Pathfinder Wow Bad Game Design

Kelly Bleart · Thursday, November 25, 2021

Originally Posted by SirCowdog

I think it's also important to note that Blizzard KNEW players would rush Nazjatar and Mechagon for flying, but designed the zones for ground interaction anyway.

First off, the question I would be asking is: Do they actually know how to design for any other kind of interaction?
Also, to be fair, they did ensure that we got to experience those zones without flying. My issue is that, because flying was locked behind simply getting the rep from those zones (and not just for Naz/Mecha, but the whole of BfA), they were strongly incentivizing us to rush the zones and that is what compromised the experience.

To me, the issue isn't that I don't agree with Pathfinder. It's that I am not convinced, based on several other design decisions they have made, that Blizzard properly understand the philosophy behind Pathfinder. And as such, I take issue with some of the ways in which they implement stuff related to Pathfinder.

I get the sense that for Blizzard, the issue is that they have simply decided that "flying is bad for the game" in principle. But at the same time, they recognise that having flying is important to a significant number of players. And as a result, they have had to accept that they need to give us flying, but do so grudgingly, because if it were up them, they would simply remove flying entirely. And I think that's the wrong attitude. I think it's a silly attitude, and I think that if they actually understood the issues properly, then they'd realise that flying isn't bad. It is problematic in certain contexts, but in others it's actually a massive boon.

Where I do agree with Blizzard is that flying does change the way we experience content. It gives us a way of bypassing a certain kind of immersion that comes from having to navigate the world on the ground. And I do agree that this can massively detract from the enjoyment of the experience. Where I disagree with Blizzard is their desire to keep us perpetually ground bound, and I do so because I recognise that the enjoyment of that kind of immersion stems largely from a sense of discovery and exploration, that, pretty much by definition, is contingent on the content being new to the player.

They want to withhold flying in order to try and give us a better experience through enforced immersion. The problem is that this immersion rapidly loses it's ability to make the experience better as content gets older (and we have experienced it). Ergo, the act of denying us flying is incapable of achieving the desired outcome of creating a better experience. Sure, it keeps us immersed, but not only is that no longer of value, I would argue that it is actually detrimental. Because, in the case of traveling in WoW, what starts out as fun and engaging when the content is fresh and new, lands up becoming tedious and boring as the content gets older.

To me it's almost tragic the way Blizzard are actually shooting themselves in the proverbial foot here. They want to keep us engaged with content longer, and IMO flying is a great way to give a lot of zones a fresh infusion of energy they need once the novelty of the ground-bound travel experience has run its course. Instead of recognising that flying allows us to skip the shit that is making the zones unappealing, they instead try to force us to keep doing it in the misguided belief that because we found it fun once, we should continue to do indefinitely.

They should really be embracing flying, not spurning it. Yes, flying does need to be managed. But withholding it entirely is just as harmful (if not more so) than introducing it from the get-go.

Originally Posted by SirCowdog

Wouldn't it have made more sense, knowing that players would fly very quickly after the patch went live, to build either excessive timegated unlocks, or zones that would continue to provide challenges to flying players after the unkock?

I think a big part of the problem with Pathfinder II was that they failed to think the whole thing through and ended up just lumping everything together. And I honestly believe that this stemmed from a poor understanding of what they were actually trying to achieve.
As I said above, I think that they simply see flying as something that they're obliged to unlock at some point. Instead they should be tying it to when it makes sense to unlock it - ie at what point is the value of withholding flying no longer important. And to me it's patently obvious that the value of withholding flying in Kul Tiras and Zandalar had long since expired, while at the same time, the value of withholding it in Naz/Mecha was very much still relevant. Lumping the entire unlock together was just daft. Sorry to be blunt, but to me there is just no kind of way saying it.

What Blizzard should have done was to unlock flying, for people who had completed the requirements for Pathfinder I, for Kul Tiras/Zandalar after the Battle of Dazar'alor quest chain. Then for Pathfinder II they should have put I would say a time-gate of 2-3 months on Naz/Mecha. That would have given people ample time to get the full ground based experience in those zones, and to complete the requirements of Pathfinder II without having to feel rushed to do it.

Originally Posted by SirCowdog

It seems weird to me to say " the devs clearly put a lot of work into making the zone", but they did so knowing it would be largely bypassed. It's a weird decision for the devs to do that, and the blame doesn't lie 100% with just the players in that regard.

As I have said, I don't know that they know how else to design zones. And the problem then becomes that they simply resent the existence of flying, and do what they can to try and make sure we are ground-bound for as long as possible.

Originally Posted by SirCowdog

Players clearly want flying. Or at least the speed and convenience of it. And yet going into Shadowlands we've got pathfinder again, no flight whistle, and the Maw not even letting you use mounts at all initially. It's like they're doubling down on something they know players don't like instead of incorporating what players like into the design, accounting for it, and making the game challenging WITH those things as part of the design.

Or, assuming that they can't make flying-friendly content, recognise that being forced to stay ground-bound is only fun and rewarding for a limited amount of time and don't try to keep us ground-bound for longer than that.
I honestly don't believe that there are many players for whom not having flying for new content is a big issue, because the played experience of new content tends to be fun and engaging from the ground. The far bigger issue is what happens down the line, once the novelty of it wears off.

Originally Posted by SirCowdog

Really they need to just overhaul the entire mount system, ground and air so it's even possible to improve the overall world design to something more dynamic than "screw you of you like flying" if the first half of the expansion, and "screw you if you like ground mounts" in the second half.

Honestly, I do not believe that there are players who genuinely prefer the ground mount experience in old content. I think that what a lot of the anti-flying brigade actually want is to keep up the level of engagement they have with new and exciting content. Which is, of course impossible. The problem is that they remember having fun while being ground-bound, but they fail to realise that it was tied to the content being new. So when they see that the later experience (with flying) isn't as fun anymore, they falsely conclude that flying is the problem. It's a correlation vs causation error in thinking. - - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Aliven

For you. If i want to have immersion i dont give a fuck about what other players do or can do. I walked in some zones to enjoy the beauty of them, even when i had flying enabled.

Taking the attitude of "i don't give a fuck about other players" is not only immature, it's also a terrible principle to apply to game design.
WoW has millions of players. The way the game is designed has to cater to the needs of the entire playerbase. The fact that you're happy with putting immersion ahead of progression simply makes you a rare oddity. It's entirely irrelevant to the discussion though.

Forcing players to choose between either enjoying the game experience or suffering a significant competitive disadvantage is bad game design. Period. If you're going to give players choices, they should be like-for-like tradeoffs.

More importantly though, and this is the point I am trying to make: the idea of implementing pathfinder such that players feel incentivized to sacrifice immersion in order to get flying sooner is antithetical to the whole concept of Pathfinder in the first place.