I am mostly posting this article because MMORPGs are one of my favorite genres, despite my lack of time to play them these days. But overall I have been pretty disappointed with the direction the genre has taken. Moving more towards solo-play, story-heavy, and small-scale theme-park style content.
When New World came out, ignoring all the other issues, a lot of the people who were playing it really wanted mounts. They said it was absurd the game didn't have it. I missed being able to move faster too, but just by looking at the game I could tell that the only thing stopping me from getting to max level in three days was that it took time to go from point from the quest givers to the quest locations and then back. If it had mounts that would completely break the progression and they would need to make us have to kill a lot more enemies or collect a lot more items to complete quests or get exp.
I heard they added mounts in a recent update. I wonder how they ended up doing it. A couple years later getting to the end game pretty quick is probably no longer an issue so they may have done nothing.
Recently got back into New World since the updates and DLC and I am enjoying it a lot more than when it first came out. They added a lot of content and things to do, made good changes to crafting, qesting is more fluid now and overall its a lot better gameplay wise.