying mounts in mind. They were well-executed and the landscape was made fully functional only after they were acquired. WotLK, however, was clearly not made with this in mind and it showed.
Unless atmospheric flight serves a real purpose — other than an enhanced speeder or a glorified taxi service — then why bother? There are so many other things BioWare can add to make the game amazing, it just seems like features just for the sake of saying they are in the game.
While I enjoyed my flying in WoW I will agree it ruined the questing mechanics of how things should be done. So I will bite the bullet and say ‘NO’ to flying knowing full well that I will have to speeder or shuttle everywhere. I only agree because flying totally changes the way the game is experienced to the point of making us not care about what is on the ground anymore unless it is a node to farm.
Wow didn’t allow flight until L70 in BC after you’d done most of your content and they made getting birds very hard to get at the time. They lessened the restriction to 74 in northrend but it still had a price tag.
And still now that it is almost everywhere, you still have the option of leveling a new toon without a mount.
And world pop was dead as soon as they introduced the bg’s.
I would like to see it but with a level restriction. But I honestly don’t see it happening.
I say yes under certain restrictions
swg had flying in the planets and people for what i understand loved it. you guys forgetting that the coast for cold weathering flying was 5k a pop so by then you already done most of the quest plus some spots are hard to get to without flying.
Total and utter ‘No’ vote from me. Like so many other posters, I played wow though old vanillia and into outland, getting a flying mount was amazing, and real push to get to level 70 (well, 68…druid flight form :) ) I just flew around for ages, swooping around mountains, it was wonderful. In WotLK we were grounded again and while it was frustrating at times, I really felt like I was exploring an unconquered wilderness, exploring old ruins and marching towards the Citidel. Until I got flying again. Then it became hop to quest zone, kill 10 foozles, hop to quest giver, repeat. No exploring, no choosing the safest or fastest path, no seeing that player that was about to die and jumping off my ground mount to save him, all immersion gone.
Cata was even worse, old world flying totally removed what little immersion was left, I played cata for a year and still couldn’t navagate my way around most zones on the ground, i have no idea how the layout goes, I just fly over it. I stopped caring about the game.
Ground mounts keep us grounded, phyically and mentally, and keep us in the game. Don’t give players flying mounts, it will ruin the game.
Now…being able to land my ship whereever I like on the planet (within gaming zones) and making my way from there…THAT i could live with.