MMOs have lost their way. Time was, everyone and their grandma had a WoW sub, and they all spent their evenings getting up to great larks in Azeroth. Now? A wasteland. WoW still has plenty of adherents, no doubt, but it's not that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven. And nothing really feels like it's replaced it; there's no big, singular, dominant MMO but instead a collection of them, all of decent but not gargantuan popularity.
Anyway, I think this is because none of them let you ride up to five camels simultaneously.
Where Winds Meet is NetEase's hot new wuxia MMO with a whole lot of players, several demonic geese, and some lamentable LLM-powered NPCs. I'm not here to talk about any of that. I'm here to talk about its mounts which are, I must admit, the best I've seen in a videogame.
'This is hyperbole,' you're surely thinking. 'This is a trick by the wily digital journalist trying to get me to read his balderdash.' While I am always trying to get you to read my balderdash, you couldn't be more wrong: one of Where Winds Meet's many possible mounts is being chased by a jaguar. Not riding it—take note—but summoning an enormous jaguar from the ether to chase your character around at mount speeds.
Which, look, you've gotta accept is kind of great. Also great: the 'mount' which consists of your character getting dragged around by up to five dogs on a lead, or the one that is, uh, literally just five camels marching in rank (you can also ride anywhere from one to four camels, but why would you?). That's to say nothing of the mount which places your dude, with perfect balance and poise, atop the back of a frantic goose.
My favourite is the simplest, though. One of Where Winds Meet's mounts looks to literally be a normal running animation cranked up to 1000x speed—your beautiful avatar sprinting about the game's hills and dales like goddamn Wile E Coyote (It's actually a reference to the movie Kung-Fu Hustle, mind you). It really feels like the devs made all their joke ideas reality, and I have to say I love it for that.
Also, some of them are just, you know, horses of various types, but why on Earth would you use them?
