While Dragonriding was tailor-made for World of Warcraft's Dragonflight expansion, it seems that Blizzard intends to keep the popular feature going even when we leave the Dragon Isles behind.
"Having seen the reception from the community, I’m sure there’d be a lot of 'feedback' if it didn’t become an evergreen element of WoW, so I absolutely think it is here to stay," associate game director Morgan Day tells Icy Veins. "There are, however, conversations to be had and problems to solve in terms of the mount collections."
Day says that the studio doesn't "want to suddenly make 95% of your mount collection feel obsolete. There’s some problems we need to solve there in terms of introducing Dragonriding into older continents, as well as allowing non-Dragonriding mounts to fly in Dragonflight. It’s definitely a hotly debated topic within the team, we just want to roll out the plan in a way that is going to achieve all of our goals."
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Dragonriding effectively replaced flying mounts for the new zones in Dragonflight, offering a much more dynamic way to get around complete with proper momentum mechanics that actually make flying feel like, well, flying. The feature was pretty much immediately embraced by players, marking a standout addition even in the broadly praised Dragonflight expansion.
Of course, as Day notes, there are now quite a few questions about how the new and old systems will be integrated with each other. Will there even be much incentive to keep using your old mounts when the new ones are so much more fun to ride? We'll have to wait and see where the answer lies, but for now it seems these are problems Blizzard is keen to solve.
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