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RobotronOG wrote: »

Are we really charging people to test your game for you? I think I am going to come down to the office and get an interview of why this is.

Monday sound good? 9ish?

Yes, yes they are. They're searching for people that want to actively support development and test game systems and loops for a long period of time VS people that just want to troll and teabag for a few days. Which if you've paid to test, you are "more likely" to help test and "less likely" to be a douche. Not 100% certainty of course.

Another fresh account writing meaningless posts /yawn

In PvP, which Area of Effect (AoE) abilities, should be telegraphed to enemies?
I guess the huge really powerful ones. But, part of the skill in PvP is recognising what the other player is using and reacting to it. I'm confident you'll sort this one out yourselves.

How clearly should AoEs be to enemy and friendly players?
AoEs should always be visible, that way you know where you can move and can sort out your positioning. If it's a damaging AoE you can keep clear, if it's a support AoE you can move into it. Can't do that if you can't see it.
Only thing is that the effects shouldn't be too high that you can't see any of the players running around in it, or too bright that it just consumes everything you need to see and react to.

Do your thoughts differ in a PvE setting?
Nope. I want to see where my group's doing damage, I want to see where there might be synergies I can use. I want to see where my Cleric and Bard have thrown some AoE healing/buffs down.


You've not let us down so far. Keep doing what you're doing!

Suseg wrote: »

Agripinensia wrote: »

People outside of Software Development rarely understand that what actually takes massive amounts of time isn't the stuff you see - its the stuff you don't see.

The condescending tone, yikes.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand they're actively developing a lot of systems, but there's nothing they have showcased or informed the community that shows actual meaningful progress except for some parts of the combat and the seasons rotations. I don't doubt Steven and the team have a lot of passion, that's what made me start following the project years ago, but there are legit reasons to be worried.

Few months ago, we saw the netcode/servers presentation which was nice, but the problem is that we haven't seen it in action working well. Last time I checked, when they had that MINI node wars (and I saw MINI because they are supposed to be like 10x bigger than that one in terms of players) a lot of players were teleporting instead of running and there was a clear desync constantly. Even Steven talked about it. So not even the netcode part is ready. Do I have to explain to you Mr Know It All, that getting that to work is literally the most important thing in an MMO and especially one that wants to have massive battles like L2 did?

For a game that claims it'll be able to have 250 vs 250 battles, to struggle with 40 vs 40 after years IS INDEED VERY WORRYSOME. There's nothing wrong with saying it out loud.

For a game that wants to have 100 different systems, that after 3-4 years not ONE of them is fully functioning is indeed worrysome or at least a reason to be skeptical about the game's development.

You think I'm the only one who thinks like this? Read any AoC related space outside this forum.

Here's what's actually going to happen, the way I see it. This game will be in A2 for at least 6+ years at the pace they're going which is a crying shame (and that's assuming they don't have any big issues) because if a good PvP MMO comes out, this one's toast. Let's also keep in mind that half the people waiting for this MMO are boomers (cause every single L2 player is a boomer with a few exceptions), so hopefully we don't die before it's out.

We all want a good game and we knew it'd take some time but I expected to be able to play it before I grow a grey beard. It's disappointing.

And all of what you said is fine. Except you complained about the lack of content in biomes, about biomes themselves not being "finished", and other bs that has nothing to do with actual systems.

I disagree that Alpha 2 will run for 6+ years, obviously.

---

Regarding the visuals, I feel like they can also be subjective.

Myself, I haven't really noticed a large drop in quality. Actually, every new stream we get, I feel like the game looks more like an actual game.
This is obviously going to be worked on, the lighting, effects, animations.

I did say animations looked bad, but I'm aware they're going to improve. I know they said countless times that visuals will improve, as well as visual fxs' for classes.

It's fine to provide feedback, and say x looks not great, or y needs improving. And that's what the original post was kind of all about. But then the replies were completely different, choosing to complain about it, saying random stuff about the development, etc.

The problem is it's been 3+ years and the base is: only few races, no augments, -2 classes, and again, the ONE Biome for A2

All of which are not systems, but content that's added on top. The base is the systems, not classes, races, augments, or biomes.

Suseg wrote: »

Agripinensia wrote: »

People outside of Software Development rarely understand that what actually takes massive amounts of time isn't the stuff you see - its the stuff you don't see.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand they're actively developing a lot of systems, but there's nothing they have showcased or informed the community that shows actual meaningful progress except for some parts of the combat and the seasons rotations. I don't doubt Steven and the team have a lot of passion, that's what made me start following the project years ago, but there are legit reasons to be worried.

The job of open development isn't to cater to your worries that the game won't be published. The game will publish by the time all components are functional. You being confident that the game will publish isn't a significant parameter in that process.
The goal for the project management behind the processes is to time things, so as much as possible may get worked on simultaneously.
The goal of the streams is to collect user opinions, not to assuage user concerns.
In the long run, the goal is also to generate hype and willingness to pay for the product. But that doesn't mean you're owed proof right now. You'll get proof when there's something for you to buy. Alpha isn't something for you to buy; it's you contributing to the development process.

It's a lot of effort to summarise the state of progression of all the elements of the game.
They'd have to go into a ton of detail about unfinished assets and systems in order to give you a full picture of how close to being playable each biome, dungeon, quest line, and encounter type is. Giving you that information isn't their goal in the first place, and it certainly isn't worth dozens of work hours and project leader coordination to give you a verified summarised presentation of all the progress and all the shortcomings.

More importantly, even if they did go through that effort, 3 months later you'd be here complaining about anything presented in those summaries that didn't pan out as planned. Giving you more details will only make the problem worse.
Because this entire thread is evidence that you're not cut out to handle uncertainty. And uncertainty is the expected default condition for a project of this scale.

The last thread on this subject is 1-2 weeks old, by the way.

Here's my highly thorough and unambiguous comment from that thread, explaining why you shouldn't expect to be kept in the loop about how far each aspect of the game design has advanced, or where the roadblocks are in the development:
And by extension why you shouldn't view a lack of information on these subjects as an indication that they're not progressing at a sufficient pace: .

Artharion wrote: »

However, when I watch the video from yesterday, even though it’s clear it’s the same game, I see the color palette is very different, there’s a lot of fog, and even the character animations look worse:

What could be the reason for such a difference in only 4 months, and why has this direction been taken? Could it be that the Node Wars video is from some dev-build that we won't actually see on October 25 during the first stage of Alpha 2?

No, it's much simpler than that. The majority of what you're noticing is simply the difference between the scenes. Direction of the sun, time of day, flora, building architecture, the scene as a whole being more impressive when 50 fighters are ready to follow their commander's lead.
Everything they did in that stream was set up to look great zoomed in. The October stream represented PvE questing. It's inherently less glorious than a large-scale PvP battle, so it'll look less glorious, because there's less happening that you could look at.

Click on the parts of the current stream where Steven is looking and running away from the sun, and you'll notice the graphics will look much better than the average scene in the dungeon or looking into the sun. (Though some of the lens flare scenes are pretty gorgeous, as well.)

Another thing to mention is that Steven really likes what most players call fog. He likes atmospheric dust in the rugged landscape, and glaring sunshine casting rays while the player is looking towards mountain tops.
Some things I'd remind you to consider about this:
1) You're seeing more of it than you will during a regular play session, because Steven actively looks towards the light source.
2) The locations that looked too grey/foggy to you will look different during different seasons and different times of day with the sun in different positions.
3) Different locations also render differently on YouTube and Twitch because their compression is really bad at handling noise, and scenes with less contrast (lower lighting, more fog, more objects with small details that render as a blend of colours from a distance) have a lot of noise. So some of the fogginess might look substantially worse in some of the streams than others - let alone the game.
4) Fog and dust effects can be turned off, if you don't like them. Sure, ideally you want them to be good enough to keep them on, but just keep the option in mind when you blow these detailed issues up into problems.
5) It's work in progress, and many people commented on it after the dragon boss fight dev-update, so it's likely there will be several overhauls before release.

Suseg wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

There is no reason to have quests in a build for a live stream if they don't intend to show those quests.

To me that sounds like insane copium. "They're just hiding it in other builds". I don't have as much faith as you.

I used to, but after the keys and after the broken promises I'm skeptical about everything.

i thought the same up until the last livestream, the reason being is yes this game is in development that is understood by everyone, but the fact of the matter is over the last three years the livestreams have been going backwards, the game looked Spectacular up until about 6 months ago when we saw the real in game footage of the game that looks absolutely NOTHING like the footage that was shown in the showcases beforehand.

furthermore the footage just keeps getting worse and worse up until the past two showcases witch to me seems like intrepid know the NDA is about to be lifted and they can't keep pretending anymore so they are showing it for what it is, also adding a huge layer of dense smog and over the top particle effects to try to hide the fact that what we have been shown and advertised to buy into, is not the game that we are going to get. so i would HIGHLY doubt they are hiding the weathering showcase build in another build

on that note, i don't think the game looks per say bad, i think that the team are improving bit by bit, but i do think that the game has no soul and the art style is extremley bland and just UE 5 assets resized and placed over and over, comparing the A2 world to the world we saw in A1 the graphics are a little better but the soul of the world is all but gone, and yes i think it is warrented to have concerns with the rate of progress, yes its an alpha, no its not an alpha 1 anymore, we are now launching A2 we should be seeing the start of some systems that are here to stay with some polish


also ... back to the main topic, this point has been raised time and time again and the forum posts usually go the other way, the OP asked why the game looks so much worse than it did 6 months ago, color pallet is terrible, graphics are blury, and visuals went from astonishing to pretty average for a mmo in 2025, let alone when it launches in 2035, so back to the question at hand, what's the reason?, the OP didn't even post the best examples, go back and watch these showcases vs the showcase we just had

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


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