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If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Best Of
The Problem With Ashes of Creation Biomes and More
First, I want to say I appreciate the devs and their work, like adding zones quickly and constantly touching them up. This isn't meant to take away from their work — it's just feedback (and a bit of a rant), and it's going to be a little long.
After looking at the zones for quite a while now, and with the addition of the first pass of the Jundark (well, more like Junlight), I sadly have to say that none of them seem to capture the feeling of what they actually are, due to a few problems.
1st: The Riverlands
The Riverlands is the most complete zone out of all of them, but it's just so boring and uninteresting. It feels flat, and everything looks the same — same trees, randomly scattered everywhere, no zones with different types of trees, no open lush grassy windy fields, nothing. There are POIs, but none of them make you stop and think, "Wow, that looks cool, I want to explore that."
The only one that gives a little bit of that feeling is Carphin, and while it will change, right now it's just a fancier-looking cave (aka a pocket dungeon) where you aimlessly grind mobs.
That's the Riverlands, and the problems of randomness, lack of interesting POIs, and the whole zone looking the same instead of having unique areas inside the biome carry over into the Tropics and the newly added Jundark. The desert has another problem too.
2nd: The Tropics
Same problem as the Riverlands — it all looks the same. There's nothing interesting. This one barely has any POIs (and I get that comes later), but there's no point if they're going to end up like the Riverlands ones. I also get that there aren't many different types of tropical environments you can make, but they didn't even try to begin with.
There's another problem that adds to all the zones looking the same, which I'll touch on later.
3rd: The Jundark
The newly added biome — while it's a first pass — you can already tell it has the same problems. It's just one tree repeated everywhere. Right now it looks more like a new part of the Tropics than a jungle.
I understand they can't make it super dense because of performance reasons, but they don't need to do that. It's all about atmosphere and presentation.
All they had to do was make giant trees with big leaves, vines and branches intertwined with each other, covering the sky and barely letting any sunlight through. Smaller, but still bigger-than-normal trees should fill the lower levels, with tall grass and vegetation like banana trees, totems, and whatever else fits a jungle.
A jungle should be dark and green everywhere you look. It should barely have any light — it should be dark, gloomy, wet, damp, and feel dangerous all the time. It should be filled with tall and lush vegetation that blocks your view, where you can easily get lost. It should have dark clouds above it 90% of the time, be rainy most of the time, and have fog constantly filling the area.
And it already feels scarce; whatever POIs and roads they add will only make the "jungle" part feel even more non-existent with how much space those nodes take up.
4th and lastly: The Desert
I can tell they put more effort and thought into this one — finally, a biome that doesn't look exactly the same all over and has different, mini-like desert biomes inside it.
Yet, none of them get to shine. Why? Because they're all mashed into each other — a piece of this here, a piece of that there, etc.
Why is that though? I can see there are different types of deserts within the biome — why not make each of them their own mini-biome instead?
You could've made a big Grand Canyon with a node on top of it instead of that random node on top of a random rock in the middle of the sandy desert.
You could've had caves under it with spiders, snakes, etc., even a pocket dungeon or an actual dungeon deep below.
Then at the end, it could transition into an area with dry ground and lots of desert trees and cacti where the Minotaurs are, and place a node there.
Then that could go into a giant area of sand and dunes (which, by the way, looks like Play-Doh instead of sand???), where if you go right, you find an oasis with a node area nearby.
If you go left, you find an area filled with the bones of giant monsters and a node nearby that meshes with that boney aesthetic. Same with the rest of the nodes — mesh them into their environment.
If you go forward, you find that god spike with a dangerous atmosphere and lots of dunes and monsters leading to it, etc.
Remember the desert showcase? It felt good because it showcased those areas properly and let them shine — not like what we have right now.
while i admit that a part of the lack of interest in the POIs that exist is already knowing that there is nothing to do there other than grinding mobs that is still just a small part of the problem.
Other problems with the biomes:
1. The same-looking random rock formations that are in every zone and take up way too much space for no reason.
2. The grass and lack of vegetation — so scarce. And whatever happened to the tall, lush grass we saw in all those showcases? If their fix to the view distance was to have these small, short, bad-looking patches of grass all over the world, then I'd rather have less view distance but better-looking vegetation. Also, it didn't even fix the problem because most of it still disappears at just a little bit of distance. It's supposed to be a world that no man set foot in for hundreds or thousands of years, yet it looks like it's been maintained and mowed on a weekly basis...
3.The nodes — right now, the nodes lack the assets and layouts needed to blend and combine well with their environment. They and the zones also lack ambient effects, small wildlife, thick vegetation, etc. I get that the node thing is something that will come with time, so it's not really a big problem for now, but I hope they do it right.
4.Last but not least: it's like Intrepid forgot that this is a fantasy world — high fantasy, last time I checked the wiki. They're not chained to making only real-life, realistic assets, areas, and POIs. There's barely any fantasy feel to any of these zones and areas. Just because the Tropics in real life don't have much variety, they could still create their own tropical areas with a touch of fantasy — same with the other zones.Same with the mobs — a huge amount of them are just real-life animals: elephants, rhinos, lions, bears, otters, and a huge number of random human bandits who somehow seem to have entered Verra before everyone else... If you're going to add those, at least give them a fantasy look and make them bigger. We have spiders, scorpions, and frogs that are huge and have a fantasy look to them, so why are the elephants, rhinos, and hippos look normal and so tiny by comparison? If I wanted to look at real-life animals, I would just go to a zoo. Please make more weird, huge, and small creatures!
5. pick a style : the environments are too cartoony , the sand in the desert feels and looks like play-dough instead of sand while the characters look horrible like skinny ugly realistic looking drug addicts and you cant make a decent looking character in the CC non the less an actual good looking one
6. i dont know if this is just me but the scale of everything dosent look right , espically the environments they just feel and look smaller than they should be and characters are too small.
PS: another positive of having mini biomes where nodes reside instead of the same looking place everywhere is that it would lessen the fatigue of seeing the same view over and over again as more likely than not like at least 60-80% of nodes gonna be the same human looking nodes instead of other races but if at least the area a node is in is different from the node next to it and so on, with the unique area seeping into the node it self it will make it look and feel a lot more unique and more personalized to the citizens of that node and you could make it so these node zones are more abundant in a certain biome material like miraleth node with all the basalt around it.
Apologies if this went a bit too long or felt a bit ranty — and for any mistakes, since English is not my first or second language so i did use an AI to fix any mistakes and make it better presented.
While I might have forgotten to add or missed some stuff, this should conclude what I think about the biomes so far.
After looking at the zones for quite a while now, and with the addition of the first pass of the Jundark (well, more like Junlight), I sadly have to say that none of them seem to capture the feeling of what they actually are, due to a few problems.
1st: The Riverlands
The Riverlands is the most complete zone out of all of them, but it's just so boring and uninteresting. It feels flat, and everything looks the same — same trees, randomly scattered everywhere, no zones with different types of trees, no open lush grassy windy fields, nothing. There are POIs, but none of them make you stop and think, "Wow, that looks cool, I want to explore that."
The only one that gives a little bit of that feeling is Carphin, and while it will change, right now it's just a fancier-looking cave (aka a pocket dungeon) where you aimlessly grind mobs.
That's the Riverlands, and the problems of randomness, lack of interesting POIs, and the whole zone looking the same instead of having unique areas inside the biome carry over into the Tropics and the newly added Jundark. The desert has another problem too.
2nd: The Tropics
Same problem as the Riverlands — it all looks the same. There's nothing interesting. This one barely has any POIs (and I get that comes later), but there's no point if they're going to end up like the Riverlands ones. I also get that there aren't many different types of tropical environments you can make, but they didn't even try to begin with.
There's another problem that adds to all the zones looking the same, which I'll touch on later.
3rd: The Jundark
The newly added biome — while it's a first pass — you can already tell it has the same problems. It's just one tree repeated everywhere. Right now it looks more like a new part of the Tropics than a jungle.
I understand they can't make it super dense because of performance reasons, but they don't need to do that. It's all about atmosphere and presentation.
All they had to do was make giant trees with big leaves, vines and branches intertwined with each other, covering the sky and barely letting any sunlight through. Smaller, but still bigger-than-normal trees should fill the lower levels, with tall grass and vegetation like banana trees, totems, and whatever else fits a jungle.
A jungle should be dark and green everywhere you look. It should barely have any light — it should be dark, gloomy, wet, damp, and feel dangerous all the time. It should be filled with tall and lush vegetation that blocks your view, where you can easily get lost. It should have dark clouds above it 90% of the time, be rainy most of the time, and have fog constantly filling the area.
And it already feels scarce; whatever POIs and roads they add will only make the "jungle" part feel even more non-existent with how much space those nodes take up.
4th and lastly: The Desert
I can tell they put more effort and thought into this one — finally, a biome that doesn't look exactly the same all over and has different, mini-like desert biomes inside it.
Yet, none of them get to shine. Why? Because they're all mashed into each other — a piece of this here, a piece of that there, etc.
Why is that though? I can see there are different types of deserts within the biome — why not make each of them their own mini-biome instead?
You could've made a big Grand Canyon with a node on top of it instead of that random node on top of a random rock in the middle of the sandy desert.
You could've had caves under it with spiders, snakes, etc., even a pocket dungeon or an actual dungeon deep below.
Then at the end, it could transition into an area with dry ground and lots of desert trees and cacti where the Minotaurs are, and place a node there.
Then that could go into a giant area of sand and dunes (which, by the way, looks like Play-Doh instead of sand???), where if you go right, you find an oasis with a node area nearby.
If you go left, you find an area filled with the bones of giant monsters and a node nearby that meshes with that boney aesthetic. Same with the rest of the nodes — mesh them into their environment.
If you go forward, you find that god spike with a dangerous atmosphere and lots of dunes and monsters leading to it, etc.
Remember the desert showcase? It felt good because it showcased those areas properly and let them shine — not like what we have right now.
while i admit that a part of the lack of interest in the POIs that exist is already knowing that there is nothing to do there other than grinding mobs that is still just a small part of the problem.
Other problems with the biomes:
1. The same-looking random rock formations that are in every zone and take up way too much space for no reason.
2. The grass and lack of vegetation — so scarce. And whatever happened to the tall, lush grass we saw in all those showcases? If their fix to the view distance was to have these small, short, bad-looking patches of grass all over the world, then I'd rather have less view distance but better-looking vegetation. Also, it didn't even fix the problem because most of it still disappears at just a little bit of distance. It's supposed to be a world that no man set foot in for hundreds or thousands of years, yet it looks like it's been maintained and mowed on a weekly basis...
3.The nodes — right now, the nodes lack the assets and layouts needed to blend and combine well with their environment. They and the zones also lack ambient effects, small wildlife, thick vegetation, etc. I get that the node thing is something that will come with time, so it's not really a big problem for now, but I hope they do it right.
4.Last but not least: it's like Intrepid forgot that this is a fantasy world — high fantasy, last time I checked the wiki. They're not chained to making only real-life, realistic assets, areas, and POIs. There's barely any fantasy feel to any of these zones and areas. Just because the Tropics in real life don't have much variety, they could still create their own tropical areas with a touch of fantasy — same with the other zones.Same with the mobs — a huge amount of them are just real-life animals: elephants, rhinos, lions, bears, otters, and a huge number of random human bandits who somehow seem to have entered Verra before everyone else... If you're going to add those, at least give them a fantasy look and make them bigger. We have spiders, scorpions, and frogs that are huge and have a fantasy look to them, so why are the elephants, rhinos, and hippos look normal and so tiny by comparison? If I wanted to look at real-life animals, I would just go to a zoo. Please make more weird, huge, and small creatures!
5. pick a style : the environments are too cartoony , the sand in the desert feels and looks like play-dough instead of sand while the characters look horrible like skinny ugly realistic looking drug addicts and you cant make a decent looking character in the CC non the less an actual good looking one
6. i dont know if this is just me but the scale of everything dosent look right , espically the environments they just feel and look smaller than they should be and characters are too small.
PS: another positive of having mini biomes where nodes reside instead of the same looking place everywhere is that it would lessen the fatigue of seeing the same view over and over again as more likely than not like at least 60-80% of nodes gonna be the same human looking nodes instead of other races but if at least the area a node is in is different from the node next to it and so on, with the unique area seeping into the node it self it will make it look and feel a lot more unique and more personalized to the citizens of that node and you could make it so these node zones are more abundant in a certain biome material like miraleth node with all the basalt around it.
Apologies if this went a bit too long or felt a bit ranty — and for any mistakes, since English is not my first or second language so i did use an AI to fix any mistakes and make it better presented.
While I might have forgotten to add or missed some stuff, this should conclude what I think about the biomes so far.
Re: Broke the Server :'(
They know. Servers are being restarted at the time of this post.
Re: Broke the Server :'(
I'd like to add that we were crossing the borders between the north of Lionshold and Joeva right as everyone crashed.
Broke the (Vyra) Lionhold server worker with a Caravan Train
We were traveling through LH with a caravan train without nearly 20 caravans and a lot of defenders (some on mounts) when we all get kicked off and cannot log back in. Characters walking into the area after are also kicked off.
Re: Intrepid... Devs.. Steven... Corruption needs to be addressed...
Dunno how it was in AA, but such stories from L2 always revolve around Guild Wars, not lawless zones or PK-based pvping.what happened to the stories of hour-long bosses with guilds fighting each other to contest that steven used to talk about? man that would be AMAZING content....
This was one of the reasons why I was surprised to learn that Steven didn't want "just kill each other" type of wars in Ashes. And now it's obvious that this approach is not really working out for the game.
And in L2 it was the guilds that would drop the war tag (cause in L2 wars weren't forced) would be the laughing stock instead. Obviously the gaming culture has shifted to being a little weakling and not even attempting to properly contest content, so I think that forced wars are the way to address that. But those should still come with a proper cost. And ideally we'd have "POI-contest" wars that would give goals, higher rewards and motivation to fight over a POI, within a certain timeframe.
Though I know that those very weaklings would either surrender immediately or just bring their 2nd or 3rd sub-guild to that spot, just to avoid the war. HAVING ONLY GEAR DECAY AS DEATH PENALTY WOULD ALSO HELP MOTIVATE PEOPLE BTW, STEEEEEVEN!
As for corruption, yes, I agree that the first couple of kills should have a really limited impact on the threat to the killer, though PK count costs should counterbalance that.
But ultimately, I say that it's still too early to ask for either of those, cause I want other parts of the game figured out and implemented first. And yes, it's probably separate teams working on any of those features, but considering the overlap of systems and the potential to just break the game - I'd imagine that implementation of broad system changes could fuck things up in a major way. So, stabilize the game first and then add/change pvp features.
I'm sure it's annoying to redo the whole "server start suffering" dance again, but we've done it twice already (and for some even more), so what's another one?
Ludullu
2
Cheaters Island
Okay so the game is being delayed. Let's take a look back at what really slowed us down over the past couple months. Was it that the development of the game? No not at all
Coming back from Christmas break Intrepid Studios spent the next several weeks dealing with all the cheaters and all that they had done going over the data. And it didn't end there either.
They've been trying to compensate for what the cheaters have done and trying to balance things out for those 90% of the players that just want to play a game.
They are literally stealing development time away from this game. And the sad thing is only a few of them maybe a few hundred from what we see from the reports from Intrepid Studios. What should we do?
The game Grand Theft Auto had a wonderful way of dealing with cheaters. It was called cheaters Island. All the cheaters were banished to cheaters Island and they were left there to do all the cheating and exploiting that they wanted to without interfering with all the regular players that just wanted to play the game.
In my opinion I believe that there should be a cheater server. If you are a cheater caught exploiting you should be transferred your character and your ability to log in only to the cheaters server. Let them exploit let them figure out all the ways that you can mess up the game. Who would they be hurting? Just the other exploiters. Let the rest of us test this game like we will be playing the game at lunch fairly working together or against each other lol.
Coming back from Christmas break Intrepid Studios spent the next several weeks dealing with all the cheaters and all that they had done going over the data. And it didn't end there either.
They've been trying to compensate for what the cheaters have done and trying to balance things out for those 90% of the players that just want to play a game.
They are literally stealing development time away from this game. And the sad thing is only a few of them maybe a few hundred from what we see from the reports from Intrepid Studios. What should we do?
The game Grand Theft Auto had a wonderful way of dealing with cheaters. It was called cheaters Island. All the cheaters were banished to cheaters Island and they were left there to do all the cheating and exploiting that they wanted to without interfering with all the regular players that just wanted to play the game.
In my opinion I believe that there should be a cheater server. If you are a cheater caught exploiting you should be transferred your character and your ability to log in only to the cheaters server. Let them exploit let them figure out all the ways that you can mess up the game. Who would they be hurting? Just the other exploiters. Let the rest of us test this game like we will be playing the game at lunch fairly working together or against each other lol.
Re: More Lawless Areas? or Just Flag/War/Red PK ?
I'm truly saddened by the fact that as time goes on, I expect we're going to see more and more push for Ashes to be more like this.
"I hate being right."
Every single datapoint I have from every single game that tries to appeal with features that aren't focused on PvP and then provides more 'Lawless Area' style gameplay is that everything goes to shit within 3... MAYBE 4 months.
PvE players constantly trying to change any game that designed for or with PvP in mind in basicly every game that comes along, god forbid a game isnt designed as them as the target audience.
Open oceans and the 3 island should be lawless zones imo there to far away from the 2 main continents for the law to police and nodes on those islands should only be policed within the city walls or very close proximity but outside of that it the wild west where players have more freedom to police/politic those regions.
PvE players should also like this because it will pull the more PvP minded player bases away from the mainland towards those islands regions which will make the area less hostile for those players. So doing so would be a win for everyone, have some unique items/resources and thing to incentive people to go into lawless zones but since everything is tradeable you will see PvP players selling those items for the peopel who dont wanna go in there to get it themselfs
Veeshan
2
Re: More Lawless Areas? or Just Flag/War/Red PK ?
STOP WITH THE FUCKING LAWLESS ZONES FFS. The fucking open sea change will become the biggest damn mistake of a design shift in AoC's history, I think. Because it has drawn all the "I want to kill everyone all the time" crowd into the game.
I played L2, that had a very similar flagging system to Ashes. I also played on servers that had "lawless zones", because private server admins thought it could be a cool addition. You know what would happen on literally every damn server? Those zones would be constantly overtaken by the strongest sweatiest players. And locked down, so that these players become even stronger.
And all of that happened in a game where death only came with negative xp penalty, which was even smaller in the lawless zones. ASHES HAS FUCKING LOOT ON DEATH. And yall want to add these zones to the most profitable locations, on top of that. It's asinine to believe that the game will have anywhere near a healthy population, with that kind design. Even those L2 servers barely survived, because even the super filtered hardcore population of L2 (who are waaaaaay more willing to suffer through endless pvp than majority of future Ashes players) still couldn't put up with that kind of design for too long.
Ashes is already built on the principle of "strong are strong and weak are weak". Yet people just keeeeep pushing it everfuther into the "endless snowball" area, where the strong will simply be gods, while the weak will simply leave. Like, the P2 situation with legendary mats was the greatest indication of exactly that. Sweaty hardcore players found the best way of becoming super strong. They then monopolized the fuck out of that way. Became literaly one-shot gods and the rest of the players left.
Lawless zones will accomplish the exact damn thing. So stop with this bullshit and just ask for proper corruption balancing and much better war design. Though either of those things should came later on in the alpha BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THE BASIC STUFF STILL. Where's the dynamic gridding that would help with assessing your pvp situation? Where's node growth that's meant to layer mob lvls, instead of having a fucking thmepark layout of pve strength? Where's summoner and the npc AI required for it? Where's proper crafting cycles w/o full fucking items in the mob loot lists? Where's proper loot list distribution and gear type design that allow people to NOT farm the exact same spot for all of their needs?
Once we get AT LEAST all of that basic shit in the game - then we can start talking about what kind of pvp gameplay loops we gotta have around it. And supposedly we'll be getting it before/at, now delayed, P3 - so just, please, shut the hell up about the god damn lawless zones and wait a bit more.
K, thx, bye
I played L2, that had a very similar flagging system to Ashes. I also played on servers that had "lawless zones", because private server admins thought it could be a cool addition. You know what would happen on literally every damn server? Those zones would be constantly overtaken by the strongest sweatiest players. And locked down, so that these players become even stronger.
And all of that happened in a game where death only came with negative xp penalty, which was even smaller in the lawless zones. ASHES HAS FUCKING LOOT ON DEATH. And yall want to add these zones to the most profitable locations, on top of that. It's asinine to believe that the game will have anywhere near a healthy population, with that kind design. Even those L2 servers barely survived, because even the super filtered hardcore population of L2 (who are waaaaaay more willing to suffer through endless pvp than majority of future Ashes players) still couldn't put up with that kind of design for too long.
Ashes is already built on the principle of "strong are strong and weak are weak". Yet people just keeeeep pushing it everfuther into the "endless snowball" area, where the strong will simply be gods, while the weak will simply leave. Like, the P2 situation with legendary mats was the greatest indication of exactly that. Sweaty hardcore players found the best way of becoming super strong. They then monopolized the fuck out of that way. Became literaly one-shot gods and the rest of the players left.
Lawless zones will accomplish the exact damn thing. So stop with this bullshit and just ask for proper corruption balancing and much better war design. Though either of those things should came later on in the alpha BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE THE BASIC STUFF STILL. Where's the dynamic gridding that would help with assessing your pvp situation? Where's node growth that's meant to layer mob lvls, instead of having a fucking thmepark layout of pve strength? Where's summoner and the npc AI required for it? Where's proper crafting cycles w/o full fucking items in the mob loot lists? Where's proper loot list distribution and gear type design that allow people to NOT farm the exact same spot for all of their needs?
Once we get AT LEAST all of that basic shit in the game - then we can start talking about what kind of pvp gameplay loops we gotta have around it. And supposedly we'll be getting it before/at, now delayed, P3 - so just, please, shut the hell up about the god damn lawless zones and wait a bit more.
K, thx, bye
Ludullu
2
Re: Jumping
No, jumping is fine
Your post is pointless.
If you want to bring some value to the topic, you should explain why jumping is good as it is now. Otherwise, it's just a mindless opinion... Someone might say it's okay, someone might say it's not okay.
excmatt
1