One of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight’s best features, dragonriding, will soon break free of the expansion it was introduced in and come to older areas of Azeroth, Blizzard has confirmed, though it might not as soon as some fans would like.
Dragonriding has revolutionized navigating Blizzard’s MMO, turning the act of flying from a passive speed boost into active gameplay. The only downside is that dragonriding is currently only usable in the new Dragon Isles zones and with specific dragonriding mounts. There was a bit of excitement then when data-miners combing through the public test realm build of Dragonflight’s upcoming Fractures in Time content patch discovered several indicators that pointed towards Blizzard adding dragonriding to the whole of Azeroth.
In the files were new options for “flight styles,” one of which allowed for “dynamic flight abilities.” That sounded an awful lot like dragonriding, and pointed towards some non-dragonriding mounts possibly being retrofitted to support the feature. Turns out, those data-miners were 100% correct, with Blizzard acknowledging their discovery in a recent forum post.
“As data-miners have guessed, we are indeed working on dragonriding outside of the Dragon Isles and broadening the set of mounts that can dragonride,” Blizzard writes. “Our initial work on this can be seen in the Fractures in Time game files, but that feature will not be complete or featured in the live game until later in Dragonflight.”
Blizzard goes on to note that in the future, fans can expect to see more work-in-progress files from PTR builds that may not be indicative of what’s coming next patch, and that new features ready for prime time will always be announced in official posts.
Even if dragonriding won’t be coming to all of Azeroth as soon as some players hoped, they will be able to get a taste of what it will be like sooner rather than later. For those wondering what it’s like to dragonride outside of the Dragon Isles, Fractures of Time will introduce a new limited-time event called the Kalimdor Grand Prix. The grand prix will see players completing dragonriding races in zones across Kalimdor, one of WoW’s original two continents, though dragonriding will only be enabled during each race and players will have to use their normal flying mounts to reach each race’s starting point. Completing races will earn players badges that can be exchanged for a cosmetic dragonriding racer armor set and a teal color variant for the Windborne Velocidrake dragonriding mount.
WoW: Dragonflight recently introduced a new raid, an underground dragonriding zone, and cross-faction guilds as part of its Embers of Neltharion update. Fractures in Time will be the game’s next content update, and alongside the Kalimdor Grand Prix will add a massive time-hopping mega-dungeon where players will come face to face with the most terrifying dragon in Warcraft history, Galakrond.
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