Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
are mounts to easy to obtain?
Chicago
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
what's everyone's thoughts on mounts being locked behind levels or some sort of a grind/achievement, I'm not saying gatekeep them 70 hours played into the game but re watching some A1 footage, and being able to just purchase a mount from a vendor 5 minutes into the game seems a bit easy lol. I understand ashes is a huge game and it may be necessary though, only time will tell 
, what's everyone's thoughts? maybe just the higher level mounts could be gate kept like the gliders etc
, what's everyone's thoughts? maybe just the higher level mounts could be gate kept like the gliders etc 0
Comments
Pretty such there is going to be a huge grind for amounts, it will be like breeding pokemon with lots of rng. But we haven't seen how they plan to fully do it which I'm guessing is going to be not at the start of alpha 2 but who knows.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Animal_husbandry
New players will be able to obtain their "Standard Verran Quarterhorse" (or whatever the beginner mount is) shortly after starting.
The end game Tier-3 flying mounts have already been well discussed here in the Forums.
For everything in between, Steven says they "will require varying degrees of effort, skill and strategy."
Fine be me.
Players get to choose how much effort they want to put into getting an achievement mount.
Having "a mount" isn't an achievement. It should be a fairly basic thing in every game. Having a good mount should be an achievement of sorts - but not a basic mount.
My expectation is that we should have a mount by level 10, and a pack horse or mule by level 25.
Not the ones that bite.... and you know those will be the BEST ones
You may be able to purchase vanilla horse #19t5732 directly from a vendor but that thing probably has worse movementspeed and mobility than the first attempts of a horse breeder. So what will distinguish the mounted players will be the quality (tier & stats) of the mount, not the fact that they own one in the first place.
- Ground-Mounts shouldn't be t~ooooo hard to obtain.
I am all the way like Sir Steven already announced it.
Special kind of Mounts like for Example Mounts that are able to fly,
and/or carry You over huge/steep/tall Mountain-Massives - that are usually barely or not traversable at all,
or can fly you up to the small "Sky-Islands" floating around here and there,
those should be rare. Those should be something People can attain only for a short Time if the flying Mount should be able to get attained by a Majority of the Playerbase,
and only being able to get attained as a permanent or long-term Mount when someone is a Bigshot like a Major, or a King, or a religious Leader of a Divine Node, or whatever.
Building the combat Mount you desire is not necessarily easy.
I want to build a Mount that can " fart " in Combat.
Release a small, probably green or brown Cloud of REALLY bad-smelling Odor that stuns all Players who traverse it - including Fighters with their amazing Charges and Jumps.
The stunned Target is losing an amazing Amount of Stamina for a short Time because they are unable to breathe unhindered.
Nothing to powerful - but something that efficiently stops a small, charging Army/Group of like +20 in a more narrow Passage or Corridor.
And in classic - the peak of WoW - it took suuuuper long to get even a relatively slow mount.
In one way this benefited the feeling of finally acquiring one for yourself but when I'm fair and unbiased, it was kinda anti immersive for me and just did not made any sense.
Even if the playercharacter we played started as a complete nobody without any kind of wealthy family background of connections in any society.
We probably travelled one and half of the other continent BY FOOT before we got our first mount.
What even is that? How does this feel realistic?
For game mechanic reasons of course the continents will always appear tinier than what they would probably be in "real life".
But it does feel wierd sometimes that our characters never get sore feet.
And I'm not even into "survival" aspects that much in videogames.
I've got no idea if it will feel too easy or hard to obtain a mount in Ashes.
To throw something productive onto the table here is an idea:
If you are still in the mountless phase of Ashes
* You can 'rent' mounts for either longer distance travels inside of an area for a super cheap price
* Or have mounts, which have been trained for a specific task & route, to bring you to a certain place automatically, like the automatized flight routes in WoW and then you jump off and they run back to their trainers again
I believe this has already been announced once before as well?
That there will be timelimited events in which you can recieve even a FLIGHT by a mount that is able to fly, to a certain location and then land in a designated area, probably as an emergency reinforcement of sorts?
Or to reach a location on a plateau that is otherwise impossible to reach?
Private mounts you can use whenever you want are definitely a highlight and should be a thing near "3/4th" on the path to maxlevel. Until then we must make do with the rentable versions.
And to further compare my hopes for mounts in Ashes with my experiences in WoW, I do hope that there won't be a "normal & fast" category for mounts like in WoW. As soon as you get the fast mount, the mounts that are classified as not fast, look just pathetic and lame to you.
I would rather be on foot for even longer and obtain only a single mount with proper running speed as to go through this two phase nonsense again, with one mount being only a tease or appetizer for the real thing.
Same with... not all mounts can ascend the same ways.
A big mountain ram can carry you upside directly on the face of a rocky, rough mountain.
While a horse might be faster in the planes and on linear roads. Stuff like that.
We have an entire Artisanship tree option for this.
'Good' Mounts will already be 'locked behind levels'.
Otherwise we're going to have a lot of irritated Artisans.
But I think for the sake of progression feel, low to mid tier mounts should be collectible relatively easier.
maybe they just let you purchase the mounts from a vendor because it was a short test phase T_T
If people can not travers the terrain in a somewhat timely manner they will just log and not bother. And for some they are ok with that. However mounts are such a core compenant of mmorpg games that it would be foolish to not have them to some extent easily avaialble. You just have to tweak how beneficial they are.
Whatever will be the final verdict will be, we can expect that mounts will behave the same as all other kinds of slot items. Which means it will be easy to come across the "leveling gear" but to get our hands on equivalents of everything which are a cut above the average, we have to go out of our way to make it happen.
For some things the extra mile.
For others 100 miles or so.
And flying mounts (if memory serves correctly) will be tied to important positions in an important node like Mayor or King even, or they will be an event-thing.
Like you accept a quest and the flavour of said quest is that you are send off right away by a flying mount to a certain location and as soon as it brought you there, you jump off and it flies back to the questgiver.
I wonder how useful or previliged a flying mount will truly feel cause Intrepit stands before an obvious designchoice if they really plan to give only a hand full of players flying mounts for standart, private use.
For example when Vashj'ir was introduced in WoW, it was the first landscape of it's kind - that being an underwater landscape - and a lot of players absolutely hated it.
But why do I mention that?
Because of the MOUNTS that were introduced in Vashj'ir.
In order to deal with the fact that swimmingspeed is relatively slow in the game and that only class had a swimmingform (the druid), Blizzard handed out the most amazing and quickest underwater mount of all times, pretty much for free to the playerbase.
Locked behind an easy and short questchain was an incredibly quick Seahorse mount!
I stopped playing as I mentioned a few times but if nothing has changed, then these are still the quickest underwater mounts in the game today and by far!
With the one "openworld variant" of the Seahorse, Poseidus, being a pathetic snail in comparisation.
So I expect Ashes of Creation to not really make it so that flying mounts will be a vast necessity to stop your hair from greying out too quickly.
I expect about and at best, 10% of the entire game's traversal to be affected by flyingmounts in a capacity that will make you feel " Puh! I am really lucky/previliged to have a flying mount for this part. "
I believe flying mounts will mostly be the +A for photogenic reasons.
That must be incredible to be able to make shots from air and have landscapes be visible from a birds eye point of view, when about 98% of the playerbase cannot.
Makes me wonder... will there be baloon or airship like tours over Verra too?
Sure hope so.
Welp in any case we can say for certain that groundmount traversal will not be designed too annoyingly.
Imagine a Guildleader being able to straight fly to a certain location, only so that he has to wait for his guild to catch up in the next +20 minutes, due to all the detours they have to make.
People are willing to tolerate a bit of troubling realism.
But not too much from what I've seen.