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.