What is the point of mount skins?

For people that don't know how mounts work
You get a basic mount early. You can also find mounts and tame them. You can also breed them.
There are three tiers of mounts, these are: ground mounts, gliding mounts and flying mounts.

Mount skins
Every single mount from kickstarter and APOC are skins you apply to your tier 1,2,3 mounts. They are not unique mounts, only cosmetic overrides of your standard mount. What are the benefits of this?

Why not simply make them unique mounts that you can collect? It feels a lot more immersive and logical than collecting skins.

Personally, adding a "super dark edgy wolf of doom" on top of my plain horse feels strange. Why is this the way ashes decided to go? I would like to hear the reasons.

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Comments

George_Black

I hate those, but there has to be something in the cash shop to generate non p2w income.

They are totally immersion breakers, but since they benefit companies, oh well.

But again, massive immersion breakers dem weird mounts. In every mmorpg.
I'll stick with a black horse and a white one.

Plateau

unknownsystemerror

The husbandry system will allow you to breed for specific stats and even create new combinations. Maybe you don't like the look of the chicken/turtle (churtle) you just bred and want to make it look like an edgelord's dream. That is one of the reasons why there are skins for the different tiers.

Caeryl

It’s for making those great stats look better than a basic horse, same as with any transmog system. It’ll be rough enough taking all the time to breed for the right stats, do you really wanna have to breed for decent looks at the same time? I know I sure don’t.

Atama

I think of it like WoW. You only had a handful of different mounts. You had ground mounts, flying mounts, swimming mounts, and some that could skim over the water. Other than that, they were mostly the same except one looked like a horse, one looked like an elephant, or a dragon, or a helicopter, etc. You could have dozens, over 100 mounts, but mostly the difference between them was cosmetic.

That didn’t stop people from collecting them, or going to extremes to get the rare one that they wanted. People really wanted them. People will want them in Ashes, so the developers will provide them. It’s that simple.

You might as well ask why we have different armor and weapon appearances. People want to craft a look, and change it.

Nagash

To look fabulous

Amata

Hi there! *waves*
I'm Amata, and I'm a vanity collector.

Mounts, pets, skins, hairstyles, recolors, dyes, fancy hats, costumes, housing styles, decorative (non-functional) furniture & items, fireworks, titles, obsolete objects that only have lore significance.... You name it, I've bought it. I pay in-game money, I pay real money, I trade subscription time. If there was a way to use parts of my soul to buy these things, I would do that too.

I've done this in every single game I've played. From that awful Celestial horse in WoW to dye packs in GW2, to whole fully-furnished estates in ESO.

Why? because I derive enjoyment from it.

In fact, in AoC I will probably not only collect various mounts - but I will also be buying all the skins for them, too. I'll take vanity items in any manner that a game's devs decide to package them. I just don't care. The point is the thing itself not how the devs decide to arrange the 1s and 0s.

In WoW, I had to use addons and custom macros to manage my mounts and pets - I had hundreds of both. I would not have a problem if AoC made it a tiny bit easier for crazy collectors like me to have diversity in our looks without needing an entire separate mount every time. It sounds like the way they're planning to do this will give me a nice handful of basic mount types (wolf, horse, turtle, w/e) and then I can have a list of skins usable for each type. I love this concept for mount & pet organization!

Anyway, that's just my thoughts.
*bows*
*scurries away*

Aardvark

Cosmetics are big sellers for some... I remember the GW2 launch and less than a month in 100s of people were making tickets that they suddenly could not buy any more cosmetics from the store...it turned out there was like a $400 monthly limit incase your account got hacked and they had already managed to spend up to the $400 monthly max triggering the unknown store lockout.

Songcaller

FF14 has nigh on $4000's worth on their cash shop. Cash shops can get rather swamped.

bloodprophet

Dante

I think some are missing the question here. The reason it is skins, and not mounts themselves, to my understanding, is kind of like what leonardo said

leonerdo wrote: »

So your dark, edgy wolf skin would apply to the base timberwolf (made-up example), not to the basic horse.

I'm assuming they are making them skins and not mounts because you will still have to go out and find that "category" of mount to enable you to use the skin. If they gave everyone in the beginning of the game mounts that could already glide/fly it would be an unfair advantage. As far as if you specifically have to get a "timberwolf" for a wolf skin, I have no idea.

5itz

Wonder what the swamp-turtle will re-skin, unless there's literally just a turtle..

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