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
People who actually understand this process, or care enough to educate themselves even the slightest bit on it will not have "lost trust" already. If Intrepid had not done the BR, which really took very little resources away from the primary project (the mmo), they would not have gotten all the data they did and would not have fixed a really critical issue that they would probably not have noticed until much further in development, and would have lead to a massive delay because most of the game would have been built on that issue. If they just throw a test server up on an empty map with no content and no incentive to test, then nobody will test it and they will not get any useful information to make as polished of a product as possible. If they went this route, a lot of you would be crying and complaining about that, too.
This is very much a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario for them and honestly they have explained, and explained, and explained, and explained, and explained, and explained all of these things in intricate detail, in many ways over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. Yet, there are still a number of you that simply cannot seem to comprehend it in any capacity, that or you simply want to wish the reality of game development away and be lied to. There are not many companies in this industry that will share as much as they have with this community, and you are quite literally teaching them the lesson as to why, thereby shooting yourselves in your own proverbial feet. Honestly at this point I would prefer they just stop trying to explain these things to people and ignore you and focus on answering things that are more entertaining for everyone else to know.
You can not develop an MMO in 2 years. You cannot even develop a single player game in 2 years unless you're going a very "inexpensive" route, with very limited content and it would be a boring game with a lot of bugs. Anyone who thought an aimed for "2020" release was even remotely close to being realistic was honestly just fooling themselves, as we've only seen how THAT sort of thing has played out, even for AAA titles from major corporate studios.
I don't trust game devs or game producers - especially not when it comes to dates.
Regardless of how great game devs might be... games in development can very easily become vaporware for a wide variety of reasons.
I have hope - not trust.
While a product is in development, the only things said are (generally) hopes. It isn't expectations or wants, just hopes.
Things don't move away from being a hope until they are delivered.
My interest is still based on what happened and what I played in 2017 and 2018 including A0, too many things that were promised by Steven or said to spark Intrest in the project felt through. So I moved to the camp of what we get is what we get. The Studio changed and how they approach their community and how they handle things, yes I still think this game will be great when it comes out, that is when it comes out and what else comes out at the same time. The core community that was built in the time period of two years and the way they interacted with set community is now gone, and hard push to promote something nobody was asking for and so on and so on, there is much reason to not trust in what they are doing at the moment if you come from 2017 and 2018. But the vision is still great, so all you can do is try to communicate with Intrepid even if they Ignore most critical or negative feedback as seen in recent months, you can still hope.
I wouldn't call most of it blind trust, it's mostly just being realistic and having a lot of experience as an MMO player and witnessing how the development process unfolds a million times over, if this describes you then you would know what to expect by now. There are certainly things Intrepid could do that would move me and move most people away from trusting them, but they haven't done any of those things, and not nearly enough time has passed yet for that to be a reasonable or fair attitude to take. You are looking at a game that has not been in development for that long. Most studios don't even announce their game until it's much further in development than Ashes is, but it's a kickstarter/crowdfunded game so that was obviously not going to be an option for them.
As I said before, I think a lot of people either do not know or understand this process, or they are being unreasonable and wishing the reality of game development away.
My distrust is that I don’t think everything they say is true. For example, don’t expect “exclusive” offers to be exclusive. Be happy if they are but they’ve lied about that kind of thing already.
I still have hope that we’ll have an MMORPG eventually and it will be good. That’s my hope. The details are what I don’t trust.
See, to me, companies (and people representing them) don't make promises.
They tell you what they want to do, what they hope to do and what they will try to do.
If I had no trust in Intrepid, I would have my credit card canceled.
I know you meant incidentally, but this is way funnier
Yeah, I saw that a while ago, what happens when you type longer posts than you should on your phone while you're at work.
Was going to change it, but I figured it was more fun to not do that.
And companies do make promises. That’s what contracts are. Commerce is based entirely around promises. Without a binding agreement (which is essentially the definition of a promise) you can’t conduct business.
And by the way, you mischaracterize what Intrepid has done. They didn’t just “want, hope, and try” to do things that they couldn’t. They deliberately chose to not do what they swore they were going to do, because they decided that asking for more money from other people was more important than keeping their word. It was slimy and wrong and engendered a lot of bad faith from the community.
@noaani this is true. Intrepid said that the lifetime subscription would be exclusive for the Kickstarter, but then they extended it into summer backing.
most people on this forum thinks intrepid is this cheating spouse that owes them a explanation lol no one force you to backed n you only paid for extra content n goodies
The My.com thing was almost as controversial but at least there was some reasoning behind that one. That was an example of Intrepid getting caught off-guard and being unprepared.
I'm on the fence as to how bad it was though. I mean, exclusives are never that exclusive - look at Epic right now with their "exclusives".
I agree it was a bit rough selling it again before the game even launched, but my understanding of the whole summer thing Intrepid did was that they looked at it as an extension of the kickstarter anyway.
It probably is the "worst" thing Intrepid have done, but from various perspectives it takes on very different levels of "worst".
And honestly, it's nothing at all compared to what Trion would do on a weekly basis - so if that is the worst thing Intrepid do, I'd rate them as the most trustworthy MMO developer out there - if trust were a thing I applied to companies.
But without the BR, the play styles they want to develop and us to enjoy would have been in the siege mode without the stats they got from the BR and without the polish they made...
I'm pretty sure we will enjoy the siege mod and forgot about the BR quickly.
The fact that's a standalone game is a good thing for me , if they update the siege mod with classes once the mmo is realised I could be a good training ground for siege in the mmo
How do you know the siege mode is coming out in two months?
It was initially supposed to come out early 2019, then it was supposed to come out by 2020... both of those dates failed.
Stop making stuff up.
Let's say 6month so if IS make us wrong, we all be happy
What makes APOC a standalone game is that it's a different setting - thousands of years before the MMORPG. And APOC has separate funding from the MMORPG.
Really, the only thing in the BR that won't be in the MMORPG is the storm.
We wouldn't be any farther along in MMORPG development had the BR not existed.
We would still be waiting for Alpha 1. People would be whining that we've had no hands-on with gameplay in years. And, we would be way farther behind with network code - probably without any awareness of the issues with the networking that the BR flagged.
If the storm in Apoc is coded to be versatile, I could see it put to use as a boss mechanic.
There are so many wrong things in what you're saying.
1. "It's not really a standalone game". Intrepid themselves have said that APOC is a standalone game.
2. "APOC has separate funding from the MMORPG". By testing out things in APOC they are supposedly building the MMORPG which would directly correlate the two even in terms of funding. Therefore, funding that goes towards APOC goes towards the MMORPG also and vice versa... therefore same funding.
3. "Really, the only thing in the BR that won't be in the MMORPG is the storm". The combat won't be in the MMORPG (action only vs hybrid). The same itemization won't be in the MMORPG. The flashiness of spells won't be in the MMORPG. The crazy acrobatic jumps won't be in the MMORPG. The same TTK and balance won't be in the MMORPG. The same player size (therefore server stress) won't be in the MMORPG.
And lastly don't act like the BR propelled the development of the game and brought us this far. The BR was a design choice, but they could've just as well dropped us in a portion of the map from Alpha 0 with the classes from the first PAX booths from a couple years ago and have us either fight each other or their boss for some quick testing. They literally already had classes and a map designed from previous showcases and tests. The BR is just what they decided to go with, but there were other options.
Edit: word
The techniques and animations used to build the combat in APOC will be used for the action portion of the mmorpg. The effects and animations used for the items in APOC will be used for the class and weapons abilities in the mmorpg. I don't know about the jumps and neither do you. TTK and balance can be tweaked during testing for the mmorpg. The player size is yet to be determined based on how popular the mmorpg ends up being, and we won't know until we start testing for the mmorpg.