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On the topic of design hell, I have a very deep seated hatred of average MMO players and while I try to keep these to myself, I think for once it might be useful to articulate WHY, particularly because to me most of them are average, arrogant as that might sound.

Players ask for things, and then proceed to completely skip them. Which causes a pain for devs who truly love their work (Tico from TL talks about this a bit in an interview) and is a detriment to the very same players. There's no point in asking for content to consume if you're bad at consuming. That's the core of my problem with players.

I will provide a few examples, see if you can find yourselves reflected in any of them. Because if you do, it means you have, hopefully unintentionally, contributed to the design hell.

1) While some players hide their problems by just having maxed gear, late night Dimensional Circle runs in TL (instanced dungeon run with boss at the end) often involve less geared players, which will result in the following: players skip literally all non-mandatory mob fights on the route to the boss like usual, then someone messes up some execution element and the angry swarm of mobs catches up and kills someone. Then people get mad at each other and someone leaves, and we have to search for new members. I've had this process take literally 3 times the time it would've taken to just clear the dungeon once, the normal way

2) I once had a Dimensional Circle run in the orc region and in order to unlock the boss area, we had to defeat a few orcs on a narrow bridge. One of the orcs got pushed by a player ability on the rocks under the bridge, making it impossible to advance. In order to resolve this, I climbed down to beat it. For various level design reasons, climbing back up takes a bit even if trying to kill oneself and respawn. As thanks, my party started without me, and I got locked out of getting any rewards. Please take a moment to process what this means on the design side. Are we expecting devs to design every single square meter of their content with the base assumption their playerbase is made of scummy weasels? Do we even pay them enough for that?

3) In a separate run, I've had a player complain the entire time that the party was being weird or weak (we were about 10-15% slower than usual peak hour tryhard comp) and focused on dropping really unpleasant comments instead of working on the teamwork. When I finally had enough and asked them to stop so I wouldn't block them, their reaction was along the lines of "lol I don't know you, what are you going to do about it?". This might be hard to see at first, but in order to minimize these kinds of reaction, devs need to work really hard on making sure those gaps are not large or frequent for most of the playerbase. Can you do that? I'd quit before I started.

4) I recently had a new member join our guild. They were a returning TL player who had the same standard experience of their party members skipping everything and taking the most direct routes to the boss. When our guild proceeded to full clear the dungeon run, they discovered new and interesting parts about dungeons they'd already done many times before. How's that for asking for content you won't consume?


So here's my tl;dr: from all of my gaming experience, the kind of people that devs need to design around the most is like that toxic rival party in isekai animes. When we watch those shows we root for their downfall, when we play MMOs we become them. How do you design for that?

Expanding on what @JustVine said, for design reasons, games are often not built at a realistic scale (it's harder to accurately position your character from a third person perspective than it would be in real life, so you need to give the player extra space to move around).

How a game's environment feels also varies considerably based on how zoomed out the camera is. Here are a couple of examples, again from DS3:



From the default over-the-shoulder perspective, this environment feels about right.



However, if we zoom out, the character suddenly appears tiny relative to other objects in the scene, and the area starts to feel bare and empty. There's also more visible texture tiling, and the foliage assets don't hold up as well.





Another good example of an area which needs to be fairly large for a boss fight. If you zoom out, the visuals don't work nearly as well, and there's very obvious texturing tiling.

How far you can zoom the camera out also has some significant impacts on area design. Here's a location which looks fairly normal from an over-the-shoulder perspective, but would break completely if you zoomed the camera out as far as Ashes allows you to:





Of course, these are all issues which can be worked around. Games with a zoomed-out, top-down camera perspective can certainly work well (see e.g. Path of Exile), but generally this requires a different approach to environment art than over-the-shoulder or 1st-person perspective games. They also require that you build environments at a different scale which can accommodate the camera perspective.

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

JustVine wrote: »

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

but that sucks and most dont like it if not hate it , even in AA the ones who played with the game zoomed out to the point of modding it to like literally zoom out to space yet the world looked fine and on scale , so once again its not really about zooming they just suck at making actual right scale , it dosent matter if they want it to be played zoomed out or not they got the whole world and character scale straight up wrong and its legit the first game ever that i've had that problem with

In order to maintain your position, you would first have to accept that we had a game that was built with every intended principle Ashes had, but at a different zoom level. Fortunately we had such a game, it was Alpha-1 and it was located on Alpha Island and it was one of the best Alpha's of an mmo I have ever played from an art direction standpoint.

Let me bring this to the core topic at hand. My favorite example of a design that incorporates some of OP's suggestions while still remaining the level of flatness Ashes tends to have (I got receipts later in the post) is Zi'tah and Boyahda Tree in FFXI. FFXI depending on where you go has very flat terrain. There are definitely inclines, but due to the limitations of player pathing and level design sharper inclines were reserved for splitting up areas. The way they make this interesting is by incorporating 2 fantastical elements, mob design, point of visual interest design, and lighting SO MUCH LIGHTING.

fantastical element 'something is bigger than average'


fantastical element 'nature is your bridge'


mob design 'nature is alive'



Point of visual interest 'make it stick out and glow' (as above so below)



I cannot overstate how flat these zones are, they are some of the flattest in the game but you never feel it because there is just enough variance that your visual field almost never has to think about it for TOO long.

In Ashes Alpha-1 I experienced this MANY times, particularly in the jungle, mountains, and caves. I almost never experienced these same design principles in Alpha-2 by contrast due to how much further apart things seemed to be and how much more artificial the over all terrain design felt. But if you ever play Ashes at max zoom I'll say that you definitely notice this issue /less/.

fantastical element 'something is bigger than average'




mob design 'nature is alive'







Point of visual interest 'make it stick out and glow'



And just some random other screenshots from Alpha-1 era AoC that I think directly counter some of the points in OP






There is definitely some truth to what they were saying even in Alpha-1 to be clear


But over ALL the art direction definitely spoke a lot more to the types of design elements both big and small that tied together the game by a lot.

So why do I think you are logically correct and spiritually wrong? What Azherae said is true, max zoom matters for game design. We live in an era of streamers for starters. But we also live in a game that is for those 'try hards'. Not getting ganked in open world is core gameplay. Ashes HAS DONE BETTER. The problem YOU are complaining about is the max distance, not 'the capability of Intrepid'. However, it is almost impossible without a ton of work to shift design direction from the new zoom level back to the old one. Where as the design tricks above are still definitely possible in Alpha-2.

yup A1 was way better , visually,stylistically,atmosphere,zones that are diverse not 1 tree and rock scattered all over the flat ground...etc it missed a lot of the problems they have with A2.

i dont like close zoomed cameras nor far ones more like something in the middle so its not really a problem ,i dont think i get all of what you're trying to say since english isnt my first language but i still dont think its about the distance tho as i said its just everything is made small cuz even in games that had similar kind of scale/look to ashes like throne and Archeage i didnt have that problem

Well I'll clarify then very directly:
What I was trying to say is you need very different design principles to build at different max zoom levels for players to feel comfortable. The tricks to make it feel right, however, tend to have overlap. Distance matters how much detail your eyes/brain need to comprehend and feel comfortable. It also effects how big things need to be in order to look properly at scale. This isn't a linear thing either. I think @GrandSerpent can explain that part better than me since she actually does blender stuff, but generally the size and scale of empty spaces and changes in terrain look differently depending on the 'common'/'max' distance. I hope that helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ9RU7pznTs

Love all the visual examples yall are sharing

Yeah, just depends how far they want to take it I guess.

I was having Anticheat issues as well.
Installing the game files through fargus or in steam, and then running AoCClient.exe in steam with Proton Experimental works for me.
AoCClient launch options used are the ones defined in OP post.

eval $(%command% LauncherTetherPort=$(netstat -ulpn | grep wineserv | awk '{split($4, a , ":"); print a[2]}' ) -NOSPLASH -USEEOS=0)

Make sure you're also running the launcher when you execute AoCClient.exe

I'm running on Kubuntu 24.10

Elohim_Venture wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Elohim_Venture wrote: »

I'm simply pointing out that paying $100 to support the game at such an early stage, like Alpha 2, and only receiving one free month at launch feels like a small return.

Then don't.

That said, if you are pushing to get more for that $100, you aren't actually wanting to support the game. You are wanting to purchase subscription time.

It's typical childish reasoning. It's logical that as a buyer, one expects to get benefits commensurate with what one pays.

It is indeed logical, and everything I have seen from Intrepid - other than cosmetics - follow this basic reasoning.

This is why your complaint is essentially being mocked. None of us have seen any alpha or beta packs we consider to be less than acceptable.

If we look at the only pack being sold right now, it is $100. For that, you get $15 in in game currency, $15 in subscriptions time, and the remaining $70 is for late state alpha access and access to all beta tests. That is a good value already.

It also stands to reason that your comment about supporting this game "from the start" is just weird. I first gave money to Intrepid in 2018 (iirc), so anything you are doing now is not "from the start" it is after years of development when there is a solid assurance that the game will actually exist.

Nothing at all childish in that reply to you.