Locomotion - Flying

[Dustie]

As you all play Aion, can you enter some comments or notes on flying and MMOs?

For example I was talking to Slamz and he noted that while his pet class is cool, his pet can't fly. It will apparently be fixed in the future. In any case, what are the other little notables that you're experiencing with Aion when it comes to flying?

[Hoofhurr]

Flying in WoW became this instant "Safe zone" where if you could get away and get mounted you could escape pvp fairly easily. I found this to be kind of lame from a pvp perspective. I understand Aion PvP is very flying focused so it's mostly just an observation about flying in WoW that I didn't like. Also, floating in EQ was very similar but at least you could dispel that and there was falling damage so fair game there.

If flying adds to the 3 dimensionality of PvP then I'm usually all for it as long as it's not prohibitive to a majority of the classes in the game.

[Diggles]

Z axis doesnt play nice in most FPS engines, Aion included. There are all sorts of mobs bugging out if you are fighting in the air, not to mention the occasional seizures when trying to loot.

Right now its just a gimic and doesnt add all that much to gameplay. It would be nice if they actually incorporated PHYSICS into the flight.
Ie...
gliding uses little to no flight time
-dodge if you are hovering or flying up
+ damage reduction if you are above target (gravity lessens blow)
+damage for diving attacks or ranged attacks from above
far faster movement speed when diving or flying downward

[Slamz]

Dustie, you keep not playing the games that actually have flight in them.

In Champions Online you had unlimited flight (assuming that's what you picked as your travel power) and there was a certain degree of "haves" vs "have nots". If you have flight in a PvP game and not everyone has flight, the people who don't have it are going to need some other method of getting at the flying people. Champions had moves that would shut off travel powers, but not for very long.

Both Champions and Aion have pretty good implementations though, in that flight is not "safe mode". You can fly and still use all of your abilities, so aerial combat is just part of PvP.

Aion makes it a bit more interesting because flight has a limited time. You can drink a potion to extend the flight time but in PvP that's the same potion timer you're probably using for heals. There are anti-flight abilities as well but the big thing is that constantly flying in PvP comes with a risk of falling damage if you're doing it from too high up. Flying also apparently reduces your ability to resist melee attacks. So I hear.

Aion's flight is quite good though. You can flap your wings and maneuver well, but that costs more energy than "gliding". Gliding means you use less power but you lose a degree of control -- you'll start hitting updrafts, which can give you altitude but kill your forward speed, and you can't hover without exiting glide mode. There are places in the game (most of the PvE area, in fact) where you can't fly, but you can ALWAYS jump off a cliff and glide. Gliding is a little faster than running so I usually jump and glide at every opportunity (you don't need a very big "cliff" for this. Three vertical feet is plenty to get a glide started with a jump, and once it's going you can glide pretty far over a flat surface.)

But as a Spirit Master, I'm constrained by my pets, which don't fly and are too slow to keep up with my fly/glide speed (except for the wind pet, which also doesn't fly but does run fast enough to keep up on the ground....and agro anything I fly over...)



So, I like flying avatars, if it's done right with PvP in mind. WOW's problem was just one of "mounted combat". Basically WOW didn't have a good solution for travel powers + PvP. Champions and Aion both solved that problem basically by giving you tools to fight each other while using your travel abilities, and they put in limitations to keep it from getting too nuts. (In COV, travel powers had some problems in PvP in that there wasn't enough you could do to stop them and they were too fast for good combat. Champions addressed the problem to some degree by making travel powers have 3 speeds: slow, medium and fast, and if you engaged in combat you would get dropped to "slow". This kept people from zipping all over the place while fighting, as they did in COV. In fact, the problem travel power in Champions wasn't flight, but teleport...)

[Kakarat]

One of the flying 'pioneers' was Shadowbane. There was magic and there was a race Aracoix. You could fly as long as your stamina/mana would allow. You could fight in flight, your movement was faster in flight and you could fly over enemy walls.

As I recall one particular incident where I nearly started a war between us and another powerful nation... I was an Aracoix Assassin and I killed some mage in flight... He was trying to get away and i flew up right beside him and stabbed him to death in the air. Anyways, I was farming an item I wanted... I got a tell from Wiggles. Did you kill so and so lol... it was funny.

Seriously if they could have done more with Shadowbane, It would have been epic.