ScatheZombie
Member
From a design standpoint, it comes from a number of reasons.
People inherently live in mostly a two dimensional plane. In that, I mean, you don't fly on a normal basis. You are used to exploring, working, and living on the X-Y axis in 99% of your life unless you are a professional pilot. Because of this, many people find traversing a fully three dimensional space with Z axis movement (i.e. flying) disorienting. This is actually why a lot of games with flying mechanics limit your flight to mostly maintaining the horizon. They don't allow you full flight controls because doing things like flying upside down or flying directly into the sky without a solid reference point (i.e. the ground) becomes confusing to the user. I have no doubt there will be plenty of 'but that doesn't happen to me' responses, because it's definitely not everyone. But I've been in a lot of focus testing for this type of thing and every single time over half of the participants cannot handle full flight control and end up disoriented or confused and ultimately return to using ground transportation - or fly just slightly above ground for the convenience of bypassing terrain and content while still mostly maintaining that X-Y movement paradigm. Think about how many games you've played with flying and you'll see what I mean. How much of that 'flight' content is actually just an X-Y coordinate slightly above the ground? Chances are - most of it.
The other big reason, is that because of the above - designers are inherently better and predisposed at designing content along an X-Y axis. Populating a city full of people, a field full of monsters, or a room full of decoration is very natural. Creating compelling Z-axis flight-based content is not. And when you design an entire game around X-Y coordinate content and ground-based gameplay, flight generally breaks everything. It's why flying in World of Warcraft, for example, is actually horrendously bad for the health of the game despite being perceptually fun to the player. The 'fun' is the convenience of bypassing terrain obstacles and mob spawns to get to the juicy bits you actually want to do. Unfortunately, even when Blizzard made flying-specific content, it was still based around a game that is built on X-Y coordinate content on the ground. Giving players the option to bypass terrain and content actually changes the dynamic of the game and actively discourages player interaction when you can just fly away and/or bypass everything but the named mob. When the game is built for a type of content and you then add flying to it, it is going to break the existing content in some way. Always. Which is why flying has always had major issues in any game that isn't specifically designed to support and be built around Z-axis content.
People inherently live in mostly a two dimensional plane. In that, I mean, you don't fly on a normal basis. You are used to exploring, working, and living on the X-Y axis in 99% of your life unless you are a professional pilot. Because of this, many people find traversing a fully three dimensional space with Z axis movement (i.e. flying) disorienting. This is actually why a lot of games with flying mechanics limit your flight to mostly maintaining the horizon. They don't allow you full flight controls because doing things like flying upside down or flying directly into the sky without a solid reference point (i.e. the ground) becomes confusing to the user. I have no doubt there will be plenty of 'but that doesn't happen to me' responses, because it's definitely not everyone. But I've been in a lot of focus testing for this type of thing and every single time over half of the participants cannot handle full flight control and end up disoriented or confused and ultimately return to using ground transportation - or fly just slightly above ground for the convenience of bypassing terrain and content while still mostly maintaining that X-Y movement paradigm. Think about how many games you've played with flying and you'll see what I mean. How much of that 'flight' content is actually just an X-Y coordinate slightly above the ground? Chances are - most of it.
The other big reason, is that because of the above - designers are inherently better and predisposed at designing content along an X-Y axis. Populating a city full of people, a field full of monsters, or a room full of decoration is very natural. Creating compelling Z-axis flight-based content is not. And when you design an entire game around X-Y coordinate content and ground-based gameplay, flight generally breaks everything. It's why flying in World of Warcraft, for example, is actually horrendously bad for the health of the game despite being perceptually fun to the player. The 'fun' is the convenience of bypassing terrain obstacles and mob spawns to get to the juicy bits you actually want to do. Unfortunately, even when Blizzard made flying-specific content, it was still based around a game that is built on X-Y coordinate content on the ground. Giving players the option to bypass terrain and content actually changes the dynamic of the game and actively discourages player interaction when you can just fly away and/or bypass everything but the named mob. When the game is built for a type of content and you then add flying to it, it is going to break the existing content in some way. Always. Which is why flying has always had major issues in any game that isn't specifically designed to support and be built around Z-axis content.