No flying in 5.0: Would it be better?

[Iscah]

What beauty, every map in this game rather baron with few locales.. Azim had Dawn throne & really nothing else worth a gawking, Yaxnia got Castle & Upcoming dungeon not much else, Fringes is pretty much dirt & rocks very few zones have enough to be worthwhile on foot & then fact all maps with a decent sized area are even more baron like Western Highlands it's large with a Bridge & Dungeon to gawk at & f all else in between worthwhile to walk the zone.

I think you may be confusing "landmarks" and "scenery" here. The Dawn Throne is the one really visible landmark on the Steppe - though I would probably count the other settlements too - but the scenery is the wide plains, the desert, the mountains, the rock pillars... it's beautiful, and you don't go to look at each part individually but altogether it creates that setting. Even the 'barren' areas like the Fringes and the Western Highlands set the mood for that part of the story.

One of my long-term favourite games is Shadow of the Colossus - if you're not familiar with it, basically the two things you do are fight giant monsters, and ride your horse through a deserted landscape to get there. Lots of varied scenery and ancient ruins, but no other characters or enemies to encounter. It's lonely, but beautiful, and I like that feeling of travelling without interruption. And in the later areas of this game, so long as the ground is full of aggressive enemies that won't let you pass peacefully, the only way to get that experience is in flight.

My idea: vertical flight would be limited to a smaller distance higher than the landscape at that point. I.e. you can still fly, but not so high that you lose sight of the details below you.

I don't think this is an issue with the flying height, it's an issue with the flying controls. Currently, with the way your steering is tied to the camera, it doesn't matter how low you fly - you cannot look at the ground below you because it sends your mount into a nosedive. In fact I tend to fly higher than I otherwise would, just so I can look down more easily without coming close to the ground.

I'm really not sure why they've done this. When riding your mount on the ground, you can pan the camera around them and look around you, but as soon as you're in flight it's locked to your movement.

Also, I think it makes more sense to keep a larger limit to how high people are able to fly, and let us *choose* to fly there if we want, or stay close to the ground if we want. There's no need to go near the height limit when you're travelling anyway - it's only going to take you longer to fly up and back down again! I think I've only hit the 'invisible ceiling' when I tried to fly over the wall in Yanxia, and trying to reach islands in the Sea of Clouds that were actually out of bounds.

Forcing a lower height limit doesn't add anything, it just cuts down on the enjoyment of flight. Ideally it should be higher than people will feel like going, to avoid immersion-breaking collisions with the ceiling!