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Turning flying into a minigame sounds really tedious and annoying. And I remember from WoW that zones are huge and would take forever to fly across. So I imagine it works fine there. But XIV does not have as massive of zones so I'm not really sure there's a necessity for something like this.
I mean, before they can even do this, they need to fix the damn physics engine and have proper platforming/jumping.
As a person who feels incredibly proficient in platforming games and has a great love for solid platforming stages/gimmicks, FF is absolutely infuriating in this regard.
We can’t even have proper races with it. Unless you like that pseudo temple run rails thing with chocobos.
I must ask first, what point would it serve? Because if it's just to make something more realistic and closer to a sim, then perhaps it takes all of its meaning from actual content benefiting from it? Because if you do all of this just to move around, yes, it's gonna be fun the first few times until the magic disappears and then just starts feeling like an obnoxious chore when the only thing you want to do is to move between point A and point B. Else you could also do the same on sprinting, you know? Adding more athletic based stacks of stamina, managing energy introducing breathless debuffs rooting you in place... Makes sense in a race or a marathon, but for moving around?
At this point I honestly don't see any reason why FF XIV should add something like dragonriding in their game. Unlike in GW2 in FF XIV the mounts only are a means of faster transportation and for glam purposes purely.
In GW2 on the other hand each mount adds something vital to exploring the environment. For example the Springer can knock down enemies by using its skill cannonball. The longer you press the space bar the higher it jumps, so perfect for reaching spots higher up, like mastery points or hero points or such.
The Raptor does have a dash skill which is pretty useful too. Also it can pull in nearby enemies with Tail Spin and if you unmount it it does this little tail spin and damages the enemies. Hell, if you trained the specific masteries the mounts even have some shared power with increased engage damage.
The Skimmer can float above the water and once you fully mastered it you can even ride it UNDER water. So fucking awesome!
But the best ones imo are the Skyscale (my favourite) and the Griffon. If you master them fully you can even use updrafts or ride one the ley-lines. The Skyscale actually is best imo to fully explore maps and reaching very high up locations. The Griffon on the other hand has almost unlimited ability to stay in the air when you time the soar right after a dive. There's even a guild in GW2 who actually teaches how to ride the Griffon effectively XD
Even the Warclaw which only is a thing in WvW in GW2 will get to play a role in the upcoming expansion so it can finally also be used in PvE along with new skills.
Before the mounts were introduced we even had the glider abilities which helped in Heart of Thorns and which could be trained. I do catch myself often in FF XIV, standing on a cliff and being close to hitting the space bar in an attempt to open the glider, lol.
So yea, the mounts in GW2 are useful and needed story-wise from some point out. The Skyscale was a pain to get but you don't wanna miss it once you unlocked it. The story in GW2 made the mounts kind of a useful tool in order to progress, but in FF XIV... ? The devs would need to actually bring content which requires some sort of mount usage and not just flying but actually come up with a skill system around the mounts and kind of a way how to teach the mounts or at least one of them said skills. I don't see that happen, especially since "mounts" in this regard - maybe except for chocobos - never were a thing in the old FF games either. The only FF I can recall which gave the chocobos some real purpose was FF 9 with their chocobo treasure hunt, kind of a mini-game. Looking for treasures or treasure maps in Chocobo Forest and then going out on the world map, trying to find the right location from the little treasure map thumbnail. I enjoyed that and would do so in FF XIV as well.
No thanks, I hate GW2s mount system. If you're going to give me a flying bird, then it better FLY and not just fall gracefully or have to use stupid wind spots to get a boost. I don't need minigames just to get where I want to go. Also, the mount system in GW2 is just another way to sell cosmetics. Have you seen their gambling boxes? It's absurd.
I don't think that a Dragonriding esque feature... or any sort of dynamic mount system, or player action will work in XIV because of the innate server lag the game has.
The game neither forces you nor requires you to have a skin on any mount. All the mounts do function in discribed manner without skins just fine but do require a somewhat skilled player and patience at times.
Besides tons of FF XIV players also do glam runs in order to just obtain a certain glam or suffer or enjoy through savage content only to get a specific mount (axolotl for example). No actual use in both imo when my armor is already decked out and max ilevel.
There always will be those who spend money on games (except for subs or the base game) and those who rather invest good amounts of their free time which could be used to go out with friends or other stuff.
I'd rather they put their efforts into other content than just designing new expansions zones to be more difficult to traverse on the ground and then making 'dragon riding' to compensate. I didn't play dragonflight long but the whole system felt kind of arbitrary and annoying.
It could have a GW2 mount system, where there is some dashes or portals you can enter with them, just to be more fun to explore and fits the maps even if they're "small"
Unless they fix the netcoding I cannot see this working tbh