I’m getting really annoyed of seeing a lot of people (even lower level than myself) owning mounts. I’m Level 7, and I’ve seen people on horse mounts as early as Level 5 (mainly the white one which seems to be a favorite). To own even the “cheapest” mount costs 10k Gold. Why are they so expensive, especially this early in the game?
I think it’s possibly because you can literally steal your way to victory. Stealing is a thing in this game, and it has similar consequences of the Single Player version. The only differences is you can ‘get away with it’ if someone sees you stealing. You’re given a bounty. If you’re willing to wait a half an hour or more depending on how much gold the bounty is, you’ll eventually be cleared of being considered a thief. You can also get away with murder (as long as a guard or anyone else never saw you commit the crime). Though I don’t know if The Dark Brotherhood pays you a visit afterwards in this game.
Another thing, if you let a guard catch you, you can just pay the fine and have your stolen items taken from you. You’re not sent to jail over it.
Also, GTH(Grand Theft Horse) isn’t possible. In ways this is good, given the number of players who would be constantly taking every horse at the stables (which is probably why it was disabled).
Stealing isn’t the only option to get quick money. Some say you can get a lot of money from fishing. Of course, they left off the “as long as you sell it to other players” option. Others say get into Blacksmithing and let people buy your stuff, other say to just do lots of side missions.
My only alternative from hard work and possibly having no mount until I’m Level 15 or so, is to pay real money for Crowns, and literally buy a mount on the Crown Store. That way I can focus my gold on buying useful things like upgrades to my gear (instead of hanging around the starting city forever, stealing everything I can to get up 10,000g (only to blow it when I do and have nothing)).
And that’s basically what I did. The horses in the Crown Store are 900 Crowns each (that’s just the standard ones). I had to simply pay $8 to get up to 1,250 Crowns (had 500 when I first started). Bought the horse, everything’s good… except you can’t go in first person. However, you can’t do that in Skyrim or Oblivion. There was a mod in Skyrim that made it possible (that a lot of the people that were trying to help me with the C++ crash were claiming it could be the culprit). But it was still awesome.
Oh well. It’s not that big of a deal. Now I have a horse (finally), I can stop stressing myself over feeling like I have to give up everything to get one, and actually play the game (with a horse)!
Also, that whole thing I said about the “train your horse” thing? It’s actually a waste of money. They give your mount a ‘Crown Lesson’ of depending what you buy, to make your horse have one point in speed, bag space, or how long your horse can go before it tires out. All of zone chat said it’s not worth the money.
However, I’m hearing rumors that you will have to feed your horse. There’s even a mod on Curse (ironically enough, ESO TU supports mods) that tells you “when to feed your horse”. This has me curious.