Often the quests in-game include quite a long walking distance, this is often quite dull.
The way I would implement mount is as followed.
- Player unlocks mount at level x, (perhaps after a quest), where you have to steal a horse in the fortress stables, you get a whistle from the questgiver.
- this whistle gets a place on your belt.
- you bring the whistle to your mouth and the equiped mount on the character tab gets summoned. Only castable out of combat (you have to put away weapon to pick up the flute).
- mountspeed: normal speed x2 for regular mounts, x2.5 for epic mounts.
- mounts can be obtained through chance on kill when killing a raidboss or worldboss. Regular mounts (horses for example) can be bought with dram in Highlands (given the level requirement).
- special mounts (cosmetics) can be bought with real money in the future in-game store.
Win/win situation for devs and players.