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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.
Will the overall aesthetic suffer due to each race contributing to the city aesthetic?
ArchivedUser
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[6-27-2018 Addition]
For those concerned, I did find a quote on this today. It addresses the issue pretty well:
[/Addition]
I've asked this question before in some different ways, but I don't know if my point has ever entirely come across—so I figured instead of in the discord I'd ask it here, where I can elaborate a bit more.
I have some concerns about the "aesthetic" of the game suffering due to one particular game mechanic: "The contributing race will determine the aesthetic of the city". For my purpose, I'd like to point out the Nikua who, in my mind, are the greatest examples of this:
The most important question to ask is "Why does that look the way it does?". Yes, a lot of the style is particularly cultural, a sort of "shared style" between people—but it's also entirely practical as well. This is an amazing housing style for a tropical climate. It's light, it won't keep in a lot of heat, the sides are open for further ventilation, it's made of readily available resources such as dried palm leaves/grass, wood, twine, and stones. It's also fairly simple to rebuild if something happens to it, which given the nature of things such as tropical storms, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, heavy rain, famine, and so-on—this is absolutely crucial as well if they come from a tropical island/shore sort of environment.
Some are even specialized. Built on platforms that are suspended above the ground to prevent exceptionally high tides, waves, and flooding from washing away the home (or at least its contents).
Now, we have to ask: "Would this house work well in an arctic climate? Would the design of this home keep the people inside sheltered from the environment? Is it built to face having snow built up on top of it? Will it keep in the heat? Do they even have the same materials to be building the same way in the arctic? Is there something that would serve their purposes better up there?"
The point I'm raising, is that Nikua homes would not make sense in an arctic environment if one were to use the example image above. They would be built from different materials, they would harm the inhabitants if they tried to live in them long-term as they are now. This is why these things look like they don't fit in different environments. There would be a way to make a Nikuan styled home built for an arctic environment, but it would require a lot of variation of the housing styles to "make sense" for most environments.
I've been wondering for quite some time if this is being considered with the city designs. Are we going to potentially be seeing a Nikua metropolis with straw roofs and open-aired designs in the middle of a tundra because more Nikua happened to be there? Are we going to be seeing heavy settlements of another race meant to keep in the heat and survive the snow in the middle of a desert?
I trust the team, this just hasn't been discussed at all when the talks of racial influence on city have come up so I was wondering if it's something that's been accounted for.
Thank you for your time!
Edit:
And something else I forgot to add is another concern that is just as large: Due to a race being much less popular than others game-wide, we may never see a settlement larger than a village of certain races in any server. Wouldn't that be a waste of time invested making those things instead of doing something simpler like switching out banners/statues/NPCs/music/textures but keeping an overall theme to the node based more around its type combined with its environment (Military, Economic, Religious, Scientific)?
Given the types of races people tend to play, we can probably assume most will be Human and Elven cities—which means there's a chance on most servers you might not get anything but those as metropolises. I suppose I'm just worried we won't get to experience much variety at all in terms of aesthetics due to how the design sounds.
For those concerned, I did find a quote on this today. It addresses the issue pretty well:
[/Addition]
I've asked this question before in some different ways, but I don't know if my point has ever entirely come across—so I figured instead of in the discord I'd ask it here, where I can elaborate a bit more.
I have some concerns about the "aesthetic" of the game suffering due to one particular game mechanic: "The contributing race will determine the aesthetic of the city". For my purpose, I'd like to point out the Nikua who, in my mind, are the greatest examples of this:
The most important question to ask is "Why does that look the way it does?". Yes, a lot of the style is particularly cultural, a sort of "shared style" between people—but it's also entirely practical as well. This is an amazing housing style for a tropical climate. It's light, it won't keep in a lot of heat, the sides are open for further ventilation, it's made of readily available resources such as dried palm leaves/grass, wood, twine, and stones. It's also fairly simple to rebuild if something happens to it, which given the nature of things such as tropical storms, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, heavy rain, famine, and so-on—this is absolutely crucial as well if they come from a tropical island/shore sort of environment.
Some are even specialized. Built on platforms that are suspended above the ground to prevent exceptionally high tides, waves, and flooding from washing away the home (or at least its contents).
Now, we have to ask: "Would this house work well in an arctic climate? Would the design of this home keep the people inside sheltered from the environment? Is it built to face having snow built up on top of it? Will it keep in the heat? Do they even have the same materials to be building the same way in the arctic? Is there something that would serve their purposes better up there?"
The point I'm raising, is that Nikua homes would not make sense in an arctic environment if one were to use the example image above. They would be built from different materials, they would harm the inhabitants if they tried to live in them long-term as they are now. This is why these things look like they don't fit in different environments. There would be a way to make a Nikuan styled home built for an arctic environment, but it would require a lot of variation of the housing styles to "make sense" for most environments.
I've been wondering for quite some time if this is being considered with the city designs. Are we going to potentially be seeing a Nikua metropolis with straw roofs and open-aired designs in the middle of a tundra because more Nikua happened to be there? Are we going to be seeing heavy settlements of another race meant to keep in the heat and survive the snow in the middle of a desert?
I trust the team, this just hasn't been discussed at all when the talks of racial influence on city have come up so I was wondering if it's something that's been accounted for.
Thank you for your time!
Edit:
And something else I forgot to add is another concern that is just as large: Due to a race being much less popular than others game-wide, we may never see a settlement larger than a village of certain races in any server. Wouldn't that be a waste of time invested making those things instead of doing something simpler like switching out banners/statues/NPCs/music/textures but keeping an overall theme to the node based more around its type combined with its environment (Military, Economic, Religious, Scientific)?
Given the types of races people tend to play, we can probably assume most will be Human and Elven cities—which means there's a chance on most servers you might not get anything but those as metropolises. I suppose I'm just worried we won't get to experience much variety at all in terms of aesthetics due to how the design sounds.
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Comments
To me, the potential rarity of a certain city aesthetic is more interesting then them forcing certain cities to belong to certain races. If a group makes a high level node with an unpopular race it's going to mean something.
This is just a side thought on the subject:
In my opinion i sincerely hate the idea of everytime a node changes its the races majority that reflects what the node will look like. I know the theme is change in ashes, but i feel like some nodes should be a permanent to reflect culture as some races might be way more dominant then others.
I would agree on the potential rarity of a certain city aesthetic, except that in most cases the % difference tends to be pretty extreme. For instance, if 5% of people happen to play a Nikua, it isn't realistic to think that they'll ever be able to pool up the people to make anything big. I suppose it's my inner skeptic speaking along with past experiences—but I do truly believe that we may just never see a Dwarf/Orc metropolis. It'd require the majority of the participants to be Dwarven/Orcish, and based on the timeframe it would mean it would have to remain majority Dwarf/Orc for months. If a bunch of humans run over to help or follow the activity of all of the stuff they're unlocking, they're going to boot out that influence and make it another human town once it levels up.
And we know that once a metropolis is up, we can expect it to stay up for a while.
The one thing that might pressure for this (or would have) is the starting zones of different races being in different places. If all Orcs start at one portal, you'd get majority orcs everywhere outside of that portal. But I believe last they heard they were going to let people choose which portal they go to, so I suspect humans/elves everywhere.
An example of what I mean is if a group of elves found a camp and upgrade it to settlement it'd be elven in nature. Now what if there is a large influx of tulnar which cause the next node upgrade to reflect Tulnar... would there be a small area within the settlement that is still elven or is everything Tulnar? Now what about the Tulnar and Elves moving out to a better region only for some orcs to take over and get the next upgrade. Will it be orcish with a small part tulnar and a small part of the tulnar section elven? Or will the orcs destroy the entire settlement to build a fresh, oricsh city?
In all of these cases the most popular races are the ones most close to idealized human physiology and appearance in face (seemingly most important) and body. What we've also done is taken these and divided them. So let's say 8% of players play an Orc. That means that the % of Orcs will be split, and they will be competing against each other. So you will need to outnumber subraces with the one you want, not just racial categories. If evenly divided you may see 4% of players are Ren'kai and 4% of players are Vek. If not-so-evenly divided, we might see something as dramatic is 6% of players are Vek and 2% are Ren'kai. When taking into account one of the races least likely to be played often (Dwarves) this could be catastrophic for the least popular subrace's category. Even in places largely dominated by their general race, their sub-race is still much less likely to get the numbers needed.
You could have a Niküa player doing 24 hours of work to try to get their racial EXP to contribute the most to a node—but if there are 3 Dünir doing 10 hours of work, it doesn't matter how much the Niküa works, they cannot win without booting out the Dünir and making it a Niküa-majority node. This isn't feasible or realistic. As I pointed out before, developing nodes are likely to bring people from all races in. All it takes is 10% of the server paying attention to your node (they don't even have to live there, they might just run in and start gathering and questing before returning home) and it would demolish the race with the smallest %'s chances of making that their node.
Unlocked dungeons, different monsters, more higher-tier resources, guild halls, places to craft, homesteads (which can only be obtained at a T3 or higher), quests, markets, and so-on will all draw in people from across the map. And this isn't even factoring in that in those cases, the race will not all be centered in one town—they'll be as spread out as anyone else. That demographic of players will never all be concentrated in one node. Even if you worked together to get 20% of the Ren'kai to work at making a node Ren'kai, 5% of the Kaelar population could outnumber that and all they have to do is continue passing through and quest, craft, and adventure.
All of this means a massive waste of resources and time on the development team's part, as the chances of the least populous subrace hitting the metropolis stage across any server is slim to none. A metropolis requires the collective work of hundreds/thousands over the course of months. A very small % of the player population (remember, could be as low as 2%) can't realistically hope to hit the metropolis stage with all of this factored in. It'd require an unrealistic amount of effort, coordination, and complete isolation with no outside forces interfering.
You'll have to make sure it's one kind of Orc as well. I don't doubt that Orcs might hit the village stage somewhere, though!
@nagash suggested something to that effect (the smaller areas within a city to reflect the structures of the past), and honestly I don't recall if anything specifically was said about that or not. If that ends up being too strong it may end up being rather strange, as the buildings that were there from the beginning end up becoming the huge mansions and the massive central structures like we see in the Vaelune node in the kickstarter video. So it becomes a question of "would that look weird, to have a huge elven spire and mansions surrounded by Tulnar architecture, despite Tulnar being the most populous?". It could be cool, until you factor in something like a giant Nikua straw-and-wood structure and mansions surrounded by, say, smaller stock medieval European homes.
It might just end up looking too weird, though it depends on how they'd go about it too.
As for solutions, my suggestions would be something along the lines of these:
I also don't see a big deal with having orc style buildings in a predominantly elven area. We see varying displays of architecture around our world that have been influenced by different cultures and time periods.
A city with every style of every building being consistent is what would seem odd and unrealistic to me.
For clarification: What I was initially pointing out is not any issue regarding "orc style buildings in a predominantly elven area". What I was drawing attention to are circumstances like open-air tropical structures with little protection from the cold situated on a glacier, because the race's "style" is that.
Imagine this architecture (actual Ashes concept art for the Niküa dwarves):
Built someplace like this (source):
Everyone living there would freeze to death, because of their architectural style.