Best Of

Saabynator wrote: »

Its like making a good dish, you take a bunch of good food and put it together.

The issue here is that in both cases, with food and with game design, it still takes knowledge and experience to get this right on a large scale.

You could take all the best foods you like and put them in to one dish, but if you dont know how food works, there is no guarantee it will work.

I like taleggio cheese, and i like salmon. There is no world in which these two foods should ever be on the same plate. Ideally, there is no world where these two foods should even be in concurrent courses in a multi-course meal.

On the other hand, white chocolate and caviar go together incredibly well, if executed by someone that can get the balance perfect.

Same with game design, different aspects that are great in some games wont all necessarily fit together in one game and result in a good game.

Placing limitations on crafters being able to get to the top end of crafting that only organized guilds are likely to be able to achieve can be a good mechanic. Making the vast majority of items in your game be player crafted can be a good thing. Putting these two things together, however, isn't necessarily a good thing.

Ashes is full of contradictions like this.

Ace1234 wrote: »

@Azherae

But the point is moreso that Intrepid is in a bad spot when it comes to that aspect. Small, 'less experienced' studio without the ability to pull on the resources of a big MMORPG producer. Most MMOs have a similar enough basis that if you wanted to add all this stuff Ashes talks about, it would be easy.

New games don't 'not add' things Ashes is offering 'because they can't'. They don't add them because they don't think people are going to want them/they think it isn't worth it.

If Amazon Games thought those things would work in , they'd have added them to New World instead of 'taking them away'. Which also means that if Intrepid 'proves' that people want to play a game with variable Nodes, we'll see more modern MMOs adding them.

This is why people end up focused on all the things that 'make Ashes unpleasant', because they 'know' they only have to wait a bit longer (possibly less long than even for AoC) for a game that does the same things but less unpleasant.

As a bystander to this convo, I think it would be beneficial for the point you are making (less for me, maybe moreso for others), to provide some specifics to illustrate that "exposition", since I myself see a few different ways of interpreting that.

I could see someone reading that and thinking "Azherae just doesn't have faith in Intrepid's vision and capabilties, but there is nothing inherently wrong with the potential audience demand/reception, and Riot could pull it off if they wanted to, so why not Intrepid, you're just a doubter"


So I think it would be in your best interest and help avoid potential misunderstandings for you to clarify-

Are you highlighting moreso the potential inability to execute financially, or even content quantity wise because of the smaller team?

Or is the point moreso about the lack of cohesion in the design? (Bringing various micro experiences/audience subsets together)

Or is it that the design is actually cohesive (the macro experience), to appeal to a certain player type, but the concern is the size of that subset?

Etc.

Hm, ok, I see that (I fell into the trap of thinking 'I'm always ranting about that, surely no one wants to hear it more', but there's always the 'first time reader').

Therefore as an example, Ashes of Creation has talked about:

8x8 combinations of Archetypes to make unique classes.
FF11 is 20x20. Throne and Liberty is about to be 9x9 (I'll spare people the combinatorics, just assume that there are two styles of every combination even if they don't distinguish the combinations themselves). TL already contains more Augments than I even expect to see in Ashes, and technically more than Ashes has indicated or promised.

Social Organizations and related perks/relationships
Elite Dangerous is entirely made of this, and Throne and Liberty would implement this faster than Ashes would (a currently stronger base scaffolding), and the form of PvP/PvE separation that many players prefer, while also using the implementations that keep it 'safer' from bad actors. So while it 'doesn't exist now', if somehow something 'proves' that people really want this, it will probably appear.

Nodes
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/elite-dangerous-trailblazers-update-3-now-live.636973/
or
https://wiki.albiononline.com/wiki/Cities

The amount of work required to make sure that Nodes are fun and not some of the most 'degenerate' gameplay possible in all of gaming will be monumental (and I am here cheering all the way, Intrepid). And Ashes is still not actually poised to be the primary/optimal deliverer of this content type precisely because Albion Online would do it better with minimal relative effort. That's practically guaranteed.

Dynamic World, Weather, Mob Spawns
I don't think most people who follow MMOs think that Ashes is going to revolutionize this aspect, it's old, and fairly common now Therefore any benefit would come from 'how it affects gameplay, either combat or one of the other three above' (let's just count Archetypes and such under Combat actually). But, again, this is already a thing in modern PvP/PvE MMORPGs, and the influences of weather and a dynamic world on PvX isn't 'redefined' by slightly more focus on that PvX-ness. If it rains at Frenzied Queen Bellandir, the experience isn't vastly different than Ashes would provide relative to this aspect. If anything, TL is more 'interesting' because we do have something that is a 'stand-in' for 'social orgs' and that is that the most active person on the server can control the rain once per day.

So, Albion could flesh out Nodes and Weather. Throne and Liberty could flesh out Boonstones to make Node-like relationships similar to the old FF11 ones or an improved version of the BDO ones. Both games already have established combat depth that Ashes is still muddling through.

If this becomes a 'race' to 'the endpoint that Ashes promised', Albion will win, TL will finish right after, and Ashes of Creation will pass the finish line 2 years later imo. We'd be banking on Naval Combat and then it's a race against Archeage 2 even considering that game's pivot.

The main 'unique' thing Ashes 'allows people to do' that other games are almost desperately trying to limit/solve, is zerg.

And a nontrivial chunk of Ashes' original, fairly invested/dedicated audience is opposed to this 'feature'.

Xeeg wrote: »

ryujinjakka74 wrote: »

Simple and short...Is this game PvP enabled all the time as in you can get ganked out in the world just minding your own business or inside of a dungeon? We would like to know before we plop down $100 each to join the alpha.

The way it is set up right now, this rarely happens. If you choose not to fight back, they cant kill you without going red. If they go red, a mark appears on the map and everyone can see that someone is red. If they die red, they drop 3 items. Dropping 3 items can be losing dozens of hours of work and is almost never worth whatever you might be killing people for.

So technically you can be killed in the open world randomly, but practically it never happens outside designated open PVP regions.

Best response, take my like. I’d like to add something: just like in Archeage, when players turned into pirates and entered cities, everyone would join forces to kill them. I think something similar will happen here if someone kills you in a spot and goes red-flagged.

Ludullu wrote: »

Saabynator wrote: »

Caravan system. The sieges. Nodes. Player run citys with political systems. World that changes by what citys are big. There is actually a ton of new stuff. Not all of it is brand spanking, but it has not put together like this. AoC is very creative with the lego.

As Azherae implied, pretty much all of that stuff has already been done in other games (mostly space ones), but even outside of the space stuff:

• Caravans were in AA and in Silk Road (afaik)
• Sieges were in L2
• Nodes, as I said, we got no damn clue how exactly they'll end up being design by release
• I guess player-led cities might be somewhat unique in fantasy, but I coulda sworn I've heard about something very similar before.
• Node-lvl-related changes remain to be seen too. I hope it's as deep and intricate as was promised before

A somewhat rudimentary combo of those 2 last points was in L2 with the Manor system. Castle owners could add different items to mob loot tables in their region, which was both a political tool that attracted players (somewhat akin to node buildings in Ashes) and was related to the state of the region, cause if the castle was unowned - that loot would not be present and gameplay related to it would not exist in that region.

L2 also had a religious system that opened up dungeons based on player activity, so, in a way, that is another similar system.

And that's just examples from almost a single 20y.o. game. I'm sure I'm missing several fantasy mmos that had either very similar systems or literally the same ones. And, as was said above, space games literally have the exact same systems.

You are thinking of Albion online player cities I think. The mayorship system itself is unique as far as I know, but player built cities are still a thing even in other fantasy mmo's. I think this gets to the heart of Ashes current predicament. You can go on and on about how the game isn't for everyone, but Ashes has kind of always talked about itself as a 'special' and 'unique' thing that made that 'not for everyone' really mean something. Being an exclusive niche focused thing has no value unless that niche is offering something actually unique that you cannot find elsewhere.

In reality to me this game is just a spiritual successor to Dark Ages of Camelot, maybe L2 if they manage to shape things up further. That's not a bad thing, but this game is so people centric that it needs people. It is a social game with systems that only make sense at a certain player count. It needs to recapture that feeling of 'specialness' going forward and play to its strengths. All I see right now is a game that has under invested in everything that would make it great and over invested in all of the things that would make it 'not for everyone'. It is a real shame too because I keep seeing mmo's that are starting to deliver on the promises AoC made 6-8 years ago. Clearly the market wanted some of the stuff AoC was preaching and I definitely credit them at least in small part for the mmo renaissance of the past few years.

Yes AoC is not for everyone. But if it doesn't do something better or distinct from the games from which the audience comes from that AoC is meant to cater to, it isn't going to have an audience. They are going to keep playing on private servers or some of these new high quality mmos.

Hello! Ashes of Creation is taking a very different path. Intrepid is doing something rare: full transparency, real community engagement, and building systems that are meant to last, not just impress at launch. The development is slow, yes, but it’s deliberate and deep.

This isn’t a copy-paste MMO. It’s a project that’s actually listening and iterating during testing. That alone already puts it ahead of where Crowfall was.

We're still in Alpha, but every test brings visible progress. I’d rather wait longer for something truly groundbreaking than rush into another shallow experience.

We’re in good hands. Let’s keep the faith.

As noted, it's not the same type of statistics and therefore not the same type of comparison.

Intrepid has managed to do a thing (at least from that chart) that I personally find really... 'scummy'?

Proving statistical issues to new players takes so long that just 'coming up with a new system' even if a statistician could eyeball it and go 'yeah that's definitely worse' from experience, is a House Bet.

"Prove that this new distribution of probabilities is also rigged/bad and not secretly just the perfect one that will solve all the issues that other games have with this system." is a real tactic that modern games can use.

I'm not even going to bother specifically claiming anything, I'm not interested in even doing the math for this particular probability obfuscation, especially since everything is subject to change. it's barely even worth having the conversation but I can at least let Intrepid know that I bet the consensus response from my group members will be [insert string of banworthy vitriol] when they see that chart.

I'll just remind them that such things have no meaning at this stage.

Ludullu wrote: »

Sophisticus wrote: »

Heavy power scaling, one shots, long and boring grind, open world PvP and the fact that a few RNG-happy enhancers set the market price will lead to the same problems.

Those 2 points in bold seem like the real problem here. Rng enchantment is not really a problem when it doesn't lead to one-shots.

even if it doesnt give you that tremendous power, it will still make difference. And being RNG means some people will get lucky and other unlucky with it. So it creates differences for players based on luck.
These differences lead to bigger differences along the way, when those with the successful enchants get the advantage when fighting bosses and ect. So they only increase their lead that all began from RNG.

Its very similar to Pay to Progress. Just you dont pay with money, but with your luck. The result is the same.
You get Starter boost that only gets bigger

ryujinjakka74 wrote: »

Simple and short...Is this game PvP enabled all the time as in you can get ganked out in the world just minding your own business or inside of a dungeon? We would like to know before we plop down $100 each to join the alpha.

yeah... "This game isn't for everyone...and that's OK"