Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Proxy News Update - 09/22/2017 - Alpha Zero Details, Concept Art & More!
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The Latest Proxy Update:
https://youtu.be/oWYOV8mQB18Older news Updates/AoC Content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLFnhhjKaQo&list=PLJvvIDgksu7PqsKE5geDHuX3T7kXULc2_What We Know So Far Series:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/exzc1P2ka1A?list=PLJvvIDgksu7OluQF-IeSzwh_AlEMe8m7s
Not the most exciting news update, and might have a few quiet months ahead!
As always guys thanks for watching.
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Good video, keeping us up to date.
Looks to be quite a good cast so far, won't drop names yet but two are MMO veterans complete with PhD's and very talkative. It wont be Ashes of Creation Exclusive Podcast, but it will definately be a topic from time to time.
I was lead to believe there would be Zero details about Alpha!!
With no fast travel, it should really make the world feel even more massive.
Larger the Game-Map = More Content. And since their is an UnderGround .. it'll be even bigger below the depths >~>
( including the Oceans/ River/ Lakes/ etc )
If a game world is too large, the populace will be spread too thin and player interactions will be too rare, especially in a PvX game like Ashes.
Too small and people are jammed together fighting for the same resources and things feel too claustrophobic, allowing not enough downtime for exploration, gathering ,etc.
I think one of the keys is to hit the sweet spot of size vs interaction frequency the devs are planning on, and balance this with ensuring that each zone and area within that zone have persistent meaning as the game matures.
Too many MMOs neglect areas and as the player base matures, early zones become dead, wastes of space. The resources they contain are worthless, easily superseded by those from "higher level" zones and all the effort put into those zones is lost. The zone may have content, but if that content is quickly surpassed and becomes meaningless then it is the same as no content at all.
There are dozens of ways to ensure all zones are fresh and attractive to all player levels as the game progresses in maturity and I hope Intrepid really are planning their development based on a 5+ year cycle. They seem to be, but time will tell.
I mean 100km2 in DayZ is different to say.... 100km2 in GTA5. Different transports, travel, fast travel etc etc makes a huge difference to how fast you can reletively traverse that given terrain. So isnt it less of an issues of world size, and more of an issue of how that world size is used?
Given that the travel speed will be fairly limited and relatively slow, compared to other MMOs, I think size then is very important. If they are aiming for 8,000 concurrent users, it makes a big difference.
If the world is so large that it takes days of real world travel time to traverse the player available area then that is a big difference as those 8,000 people may be spread too thin and end up either clumping together, and leaving a large portion of the game empty, or spreading thin and not experiencing the game the way the devs envision.
The game can be packed full of content, but if everyone is off doing their own thing in disparate parts of the world and there is so much content that everyone is able to choose something different it will defeat the purpose of a PvX design.
I guess it all comes down to balance of size, travel speed, content and design.
A pure PvE game design doesn't suffer from having a massive world as much, as people can happily play apart, which gives us the current state of MMOs where most people play solo
As @Eragale alluded to, don't forget the underground. If you're stacking layers, then 16 sq km of surface area can double in volume if you add a zedd dimmension, especially if theres a clever way to go up and down layers.
Most likely i missed a lot of other examples too xD.
Regardless, It'll could really add " depth " to the 4km x 4km Zone Area
But to talk about Alpha Zero and relevance of map size...
If the map is 16km2, thats 16,000,000m2, with 800 people,
Thats around 20,000m2 per person if the population spread out equally.
Obviously due to the nature of POI and Hubs no one will spread out like this, but its still a decent amount space
for 800 people (not that all testers will be online at the same time anyway).
Skyrims map size is 39km2. Initially it feels big, after a while of playing it feels smaller and smaller, and fast travel eventually
makes its size feel quite small. Interestingly if you play skyrim with fast travel disabled, the world already feels much quite
vast again. So considering that this one zone in AoC is 16km2, and we know theres going to be quite a few zones, with limited
forms of fast/faster travel, the world should end up feeling pretty big, but hopefully not to big that player interactions never/rarely occur.