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Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
The issue with having the bosses be "Mythic WoW/ Savage FFXIV" tier difficulty is that those fights take hours to days of progression to master. That can't realistically be expected in a open world environment.
I really wish they would do something like, have the open world bosses drop an item that would allow a party temporary access to a instanced "Mythic WoW/ Savage FFXIV" fight. Maybe like a POE map where you get so many attempts before it is wasted.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Seems like EQ got a lot of things right.
I'm not saying it should be the same has these bosses. It should be the same on a difficulty scale. Aka. The skill requirement needed by the raid to kill these bosses. You can't make bosses just like WoW, WoW couldn't make bosses just like WoW if they didn't have the abundance of support tools like Deadly Boss Mods, DPS Meters... in the first place. Hard DPS checks will be the first thing that can hardly be implemented in AoC. The margin of error also has to be somewhat bigger, as the whole Respawn -> Next attempt dynamic won't play in AoC.
That doesn't mean there can't be bosses that are just as hard to complete successfully. The hardship just comes from a different source. (Limited Amount of Tries, Different Mechanics, that aren't basically DPS checks...)
Nobody is asking for it because they cannot work around player interaction.
The point of the matter is that open world content just flat out sucks in 99% of the cases.
It is mostly not skillful content but a zergfest.
People want content they can strive for and work towards.
PvP has sieges.
What PvE content is there that is even remotely as meaningful and would prevent roughly half of the playerbase to just leave the game once grinding stuff for no reason gets boring?
How is asking for PvE content that is skillful ignorant if Steven literally said they want to design PvE content for all kinds of players?
Archeage had instanced content it did not impact the living open world to a devastating degree if any at all.
L2 is dead, it is fine to take inspiration from it but obviously it wasn't great enough to stand the test of time.
Making a copy paste of it seems like a crazy thing to do.
Even WoW has an open world and pvp player interaction (at least on PvP servers).
What you don't get is that there is more than 100% PvP and 100% PvE things exist on a spectrum.
Nobody wants or demands a full PvE game but refusing any PvE content apart from grinding without meaning is just bad for the game.
And nobody is arguing with you in this thread to NOT have challenging PvE content. Everybodys arguing against adding instances.
Lineage 2 has a lifetime revenue of more than 1 Billion USD. Pretty sure Steven would be a very very happy man if he could just copy paste the success of it.
Also, Lineage 2 is a completely different game, certain aspects being inspired by it doesn't mean it will be the same game. Also, attributing the Death of Lineage 2 in the West due to the lack of PvE Content shows ignorance from your side. If you can even call it a reason, then it wouldn't even tank in the top 10. Heavy Mismanagement from NCSoft West, rampant botting and RMT issues, complete disregard for most features that make an MMORPG an RPG, The fact, that it wasn't designed with western players in mind (hardcore grinding, heavy RNG based game system..). all attributed to its fall in the west. There is lots of reasons to count, non of which is even remotely relevant to this thread.
ArcheAge certainly did have non-instanced and instanced PvE Content. The gear rewards from that were subpar at best. In the original development progression from ArcheAge (Classic to 5.0) PvE gear wasn't even remotely relevant to the gearing process. It was pretty much the f2p casual alternative to the top-tier gear owned by p2w and hardcore players. It certainly didn't impact the open world to a large extent, mostly because it was barely even relevant for the non-casual player.
Funny that you mention the open world and PvP Design of WoW. They can easily be rated as barely a 2.5 out of 10.
To build on this, instead of looking for solutions that fit into the design principles of the game, you create a convoluted mess of a problem, which you then attempt to fix through instanced PvE Content. Zergs? Zergs can be dealt with easily. Easy Tank and spank world bosses in other games? Can be dealt with easily. You start mixing and matching these problems to dismiss solution for each one of them based on the argument, that they don't fix the others.
The only thing you guys are trying to do is further your agenda to make this game more WoW-like whether this goes against the core design principles of the game or not.
Are we talking about revenue he should stop making a pc game and go mobile:
https://sensortower.com/blog/lineage-mobile-games-revenue-4-billion
Thanks for educating me on Lineage 2 I appreciate it, since I in fact don't know everything about it.
I agree, it was pretty bad.
Thing is apart from some good things the overall game was bad as a whole.
The only reason why I brought up AA specificely is because you stated it as an inspiration.
Even though I see no reason why you cannot make some limited instanced content that's challenging and drops loot appropriate to the challenge involved.
Archeage wasn't challenging and the loot was appropriate.
That's why I am not asking for Archeage level PvE content but challenging content.
Yea because it is not the focus of the game, but merely a small addition to the game.
That's why I never asked for a WoW clone but asked for some relevant PvE content.
AoC is advertised to have PvE content for every kind of players.
Why would I not ask for what they advertise?
Having some instanced areas doesn't destroy the overarching open world.
Since not only WoW has instances but a lot of MMOs even ones that they take inspiration from like AA.
It is self evident that this is not exclusively a WoW-like thing.
The thing why people bring it up is so the devs deal with the issue.
If it is like you say, it being easy to solve, they will solve it and there is no problem.
If it isn't easy to fix devs need to find a solution, the popular one in most MMOs being used is instancing.
How is that a convoluted issue?
I personally love pvp besides pve not within. But thats just my experience on the long "mmo" course. Hopefully the betas will show if this is fun, on a long term too.
Having instanced areas basically does destroy the overarching open world. What happens is people start treating the open world as a waiting lobby for their instanced PvE content. Then it'll go down the route of WoW, with a mostly empty open world with people standing around cities waiting to join their sequestored dungeons. Finally, a gigantic portion of this player-base will realize how unfun this is, and yearn for the classic WoW's open world and will literally be willing to play an outdated version of the game just because the partitioned instance PvE carebears ruined the open world.
That might come as a surprise to you but classic WoW also have instances.
Also Cities in AoC will have exactly the same effect that people are not in the actual world.
You always will not have all people out there in the world doing stuff.
This problem exists on a spectrum.
If you instance everything there is no open world.
If you instance a few things like a couple of boss rooms there are still people in the open world because:
1) You need to get there by walking in the open world.
2) It is impossible to spend all the time inside if you for example can just make each instance once a week.
Cities are part of the actual world. There is no special rule set for Cities. PKing is allowed, griefing is allowed, hell, you could even attack people why they fend off the Monsters attacking the town.
You are right, everything is based on a spectrum. Shifting it a bit to the left or the right won't make a difference though. As you are said, creating challenging open world bosses is very difficult, but so is their general ambition of the game. I don't think moving away because its a challenge is the correct way of solving the problem. Make the open world bosses difficult, make them hard to kill in a PVE sense. I'm all for that. If that means, that the first guild to down them needs 15 days after reaching max Level, then so be it.
Also, they already said, that 20% of the dungeons/raids will be instanced. So how would you know, that there isn't the challenging PvE Content you are asking for already? The once a week type of instance. The competitive type of PvE Instance. In the end, we don't know how exactly their vision will unfold. There certainly is the possibility, that challenging pve instances already exist. What the reward structure, the rights of entry and the requirements to join will be is a whole different Question.
Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of retail WoW's problems came from things other than instancing, mostly being the removal of open world PvP. But this change was precipitated by catering to the PvE crowd that wanted a removal of all PvP content, in favor of focusing on PvE instanced content. The open world was completely watered-down by letting these people influence the game. All WoW players will admit that is very little open world interaction in WoW anymore, and I believe that the root cause of that was instanced PvE content.
"Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal."
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Dungeons#Open_world
Current plans for instancing only seem to apply to lore related dungeons and arenas.
That can apply to WoW styled raids tho. All of their raid areas tied into the lore.
WoW Raids have a great lore related appeal. They still have a varying degree of difficulty (Normal HC and Mythic). Literally no statement entails, that there won't be challenging pve content tied to these.
So you assume they gate the ingame lore behind your ability to PvE?
Is there any statement saying those will be challenging?
The general problem with talking about WoW is that the game is around for a long time.
Things that apply to current state WoW may not apply to other expansions of it or even the base game.
I personally disagree with some things you are connecting here:
1) Open world pvp:
If you are a PvE only player and don't want to be affected, you can and always could just play on a PvE server.
On a PvP server you can attack everyone of the enemy faction without any drawback, not even a corruption system or aynthing like that.
On a PvE Server you simply can't.
As a result reducing the involvement in the open world in wow cannot cater to any PvE crowd since they just played on a PvE Server and never had that issue to begin with.
2) Watering down of open world:
While this happened, it did not happen because of instanced dungeons.
The major system that "removed" the open world was the introduction of the "dungeon finder" in Cataclysm.
It was a literal Cataclysm and killed the open world.
With the "dungeon finder" you could queue up for dungeons and raids, once a party was formed people were teleported into the instance.
I personally would say I was part of the PvE crowd at that time and left the game because of this new feature, if they catered to me with it they did it wrong.
Another problem in WoW's open world is that they started to instance parts of the open world.
If you made certain quests that changed the region.
For example if you made a quest chain to conquer an area for some NPCs you had one instance before and after that.
So if a player was in the area before finishing the quest you could not see any other player that had finished the quest.
That concept started getting used in Wotlk I think.
I personally would say that current state WoW is a good example of bad instancing while vanilla WoW has a good implementation, but too few things going on in the world that makes you go out there.
Nah, i believe this to have a variance of difficulty based on their planned dynamic difficulty scaling system. Going through them for the story: easy.
Going through them with the highest tier of the reward structure? Very Hard.
That's all just based on assumptions though. We will see about that.
I did bring the suggestion of utilizing the already designed bosses into much harder but instanced variants of themselves. With a competitive type system and a reward structure, that doesn't affect progression (as that would go against the core principles of the game), but is mostly designed around cosmetics, titles, prestige, trophies etc.
You can read more about that here in case you are interested @Grievousness
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/46352/different-types-of-dungeons-and-raids/p1
I can't link you directly to the post, just "CTRL-F" and search for Warth.
If that was the metric to consider, then surely they would look at WoW, not L2.
They designed the game taking heavy inspiration from L2 tho.
Read the context. He brought up that copy pasting L2 wouldn't be a great idea as it failed. I just pointed out that he wasn't just wrong, he was talking about things he knows nothing about. Claiming L2 wasn't successful is just a poor joke. If AoC could copy the success of L2, i'd estimate that Steven would be more than happy as that would mean a XXXX% return on investment for him.
Also yeah, better try to copy a game that is still alive in a completely over-saturated corner of the market (MMORPG with a focus on instanced PvE Content). Great idea, that worked splendidly for all the WoW Clones we have seen over the past 15 years.
There are no PvP servers on retail WoW though, they've been stripped of completely open world PvP.
So how much of an impact do you think instanced dungeons had on the open world of WoW?
I agree that the dungeon finder really affected the open world, and it never should have been implemented. The dungeon finder was made because WoW was changing from an open world experience to a linear co-op content dungeon raid experience. The dungeon finder facilitated this for their changing audience, and it would've never been created if instanced PvE dungeons had never existed in the first place.
This is the slippery slope argument. That instancing automatically leads to dungeon finder and then to dogs & cats living together.
As a general rule, slippery slope arguments are garbage, and rarely valid. If instancing didn’t cause the problem but Raid finder did (And I think this is a pretty good take on what happened) then the solution is: have instances, don’t have raid finder. And if some idiots start demanding raid finder just say no. The developers have the power to decide what features they want in their game.
My bad they removed them with bfa, in favour of volunatrily being able to flag for pvp.
Kind of hard to objectify it to be frank.
Overall the game world is kind of an underused feature in WoW nowadays but that's mostly because they took away from its importance slowly but steadily over the last decade.
In vanilla major events like the opening of Ahn'Quiraj where happening in the world not in instances.
As a result people came together in the world for this stuff.
Dungeons in AoC will probably more compareable to grinding areas.
That's why a completely instanced dungeon like WoW would be a really bad thing to happen.
Having limited use of instances or gating mechanism for a couple of bosses though seems reasonable.
Major events like the sieges or world bosses won't stop being important because of that.
In the same way some people doing arena won't kill the whole open world pvp scene.
You just need to make sure not to go overboard with it.
Having limited use of instances is not mutually exlusive to a vibrant open world.
I think that instanced PvE content is still a contributing factor to the problem, but I agree that dungeon finder is the cherry on top that completely breaks the game. Having lots of content behind a wall of instanced PvE is the root cause of the issue, in my opinion.
It's just simple cause and effect. If there is no cause (PvE instanced content), then there is no effect (dungeon finder). I know that just because PvE instancing exists does not mean that a dungeon finder will follow, but the better option in my opinion is to just not have the instanced content in the first place. In all likelihood, the game catering to carebears would push it towards removing PvP. It's not a slippery slope to claim this because we have enough data from other mmorpgs to see that having a sizeable portion of PvE instanced content tends to push games in that direction by virtue of a large subset of the population that enjoys that content pushing for no PvP.
I just think that we have fundamentally different opinions on how much of an effect instancing content has on the open world. It's not mutually exclusive, but highly disjoint in my opinion.
So I've played a variety of MMOs over the years, currently on WoW and do some Mythic tier content. I think the issue here is that we want 2 things that contradict each other. PvP meaningfully affecting PvE and PvE that is not trivial.
These two just don't work together. As it is, its hard enough getting people to focus for a high difficulty instanced raid. The last thing you want is the complexity of PvP interaction 'screwing things up'. To some this may sound 'fun', but from a PvE perspective all it does is create a frustrating experience. People intentionally griefed each other as well e.g. leashing bosses/getting them to reset, pulling mobs on the raid, etc. That is not fun gameplay for the party being assailed.
In a FFA PvP flagging type of game like Ashes, this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Sure this worked back in the L2 days, people even had fun. But in 2021/2022, the audience for that is niche at best. The majority of MMO players are in their 30s with responsibilities and limited play time. People aren't going to log on and play for a few hours each night to get ganked on bosses their guild wants to kill. The players give up, the guild gives up. People get frustrated and leave the game.
FYI WoW Classic had open world bosses that were contested over. Yes it attracted players in massive numbers and was a laggy zerg fest. No 'fun' was had. Eventually most guilds gave up, since even if they helped larger guilds through e.g. coalitions, they never worked out. In the end only the largest guilds dominated these world bosses. Everyone else stuck to instanced content.
I think there are 2 ways to reasonably handle it.
1.) Have open world dungeons / bosses with valuable items for e.g. the node building aspects of the game. E.g. you clear these raid elite mobs in the 'mystic forest' so that you can cut down magical trees used to build some node building. Then have instanced content for getting materials to craft your personal armor upgrades.
2.) Have open world / instanced dungeons/bosses both drop the same kind of loot. The loot in both would be equal in power. Have open world bosses be harder to get to (they are already due to PvP), but mechanically easier. Instanced PvE encounters would be the hard PvE content people want.
@Archaeon
This is a fantastic way to go about things and I'm betting it will work very similarly to this. High Level dungeons and areas with difficult mobs inside that you can grind and drop great recipes/materials/whatever. Guilds will be able to fight for control over these areas and player driven interactions will come from it. World bosses are most certainly going to drop legendary crafting materials however. This is almost certainly how the game is going to function I believe. It worked very similarly in Lineage.
I would also like to point out that world bosses will be much easier to handle as a guild in Ashes for the sole reason that WoW's close-by respawn and flight path system makes it very easy for large groups of people to move around the world quickly, and that will not be the case in Ashes. If you wipe an enemy guild that is challenging you for a world boss, it is going to take them a very long time to get back to you. They will have to Respawn at a pretty far away place, regroup all their members back together, get morale back up to try again, rebuff, run all the way back to where the world boss is, and by that time it's been 25 minutes (Or longer) and the boss is long dead and your guild is laughing all the way to the bank.
Instancing certainly doesn't add to the open world in a positive way if that is what you are playing at.
If they can archieve truely challenging PvE content in the open world, it is fine as well.
The only reason why it is a topic is that there are obvious pros to instanced content hence why they announced 20% of the dungeons to be instanced anyway so they can have a better lore telling in them.
@Bricktop
You always state that respawn will be far away from the location.
Do you have any source for that?
I looked through the wiki but didn't see it anywhere, might have overlooked it though.
In one of the interviews steven says that it will be hard to move large groups around the world and it will take a long time, and it shows with the lack of fast travel options and flying mounts. I can't look for the interview right now I apologize.
I really doubt they will have respawn stations littered throughout the world to make it super easy for someone who you just killed to jump you 30 seconds later, that would not be healthy for the game. That's just not how Open world pvp games tend to work. If the guild HAPPENS to be fighting for a boss that they have a closeby respawn through an owned castle/node/guildhall or what have you, that's just good luck for them and the unpredictable nature of an open world game.