"Mount up!", "Transformers, ROLL OUT!" "It's a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Showtime!"  " You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together!"   Epic phrases all.  You know what they all have in common? They were uttered right before the protagonists of the shows Got on their favorite method of unified navigation & time, henceforth call M.O.U.N.T.  and rode off to kick some ass and defeat overwhelming odds.

Thats right. Mounts are on my mind today. The rumors concerning them or more specifically the lack of them.  Now I don't know about you, but I can think of about a dozen reasons off the top of my head why mounts should be in the game and only one remotely plausible reason not to have them.  Let's start with the right opinion, sanctioned by the Vatican, blessed by the pope, and people who have this opinion and 47.3% more likely to get laid just for being so witty and having such great taste in hats. Mounts should be in-game.

Reason #1: Mounts make you move faster.

I know, this one is a no brainer. The ability to travel long distances at an accelerated rate is handy as hell.  I mean really. Say you have to deliver a package containing 15 jawa heads and some toothpaste to the bounty office on tattoine, but after the full-on death orgy of roman proportions you started in the jawa camp/sandcrawler/condo you decide you don't feel like heading back to town. You wanna scope the desert for bantha poo, since you really enjoy making your companion scoop it up and carry it about like some Zabarak cat-box. You look up and low and behold, you're in the middle of BFE, about a 45 minute run / kill-a-thon from the bounty office.  What do you do?  I personally would logout and have a nap, but most people will MOUNT UP. Thats right. Hop on that mount and zip back to the office to drop off your Colgate and bag'o'jawa. Allowing you to get back to bioware's favorite part of the game, The Story.

Reason #2:Mounts are just cool as hell

Who doesn't like pimping out their uber-speeder of unber uooobiness.  I do know some of you people. You're the same assholes that whipped out those 747 jetliner of a woolly mammoth mounts with entire little villages living on top of their saddlebags in wow and stood directly on top of the banker/mailbox/auctionhouse/flightmaster guy.  But hey, no hard feelings. I kind of understand in a way.  It is inherently fun to have people look at you and want something you have. Envy is good.  It drives action. It's a motivator. Action and motivation is good.Someone has to do something or we'd all starve to freakin death.

Reason #3: Mounts are a non combat item that requires time, money, and effort, is highly sought after by all players, and has a utterly negligible impact on game play balance.

Lets be real. When is the last time you lost a battleground, duel, pepper eating contest, gank, world pvp objective, or darts game because the other guy had a better mount? Oh? NEVER? Shocking.  Thats right. Unless you can fight on the back of a mount, the type and speed and impact on generic game play is almost non-existent. Well, if for some reason bioware collectively took a whole bottle of retard pills and decided to put 700 timed quests into the game because the voices told them to, then Mounts, and travel speed might be an issue to address.  God willing this won't be the case.  I personally am like a mentally challenged hamster lost in Richard Gere's BDSM dungeon when it comes to timed quests. I often run around in circles killing things, all the while convincing myself I can run from thunderbluff to org in 47 seconds.... Yeah, no prob.... FAILED.  Mounts make nice show-offable personal achievement trophies, and give the gamer something to aim for other than gear..to raid....so I can get more gear....so I can raid.... so I can get more gear....so i can raid.....so i..i.. BLAG! Sorry, Mental treadmill.

Reason #4: Mounts on Date Night

Now I'm not a total idiot. I know bioware will have some form of dungeon queue system, but for certain encounters I'm sure you will need to physically go to that spot. I for one am a big one for traveling around, meeting up with group mates and killing everything in the countryside that draws breath.  I miss those days when you rallied up at the dungeons. It encouraged you to actually get to know the people you were questing with.  My last 50 Lich King heroic dungeons as a PRIEST mind you, I don't think I typed 10 words total. I eventually got to the point where I could smash my face into the keyboard for 10 minutes and clear a dungeon without anyone's health going below 80%.  Except halls of reflection. Hated that gods forsaken place on my priest.

You could zip around together, pull the old gank & dash, ride through enemy towns and get the guards to all go totally apeshit.  Fun stuff.  Now people just want meat for the sake of meat.  I want SWTOR to pull what bulletstorm is aiming for in the FPS genre. To put the fun back into gaming. Kill these mind-numbing braincell enslaving, kitten killing, dogfight endorsing, treadmill mechanics. Get the personal touch and the "group that plays together, advances together" mechanics back in there.  Thats what we need, but in the trend of gaming today, and BioWare being the gods that they are, they will undoubtedly be lacking in what drives different people to form friendships and bonds ingame, opting instead for easy mechanics in grouping and matching. Why can't we have both?  That's something I just can't understand. It's like a unified theory for physics. If we had it we could bridge all those gaps.  But unfortunately those two ideas go together like Peter Griffin being the keynote speaker at a M.E.N.S.A. convention.  Not gonna happen.

Ok, now lets give the other side of the coin. I know there are people who don't want, don't care, don't see a reason for, or just plain don't like mounts. Let me start by saying I totally respect your opinion, as retarded as it may be. Let me further say you are wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. So wrong you have just broken something having to do with space-time, all because of your sheer and un-remorseful wrongness.  The belief you have in yourself that you might be right, just further adds to your wrongness and compounds it with the word "dense".  I have looked into it deeply, and I was assured to men at the highest levels that anything other "Mounts are good, we should have them" should be treated as a mental illness and reported at once.

Reason #1, because there is only one freakin possible reason.

The game world / action area / open area is to small to support mounts.  There. Thats it. That is the only possible, plausible, even remotely sane reason not to have mounts. I have racked my brain for at least 2 1/2 minutes trying to think of one, then I got sidetracked by a SG:U rerun and forgot what I was thinking about, then remembered but before I could get to the computer I forgot again. Then I started today's blog and remembered again. I think I have Alzheimers. Or smokestomuchpotitis. Either way as I see it there is no reason to leave mounts out. The fact bioware has spoken so little about it is not a bad sign though. They aren't exactly famous for their massive Friday reveals lately.I full well expect this week to be an in depth look at how the janitor at BioWare keeps the bathrooms so bloody clean.

I for one want a killer sithy darthy swoop-bike that I can force leap off of, somersaulting through the air to land with my lightsaber drawn ready to murder all the small woodland creatures or hopefully ewoks / gungans surrounding me.   I want to chase a republic snapperhead through a swamp as he flees my evil sithyness, and races frantically, but partially afk, to a friendly outpost.   Epic shit. Cool awesome storage containers filled with kick-ass.  There is nothing epic about one dude and his sling-blade brained AI controlled companion jogging into a camp of Smugglers. That is so utterly un-epic, it sounds like something I would do drunk on St. Pattys day.  Cheers all.     

/Flagg