Phoenixmgs said:
I feel like leveling robo-dinos and crafting armor for them would be adding systems for really no reason. I love how reserved Horizon was with its mechanics, it only had what it needed and nothing else. One of the great things about Horizon is how you can just do everything on the fly and having to level robo-dinos and craft armor and such would then probably greatly discourage players from finding mounts in the wild to just use as they'd be so much weaker than a leveled up one.
Well yeah, that's kinda the point. Instead of just jumping on any random mount in the wild and have it be just as useful and disposable as any other, give us a reason to actually get attached to a particular mount. Throw in leveling, training/programming, maybe some minigames to bond with the thing, etc. Not to mention crafting armor and who knows what else for that mount could give us something to do with those mounds and mounts of junk we end up carrying around after a couple hours of play that have no real use besides selling them when we've already got more money than we could ever use, not to mention a money sink in itself. Hell, we could even take the mount itself and sell it for a decent profit after leveling and enhancing it, then picking up another in the wild and doing it all over again, creating another time sink.
More mechanics doesn't hurt a game so long as they are A. largely optional and B. make use of the resources you'd get anyway doing other stuff.
I believe the expansion added the ability to pick up stuff while riding, but the world being dense is a good thing, I hate open worlds that are big just to be big (and to basically be a bulleted point for the marketing team). One of the coolest things in Horizon was to whistle for a mount in the heat of combat and fight the robo-dino (like a rockbreaker) on a mount; sure, it was harder than doing it on foot but it was so cool to pull off.
Well, the issue with an open world having riding mechanics while being so dense is how often you have to get off the mount. Red Dead Redemption is the only game I've seen that did this right. Sure, there's tons to do all around the map but they are spaced out a lot which made using a horse to get around essential to getting anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, on top of the random stuff that could happen every so often as you were riding around. On top of that mounted combat and whistling for a new mount if your old one died or got lost was in there from the start. Horizon makes the mistake of having far too much clustered all together that the mount ends up being pointless due to it being much more practical to just walk around normally.