Best Of

Most of the info is in the nature of "these are placeholders - final to arrive later...", so really everything is still up in the air and too early to comment on much except that things are moving a little slow.

I know this is more a tips and tricks thread but I want to catalog experiences on Linux which I am seeing setting up, logging in and playing the game.

General Setup and Launcher
Linux version
Linux of old will not work - anything debian based or Ubuntu based will have problems that may not iron out until 1-2 years from now. The kernel is so old and does not include some of the new features that are needed for functionality and performance. So if you are using an older system, then I would look at moving to anything fedora based, Nobara, catchyOS, Arch etc.

Installing the Launcher.

This is a long standing issue with the Tetherport and MsEdgeView2 install. The principal still stands with Intrepid using the MSwebView2 launcher for authentication and the Launcher not being able to pass this to AOCClient.exe without some kind of intervention. Despite this, it still works providing the correct methods are followed which are included here.

Webview 2 still requires Windows7 version in the winecfg. I don't know why it keeps breaking with the Windows 8 version which are default but at least we know that 7 works. Keeping it as windows 8 you get the white/black screen issue and cant enter your username or password or see the cloudflare window.

Making changes to the settings of an install - for example changing the runner after the game is installed will not have the desired affect. Know the settings and runner you are going to use and install it using that runner. Switching later on may break the game and removing everything completely and reinstalling will be needed.

One thing I have noticed is that I have had to reinstall the game more than once to get things working. If things are broken for you, and they should be working then remove everything and reinstall everything, this may include bottles, steam, Lutris, Faugus and even nvidia drivers. Once you have this sorted then reinstall the game. Although to some this may seem like an unnecessary task, the state the game is in within a bottle sometimes cannot be undone and the only option is to reinstall.

Running the game
Character Screen
I will say that since day 1, I don't think I have had a major issue accessing the character screen. What I will say is that the character screen has been a bit glitched, textures missing etc. Everything seems to be getting better slowly.

Loading Main Game
Recently I have noted that the shader loading progress has appeared on the screen after the last few patches. This is good, because before it was just a black screen, so at least you can see the progress. Although when there is a patch, there are a ton of shaders to process for the first time logging into the game after the patch. So you have to wait a lot longer to run the shader renders compared to logging in on Windows.

Apart from this, the game loads fine. Although historically I have seen that the game will not get to this point and it will black screen/crash in terms of the CPU will lock up. Running a ps on the Win64Shipping client and killing that will bring your system back, I tried this in windowed mode, with a low res and low detail and it was still crashing the system in 1024x768. However this seems to have been solved now, so I think a runner update and kernel/firmware updates have sorted this out it seems and have have not had the freeze for at least 2 months now.

Performance
Performance is playable but not as smooth as Windows. I am running 3080 intel 9900k with 16GB DDR4000. It handles fine on Windows but on Linux I have to scale down the textures to low. If I use anything else, I am usually OK, but in a town or a busy area with lots of models the system just crashes out without warning. IT does not do this on the Windows partition though

Very rarely the games FPS will reduce by approx 50%. For example I will be riding a horse and then ill join a group and then all of a sudden my FPS goes from about 80 to 30. Quitting the game fixes this. Usually joining a group isn't a problem but I have seen this happen 2 times now.

Interface issues

So there are a few niggles with the interface, but the biggest one is that some abilities just stop working and go dark. Moving is fine, its just anything on the bar disappears - for example grit disappeared for me yesterday alongside a few other abilities when I was tanking and then on the screen there was an error of "error". Some people in the group said that they had seen the same and a re-log sorted it out

The interface seems very slightly slower than Windows. For example, buying/selling/crafting. There seems to be a very slight delay when submitting something on a window in the game compared to Windows. This is to be expected I guess but its just an observation.

Textures sometimes go missing on the character. So I sometimes will start the game wearing no clothes (on the character, not in real life). And it takes a good 10 mins before my textures appear.

The map slows down the system generally. Pressing M in the game has a large performance hit to the game and can cause a game crash. In fact, in a city pressing M within the game on the last patch has crashed the game about 4 times. This is not every time I press M just enough to make me concerned about pressing M in certain areas, for example cities and busy areas.

Clicking on the interfaces sometimes fails. Pressing ESC does not work either. Key shortcuts work, but I cant click on or select anything with the mouse. A relog sorts it out.


Thats about it so far. I have to point out that these are just my experiences on Linux. The game is very playable but there are some things to be aware of. Things have got better and they will continue to do so.

Ludullu wrote: »

Steven keeps mentioning soft friction with almost every damn new system he introduces (crates? gathering pylons? I'm sure I'm forget some other recent addition that was also presented in the form of "this creates soft friction in the world").

Crates are awesome. You will see. If I understand how they were explained correctly, then they're going to be similar to crates in Archeage. Which were trade packs, fish. Physical objects in the world that you had to turn into places. Yeah they will create friction that's for sure.

I will kill the shit out of you if you steal my trade pack. I will stalk you. One time in Archeage, ahh fuk it's a long story but these 2 dudes killed me on my farm and stole my trade pack then I killed them and stole theirs, shit was epic gg.

But I'm not in love with every change that's been made, and I'm a pvper. There's certain things I disagree with. Yeah the pve game is lacking. Pvp game is kinda lacking too lol. But I know what you mean, we need more pve, quests, dungeons, better crafting, more pois, better mobs, the whole 9 yards. All of it, the more the better. I think most pvpers want as good of pve as possible. They should at least, because they're going to be doing a lot of it. It's not always going to be contested either. A lot of times it won't be.

If pver's quit, I mean I don't really know what to say about that. It's a pvx game. Done right, most people, other than the utterly helpless, should be able to advance in the game, albeit at different rates, including pvers. But if you're talking about like a pure pver, no tolerance for anything else. Then yeah I guess lawless content might make them quit. The eternal mystery to me is why this person is playing a pvx game in the first place. Whether they're killed, out tagged, out dps'd, their node is sieged and destroyed, they're guild war'd, node war'd, caravan raided, I mean it's just like, what can ya do. They aint takin none of this shit.

But for everyone else, my main concern is that amongst pvxers, the people who want to play pvx games, they're not all god gamers in elite/mega guilds, with 16 hours to play a day. And so I'd try to make the game as fun and fair as possible, for the largest range I can, of that group. Lots of content, everyone able to engage with the basic, core systems. The game does seem a bit out of balance in favor of the hard core to me. Edit: (And so yeah to your point, lawless zones are something that could make it worse. Imo they need to be done in a way that allows the most people possible to have fun in them, again primarily imo by spreading it out, making it hard for just one zerg to dominate every lawless zone. At the end of the day we know zergs, megaguilds, they're gonna do what they do and have success with it, because it's easy, you can't fully stop it. But spread em out, let smaller groups pick at them, or avoid them at least in their full zerg form. The zergs do have to compete against other zergs, and that balances in a way too. But the zergs, even if they don't realize it, they too want to be spread out. Only the most fanatical zerger can literally just zerg forever and never get tired of it. Most of them eventually will get bored of nothing but zerging. So just help em out early, and help everyone else out at the same time by getting it right from the get go.) We'll see what happens, it's really hard to fully judge right now. Honestly I'm speculating with a lot of what I or anyone says.

I don't remember a Core Pillar that says no Gank Fest areas.
I do remember Steven saying to me during our 2018 Ashen Forge interview that Ashes would not have FFA PvP zones like The Open Seas and the Lawless Lands.

Should be OK that Ashes is not for everyone.
Hopefully it will maintain enough of a population to keep the servers going for at least a decade.

Thanks, that's very clear, actually.

You seem to be even moreso the person who wants the other type of design direction for this game type, than I originally thought.

I don't think Steven intends to make that game, but it's already been made, so thankfully, he doesn't have to.

Thanks Dygz, always helpful to get your perspective (in this case it matches my data/models).

@Ace1234 a question then given your perspective, because I think we've 'soft-disagreed' before on whether or not PvX 'means' integration or not.

Ashes is the game where you are forced to consider both halves of the content all the time. There are games where you aren't, where the distinction is closer to what you describe, where the games themselves describe as 'PvP and PvE' (could easily be because PvX isn't a term that has caught on yet).

But in those games, if you decide to do most PvE things, you can only be delayed by PvP, not 'forced into it' (i.e. the area becomes PvP and you have to wait, or try to PvP a bit).

I would argue that the type of Story Arc content or even Biome-based gameplay that we were discussing in the parent thread fits better in those games than in Ashes, because PvP does not have the capacity to utterly overrun a progressing narrative in those games.

I'm sure Ashes could be designed such that PvP can be suppressed out of 'existence' by doing the narrative/preparation really well (Elite Dangerous works like this for instance, mostly), but it keeps shifting away from that design space so the 'concept' that spawned this thread still seems to apply.

The female Py'Rai looking nothing like the concept from a few years ago is very disappointing. It went from one of the most stylized and unique races ashes has to a generic human-like elf with branches glued on.

The button nose, the flatter wider face, the eye brows, the skin lines, the longer more stylized ears, all missing from the new model. It is so different I am pretty sure the character creator cannot fix it. Please made the default appearance closer to that original concept, you had a really iconic race and it was deleted in favor of a generic human like appearance without any of the charm. I dont think anyone asked for that.