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.
Comments
If flow can exist in simple turn based strategy games, as you mention chess, even though you might not be able to maintain a flow in Ashes, that doesn't mean others couldn't.
Super Mario Bros. resulted in many hours of me obtaining said flow, all that encompassed was timing jumps. Yes, I am very familiar with being "in the zone" with both physical and mental activities, and I find it hard to imagine anyone in these forums have never reached that point in their life. Mine is mostly with Billiards and Mathalons.
I am glad you found Dark Souls III easy, I read on the Steam forum for the game once someone's 3 year old beat it without much trouble too. I guess my point is on the internet I am only as good as I tell you I am.
I am sorry Ashes doesn't seem like it might challenge you. I wish you the best of luck in being challenged in the future by the upcoming titles you mention. Were any of those RPG's?
Sorry if that came off as putting you down. That was definitely not my intention. I never put someone down for trying something that's difficult, even it's only difficult for them. I want to everyone to strive to improve themselves in anything they do in life.
The only reason why I brought it up, was that from what I read, it sounded like dark souls was difficult for you, and that you wouldn't want Ashes Of Creation to be as difficult. Souls games, are not really that difficult, because once you become fairly competent with the combat system. Which granted can take more time for some than others. Then the boss fights basically come down to route memorization, and once you realize that, every boss is the same. Because now if you die to an attack from a boss, it's often because the boss did an attack that the only way you could have avoided, was if you memorized it's attack patterns. At that point, it basically becomes die enough times until you memorize the boss, or if you don't ever want to die, play it super-super safe and just stay way out of the bosses attack range and watch all of it's attack patterns play out. Both options I find boring..
Dark soul 2 pvp was really-really good though, I very much enjoyed it and got very good at it.
Regarding flow state, I made sure to specifically say 'Deep' flow state. It might sound contrived, but there's honestly quite a big difference between the two. I also made sure to mention that the more challenging the system, and more skillful you are at the system, the deeper the state of flow you can achieve. If the game is shallow, then maybe you might experience a bit of it, but after a short amount of time, depending on how fast you learn, the game will no longer be challenging to you and as such, there's no more flow.
As I mentioned before, I play a lot of difficult games, eventually your brain starts to get better at learning these games. To the point that it takes deeper and deeper systems to actually pique your interest. And because most games can't provide that, It means I can't really enjoy most games anymore.. A friend of mine who's even more skilled than I am in many games told me she unfortunately feels the same way. She basically only plays a couple of niche games and chess for the same reason.
Exanima soon to be Sui Generis is an RPG. It's probably the most unique and deep combat system i've ever come across. It's entirely physics based. The name of the game Sui Generis, actually stands for the word 'Unique'.
Here's a video showing some of it's really cool and unique gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqaRqih7Cuw
Honestly, even though this game is difficult, and unique. I really do think most people would very much enjoy a game like this. As it's a breath of fresh air, and after playing it. It could be difficult for people to go back to the traditional more static systems that are normally presented in games.
I think people want games like this, but don't really realize they do. So they don't know it until they try it. These are the types of games that cause the gaming industry to advance.
The players might look a bit drunk, but that's due to player input, the more skilled the player, the more control they will have over their characters movements. Kind of like learning how to walk.
Here are some gif's showing what skill can look like once you get better at controlling your character. The game is planned to have co-op and pvp. I'm mostly going to focus on pvp, but this is one of those rare games where pve is actually interesting to me.
As I said before, I hope that the titles you mention live up to your standards and provide you with a complex experience that challenges your skill level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNgjMwwUoUg
https://youtu.be/D-aiFhS2DQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvoum82yJa4
Details:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPy65WA2aA
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=436694425
One example I would like to not is a fighting game called tekken. It takes a while to get the timing right. Plus learning all the moves (90 average) And then learning which moves to use against which opponents plus learning very specific counters. So after hours and hours of practice you actually see a great improvement in your abilities.
It is important to have a sense of progressioin with their toon. The opposite is making the rotation cycle of a class to boring with almost no chioce or options.
Think there should be some challenge to playing every class some more than others.
Class that have a higher skill cap. (hard to play) should have a higher reward. Versus a class that is difficult to play but it just better to play an easy class cause it is just better for the team to play the easy class.(better dps better heals better tank)
I do agree though that it could be nice if people were able to choose different classes with different skill ceilings.
You will probably hate me for bringing this up but I think what we are ultimately talking about are the things which bring down all great MMO's in my personal experience. In my opinion WoW for me died as the result of two main contributing factors. Everything was made oversimplified. Everything. It all became to easy and therefore boring and uninteresting. The second and just as important is that the tight-nit feeling of community was completely decimated with stuff like LFG, LFR, mixing all the servers together etc..etc...
Now, I'd like to bring up an example but preface it with making it clear I'm am not trying to make a dig at anyone at all. I like all the developers and they seem like good people working hard on a great project.
I was watching a recent stream last night in which the lead game designer(?) was playing what appeared to be a light armor/ranged/magic type of class. He kept running into melee NPC/monsters and getting bashed over and over again. For the game to succeed you absolutely cannot cater the game around this kind of interaction. He kept saying something like, "there to high level". Well, I'm not so sure they were. You are a ranged class, maybe slightly lower level and you were doing plenty of damage. You just can't stand there and let them beat on you. You have to kite, run, avoid attracting agro from surrounding beasts, etc..etc... Remember that freeze spell you were using? Use that, get distance and then unload. Rinse repeat. This is a staple of MMO's which has somehow been perverted into people thinking they should just be able to stand around press buttons to win.
These are the kinds of things I'm waiting to see evolve before I help fund the project. To me there is no point in playing unless there is a great challenge and sense of community. On the community end, aoc seems to be on the right path.
Just about all mmo's are balanced around group play hence the massively multiplayer online and every game you mentioned is built for small groups in a controlled competitive environment. If anything I feel like you don't understand that there is going to be complexity and depth built into the game, but not at your level (solo). The complexity/depth is going to come from massive groups doing pvp with each other and this is going to incorporate calculation on group optimization.
Example, we have a 100 people that you will need to fill roles with using the 64 supposed classes that Ashes will be offering. So how will you build your group comp? Will you go a mix of 30 fighters/tanks, 30 rogues/rangers, 20 mages, and rest random supports? Out of the 20 different mages which would be the best for dps or cc? What kind of supports we should be putting into out group for buffing or debuffing? But the world is not perfect and so you are forced to work with a comp of (same order) 15, 40, 15, and 30, so maybe we should look for supports that can debuff by making players take extra bleed damage because of our high number of rogues. Then take our 15 mages and get them to specialize more into CC instead of dps so we can utilize the rogues movement speed and do hit and run?
The game (correct me if I am wrong) is balancing around group play. The real question is not the combat per say aka QTE bar or being able to dodge as being complex/deep, but in my opinion how diverse and deep the class system is going to be. I like to think of it as Dota, but with more people and you can have them run specific classes/builds to win 30 vs 60 or 50 vs 100, since I am going to assume most of the guilds will go casual so any coordination with a small tight knit group will carry the day. Reminds me of the Rooks and Kings video's which on youtube the Clarion Call series if you are trying to get an idea of where I am coming from as my English is not the best.
Regarding your description of balancing around group play. That's not depth, that's just playing with numbers, I would even argue that it's bad game design that actually over complicates the system. The best games are ones with very simple rules, that allow for a lot depth.
Lastly, the system you describe, is already how most MMO's currently work, and this is where it's got us..
The reason why most games I've mentioned are smaller games, is probably because all of those games actually trying something new. It's hard to get funding and resources to do new things, and MMO's require a lot of money and resources to make. Most companies just pump out the same thing every year.
I'm familiar with Rook's and King's and Eve online. I think Eve is currently the most 'Alive' MMO out there. This is due to the fact that Eve's world is essentially entirely generated by the players themselves. The worlds story unfolds uniquely due to the accumulative actions of all the players. It's also one of the longest surviving MMO's out there with probably the most dedicated group of players out of any MMO. Eve's world system is a shining example of what good game design is.
The only problem I find with Eve, is the shallowness of it's combat system. I realized the 1 v 1 ship encounters didn't allow for much skill. But I was fine with that as long as the larger battles were interesting. I was hoping the battles be like playing a high skill RTS like age of empires or starcraft, but instead of commanding npc units, you were commanding people. The problem is that Eve's combat is nothing like that, most of the tactics come down to the commander telling everyone to aim at one specific target to maximize dps until it pops. Rinse and repeat. Rook's and King's try to add some skill to it, but their attempts though admirable, are largely futile. They don't actually own any large amounts of territory or have much influence on the world of Eve, because tactics and strategy largely does not matter.
If tactics and strategy did matter, you wouldn't see it in such a isolated case like with Rook's and King's. You would see it in nearly every battle. The commanders leading large wars would be like top Esport starcraft players guiding their armies to victory. Just like in real life, great commanders that were smart and had the highest knowledge and skill dominated. They nearly took over the world, multiple times. But that's not what you see at all in Eve, unfortunately.
The best game I think, would be something like Eve, with a very deep combat system on all levels. To the point where a single warrior can be greatly skilled taking on multiple people with ease. And a commander can be greatly skilled, effectively commanding armies, and being able to take over the world. No game like this exists (yet), unfortunately.
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I'm glad to see that other people like you and sussuro, see and agree with my perspective as well.
Once the first Beta drops I have no doubts that they will give us a combat system that will be satisfying and push the iterative process in the right direction.
@Sternzy, Steven seemed to be role playing as "the inept leader"; honestly, doing something you know you shouldn't be able to do and making sure you can't can be a great form of testing.
Despite what I've said I encourage both of you to continue being critical. Cheers!!!