Source: Blizzard's BlizzCon 2026 videos on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel (the What's Next panel, the Found Photographs panel and the Creator Showcase) and Game Informer's interview with the World of Warcraft: Forever team. Quotes are the videos' own caption text, each with the clock, and every video is embedded at the moment discussed.
No Wings in Forever
Jones ruled out flying mounts under the first pillar slide of the reveal.
There will be no flying in the new World of Warcraft, and Blizzard said so six minutes into its reveal. Blizzard is the studio that makes World of Warcraft, the long-running online role-playing game its players call WoW, and World of Warcraft: Forever is the new version of it, built on the original 2004 game and expanded rather than replaced. Its team shortens that to WoW Forever, the name it uses on stage. The beta opened on September 17 and the game launches on November 4.
The ruling came in a panel called What's Next, the 47-minute reveal session Blizzard posted on September 13 from BlizzCon, its annual fan convention. Tim Jones, the lead game designer on Forever, walked the room through the four pillars the team says guide every decision. The first one ends on flying.
First, approachable and familiar. We believe the world should still feel like Classic. Every addition we make is measured against the spirit of the original game. Not whether it's new, not whether it's flashy, but whether it feels like it belongs. That's why you won't find flying mounts. You won't find level scaling.
— Tim Jones, lead game designer, the What's Next panel, BlizzCon 2026, 6:25, watch
The room cheered before he reached the next sentence. Flying mounts were never part of the 2004 game. They arrived with its first expansion, and the panel had opened on what that change cost. It described the players who hoped the original game would never move on, people who did not want to trade its sprawling old continents for Outland, the setting of that first expansion, a world "that you could fly across in just a few minutes on an epic mount."
That line is the whole case in a sentence. A world you can fly across in a few minutes is a small world, whatever the map says. Forever keeps its world large by keeping everyone on the ground.
The Run Only Looks Empty
Mills on why the run looks like dead time at face value, and why Blizzard keeps it anyway.
Jones gave the ban its reason at the end of the same list. The fourth pillar is "protect and nurture social experiences," and it is the pillar that decides what counts as a convenience in this game.
And finally, protect and nurture social experiences. Many of our favorite memories from Classic happened because of other players, because someone helped us complete a quest, because a stranger joined our group, because a dungeon run turned into a friendship. We've had to be disciplined when adding convenience to the game, because every quality of life decision affects how players interact with one another.
— Tim Jones, lead game designer, the What's Next panel, BlizzCon 2026, 8:47, watch
The best account of what that discipline protects came from an engineer. Game Informer, the American games magazine and site, posted a sit-down with Jones and Nora Mills, the lead software engineer on Forever, on September 16. We covered the whole passage in our piece on the campfire Blizzard built to make you wait. The part that answers the flying question starts at 13:08. Mills describes what she does on a long flight path, then lays out the case for cutting the trip short, the way a designer who has sat in that meeting would, before she rejects it.
It takes time and the player's not making interesting choices or doing active problem solving or anything. They're not engaging with these systems during that time. They're just running. If you look at that at face value, it can be tempting to want to do something about it. We'll add more flight paths, we'll make that run less, we'll reduce that friction.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 13:35, watch
Seen from outside, nothing happens on that run. Mills's point is that plenty happens inside it, as long as the game leaves the time there.
But we look at it as, those are key to providing you with opportunities to slow down a little bit, decide, do you want to engage with other players? If someone's bored and they're posting in local defense and they're just like, hey, this guy over here is flagged, does someone want to come help me go after him? Maybe I'm going to take a detour on my dungeon run and I'm going to go help that person out.
— Nora Mills, lead software engineer, Game Informer's interview, BlizzCon 2026, 14:01, watch
Her examples are the moments a shortcut deletes. You take the detour to help a stranger in local defense, the channel where players call for help against enemies in their zone, because you are on the ground and the fight is on your way. Fly over the zone and the call still goes out, but you are already past it. You answer a question in general chat because the flight path is long and you have nothing else to do. Teleport to the dungeon door and there is no long flight, no run and no road for the detour.
That is why the argument covers fast travel as well as flying. Both remove the stretch of time Mills is describing, and with it the chance that a trip turns into a friendship or a rivalry.
Faster Without Skipping
Three new ship routes and a first mount you earn: Forever speeds you up without lifting you off the map.
None of this means Forever makes you walk everywhere, and the difference matters for what Riot should take from it. Forever adds new ways to travel faster, and every one of them keeps you inside the world.
The Found Photographs panel, where the team walked through Forever's new zones and stories, spent a section on travel. Evan, who co-hosted the panel and gave only his first name on stage, is the lead content designer on the team behind WoW Classic, Blizzard's re-release of the original game. He said the team discussed travel at length.
Once you've leveled up beyond your starting zones, you'll find not only new content, but new means of world travel throughout the world. This is an area our team spent a lot of time discussing. We really wanted to maintain the exploration and your journey as you navigate the world, but we also wanted to offer you ways to explore and change the way that you play.
— Evan, lead content designer, the Found Photographs panel, BlizzCon 2026, 9:12, watch
The answer was boats. One new route links the harbor of the human capital to the night elf coast, so friends who started as different races can play together without, in Evan's words, "spending hours or perhaps avoiding several corpse runs" to reach each other. Another carries players across the sea to a brand new zone.
In total, we've added three new ship routes, encouraging exploration, questing in new areas throughout the world, and really leaning into the opportunities for social play, which is an incredibly important pillar for this project.
— Evan, lead content designer, the Found Photographs panel, BlizzCon 2026, 9:36, watch
A ship is slower than a portal and faster than swimming. It also puts everyone waiting for it on the same dock, which is the point Evan made about social play. The other speed-up is the mount. The What's Next panel's closing list included a change to riding skill "to preserve that classic moment when you finally earn your right to ride your first mount." A mount shortens the trip and leaves you on the road, where the local defense call can still reach you.
The creators Blizzard invited to play Forever on its Creator Showcase stream ran into the design on camera. One asked for a summon to the dungeon and was told, "I don't think we have a summon. You got to run here." Seconds later someone in the group offered the consolation: "Hey, it's the journey, you know."
So the line Forever draws is between two kinds of fast. A mount, a ship and a flight path all get you there sooner, and all of them still carry you across the world, past its towns and within reach of its chat. Flying over the world gets you there by taking it away, and Blizzard wrote that ban into its first pillar.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot has said nothing about travel; its own canon has one teleporter, one climb nobody skips and a mount built for mountain passes.
Our read, and it is speculative. Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, the five-on-five battle game its whole catalogue grew from, has said nothing about flying, mounts or fast travel in its MMO, the online role-playing game it confirmed in 2020 and reset in 2024. The one confirmed fact about that game is its setting: Runeterra, the world League of Legends is set in. Riot has not announced a single system for how players will cross it.
The closest thing on the record is a job ad. In August the Riot careers board carried a Senior Gameplay Animator listing for "our unpublished MMO project," hiring someone to "create the animation that defines the gameplay feel, locomotion, and creatures," and the discipline blurb on the same page asked for "bipeds, quadrupeds, and creatures." We wrote it up at the time, and the listing is no longer on Riot's careers board. Animating four-legged creatures is not a mount announcement. It does mean Riot was hiring someone to decide how moving through its world feels.
Riot's instincts point the other way, and for good reason. In League of Legends, Teleport is a spell players can take into a match: "After a brief channel, become untargetable and travel to an allied unit." Flash "teleports you a short distance toward your cursor." In a match that lasts about half an hour on one map, travel is a tax, and good design removes it. In an online world, the travel is what you came for.
A mount or a ship makes Runeterra faster. Flying and fast travel make it smaller.
Players have said as much. In July a community survey of WoW Classic players collected more than 250,000 submissions, and 80.6 percent of the answers on flying mounts rejected them. And Rare, the studio behind the pirate game Sea of Thieves, is switching off its shortcut to quests for a whole season, so crews have to sail to their destination again.
That is the line we would ask Riot to draw on day one, and to draw harder than Blizzard did. No flying, in any form. No fast travel either: no waypoint network, no summon to the dungeon door, no teleport home from a menu. The speed-ups belong inside the world, where they still cost time you spend near other players. Think of a mount you earn, a ship that leaves from a real dock, a caravan that stops at villages. A mount or a ship makes Runeterra faster. Flying and fast travel make it smaller.
| Side by side | WoW: Forever | Riot's MMO |
|---|---|---|
| Flying | No flying mounts, stated on the first pillar slide of the reveal | Not revealed |
| Travel help | Three new ship routes, flight paths kept long on purpose | Not revealed |
| Mounts | Riding skill changed to keep the first mount a moment you earn | An August animator listing for "locomotion, and creatures", since taken down |
| The rule | Disciplined about convenience, because every change affects how players interact | Not revealed |
Runeterra will tempt Riot, because its canon already has a teleporter. Piltover, the city of inventors on the map, is home to the Hexgates. RuneGrove's codex describes them as "massive hextech-powered gateways that enable near-instantaneous transportation of goods and people across vast distances," and they became "the backbone of Piltover's trade." Jayce, an inventor from that city, is the champion most closely tied to them. In July we argued that if fast travel exists anywhere in this world, canon puts it in Piltover. The better reading of the same canon is that one set of gates made one city rich. That makes the Hexgates a wonder to visit and a prize rivals fight over. It does not make them a button on every player's map.
Mount Targon, the tallest mountain in Runeterra, is the canon case against flying. The codex says "the path to the peak is an impossible climb, and few who attempt it survive," and that a climber who survives may be chosen by an Aspect, one of the celestial powers of the mountain, to become its mortal vessel. Pantheon, Leona and Diana each made that climb. Riot's own concept art puts the danger in the climber, not the height: "the most dangerous thing about Mount Targon is not the incredible altitude, but the way in which it challenges the very character of each climber." A Targon you can fly over keeps the view and loses the story Leona and Diana are made of.
The same canon already has the right kind of fast. The Freljord is the frozen north of the map, and there Legends of Runeterra, a card game Riot Games set in the same world, describes the Glacial Saurian, a beast its people ride: "these reliable steeds are vital for clearing icy mountain passes." That is a mount that opens a route instead of skipping one, and it is the model Riot should build its travel on.
Take this
- No flying, written into a pillar. Blizzard ruled it out on stage during the reveal, so the question is settled before the first player logs in.
- A test for every convenience. Jones said every quality of life decision affects how players interact with one another. Riot can ask that of each shortcut before it ships.
- Speed you earn inside the world. A first mount that feels like a moment, and ships that put travelers on the same dock.
- Mills's reading of the run. At face value it is dead time. In practice it is where general chat, local defense and detours happen.
Leave this
- A ban on flying alone. Wings are the famous shortcut, but a waypoint network deletes the same road. Riot should rule out both.
- A long road with nobody on it. The run only works when other players are out there. An empty route is a loading screen you have to hold a key through.
- A lore teleporter turned into a menu. The Hexgates can stay the wonder of one city without becoming a map of instant destinations.
That map is the fiction Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the MMO opens with, how its world is laid out, its era, its platform and its price are all unrevealed. Mount Targon, Piltover and the Freljord are here because the climb, the gates and the saurian come up above; the crests illustrate the world, not a starting area.
Your Take
Should Riot's MMO rule out flying and fast travel for good?
What to Watch
Three dated Forever beats, then three more RuneGrove reads on flying, friction and fast travel.
World of Warcraft: Forever beta opens
The first time players outside BlizzCon cross Forever's world with no flying mounts.
World of Warcraft: Forever launches
A full population on a world where everyone travels on the ground.
The first new raids unlock
The first dated beat on the roadmap Blizzard showed at BlizzCon.
Reported from Blizzard's BlizzCon 2026 videos and Game Informer's interview on YouTube, embedded above with the clock. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
