Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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 II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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.
Group Size/Livestream
I noticed they mentioned shooting for an 8 man party size in the livestream yesterday. Not sure if they meant this is just the max party size or what's needed to run a dungeon. I remember EQ was 6 and how it was a pain to form groups. Any opinions on this?
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There will be lots of stuff to do in a dungeon besides just combat.
We might be bringing along adventurers focused on utility rather than combat.
We might also be bringing along non-combatant artisans.
Ashes game design should seem odd.
That's the main reason to play this game.
For a 8 men party I mostly see 1 main tank 1 off tank in case things go crazy 1 main healer/buffer 1 buffer/dps 4 main dps/ +something.
Basically you have a tank, healer, buffer/off heals, 4 DPS and a utility class.
The upside is that there will probably be need for an off-tank/healer and dps-support roles in certain situations.
Random groups will be pure madness, just imagine running with 7 guys who dont know the boss mechanics and perform their role mediocre..
And, I'm not sure who will be deciding what a character's role is.
In Ashes, we shouldn't really have to rely much on PUGs.
Since we will be living in a town/city that we continue support -especially if we are citizens- we should be very familiar with the other characters supporting the town.
We should know who like to group with, how they like to play, where in town they live and the time they are likely to be online.
We should expect to not know what group config is best when we first encounter a dungeon or raid.
And expect that we might need to return to town without completing the dungeon in order to recruit other people who have the specific skills and abilities needed for that specific dungeon or raid.
Dungeons and raids will have leaderboards, but that's not the driving motivation to do dungeons and raids in Ashes. Especially not from the dev perspective.
The driving motivations in Ashes are the Four Pillars: Economy, Nodes, Meaningful Conflict and Narrative.
Ashes is focused on dynamic content with meaningful consequences rather than static content that you repeat regardless of whether you win or lose.
The dungeons don't repopulate with the same challenges and mobs and bosses, and will disappear relatively quickly and spawn later elsewhere - again with different challenges, mobs and bosses.
QUESTION: Will there be raid scoreboards?
JEFFREY: Yes. Actually that's something we've been talking about. We can do a lot more with dungeons than what has traditionally been done. And we want to create incentives beyond just, "Hey, I'm going to get this item," that involve our dungeons that involve a little bit more consequential and a little bit more fun. So, that's something we're really focused on is pulling the fun out in places where you wouldn't necessarily expect it.
Will there be instanced dungeons and raid content that will require a set of amount of players to follow mechanics properly to defeat, or will it be more open world where you can go in with any amount of players?
Both. As it stands now, many dungeons in the world have an open world component, with several instance access points that parties can participate in. We want to maintain the open world feel while being able to capitalize on the benefits of instanced mechanics. We will go into more depth in a blog soon.