[Suggestion] Maritime Features & Gameplay Ideas

Hi everyone!

As requested during the livestream, you’re looking for feedback on fun activities players would like to experience at sea once maritime content is introduced into the game. After spending countless hours on the seas in ArcheAge, I wanted to share some features that I hope to see in Ashes of Creation as well.

1. Shipwreck Hunting & Salvaging
One of the best features in ArcheAge was the ability to search for sunken shipwrecks scattered across the oceans. Sailing in search of treasure, recovering wrecks, transferring loot to your ship, and trying to get it back safely — all while avoiding or fighting off other players — made for some of the most exciting and memorable guild nights.

2. Trade Islands & Resource Turn-in Zones
Having specific islands where players can turn in trade goods would encourage exploration and PvP encounters. Whether it's land-based packs (like Liberation in ArcheAge), salvaged wreck loot, or fish crates, turning them in on these islands could create dynamic risk-vs-reward zones across the seas.

3. Oceanic Raid Bosses
Imagine epic battles at sea against massive raid bosses — krakens, leviathans, or even more unique sea monsters. Upon defeat, they drop crates that must be delivered to specific island POIs, adding both PvE and PvP pressure to the encounters.

4. Node vs Node Naval Events
What if there were large-scale node-wide naval events, open to all nodes, where participants score points by destroying objectives or ships on the high seas? Think of it as a naval siege. With the vassal system in place, this could promote community-wide participation rather than only focusing on large guilds. It would also help prevent a single mega-alliance from monopolizing the seas.

5. Underwater Points of Interest
This is already planned, but I'd like to echo how exciting it would be to have underwater POIs with chests, bosses, and exploration mechanics.

6. High-Sea Fishing with Turn-ins
Deep-sea fishing could become a real group activity. Catch rare fish in PvP zones, pack them in crates, and sail them back to port. It’s similar to ArcheAge, sure, but it created a lot of fun attack/defense moments and community outings.

Off-topic but important considerations for feature development:

7. Caravan/Naval Loading System
The current caravan system, where you load it directly with resources, may be too limiting in the long run. Crafting or buying a trade pack and manually loading it into a caravan or ship would offer more flexibility. It also allows resource costs (like Glints) to be shared across a group — for example, four players each loading one crate onto a ship — and sharing the profit more naturally.

8. Destruction System Is Too Punishing
The destruction mechanics make sense, but the cost of losing a fully loaded caravan or a crafted ship can feel demoralizing. It discourages experimentation with the system. Some form of soft-loss mechanic, insurance, or partial recovery could encourage more players to engage with this content regularly.

Can’t wait to see what you’re building. Keep up the great work and thank you for involving the community in the development process!

A passionate fan of the seas ⚓

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Comments

Veeshan

Just wanna add something to this

1- Another thing that would work well is darkfall sea scrapers, was just a boat you drove round that scraped the stuff off the seafloor which gave some decent loot/items/resources these became prime targets for other ships to destroy and loot would work well with say archage deep sea fishing (which i beleive we are getting fishing boats down the line) which add to a few more naval content and for pirates.

3- i belive they said there be naval bosses like the kraken so cant wait to see that down the line

4- im hoping costal nodes might have objectives in the ocean for naval stuff or even being able to pull up a boat in the port and fire in at the city, would need potentialy node cannon defence for ships though too as an upgrade option, so if u can silence the cannons with a landforce you could bring in the boat safely to shell the city. Also i beleive one of the 5 castles is smack bang in the middle of there ocean between the 2 continents

5 underwater content is spose 2 be planned from my understanding but hasnt been talked about in a long time im guessing its last on the to do list content wise pretty much

6 - i beleive this is planned with fishing similiar to archage

8 - I dont think this will be an issue in the long run, more caravans are being destroyed right now than what it be like at reelase due to large guilds being crammed all together in 1 area once there more world for the big factions to spread out some more caravans will make the trip safetly due to less population density and for the big guild that owns x area are less likly to attack caravans that are coming from people in nearby nodes cause you dont realy wanna shit where you eat alot of the time.

Few other thing i wanna see from naval

1- potion launcher arch attacks is fine but i would like to see cannon options that functions more like a fps so aim and click to shoot and they fire in an arch till they hit something or the water much like sea of theives would be nice to have the option between archare ground target cannon or sea of theives/darkfall aim and shoot options when it comes to putting cannon on boats

2 - Would like to see archage harpoon launcher at some stage too tbh :P

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