Best Of

Bard has this already in a way as well. The game will highlight abilities depending on your talents and what melody you are playing.

GreatPhilisopher wrote: »

yeah we are very cooked , there is no hope

Same noses on every race model sized differently, same eyes, oversized cheekbones... FFS! Put the green skin on that Py'rai and you have Ren'kai. HOW ARE THEY NOT SEEING THIS?!

WTF ARE THOSE BANGS?!

Same slightly stylized cr*p and everyone is ugly. Dunir have sunken faces ffs and gnomish bodies! Empyrean still look like meth addicts...

It's like a single person is in charge of character design and 3d modelling and there is no one there to tell them they are doing it wrong...
Wtf!








God, I miss the old character creator-The one Steven used to create Asmongold.

yeah we are very cooked , there is no hope

Vaknar wrote: »

Appreciate all the details here!

Interesting points about terrain shape, variety, and zone identity. The screenshots and comparisons help paint a clear picture of how things feel on the ground right now.

Here are some follow-up questions for those who haven't specified on them in this thread:

• What kinds of landmarks or terrain features make a zone feel memorable to you?
• Do you like big, dramatic features or more subtle stuff that you discover as you explore?
• What kind of biome-specific gameplay would help tie things together for you?

I think what makes a landmark or a zone memorable in general is intentionality in landmarks and connection to an overarching world lore. When a zone doesn't feel memorable, it's usually because of lacking this connective tissue. I feel like when a game tries too hard to be too big or too "realistic", that you lose some of the intent, and then you stop remembering places you've just gone through.

I'm going to try and explain something similar to what @Ace1234 did, but using existing examples from a game 20 years ago, which should show that this kind of thing is possible.

I really like Ro'Maeve in Final Fantasy XI. It's a zone that manages to do a lot of things by playing a set of specific tricks, all of which come together to make a very memorable place.

Lore Connection

The first part is that Ro'Maeve is tied directly into the storyline of the ancient original civilization of Vana'diel. You have these alien Cermet (think concrete/ceramic) spires popping out of the forest straight up, clearly ancient and broken down but still far beyond the current technology used by any of the nations. Not only that, but the zone changes outright during the full moon, glowing and allowing a different path through it that leads to the Hall of the Gods, a pivotal part of the Zilart storyline. None of this is peppered by cutscenes or even much explanation, the world and the story itself make you feel these strange things, and you pick up the scraps later, making your own concept of the world, confused as any adventurer here should be.

Features

Ro'Maeve uses asymmetry due to its ruined nature to guide you through it. When this place was new, maybe it would have been extra confusing to navigate, but by using the ways the ruins break in specific ways in certain places, you can find your way around. It doesn't have many huge notable features at first - mostly just stairs, and the occasional big pillar - until you see the central fountain, the Moon Gates and, when past them, the entrance to the Hall of the Gods that makes you feel like something important is going to happen as you scale the stairs to what looks like an enormous building. Everything is huge, many levels higher than character height, compared to the buildings you encounter in towns that have usually low ceilings or where it's easy to whip your camera near their tops, as opposed to here where you run into the walls. And the beautiful fountain right at the center of it makes it all come together. What's memorable here is the contrasts, of symmetry and asymmetry, of these huge buildings of high technology ruined, and the multiple elevation levels making it feel like it is a much bigger place than it probably is in terms of the actual distance you walk. The biggest success here is the fact that it peppers you with small landmarks so you can remember where you are, allowing the bigger landmarks to be more of an exploratory reward. A collapsed column here or there is a small landmark, and the huge fountain structure is a bigger one - both allow you to create mental markets of more of the zone rather than making them feel samey, without spending that much effort on the smaller parts.

Biome-specific gameplay

This ties back in to the lore connection, which is that only here does the full moon change the area and allow you to pass, among other strange and specific spawn conditions that are unique to this area. I think that focusing on making unique events related to the cross of time or weather and a specific biome make for even more memorable gameplay here.

I'll also propose a counter here of biome-UNspecific gameplay with Dark Ixion. Dark Ixion shows up in a pretty wide range of zones whenever it pleases, and it accentuates the biomes it spawns in a lot. The big hill on West Sarutabaruta (S) is something you learn to recognize as a safe place to relax and take a break from the Campaign battles that happen at the bottom of the hill, as it's rare that the Yagudo come down from this side, but when Ixion is wandering it now it becomes memorable for an entirely different reason. Having a large boss come down and change a former safe haven into something different, or even just having something come out of hiding like the Three-Star monsters that shows up in a specific place with unique/distinct gameplay can also make you think of that part of the zone as a landmark, because it's where the thing shows up.

The weakness that Ashes has right now is that the POIs fail one or more of these checks, and it makes me miss a lot of the stuff in Alpha 1. I feel like I remember the pirate camps in the mountains way up north, or the river crabs, a lot more than I remember any area in Alpha 2 outside of the area around any given node or Lionhold, and even the area around Lionhold is often confusing and doesn't stick as well because the terrain is not variable or there aren't as many of these small landmarks. I hope that you can take this example and rethink how you address what a smaller-scale version of a "point of interest" is. I'm going to post a video of someone wandering Ro'Maeve, and I suggest you turn off the sound and replace it with the music that plays here as it adds to the atmosphere, and their old FRAPS recording doesn't convey that as well.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wlzc_yWIXR8

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hm_zg9KxDBw

Webview2 breaks every time you change the Proton version in the prefix. There is an easy fix for that if you go to Winetricks, in my case in Faugus Launcher:



Then you choose the Standard Prefix


Choose the uninstaller


Select Webview2 runtime and press on change


Then you click on repair


Then it should reinstall and works afterwards


If you get EAC kicked error:


You need to add the AOCClient.exe to steam with this argument and select a Proton version. I use for now Proton-GE 10-4

eval $(%command% LauncherTetherPort=$(ss -ulpn | grep wineserv | awk '{split($4, a , ":"); print a[2]}' ) -USEEOS=0 -DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60)

In my case I added DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60 to limit my FPS to 60 and removed -NOSPLASH. But -USEEOS=0 is needed. For me I get the EAC error if I run it without this argument.

I tried with Faugus Launcher with

-USEEOS=0 DXVK_FRAME_RATE=60

but I get EAC error as well. So at the moment only with steam possible for now like in the past but with improvements without setting webview version and shadermodel since Proton 10.

Also for the people who want to try

-NoShaderCompile

, this sadly also not works so we need to wait this 3-5 min for compiling shaders every start

This will be resolved in the future when AOC gets in better shape. So for now it seems Intrepid did indeed not block EAC and it is some weird communication error to EAC daemon, which why -USEEOS=0 is forcing something in the background to avoid this error. We will se in the future. At least we can play

I can clarify why we (biasedly and hopefully incorrectly) see this as something other than a 'resources' problem, and a thing that has been worrying people in my group (again, hopefully incorrectly) for a while now...

Complaints are asymmetrical, both due to 'culture/behaviour type' and expectations.

I'll use a Throne and Liberty example here because it's so simple and so incredibly ... 'not nuanced'?

Soon after the release of the expansion (perhaps with it, I should check but I'm in a flow) they halved the respawn rate of basically every mob in the world.

Blanket change. Everything just respawns twice as fast. Who asked for this? If we assume it needed to be done because of increased player count, sure. It makes the world feel silly in a lot of places, but whatever, it's not that big a deal...

If it's temporary.

It's still there. The world still feels silly. Some events don't work quite 'right' anymore. Some PvP for spots is just ... entirely weirdly unbalanced now. One off-to-the-side area has mobs respawn almost faster than certain classes can kill them.

This definitely feels bad, and basically since the population distribution is back to 'normal', it's no longer serving any real purpose. But I bet that the number of people who 'complained that the mobs didn't respawn fast enough' (assuming there were any) was higher than the number of people who bothered to give feedback to complain that they respawn too fast now.

This also illustrates the cultural difference. @Ludullu pointed it out in a different post to someone else recently, that a certain subtype of player just 'goes along with changes they don't like as much' because they understand certain needs (I can't say they're actually more patient, but all the ones I personally know are). Whereas impatient people who prefer/seek quicker gratification don't see the validity in 'soft' needs of others.

Basically, you'll get more PvP players complaining that the Devs spent any time on Fishing, than Fishers complaining that the Devs spent time balancing PvP. Both are important, but by 'volume'...

This is a place where data gathering doesn't help as much. You can gather a lot of data about PvP because PvP is competitive and people won't 'give up' their PvP territories just because Balance is currently swingy (looking at you still, Ravagers and ubertanks). But I'm still here fishing up Nature's Jade and unable to make them into anything that makes me enjoy Fishing more, because even if I did yell about how X item needs to have a crafting recipe to make this game more fun, it's not as visceral as 'your balance is shit, NCSoft, fix your game!' from 40 random people.

And I'm not going to respond to those 40 people by going 'shut up, the balance is fine, I need them to focus on Fishing!' because that's stupid.

But I'm sure you know that there are definitely people who respond to Fishing improvements with 'who the fuck even fishes in this game? Why are they wasting time on this?' (verbatim from World Chat).

The people who would enjoy the Weeping Hollow get to do it a few times or 'occasionally', and it's part of their love and experience of the genre, but they're not going to kick up as huge a fuss when someone else yells about how 'this quest isn't rewarding enough, it's such BS', nor possibly even when some Dev changes the Quest/world to be more 'accessible to more players'.

Honestly one of the greatest validations I've received from my time with Ashes of Creation is to get to see all those people passionate about things like immersion and economy before they give up on the game, to remember that they're still at least equal measure if not a majority. When someone next asks "Why did this MMO fail, what was wrong with the playerbase?" I can actually say 'nah, crafting was bad/nonexistent/ignored so game was cooked' and not worry so much that I'm just projecting my biases.

Well, either Intrepid/First Spark will save us, or we wait a few years and some AI will.

Ace1234 wrote: »

I think it comes down to establishing who you want to appeal to, then making sure you create a space for those players, and enough quality content to satisfy them. I don't think you have to try to make sure every piece of content in the game appeals to the lowest common denominator, watering down the quality from each player-type's perspective. I see this as a resources problem to solve rather than a design problem. A kind of bad example (that hopefully won't derail the topic) would be how we talked in the past about corruption and how theoretically you can have a space for more pve focused players (protected by corruption), a space for pvp focused players (arenas), and a space for pvx focused players (lawless areas and areas where the rewards make it worth going corrupt). These concepts are basically seperate games in my mind that will attract different player types. It is less about "how can we make pvp players, pve players, and pvx players satisfied through a unified design" and more about "can we make enough content for each type of player". That being said, if this conflict in player desire was a real concern to Intrepid, I think it is possible to have areas like "The Weeping Hollow" even if that means not all areas are designed in this same exact way. Its just a matter of who Intrepid wants to create content for and how thin they can spread themeselves to satisfy the diverse playerbase. I would think that with a "Reactive world", "Immersive and Engaging Story", and "Player agency" being core design pillars, that the types of players who like this type of content would be a priority, but alas that is just my subjective interpretation of those ideas.

Lawless zones definitely 'changed the entire genre of the game' for me so I don't think I really disagree with you.

Settite wrote: »

One thing that I enjoyed from my time playing the chrono odyssey beta was the random encounters that would occur when traveling. For example a cart would be getting attacked by a group of bandits or wolves. It's simple but it helps to make traveling a bit less monotonous. It also makes me think about the encounters in the dragons dogma remake. There was a gray feeling from being attacked in the middle of the night while in a cart by a cyclops and or a griffin. Kept the blood pumping. I believe expanding a decent bit on these ideas within ashes would help with the lull of traveling great distances.

I'll just hope that Ashes and other games work out how to make these more procedural/truly random.

Curated versions of this content always seem to show up in the 'early stages' of these games and then drop off as the game ages, even though they should technically be easy content to add. But ofc, who has time to complain about 'the mildly lower percentage of cool random OW stuff?' (me, I have time, I'll complain)