So there was a big hubbub over the weekend about the (lack of) flying mounts in Warlords of Draenor. I guess there is a vocal contingent of folks that would (really, really) like them, but Blizzard devs have staunchly (and rudely) refused to consider the matter, given their experiences with  previous expansions. I personally don’t have a dog in that fight, but I noticed something last night that dovetails with Belghast’s take on the subject.

Scooter and I are playing through the Republic planet quests in SWTOR, even though we could skip them entirely due to the 12x XP for story quests currently in place. The thing is, by the time we left Taris (the third world) for Nar Shaddaa, we were a high enough level to tackle Tatooine (the fifth planet). Last night, I noticed that I was only getting about 6 XP for turning in the regular planet quests. We were actually getting more for (some) individual kills than we were for completing entire quest chains.

Needless to say, the questing is easy and we are enjoying the place. Nar Shaddaa has an awesome East Asian neon vibe, and I decided to buy my stronghold there. Right now, even though we can’t fly like in WoW, we can easily slip past mobs we don’t need to kill. But I can’t wondering if or when we should start skipping content completely in order to find a challenge.

The same thing happened to us in WoW. When I first introduced Scooter to the game during Cataclysm, we had the recruit-a-friend XP boost. Even though we could have skipped the Ghostlands (playing BElfs) I though we should play through, but then we started skipping whole zones because we’d out-leveled them before even arriving.

GamerLady thinks all that content (what can be flown over) is senseless anyway. To some extent, I can agree. But during the course of my playing of WoW, I went from feeling completely immersed in the unflyable world of Azeroth to being fairly disconnected from it. In SWTOR, I pushed through to the end of the second chapter of my old Sith Assassin, skipping all the planet quests on two or three planets. Even though I went through it a few years ago, I have little clue what is happening there.

In TSW, the mobs are never fully trivial, no matter what Quality Level the player’s gear is. And there is no good way to bypass them. On the other hand, the XP for going through lower level content never diminishes; rather, XP for higher content is simply greater.

To what extent does the “senseless” content add to the “reality” of an MMO? And how much do we lose when we are able to bypass it in pursuit of our story?