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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.

daveywavey wrote: »

I dunno, seemed kinda jerky. I think the feel of mount-riding in Ashes would be fixed simply by making them a touch faster, and increasing the duration of Dash.

I came back to Ashes yesterday for the Pawkets quest, and the mounts felt wooden as hell. CO's horses felt alive. The active movement, the animations, the sounds and, yeah, the speed too. But just adding speed to Ashes mounts won't do shit. They'll still feel wooden.

So I just hope that the future passes on the mounts will get us much closer to an "alive" feeling.