WoW: No Aerial Combat For Now

31 Mar 2009 at 14:53:52 by Bill Vaughan

World of Warcraft's Game Director Tom Chilton has spoken about the lack of aerial combat in WoW, but says it's something Blizzard would like to add to the game.

The PvP zone in Northrend, Wintergrasp, which was added in Wrath of the Lich King, originally had planes in the beta that players could take command of to bomb the opposition below. There were also anti-aircraft vehicles in the zone, however, both features were removed before the expansion went live.

In the latest BlizzCast, released last night, Chilton explained the reasons for the removal of aerial combat. He said that the version we saw in WotLK's beta just wasn't polished enough:

"If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics, there’s still a lot of vehicle physics tech that we want to get in that didn’t make it into the first pass of Lich King."

He goes on to say that Blizzard is passionate about producing a high quality of gameplay, and introducing more fun things for the players to try out. This indicates that if Blizzard ever do bring aerial combat to WoW, something which Chilton says is "on Blizzards list" to do, we can expect great things from it.

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