Ships, Vehicles and Mounts

ArcheAge provides a big variety of mounts and vehicles.

Not only do you have the standard mounts like horses or lions, you also have cars, tractors, big ships and small ships. Even tanks, though they are only used for sieging or random fun activities.

Let me show you some of my favourites.

First, we have the tradeship which is a long ship that can hold 20 packages. I'll explain packages later, but just remember that they are used for making money. It also has a radar and 2 cannons. It is the only ship being actually viable for big traderuns.

The Radar

The smallest ship, and also the first you will probably get is the speed boat. It has nothing fancy, but there are two versions of. Either the eastern version with a cannon, or the western version with a harpoon that is used to follow ships

It is pretty fast and small, so a good ship for solo sailing or piracy.

Considering land vehicles, there is the tractor and the car. The tractor has a decent speed and you can put 4 packages on it, not counting the one you have on your back while driving. It can also be used to water your plants - the perfect addition to the tradeship for traders!

Keep in mind that even if you are not a pirate you can still have the black pearl!

The Galleon and Black Pearl are currently the biggest ships in the game. With decent speed (Black Pearl being the fastest), lots of cannons and a radar they are both battle ships being used in naval fights and escorting traderuns.

The car only has 2 slots and is really expensive(current cost in korea around 5000+ gold). It is faster than anything on land and really fun to drive around with.

I know that there was a lot of controversy about it but the style really fits into the game. See more about the car here:

The care has some neat physics! Which...can...be exploited, more or less.

You can also customize most ship sails and logos, here's an example made by

Majiinfreddy:

Now to the mounts. There are many different types of mounts: The horses, yatas and lions, cows and panthers. Then there's the tare of the hariharan. For some mounts there are different type of mounts: standard horse, "Mirage Island Horse", black yata, brown yata, albino yata etc.

But they all have this in common:

You breed them.

It's just a little gimmick and takes up only 5 minutes: you have to feed them, wash them and watch them grow up.

When you raised them, they start at a low lvl and can level up as you travel distances. They also gain XP while grinding. With rising level they gain new abilities you can use:

Some have sprints, some have attacks, some have jumps and some even have immunites( PvP /PvM Special mounts).

PvP Mount

The basic mounts are really easy to get: just follow your questline and you get it eventually.

You can buy a yata at a stable, but you can also try to breed a black or albino yata on your farm.

Theres also a special PvP and pvm mount which you get through Honor Points( PvP Currency, will talk about that later) and Silver Coins(PvM Mount). They even released evolutions for them. Once you have the first version on Lv50, you can try and get the second evolution which is even more powerful.

You can also buy special pet armor for your pet which is visible:

Mounts and vehicles are really fun in ArcheAge and there is a lot of variety. Mounted combat might not be as complex as in other games, but it is still decent enough for PvP .

Raising your mount, evolving it and equipping involves a lot of grinding but is really fun in my opinion and you can actually invest a lot if time into it.

Also, just as a sidenote:

Yes, submarines are coming into the game.

One thing I really dislike about the vehicles in the game is that everything is too cheap. The Japanese version actually fixed it, but in Korea you don't need a lot of gold for most vehicles. The car is really expensive, but with more time it will get cheaper and cheaper.

If your vehicle gets destroyed you can always repair it with an Hour Glass, which in most cases is not that expensive, so nobody actually ever loses his/her ship/vehicle.

Conclusion: Ships, Vehicles and Mounts

One of the biggest selling points are definitely the Ships. They work really well and give many opportunities for OpenPvP, exploring and just enjoying the world in general.

It is simply stunning to see 3-4 fully loaded tradeships escorted by galleons sail over the ocean while the sun is rising in the back, and it is also stunning to those galleons being shot down by the Black Pearl!

The vehicles are nicely done, too. Big trade caravans are an eye candy and the car is a fun addition for rich players. It doesn't really serve a purpose from a PvPers point of view, but it certainly is a useful tool to get packages across the continent really fast.

The big downside to all of this is the how destroying and stealing ships/vehicles work. Yes, you can destroy ships and vehicles, but all it costs for a player is a few gold - at least later in the game. Crating the hour glass, the item needed to repair broken ships and vehicles, takes a lot of crafting skill but that will be non-issue after a few weeks. So you never feel the big "OOH SNAAP" moment when you destroy something, because 20 minutes later it will be back.

A system that would take more from you when you lose a ship would be much more satisfying, in my opinion. Just taking a look at EVE, where losing a big ship can really hurt a lot.

Mounts have one big problem: they are all nice and shiny, but they are all pretty much useless compared to the big PvP / PvE Mount evolution. Those are much faster and useful than the others you get throughout the game. It is pretty hard to get them, but once you have them there is no reason to pick anything else.

PvP

Although some of the feature XLGames introduces could let you think otherwise, ArcheAge is a pvp heavy game. Next to openpvp and a battleground you have castle sieges, naval warfare and lots of other fun pvp elements such as a crime & trial system.

Let's start with the open pvp .

In general, all zones have some amount of pvp . The first few starting zones are safe for your own faction: you can not attack them and you can not be attacked by enemies. You can, however, attack the enemy faction if you want. The player you attack will be able to defend himself, but not his friends that are with him. This system creates some trouble which I will explain a little bit more detailed later.

The higher lvl zones starting at around level 30 are free for all pvp . This means you can attack the enemy faction and also your own. However, attacking your own faction will get you in trouble with the law, but I will talk about that later.

While on the northern continent and on the open sea you have open pvp all day, the two starting continents have a war and peace system. In general, the pvp zones on those two continents are flagged for pvp . If there is too much pvp going on, e.g. too many players get killed, a war starts. This means you get rewarded for killing the enemy faction. You get honor points for kills and assists and also for succesful participation in the fight.

A war lasts about an hour: It starts with 30 minutes of preparation which players use to gather; you can already get honor points here, but the real deal is the war that lasts an hour and comes straight after the war preparation. When the war is over, a peacetime starts that can be 1 hour or even 4 hours, depending on the importance of the zone. During a peacetime, there can be no pvp at all.

Regarding losses and gains in pvp , there is no loot in pvp since CBT. You don't lose any items or gold in pvp , you only gain honor points for participating in wars.

However, with the trading system, that allows you to craft packages and sell them elsewhere, there can actually still be a loss in pvp : If someone attacks and kills you, he can take your packages, even if you stored them on your tradeship. He simply has to destroy your tradeship and put the packages in his own.

Considering you get most of your money from trading, this is actually a really big thing and traderuns are generally not safe on the open sea.

Factions

You currently have to fear two enemies: The opposing faction(West <-> East) and the pirates.

Soon, the game will have player-made factions. You can read about it here:

And in my opinion, the current system definitely needs player-made factions to be more important than the NPC factions. The reason is simple: players focus too much on the NPC factions. If you don't like an ally for whatever reason, you are still not allowed to attack him whatsoever without getting in trouble with everyone else. Green players are always your allies, red players are always enemies.

The only politics that happen here are those imposed by the developers by deciding what race is in what faction.

Also, everything looks made to be for player factions. Let me show you why.

Liberty Island

On Liberty Island, the island in the middle of the northern sea, you have the most lucrative trading post for trade packages. You have the greatest distance and from all of the crafting places and you get the most profit for selling here.

The island is also near the pirate island and is always flagged for pvp , just as the sea around it. This means that generally it is the place to go if you want sea fights and piracy.

Because it is so close to the pirate island, it is under pirate control most of the time, at least on the server I play on. There is no way of getting safely to the island without getting attacked. You must be really lucky to catch a moment of silence, because when the pirates are not there to take your packages, there will be enemies that try to do the same.

This forces players of all guilds to work together and even creates some nice political gameplay aspects: The pirates, being the nice gentlemen they are, offer you a very lucrative deal. Just leave them 1/3 of your packages on the ground when you sell, and they will leave you alone. Of course, this deal will not make you any friends within your own faction. You can read a bit about this topic on the story section.

Another reason I think player-made factions will be healthy for ArcheAge is the northern continent. This is the area most interesting for guilds, or Expeditionary Forces, as they are called in ArcheAge.

Northern Continent

Currently, the northern continent consists of 6 areas with a total of 36 areas coming into the game.

Here's a map of the northern continent, or the "Land of Origin", as it is ingame right now.

(Grey areas are not released yet)

The 6 areas that are not greyed out can be claimed and besieged. When the game starts, it is all empty, and the big guilds have to fight for the giant swords that mark a territory claim point. The winning guild gets to build a castle and houses around the spot. The claiming guild is allowed a 350m radius around the middle of the castle to build everything they want: houses, farms etc.

After the claiming, there will be auctions for so called "war declaration" every week. These are server-controlled auctions you can only bid on and the starting bid is 500 gold. Whoever wins the auction gets to attack the castle. Keep in mind that this can also be the guild holding the castle, meaning no one can attack it, and that also means that there are fixed times for castle sieges.

UPDATE +++++ UPDATE +++++ UPDATE +++++

CASTLE SIEGES ARE NOW EVERY 3 WEEKS PER CASTLE!!

UPDATE +++++ UPDATE +++++ UPDATE +++++

On our server, war declarations don't go that high. It is a few thousand gold while on other servers, prices go up to 15k gold. For perspective: It takes a group of players a few weeks to get 1k gold. A big guild can make this amount of guild in a week by doing things like kraken raid, but this always involves openpvp as you can read further down this text in the PvE section.

(Two auctions that just started)

This is a nice feature, because it

1) is a massive gold sink. If a guild really wants to attack, or another guild really wants to defend, they have to invest a ton of money which will be lost forever

2) allows trading-focused guilds to hold castles as well...

But it also creates a pay-to-win environment, because after you succesfully got a castle you can establish a system where you simply never lose the castle again by just making enough money. In a F2P game, like it is in korea, where you have a massive item shop, this is really easily done by investing real money. Let's hope Trion won't go down this path or a really big part of the game will be destroyed.

Sieges

The actual sieges in the game are less than optimal.

While the siege is going on, the area you built in gets "phased" and you can have 80 players + 20 mercenaries on each side participating in a siege.

Everyone not participating gets killed with a DoT debuff after they enter the zone, and after a sucessful siege(meaning the defenders lost) the winners can destroy everything around the claim stone up to a certain(250m) radius.

For example, this is a healthy castle:

This is a castle that looked very similar, only after an attack(the holders ran out of money after this attack, they lost their castle pretty easily the next week.)

The big problem with sieges is how they work:

Close to the castle there is a spawning point of the attackers, while the defenders spawn inside the castles. If you die, you can respawn instantly within your safezone. If you spawn a catapult, tank or whatever next to the attacker's safezone, you already have enough range to shoot at the castle.

This creates a "clusterf****" where you just bruteforce your way into the castle hoping to destroy it sooner as the timer runs out.

Some areas on the northern continent have special resources that can only be found in this particular area. The newer areas even have a system that allows the controlling guilds to influence these resources.

Battlegrounds

There are also battlegrounds in the game which are 5v5. You can only enter every 2 hours for 1 hour since it's only available within a certain timeframe.

While I personally don't like battlegrounds, I like the current system in ArcheAge for one simple reason:

It doesn't take away from the OpenPvP.

It's an addition that is fun for some people, but if you don't wanna play them you don't lose anything.

The honor you get is neglictible and the way the battleground works makes it really arcade-esque. The more kills you get, the more bonus buffs/skills you get. So in a way it's kind of like Call Of Duty, where you get rewarded for killstreaks.

As some of you may know, I once decided to "leave" ArcheAge during early development due to Battlegrounds being introduced. Turns out they aren't that bad. I won't play them too often but I don't mind them anymore.

Honor Points

Honor points are, to me, a little thorn in the eye. You get honor points through varous stuff:

Grinding certain bossmonsters, playing the battleground and participating in wars.

With honor points, you can purchase a special glider with PvP -Specific skills and also a special mount as well as equipment. Getting honor points though is a tough thing and most people focus on the glider and mount instead of the weapons. Most items bought with honor are not even soulbound.

The problem about the points is not really what you can purchase with them, it's more about how you get them: You get rewarded for farming players, this completely undermines the purpose of politics.

If there's an enemy, you get honor points for killing him.

And for you personally it is more worthwhile to attack everyone rather than to look at what the current state of politics are. If you have a truce with someone, so he is still flagged as an enemy but you are not allowed by your leaders to attack, you still want to and most of the players probably will simply because they get honor points.

In Korea it's not that bad right now, pvp happens pretty regularly and not everyone is out there just farming players, there is actually real pvp happening especially with the piracy which I will talk about later.

Savezones and the problem with Open PvP

Open PvP is a dynamic experience. Everything from massive battles to lower-scale pvp to big sea fights can happen. But it also has something many people don't like: ganking of lower level players.

The ArcheAge solution is to put a big safezone around important zones, peacetimes in other ones and many, many respawn points around the world.

Big fights usually turn out to be camping of these respawn points, where one side just waits to have enough players to deflect the enemies. If this does not work, they will just wait in the safezone until enough players leave to attack. This is not only boring, but also a huge waste of time.

It also interferes with trading. When trading, players usually hide all their packages within a safezone where neither the players nor the tractors can get attacked. This results in borin mechanics where players just hope to see others leave the safezone, as seen in this screenshot:

Conclusion: PvP

To draw a conclusion on the PvP is really hard. If you would ask past-me about 6-7 months ago, I would tell you that ArcheAge will have the best PvP ever. Now, that I've played the game for quite a while and saw how things worked out, I have a dfiferent opinion.

The OpenPvP in general is one of the best I've seen in the past few years, but that does not mean anything at first:

There are many safezones and respawn points that take away from the fun, that are frustrating for both sides; winners and losers. There are problems when it comes to guard AI and NPC-based factions, and all in all it feels really medicore.

Sea-based PVP is simply awesome, combined with naval warfare and everything else this is simply thrilling. If the PvP on land would be more like that, it would be perfect.

Then come the factions and sieging:

Sieging itself is in my opinion a huge failure. First, only money decides who gets to attack, and after this luck and money decides who wins the fight. It is 100 vs 100, which seems fine in the first moment. But then the castles in the siege are completely pointless: They are only a timesink. They have no defensive purpose because you can jump over walls with gliders, and they are also not a strategical advantage since the attackers are really close the castle anyway.

Attacking guilds try to spawn as many catapults as possible and break down the walls, defenders try to destroy those catapults as fast as possible.

The faction system, which was supposed to fix the northern continent, didn't contribute much. They made matters even worse: Castle sieges only happen every 3 weeks and there are still only 6 continents.

PvP in ArcheAge is still one of the major gameplay points about the game, but in the current status it has a lot of issues.

For further research, look at these videos:

PvP video by Inpo

PvP video by Inpo

PvP Dont Worry Guild Movie – good naval action

Another Dont Worry Guild Movie

Funny siege video