I wish they would make the ship, speeder and jetpack mounts actually fly and not jus hover, they dont need to make them able to exit the atmosphere but surely they could make them fly over mountains and rivers and stuff of that sort.

"They"(1) say that the team responsible for WoW wishes they had never added flying mounts to WoW.

 

In GW2, although there are (two) mounts that can get off the ground, they are nevertheless limited in some way:

* The Dragocopter, er, sorry, Skyscale is a sort of helicopter, capable of holding a position in mid-air, but limited to X amount of height directly above its takeoff point, and a point-up cone around that maximum height. (If you can reach a bit of horizontal-ish ground, you can reset the takeoff point to there.)

* The Griffin is an elaborate glider that's capable of fairly high speeds if you level out after a dive, but is nevertheless incapable of gaining altitude without access to a cliff to jump up bit by bit. It cannot stop in mid-air, however.

 

Neither of them is capable of arbitrary free flight, but they do, all the same, reveal weaknesses in the high-altitude(2)(3) parts of maps. (Objects you can see but can't land on because they are just visual, rocks the size of a house that are made of about seven polygons, rocks where the texture pixels are about the size of your character's head, semi-enclosed cavities inside walls and stuff where the "top" does not exist, but the hole in the top is only reachable by Skyscale, that sort of stuff.)

 

Do we really want to introduce that kind of problem in SWTOR?

 

(1) Yeah, that "they", the one that says all manner of stuff. In this case, I don't have a direct citation for what the WoW team said, sorry.

 

(2) My record for vertical distance to a map feature below is more than 32000 game units. 1 game unit is about an inch, apparently, which makes that 32000+ equal to just over half a mile.

 

(3) And low-altitude parts, e.g. the bottom of the crevasses in Rata Sum, previously unreachable, but now reachable easily by glider or by mount.

I can't provide a source link so let's call this straight speculation. I think I heard the reasoning behind no flying mounts was to prevent players from exceeding map borders. They don't want you to go where you're not supposed to. Edited August 21, 2022 by TonyTricicolo