Will grav-lev bikes like the Dragonfly and Nox ever be able to travel at their former max ground speeds in thick atmospheres like Daymar, Hurston, microTech, etc.?
TL;DRGrav-lev bike speeds could potentially go back up if they find a way to make obstacles like rocks less painful, or in places with fewer obstacles, but it's a trade-off.
Maybe, yes. However, part of the reason why the speeds are lower now is because when we re-evaluated grav-lev with the new flight model, we decided that we wanted it to be closer to the ground and a little bit more exciting. With the old grav-lev, you ended up riding over the rocks and trees.
It was more like flying low than being on a speeder or something.
We wanted it to be down close to the ground, stuff flying past you at full speed. But the problem with that is that there's a lot of obstacles. There's a lot of rocks. In some situations there's trees. There's a lot of obstacles. And so traveling at super high speeds makes the gameplay just really annoying, because you just constantly hit things.
And you never get to those speeds anyway, because you're hitting stuff.
So that's why the speeds are lower. But if, for example, we find a solution to making that less painful, then yes, we could potentially increase the speeds. Or maybe there's some places on planets where there's not as many rocks, and then we can let the speeds go higher.
It's all about trade-offs, like we mentioned before. We didn't just take it away because we wanted to. There's reasons for doing that.