When it comes to online role playing games, the ability of flight is a gift of freedom. In giving that freedom, however, a game designer could also be compromising key elements to some degree: challenge, competition, and immersion, among others.
When a player is able to quite literally be above it all, there are few enemies or situations which can threaten him or her. While this seems obvious, it cannot be overstated that a player who can deep strike into enemy zones to tackle objectives is not a player who is being sufficiently tested. Compound this with the fact that many modern games are placing quest objective indicators on the world and/or mini-map and players’ adventures become a sophisticated game of connect the dots with really cool graphics—not exactly the most compelling experience.
On a similar note, competition between players over PvP and PvE world objectives becomes difficult to encourage when flight is a factor. Not only can players drop in wherever they want, but also if given a few moments they can escape into the skies, never to be caught. It’s not that dodging fights or engaging at opportune moments is cowardly—that’s just good strategy! Taken to extremes, though, these can be very discouraging circumstances. Much like permanent stealth, flight is too much of an enabler to anti-fun gameplay. While land-based mounts or movement boosts do facilitate these behaviors to some degree, there is only one plane on which the attacker or escaper can move. As soon as vertical movement enters the equation, all bets are off. It’s unfortunate, but flighted travel ultimately discourages activity on the ground to the point of creating a social wasteland. I could be wrong, but “social wasteland” is probably not the phrase you want attached to your game, especially a massively multiplayer online game.
Most importantly, the world’s perceived size shrinks incredibly the moment a player leaves the ground. His or her gameplay becomes a “drive-thru adventure.” Identify the objective, land, complete, take flight. Rinse and repeat, add a medium fry for $0.50. Small details of craftsmanship in worldbuilding are unseen or ignored. While seeing the world from a bird’s eye view can add a new perspective for players to appreciate, this can be accomplished by other means than granting free reign over the skies. Why not include some flight-on-rails or floating platforms with warp points? There are plenty of ways to get players in the air without giving them wings. Think of all the hard work that goes into world design. The positions of paths, trees, rivers, buildings, friendly characters, and even enemies are all negated by being able to fly. The very character of the world can be lost.
So, what can a designer do to combat this? Impose mount fatigue or fuel meters to restrict the height or duration of flight? Flying enemies and z-axis objectives? Clustering enemies and objectives inside buildings or other no-fly zones? There’s always removing flight from the game, but unfortunately that’s one addition which is nigh impossible to undo. And that’s the rub: a designer needs to weigh very seriously the benefits of flight against the harmful side-effects because there is no going back. If a game gave players flight only to take it away in a later patch, that game wouldn’t have just jumped the shark—it would have soared over the dock and crash landed right on Fonzie’s bike.
In my opinion, there is not sufficient justification to include the feature of unrestricted flight in a game; there are simply too many negative aspects. Even with it being a significant quality of life improvement for the player in the short term, it can be a destructive element to the integrity, difficulty, entertainment value, and overall experience of a game in the long run.