Let you equip your dragon as a “tool”, or maybe just an tool-item that uses your currently equipped dragon (not monkies, etc) to use your dragon to fly over the scenic areas, maybe get some cool screen shots / footage but also possibly some practical usage to scout out a new area. Maybe a second tool(or an upgraded tool - 2 stage tinkerer item or maybe a “tinker upgrade/mod” concept ) that puts your camera on the dragon so you can take screenshots from its back (like using the trigger key or something). Possibly some button-press option to toggle 1st person/3rd person view from your dragon to get super clear screenshots. Pressing B exits the view and returns to your character. The dragon only takes off if you throw the item upward quite a bit, so you don’t accidentally grab/drop the item and go in dragon-mode. Furthermore kind of a “hover mode” (flapping in place) would be nice. Hitting a wall, for example, would not K-O your dragon. If your character starts being attacked, your screen will flash red on the edges. Audio would be from the perspective of your dragon (or perhaps, somehow toggle-able/mixed so you can fly together with & talk to nearby people). Make dragon flapping fairly audible to players (not overbearing) because yea this could be used for PvP scouting. Maybe if you have PvP enabled, your poor dragon can be knocked out (sorry warriors and paladins - take it up that you have no ranged tools available to you lol). Maybe you can use a net gun for now (not really helpful beyond max range, and I’d personally like to be able to soar high up). Or maybe just disable the tool if you have PvP enabled, though I think this would actually be a cool scouting feature.
Lastly, gives the dragons the ability to fly faster (like your joystick actually does something). Possibly even add a “speed” / “maneuverability”(turning) quality to dragons for breeding, which could also be used in racing. Otherwise flying across the map is pretty impossible. Maneuverability increases when you are totally hovering. Stopping and going into hover move is not instant / turning on a dime, you negatively accelerate (relatively quickly) gradually as you stop pushing the joystick forward. Pushing back the joystick lower than you previous were pushing forward will naturally accelerate you back to whatever speed value that is mapped to. Pushing the joystick backwards will also scale a lot for acceleration, because you are effectively braking. I mean, this part should be self-explanatory, right?
I know there will be out of bounds / collision problems here. But let’s assume for a second that either we don’t care about that, or that an easy (even rough) solution can be made to handle it.
Furthermore the way the game is designed, I doubt you could be in two zones at once without extreme effort. So, if you enter another map as a dragon… just show whatever out of bounds ugliness is there or don’t let players enter it at all. Or something, idk. If they are flying high enough they’ll be able to see it though (I point this out because of screenshot/video-taking quality of an unloaded map). In general this would be for looking at your current map.