
If you aren’t a gamer, this little chat is probably not your cup of tea. For those who do game, you might find this interesting.
Mounts. There is a game I actually really enjoy playing, but can’t stand logging into. The reason is simple. No mounts. The developers have now said that they will be adding them at a later date, the world is to small to warrant them being included at this time. Basically, they are saying, as they expand the world, then they’ll add it.
Game designers … I really think they are cut from the same stock. They rarely play anything but the type of game they design. They don’t venture out, try new things, they are just head down focused on what they have in mind and will not look at other ways of playing. And yes, there are other ways to play a game besides the way a designer first thinks. For a single player game, this style of design is fine. But for something that has been given the genre of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO), that means you aren’t going to have just one style of play(er).
Saying things like the world is to small when you have a subset of players, who say the opposite is simply someone being arrogant (for an MMO). Mounts provide some players a means to explore and wander about to find other content without feeling like you are grinding. I, myself, love to get on my horse, bear, winged beast, and roam off in a direction that I need to be. More times than not, I run into so many things along the way that the game becomes bigger, more so, than if I just fast travelled to the spot I needed to be.
Mind you, as I said earlier, I’m refencing MMOs. Some single player game, like Fallout, the world is huge. You pretty much walk everywhere, there are some fast travel options, but walking is your source of travel. In these games it is, what it is, and you get us to it. I love Fallout, it would be nice to have mounts, but I don’t miss it. Now take an MMO, you are on by yourself, just killing some time. You can’t really go do dungeons in an MMO without friends, some creature mobs are just a bit to difficult without friends, and sometimes you just want to pick up quests and see if you missed along the way.

In fact, these MMOs are designed to work best with friends or groups. Many of these games have single player content, but for the best experience, the group stuff is what it is all about. But what happens when no one you know is online, your guild isn’t around, or you just want to putz around for a bit? Are you really wanting to kill an hour walking from point A to point D? Sure you can fast travel to D, but then you are there and now you have fifty-five more minutes to kill. In this case you wander out of town, or the hub you are in, and peck away at creatures, bored … out … of … your … freaking … mind. Instead, if you had a mount, you could have set out on a journey from point A, stopping in at places you had seen, maybe checking out point B, or skipping it for point C, which you’ve never seen. Doing all this as you made your way to point D. In fact, I bet you’d find that by using a mount to get there, you’d probably gained a level or two, picked up some nice loot, and maybe even marked some new places to visit. JUST like in a single player game where you walked to point D.
Could you have walked, sure. But you have limited time, if a friend comes online, or a group opens up, you might also want to get to a fast travel point quickly, you might get side-tracked on something and need to speed away quickly for dinner, or a hundred other things could have happened where you needed a mount to just speed things up a bit.
Now, we haven’t even started talking about the concept of mounts also being something fun to express yourself, or provide a look. I for one, pick mounts that represent the characters I play. I’m more than happy to pay real money for mounts that are different or unique. I love to collect things, this gives me a nice way to show off my collection. The potential for developers to make a bit of extra coin, give players back something fun, seems like a no brainer.