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.
How far behind are we actually?
OrcLuck
Member, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
It seems to me that for such a core system as caravans to only be to the point where a very linear display example is possible (one that might have also been shared at gamescon_...it seems to me that we're in for quite a wait.
Obviously that isn't good news, however we aren't in this for good news, we're in this for a game. Development has ups and downs, and we've clearly heard absolutely very little in terms of how the development is going. I don't know about you, but Crowfall never made me feel like I was being deceived.
They earnestly showed the very ugly early workings of the game and their improvisations with the play tests to get people something somewhat fun to test, while they worked on stuff.
I very much find that appealing. Whether or not you wish backers to sign an NDA or not to keep as much of the ugliness mum to your future buyers I don't mind, but sitting here twiddling my thumbs completely in the blind, isn't something I feel shows that I've been appreciated in the leap I took to help fund the game.
Obviously that isn't good news, however we aren't in this for good news, we're in this for a game. Development has ups and downs, and we've clearly heard absolutely very little in terms of how the development is going. I don't know about you, but Crowfall never made me feel like I was being deceived.
They earnestly showed the very ugly early workings of the game and their improvisations with the play tests to get people something somewhat fun to test, while they worked on stuff.
I very much find that appealing. Whether or not you wish backers to sign an NDA or not to keep as much of the ugliness mum to your future buyers I don't mind, but sitting here twiddling my thumbs completely in the blind, isn't something I feel shows that I've been appreciated in the leap I took to help fund the game.
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I don't mind twiddling my thumbs now - I got hands-on way earlier than ever before.
And, I'd rather wait for them to fix stuff while the test environment is down for months than have them try to make a 24/7 test environment playable with fixes every couple of weeks.
The latter is what caused Landmark/EQNext to fail - treating Alpha as if it were a regular release.
Do yall think it would it be realistic to expect alpha1 around januari 2020 ?
The original 2020 release date was never going to happen, so using that as the expected release date is pointless in my opinion. Yes Steven made a big mistake in setting 2020 as the benchmark for a release, but I'm going to chalk that down to his lack of experience rather than the project running into problems and being set back.
You played yourself.
Yeah I know the intended message before you throw me in the dungeon.
I dont know anything about dev stuff but this seems like the most sane way to think about it.
Hopefully intrepid is special and its not the case. It definitely feels like they will be done before 2022 though
My thoughts on the deadline:
I would not be surprised if a PR video / stream were to come out soon about an extension. I don't think it'll be as late as 2022 as some people here are saying. An interesting stat in software is that most work gets done the last 20% of the deadline. Multiple factors play into that but I have found it to be very true. Also you know they are keeping a lot of stuff close to their chest. They share the fun with us but they got to protect their IP from other companies / competition.
TL;DR This community is great for not being jerks on deadlines, and they are a bit behind but not by much (6 months? )
Though honestly for some the best course of action is to take a step back and forget about AOC for a while.
2021 is totally do-able still if APOC testing goes well. When they start leaving the servers up 24hrs, that will be a good sign.
It's definitely too much to ask for 2020 release, but I bet we get to Alpha 2 by the end of that year, and a persistent Alpha will tide a majority of people over.
Most MMO's never release on the actual day its set... besides i don't mind waiting..Remember the state Bless online was released. That won't happen with AOC ♦
Because it's pointless to test MMO features when basic connectivity is a problem and it's even a bigger waste of time to try to test new features that rely on a system that is established as not working.
Let's say you're building a car and you put a very powerful motor/transmission in the car, but put these tiny 10" wheels on it. You then put the car on a tester, put the pedal to the floor and it shows that the speedometer is inaccurate with it's reading. The most probable cause is the little wheels, but it could be a speed sensor malfunctioning, timing is off, electrical short, all sorts of things.... BUT, it's probably the little wheels.
Can you see how much time is wasted if we start testing features with a bad foundation? It's not only frustrating for both parties, but it makes debugging an absolute nightmare. Testing should be about when a certain feature set is SUPPOSED to be working, but bugs are uncovered that weren't previously known. If they're already aware of a problem that all the other systems rely on, we're not doing them any favors by "testing" a system they already know is broken from the start.
I hope that makes sense. It's difficult to describe development environments and processes. Internally they are testing lots of these systems, like the Caravan system they just showcased in the last video. Developers are able to design this mock up of what the server calls look like and I imagine they have some sort of internal server they can bounce requests off of to make sure that they system is responding correctly to certain server requests. But it doesn't make much sense to integrate those systems into a framework that's not finished and hasn't been tested.
Addon Developer
OG Backer
They work on it okay? Its going to take time. They dont have anything to build their technology on, so they have to create it from the ground up.
The only reason, why you think that they are "behind" is because they gave us updates from the very beginning, other games take 5-8 years to complete development....
I think intrepid has to take some of the blame with this. Steven did say ashes would be released before 2020 so I can see why people would say its behind schedule. Most long-time followers knew it would not reach the deadline but steven did push that date.
He did indeed and it was definitely a mistake.
at least he owned up and told us it's no longer a viable launch date (better than most AAA games)
Oh absolutely and I respect Steven for that. Most CEOs in the game industry would take that kind of situation and try to pin the blame on someone else or make up some corporate PR rubbish to justify it.
“it’s not how you launch, it’s what it becomes,”
- Todd Howard
It just works ^^
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I didnt know this even existed, you have my eternal thanks!
I like the overall plan Steven has laid out, but have never been down with the timing. There is no room for error, or fixing issues like what we have just gone through over the last 7 months. As previously said though, it doesn't mean the rest of the team has been sitting around waiting, hopefully this will mean that when things get going again we will see more "jumps" in development.
I also hope Steve can keep up his promise of "leaving some surprises for launch" Although I am not sure how he will be able to with a persistent Alpha server (was the official wording persistent or perpetual? I know I've used both just now...) unless it has a major patch day on "release" to add back the missing content...
I think that moving forward they should add a small UI element that could be triggered from the quests screen to "give more details about the quest" and use that to put testing targets in, not just things to do for rewards.
Such a:
1. use the potion launcher to destroy a house multiple times
2. block a power attack with a shield several times
3. go to x,y and try to walk through the tree there
testing quests, something to try and improve things players have complained about, but the team was not able to validate. I don't see how these could auto clear and would simply be data grabs they would have to be looking out for on the backend. Unless they enable an in game recorder with a "submit the last 1/3/5/10 minutes of gameplay as a bug report" option. (possibly with the option to pick one of the testing quests or "other" as a subject for the report.
All of which would take extra time to develop outside of making progress on the game, but would be reusable for the rest of the development cycle.
At this point I am still holding off on buying a new GPU as I was doing so specifically for this game. Maybe next year.