WoW Forever is very new and there’s a lot of design space that’s still up in the air. One thing that doesn’t seem to be and never will be up in the air, however, is mounts! In an interview with MrGM, principal game designer Kris Zierhut and senior game designer Josh Greenfield touched on the subject and did not mince words.
Designed for Flying Over, but Never Flying Mounts
While talking about how the map for Forever was populated, the designers mentioned a very long-term decision. Vanilla/Classic had many empty spaces/untextured and low detail parts when viewed from above. In Forever, they wanted to design the map “as if you could fly”! Right after that comes the big caveat by Greenfield: “Now very clearly, we’re not going to put flying mounts in this game. Not gonna happen.” He followed it up with “You know we like to say never say never. That’s kind of a never.” Apparently there’s not a lot of flying mount fans in the team either. The bigger point as that the map was designed so eventually you could fly over it, so there aren’t any empty spaces and areas with no textures or terrain.
You can check out the full answer below, as well as more details on how the map was built.