I am wandering around the waters surrounding Skellige checking out all of the "?" locations, most of which are "smuggler's cache" locations (all of which have the lamest most useless loot ever making seeking these locations out kind of pointless except to "complete" the game fully), and I see this huge ship in the water parked there just off the coast of a small island. I save my game and approach it cautiously from a distance circling around looking for signs of life. I move closer and sirens spawn in (enemies visibly spawning in is pretty lame too for immersion) but no sign of humans. Ok, so I kill the annoying sirens then a short while later more sirens that weren't there magically spawn in practically right in my face. I kill them too.

Ok, so after killing off all the annoying sirens, I dive in the water and collect the lame loot from the 3 smuggler's cache chests underwater. It more or less boils down to a box of used toothpicks and an empty styrofoam cup in terms of worthfulness. But... there's this massive ship! Hell, it must be loaded with goodies! Ok, so I circle around the ship swimming and can't find a way to get on the ship at all. I get back on my boat and circle around the ship and find a loading area that has a piece of the rail missing obviously to drop a ramp down on when loading/unloading, so I park my boat as close to that as I can, and Geralt refuses to grab onto the ship. I try running and jumping, different angles, etc. and no matter what I do I can't board that ship.

Ok. No problem, so the ship is not intended to be boarded I guess. So _why_ put it there? Any gamer that all of a sudden stumbles upon a huge ship for the first time is going to naturally be curious and thinking OMGWTF LOOT! Or "Holy shit, maybe I can steal this ship! SHIP UPGRADE!". Just about any remotely curious gamer will want to board the ship and look around at least because well... it's THERE. Why is it there? Just to look pretty in the water?

Ok so now I'm in a dilemma. Do I keep frantically doing death defying non-fun acrobatics trying to jump ridiculously into the boat and hoping I get the right magic angle and luck to board to hopefully find a mega chest loaded with treasure such as a dirty pair of socks and a used tampon? Or... do I say "just a prop" and leave the area wondering if I missed finding The Sword of 1000 Truths or something?

Ugh...

If you go underwater, Geralt's body can swim THROUGH the ship's bottom too, but can not get inside of it. Seems clear that it is just a visual prop which has no proper collision detection on it. I found another ship in the water similarly before although it was smaller than this one but bigger than the small rowboat Geralt uses. I did get on that ship to find a body tied to the mast and burned alive, and no loot. The awesome thing about that other ship is that just walking from one end of the ship to the other exploring Geralt suddenly magically was transported about 50 feet into the air directly above the ship and promptly plummeted 50 feet down onto the deck of the ship with instadeath. Awesome, just walking across a ship can have you catapulted into the air for no reason to plummet to your death. Fortunately I save my game often and didn't lose anything.

When I found each of these ships I was excited. "OOOH, I found something cool, can't wait to see what's inside!" only to find they're both ultimately props with buggy collision detection bugs that can/might kill you, and protected by sirens that are on infinite respawn-right-in-your-face.

Game is f'n awesome, but glitches like these totally break immersion and leave me wondering if it was supposed to be this way, or if they had bigger plans for these ships and they got dropped on the cutting room floor racing to the May 19 deadline. Hopefully a future patch either makes the ships bug fixed and boardable with some useful reason for them being there, or just removes them to not waste people's time with superflous glitchy game assets that can inadvertently kill you.

I've seen a whale's tail pop out of the water here and there a few times... I wonder if that's just eye-candy too or if I can kill it or eat it or something. :) Still cool either way.

Attachments:

tw3-ship1.jpg - Map showing location of ship I'm at.
tw3-ship2.jpg - Screenshot showing point I'm attempting to board the ship with my boat backed up as far as it will go.

Ok, I go back in the water and swim around the underside of the boat, as I passed inside the boat that way by accident trying to avoid sirens earlier. The sirens are dead until they magically respawn whenever they see fit so I take a break for it and ... voila! I manage to swim inside of the ship with a bit of dinking around. The awesome part is that while the ship has crappy collision detection underwater and lets me swim right through the wood into the inside of the ship, it has amazing award winning collision detection INSIDE the ship that doesn't let me swim back out of the ship or move around much at all. :)

I took some amusing screenshots (attached). I suppose I should report this as a bug on the CDPR forums but man... I've encountered 200 such issues in the game and it'd take weeks to report them all with enough info to be useful. On the upside, despite the bugs the game has, it only has 1/10,000th the bugs that Skyrim has, and I haven't found a single quest breaking bug yet although I've heard some rumours there are a few.

Enjoy the screenies... :)

I'm persistent. I just couldn't give in. I kept screwing around instead of loading my save game and with my body half embedded in the ship Philadelphia Experiment style, I found a sweet spot where the collision detection is wonky and managed to swim back outside of the boat, but I kept half my body in the boat and on the left side of the boat it let me swim up the side half in and half out of the boat, then swim to the inside again, but this time in the cargo hold. I was able to make it to the stairs to find the hatch closed. No problem though! It has broken collision detection too, and I was able to walk right through the hatch as if it wasn't there.

I CLAIM THIS SHIP IN THE NAME OF GERALT OF RIVIA! I shall call her "The Yennefer"!

Ok, so sirens attacked me again spawning right in my face yay. I'm unable to commandeer the ship to take it for a spin though.

CDPR: I WANT THIS SHIP! IT'S MINE! Please update the ship prop's graphics to show the name of the ship as "SkeletonBow" in a future patch and we'll call it even. ;oP

(Honestly, if they did that I'd crap my pants laughing for sure.)

Thanks for trying and posting your experience. I just came across this ship today and am pretty disappointed that it can't be boarded. Oh well, at least I'm not alone, time to willfully suspend disbelief and move on I guess.

There are several ships like this in Skellige. I found 3 huge abandoned ships like this while I visited all undiscovered locations. At least. And I agree that it's sad they have no story/explanation. Unmanned ships like that should drift off.

But Skellige has all kinds of this stuff, there is even a flying ghost ship. :)

Wow! Where was that, I never seen that in my playthrough!

I think that can only happen at night and it was in the eastern part of Skellige. This game is so full with content, I don't think anyone is ever going to see everything. Only the devs know what's in there.

Well, don't know if this could be part of the "problem", but: all your screen shots show that you are overburdened.
Maybe drop some junk and try again, just to see if this makes any difference?
On the other hand: W3 is full of funny things - I can remember well Geralt entering this elevator at Skellige, running glued on the spot, while hovering over the small platform for the whole of the ride. Terrific :). Handmade game, I guess....

Naw, I tried that also but it doesn't seem to matter if you're overburdened or not. From what I was able to determine, it seems that being overburdened doesn't affect anything but your movement speed on foot, and forward jump distance since you can't run and jump. I only found one location in the game where that caused a problem in an underwater cave on the west side of Ard Skellige which was rather annoying. :) On the upside, the newer game patches add the stash feature and eliminates the weight of many objects so one is less likely to be overburdened with the current fully patched game now which is cool.

It would be super cool to be able to board those ships proper and have some useful reason for doing so, or to command the ships instead of the little sissy sailboats. :)

I don't know if you have already mentioned this, but the really confusing part is, that one of these larger ships you can't use or even get on, has the boat icon on the map, that's usually only for boats that you actually CAN use. It's probably cut content they couldn't finish. Maybe their original plan was for Geralt to board ships like that and complete specific tasks there. Skellige feels overall as if it got the short end of the stick - there are tons of question marks/undiscovered locations, but almost all of them on the water are just smuggler caches you could easily skip without missing anything of significance. This is not a complaint because I love this game, but unless the devs state otherwise I'm pretty much convinced they didn't add stuff like those ships just to uselessly sit there.

Still 2 weeks until HoS! I'm so pumped! :D

I FIGURED IT OUT!! If you save it as it lets you dive underneath it (swimming inside underneath the boat floor) and after you save it in there, then load that save and it lets you walk in the bottom of the boat up to the stairs and onto the main deck

BUT there isn't anything up there to get :/

Sorry for the necro on this... I too got the impression that the ships in the waters of Skellige were some kind of half-implemented idea because they know what they're doing at CDPR and naturally in an RPG if an adventurer stumbles upon a ship in the water they're going to be curious about it and possibly approach it, try to board it etc. When you do so you get a bunch of game bugs, and it appears the ship serves no purpose which seems quite odd. I have to conclude too that there was some original concept to do with these ships that never got implemented and the ships were left laying around like relics perhaps, but the bugs never got sorted out either due to lack of priority or something. It would have made more sense perhaps to remove these ships than leave them there as lure and not have a purpose other than to potentially kill geralt or require a game reload.

Not a huge deal, but it takes away from some of the polish the game has. I also agree about the zillions of smugglers caches being useless and even tedious after a while. They're same-old/same-old after a while, and I found myself only going to visit them just to have them show as complete on the map, rather than for any true sense of adventure or reward. It would have been better to have more sunken ships with treasure or something, and have stories told of treasure in inns, which you can seek a treasure map or something to track down a location, and have a unique feel of sorts to each such story. In future playthroughs I will probably not visit all of the smuggler's caches as they're more arcade-style gameplay than immersive RPG experience.

Skellige is beautiful and all that, but because of this I always feel like Velen is the more polished part of the game. But CDP apparently agrees, because in Blood and Wine they really stepped things up and made sure most ? on the map are much more interesting than they ever were in the main game. It's obviously too much to ask in such a gigantic game world, but I really wish all ? could have been more interesting like the ones in Blood and Wine - although it's primarily Skellige, where all ? on the water feel like cheap filler content, just so that there's something... I went there once, when I was still waiting for the release of one of the expansions, but I will probably never do so again.

Yeah, I got the feeling that the waters of Skellige were unfinished and the smugglers caches just an afterthought to have something there, as well as the abandoned boats in the waters. The mostly uninhabited south-western island of Undvik (IIRC) had a mystery to it and some lore, but I'd have liked to have seen a few villages alive and kicking there with more interaction as well, but it did have its merits too. The danger lurking on the island was a challenge, but it wasn't quite enough to scare off an entire island full of people IMHO. If enough of the inhabitants had weapons and armour to defend themselves they could have joined forces to go after the threat themselves and probably done well. Probably would have been a lot less effort than leaving the island entirely. Still, the island did have its charms as well.

I agree that the Velen map was the most complete, detailed and immersive part of the game overall that seemed like it had the most effort put into it.

I'm looking forward to trying both of the expansions some day, however since the 1.11 or 1.12 patch or thereabouts the game has had screwed up graphics I can not remedy which make it non-immersive to play for me, so I'll have to wait until that is fixed one way or another whatever the problem may be.

I actually managed to jump on the ship that has the boat marker from the side of my boat and it has absolutely nothing on it.

Yeah, I've boarded every single boat in the game and found absolutely nothing. They're not intended to be boarded and some of them are very very hard to get into or onto, and you can die during the process due to game bugs. The easiest way to get into some of the boats is to swim under water and trigger a collision detection bug in the game engine that lets you swim right through the hull to the inside of the boat, but you need to choose carefully where you end up inside or you could be trapped and need to reload a save game (so save before trying this). Other than feeling good about figuring out how to get inside/on the boats though, there is no reward for doing so as they're barren and unusable assets just there to look pretty. :)