[2019] Dear Funcom: Don’t give up on animals as mounts! I believe you can do it with the right amount of time and patience (and sleep!).

I’d like to offer an example that might be simple enough that it won’t mess with other parts of the game. It’s a long read so I hope you don’t mind and I hope it inspires the dev team to keep trying.

Since the pet system is in the game (and I actually like it quite a lot, good job!), I could imagine a fifth option in the click menu: Cancel, Open Inventory, Move And Guard, Follow, Ride.

By clicking Ride, the game would simply remove the pet as an object from the environment, like when you scoop a workbench up into your inventory (except the pet doesn’t become an item, it’s merely temporarily removed from the world).

Then, the player’s graphic will change so that they appear to be sitting on top of that pet (but the pet isn’t actually there, it’s just now part of the player graphic. Like adding hilariously big fluffy armor graphics to their legs!)

This puts the player in a “mounted state”, where sprinting and climbing are disabled but the default running speed now matches sprinting speed. They can jump over objects and otherwise can move at sprint speed without the stamina drain normal sprinting usually causes.

Crouching (triangle on PS4) toggles the “mounted state” off, which simply causes the player to change back to their sad and slow human legs and the pet spawns next to the player as if it had just teleported to them like they normally do when they fall too far behind.

For balance purposes, there could be restrictions like forcing the player to dismount if they take a certain threshold of damage. Or perhaps they can’t use the Ride option if they’re over-encumbered and can’t loot while mounted, but they can still use certain consumables like food and water. Swimming probably should force a dismount too.

To keep the feature from making the game’s code unstable, the pet object itself could be teleported to a game area the player can’t see or access, like a “developer petting zoo island” under the map or something similar. Using the Ride option on a pet could toggle its AI to “Scouting”, and dismounting would toggle its AI to “Follow” so that the pet simply teleports from that area to the player like it normally would in any other scenario where it was too far away.

Or even simpler, the secret dev island could have one placeable object on it that acts as a “dummy player” that the pet sets its “Follow” AI to, teleporting the pet to that island while the player is mounted. Then the pet sets its AI back to the real player when they dismount, teleporting it right back.

The big work would probably fall to the artists, since it would mean needing to create saddle-sitting postures for the player and running animations for the fake animal graphic (though they could probably just use the animations that already exist for them). The secret area under the map where pets teleport during the “mounted state” wouldn’t need to be fancy, since players won’t ever see it, so taxing servers with a new area full of unnecessary placeable objects wouldn’t need to happen. It wouldn’t even really need a graphic, just some collision code so the pets have something to stand on.

I’m not a developer, so consider this idea very amateurish and idealistic. I still think the guys and gals at Funcom have the talent to make something work, though. Never surrender!