Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
It is hard to make up a raid entirely of pugs but not completely impossible.
1. If an open world boss needs 2 or 3 40 person groups, then its not a 40 person raid
2. Dungeons can be as large or small as they need to be, that's not a worry, just depends on the mechanics of the fight.
The more people you have in a raid, the more difficult it is to make the raid meaningful and to fine tune it. WoW has some interesting lessons for their "issues" with these raids.
@Loyheta That is one of the things i'm most excited for in this game. I'm hoping i will be able to travel the map and see these groups living in different regions, making a home in the game.
1. If an open world boss needs 2 or 3 40 person groups, then its not a 40 person raid
2. Dungeons can be as large or small as they need to be, that's not a worry, just depends on the mechanics of the fight.
The more people you have in a raid, the more difficult it is to make the raid meaningful and fine tune it to be challenging. I would encourage you to read up on WoW's lessons as they implemented 40 man raids and why they made the decision to scale back.
Special herbal? Any Earl Grey?
Yes they scale down those Vanilla 40 raids to 25, but they also introduced later f.e. an open world boss in MoP, which needed several raid groups to kill. I am not saying that all bosses should be like that, but most likely we are going to see few open world bosses, which needs 80 or even 120 players to kill.
I am not actually sure what you are trying to prove with your latest comments. I just said 40 man raid is totally doable in both ways, instanced and open world. And i am pretty sure we are going to see both and not just other.
WoW only had 5 man groups. This meant players were used to working in groups of five, and often small cliques formed as groups of five players.
With 40 man raids in a game with 5 man groups, you need 8 of these groups to form a raid.
Ashes will have 8 man groups, meaning you will only need 5 of these groups to form a 40 man raid.
This may seem trivial, but if people are used to forming up in to larger groups, they will form larger pools of friends, making it easier to get 40 players in Ashes than it was in WoW.
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Just because 40 man raids are confirmed in Ashes, it doesn't mean there won't be content for other amounts of players.
This isn't confirmed at all, but as far as I am aware it also has never been asked.
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Ashes will have 40 man raid content that requires players to be keyed to enter. Keying as we know it and dynamic content don't work well together.
This means that either keying will be something totally different than what we have seen, or (more likely in my opinion) there will be some raid content in Ashes that is removed from the dynamic content system. To me, this would make sense to be instanced, however this is not in any way confirmed.
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Many games have successfully had a mix of instanced raid content and open world raid content. This in itself is nothing new.
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Intrepid have stated that there will be raid content introduced to the game that will be difficult enough that they expect a very small portion of the population will complete while still relevant. This is, in their words, to give other players something to continue to aspire to.
Apologies, Let me be more clear then... I'm challenging your assertion that a 40 man open world boss fight (raid) is very easy to implement. I'm saying slow down, it's not that simple. Sure at face value it may seem easy, but in actual implementation it couldn't be further from the truth. Open World fights have some key additional considerations you need to think of that instances do not
1. Performance (Client Side and Server Side)
2. Rewards & Balance and tuning
3. Lockouts (40 people , 1 group etc.)
I'm curious, what is an example of a game with a successful open world raid applications of 40+ people and what worked, didn't work with it? (I'm genuinely curious)
2, these are valid points - they aren't hard to do, but they do take specific consideration.
3, open world content, by definition, doesn't have lockouts.
EQ2 always had open world raid content - it was for 24 man raids rather than 40, but the same problems exist.
Archeage has what are technically 40 man open world raids as well.
I much prefer the way EQ2 did it. The main thing they did was lock encounters to the raid that tags them first, meaning you could *only* fight them with 24 players (some exceptions, though they were technically exploits).
Archeage doesn't lock encounters. They also make the encounters very simple due to the expectation of PvP while fighting these encounters. These two factors combined to turn most of my encounters with this content in to essentially un-fun 5 minute pinata whacking due to the factions working together, and there being 250+ people fighting an encounter designed for 40.
1. Fair point on #1
2. Agreed.
3. I don't think that's true but I think we we're still on the same page. Open world content by definition (my understanding of the definition) means it exists in the world available to everyone, but it doesn't mean its available to everyone at any time. Open world content CAN have lockouts with engagement and its been done to death. Now to be clear, the lockout i'm referring to is a combat lockout meaning if group A tags the raid boss, nobody else can engage with the boss in the open world or the first 40 people to engage are the only ones allowed to fight and everyone else can't heal them or attack the boss (I see from the rest of your post this is what you started to refer to).
Archeage is sort of an example of what happens with non locked encounters. The encounter becomes watered down as you can "zerg" whatever the devs throw at people with sheer numbers unless you have a target person range in mind. To your point, they purposely make the encouters simple because of the expectation of PvP and that there may be a ton of people at the fight.
This is why its much easier to instance these rather than put them in the open world. And if you choose to instance them AND keep open world ones available, its a balance between the instanced ones (which can be harder technically) vs. the open world ones (harder because you have players competing)
An encounter lock is a lock on an encounter when one player, group or raid have pulled it.
I don't see Intrepid adding a mechanic as artificial as encounter locks. They go against the free flowing, organic nature of the game.
That said, I hope they come up with a more organic method to perform the same function, as open world raid content a'la Archeage is fun for "content", but not fun for "organized content".
I see both a place for both types in Ashes though.
Monster coin events will function similarly to Archeage raids in regards to players defending nodes - they will essentially be a free-for-all kind of thing, which means the mechanics of them need to be far more simplistic than the mechanics of an encounter designed for organized raids.
For the more organized raids, hopefully Intrepid do find that way to keep secondary (and even tertiary) raids from interfering in the encounter - regardless of what side of that encounter they try to help. If these encounters allow for zerging as a valid tactic, the game would be better off without them.