Carbine Studios has told us that flying mounts are something that could be added to WildStar in a future update, but it "probably" won't be free flying.
"It's something we've argued about," Carbine Studios president Jeremy Gaffney told us. "And it'll probably come in a drop at some point. But it probably will not be free-form fly anywhere you want.
"It'll probably be resource based," he said, using gliders as a possible example. "There's updrafts," he explained, "so you kind of updraft your way around the zone. Or there's fuel nodes and you've got to land to refuel."
Despite WildStar's universe being built with flying mounts in mind, Gaffney explained the negatives free flying mounts could bring to the game. "Done naively, you really destroy PvP in the open world because people can leave or opt-in to it without any risk of being ganked," he explained. "Done naively — you know, free space is way bigger [than two-dimensional space] — it thins your population out in a cubic relationship."
Gaffney also said that free flying mounts also trivializes a lot of content. "So we build the world around flight, but we didn't do flying mounts because we decided the effects on the other games were like — nah, let's do something that's more interesting than just free flying because free flight just trivializes too much stuff," he said.
I'm not sure if this was the alternative, but instead WildStar offers players who pre-ordered the game a hoverboard at level 25. It flies, you can get some air by jumping (especially on the moon), and you can travel across bodes of water without interruption. But it's limited to how high you can fly. Sure, it's possible to skip by pockets of monsters, but not nearly as easily as it would be if you had unlimited space in the sky.
Would you want to see free flying mounts enabled in WildStar or are you content with what is being offered?
