True, it's been very disappointing so far. Hard evidence of SE cutting corners.
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I find it funny that people think hiding your character on the Rising Phoenix is "laziness" or "cutting corners" for some reason. It's a reskin of an existing mount. All of the character poses for riding it already exist. They just decided for whatever reason to have players "become" the Phoenix instead of riding it. It's arguably a weird choice, but there's no corner cutting involved.
Personally I think they should've let us carry another player while turned into the Phoenix, making it effectively a two-seater, but no such luck.
The cynic in me loves to imagine them sitting down as a team in their corporate writers room cooking up this gross parasocial bait.
https://i.imgur.com/Ea8aYVd.png
It's lazy because it's a bad reused asset mount. It takes substantially less effort and manhours to create something like this, than it does a mount with a unique model and custom animations. They're on two layers of reuse, given that this enemy archetype is already available as a mount lol.
Now to be fair, the art team is probably hard at work creating new custom models and animations for whatever the next 30usd mogstation mount is, so didn't have much time to work on this one.
Yeah, a huge portion of the in-game obtainable mounts are low effort enemy model reskins. Woohoo.
I despise how they didn't add CC to the pvp list. I mean I don't know, maybe if you want people to play FL that badly you could make some changes that actually improve it, instead of trying to harm CC's queues while buffing FL's with the event.