Quote Originally Posted by Hycinthus View Post
Let’s just keep it a 10 person mount but the passengers don’t need to be seated. They can walk around on the deck.

Isn’t it already similar to ocean fishing where a vehicular body is moving through a space and passengers can do activities onboard? There’s even an NPC selling items on the deck right? I’m not sure but previously airship to other cities were also not just a cutscene but realtime, but maybe it was 1.0.
It isn't the same thing at all.

There are fixed cutscenes of the boat in motion, with characters performing pre-programmed emotes. The boat might not even be "moving" but remaining static while the background is moved past it, if that gives a smoother effect. (Certainly that seems to be the case for other instances with complex stuff on a supposedly moving platform like the large lifts in the Praetorium for the Gaius and Ultima fights, and the Aetherochemical Facility autolift where you have enemies spawning - both are in an isolated chamber where the floor seems to move but is really static while the walls slide up or down around it. You could particularly see the difference when there were movement glitches happening on actual moving platforms within a larger zone, but didn't happen in those instances.)

So anyway. There's a cutscene boat that moves (maybe) and is all preset, and then you load onto the entirely static boat that you can run around on, fish from and access a shop. That boat never sails anywhere; there are simply a number of instances with their own version of the boat sitting stationary in it. Continuity tells you it is the same boat, but it's like a film using a miniature for a wide shot then cutting to the actors on a stage that looks like the deck.

I expect a moving platform would require the game to be constantly calculating where you are moving and how to keep you in an apparently constant position as it moves. Times ten people, times however many airships are in flight.

Also, mount programming would mean it vanishes as soon as the driver dismounts.