Getting around on foot in Ashes of Creation is all well and good, but why bother with that when you’ve got mounts? That was a topic of discussion for a recent developer livestream which focused on mounts in general, underwater mounts in specific, as well as a bit about underwater content among other things.
In the livestream, creative director Steven Sharif offered a brief rundown of the different types of mounts, confirming that flying mounts would be extremely limited — only as many as 10 to 20 on a server, as they’re often for royalty status players or as extremely rare drops from legendary bosses. Land mounts, meanwhile, will be in three different tiers, with each tier having unique abilities and skills and can be bred to have certain stats and skills via animal husbandry.
Finally, there are aquatic mounts, which were then demonstrated in the broadcast with the Tidesnapper. Aquatic mounts will be slow on land and in the shallows, but when fully submerged, they’ll have a significant speed boost. There are plans to have a lot of sea-based content in Ashes, including different classes of ships, raid bosses, treasure seeking, and underwater dungeons, all of which will be far more accessible on the back of an aquatic mount.
During a Q&A session it was also confirmed that there will be underwater combat, while items can be crafted that will boost things like breath and speed, though underwater visibility will remain poor for everyone in the interest of balance. On the subject of obfuscated underwater vision, the demonstration is a first pass of this debuff and promises to soon get better.
Those who missed out can get a look at the complete video, check out the Ashes Post transcript, and watch the aquatic mount segment in 4K resolution in the embed below.
