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
Aha, being able to set the pet/mount/NPC's roaming zone! That sounds like the answer to that one! Good job!
I personally liked the decoration and layout system of Teso from Rift and AA.
- The rescale of the objects
- Blasoning
- Paintings, customizable with the screenshot made in sets
- Previewing items before purchase, crafting and
from inventory, and during installation.
- Persistent positioning memory for
repositioning, removal and installation
- Collision management active or not
- Manually save the progress of the
possible decoration
- All internal volume completely free
- Free choice of public and private areas in the house
- Craft or transmogrification presentation dummy
possible for the trade
- No automatic opening and closing of the doors, and
windows if there are any
- Dimming of light and targeted distortion
- Background music by personal manual interaction or
shared by choice
- Interaction with the Boss Conquered Trophies reveals his
history
- The possibility of instantly finding the inside of the
empty house as when purchased
What I hope not to see :
- stretches of houses for metres and metres to
glued together in a patchwork pattern, and that they are
I can see this from my garden, I really hated it.
An idea of buff for the private home that I would like is the possibility for a short time to see it blend into the environment and thus be less detectable.
Thank you for your work and your request to share my impressions with you.
Kind regards
I always hated in previous games when most lanterns / torches / lightbulbs were incredibly dim, but then jack-o-lanterns you get from the halloween event were the brightest option available to you. So if you wanted to have a well-lit garden area, you would need to have a bunch of pumpkins around your house even if it looked awful
1) non-instanced homes (meaning, I can just walk in without going thru a loading screen) feel the most organic and inviting. Loading screens make the player feel as though they went "somewhere else" rather than just..inside of a building. Elder Scrolls Online had nice home customization options, but the homes themselves were very isolated.
2) Allowing ALL objects and items to be placed. This allowed for some of the most unique and mind-blowing creations in games like Star Wars Galaxies and Garry's Mod - you could take any insignificant prop or object and create works of art, or unique furniture by blending different objects together (such as making a table and chairs in Minecraft using a Staircase, 1 Fence, and a Pressure Plate) Star Wars Galaxies did this mechanic the best in any game ive played. Player homes felt alive, unique, and worth exploring. Games like Oblivion and Skyrim captured my attention because you could place all your treasures anywhere in your home. Find a cool sword? stick it on a table. (just please make sure that when I re-enter my home, all my placed objects dont ascend Space and Time and fly across the room...) ((thanks bethesda))
3) Allow interaction within the homes. Theres nothing more stale than being able to enter an awesome player house and finding out that you can't even sit in their chairs, or use their oven, or play a game of cards on the table. I hope that AoC adds function to the home outside of pure aesthetic. Homes and Buildings are a great place for RP, meetings, strategizing/practicing in private, goofing around, showing off.. it can be as simple as adding Training Dummies so that people can practice comboing attacks with each other.
4) Clipping props / Micro-movements. I want to be able to adjust my objects 0.005 inches to the left, right, up, or down. I would like my objects to be able to clip through the walls/other props (to a degree) so that I can get very close and personal with how the objects sit in my home. Allowing a small amount of clipping can create additional options for design, such as a normal, 4 legged table being pushed slightly into your wall, turning into a 2 legged table thats "built into the wall". One piece of furniture now becomes limited only by your creativity.
Thanks AoC team! I hope this helps
I would appreciate the option to make Armour Pieces situate on a Mannequin like in SWG. I wouldn't mind stuffed heads of animals to adorn walls like in Black Desert. I don't think there is a hunters life skill in Ashes though. I would like heads on spikes for exterior design on freeholds.
I don't want guaranteed body part drops but it would be nice if we can equip a tool for the job so we can pick and choose what we want to loot and also what we want to display. I imagine inventory slots will be finite.
2. I want to be able to use items in my home, sit on chairs, lay in beds, turn on lights and candles, sit in bath tubs. Fully functioning furniture.
3. I love fantacy but I would like furniture that also would be something that's purdy and appealing. Not just skulls and glowy things that just look cool.
4. To have tools you can use when you own a home. A rare herb for alchemy I can pick once a day or one a week. Crafting stations that add something special to my crafting. Mailboxes. Vendors. Bank access. Training dummies. Anything that adds quality of life to my playing.
5. Co-Own a home. Full editing rights and the ability to place unique items bound to me in the home. I get they could only put back in my inventory but like Co-Owners move these items.
6. Mood effects. Music boxes, sound of torture, laugh tracks, general bar sounds of people talking and enjoying themselves, lighting and filters like, fog, mist, erry glows, darkness.
7. NPCs to make your home come alive. Dogs, Cats, Birds and any other pet someone in the world love and would want a avatar of in game because they love them. Kids playing and laughing, kids sleeping. All ages from babies to teenagers. NPCs that are just people from servants to your wife. Let me sit them at the dinner table or sleeping in a bed. Let me make the house paint a picture by the NPCs I put in my home.
8. Options to change the walls, by paint color or wall paper. Outside and in. I want the only purple home on the block. Let me.
My husband and came up with this list together. This is 100% what I want =-) Thanks to the dev team for asking, we love you!!!!!!! XXX OOO
Otherwise I like living decorations that are earned/collected around the world. I strangely enjoyed how in monster hunter world you could use the small fauna you caught to decorate your house and garden. If I had a bird cage or a small fish pond (or aquarium for in-node housing) that I could show off the different parts of the world I've been to, via the plants and critters I brought back, that would be super cool.
I think importantly I want a hard distinction between furniture/decorations that are bought and those that are earned. I want to be able to distinguish and have distinct opportunity to show off things I've crafted/collected myself and those I bought as is. I'm ok with buying hides to use as rugs in my house but perhaps something could distinguish it if I killed and skinned the hide myself (or certain decoration slots that could only be filled by things I've earned/made myself). Essentially give me a trophy room, like you'd need before you could inspect people's achievements on their account.
Edit: I always feel more inclined to decorate and feel most rewarded when the decorations are surrounding something functional. Like a kitchen you can cook in or a garden you actually grow herbs/produce in. If it has an in-game function, I interact with it a lot more than an chair that only serves RP purpose for example. So for me, the more functional something is, the more decoration option I want with/around it.
They usually keep kids out of games like this, cos there's always some freak who does weird things to them. Hence why the kids in Skyrim were unkillable, for example.
Maybe it's storage, crafting tables or rested xp? So if I have cool ways to include the functionality into the décor the better.
Also the more freedom the tool gives for item placement the better. Though I've seen where no clipping/assistance can make placement SUPER annoying getting things to align correctly. So some sort of functionality to help align things and prevent things from magically floating due to poor placement will help.
There's so much in here that just completely transforms the housing experience and is shockingly left out of most games. Even things like the grid system are pivotal. The question will ultimately be just how much freedom we have/where you guys want the system to go.
TL;DR: Just be like Ultima Online. Every housing system is trash when compared to Ultima Online. An MMO that came out in 1997.
Inside the home is different that's where i'm gonna sit and think etc so lets see...
Free-form placement of items inside the home, rotation, xyz axis etc. I've been in Second Life for over 13 years they have that tool perfect as a reference if you wish to see how they enact it for placement.
Furniture with a menu of pose/animation scripts to choose on chairs, couches, beds. Not a ton just enough to fit various moods. One menu for men and women each a bit different.
Inside lighting/atmospheric adjustment again for mood. Maybe as a preset menu, or sliders, either would work.
Picture frames scripted to take personal image uploads (content filter or screened) but kinda like the guild banners you've been talking about. A screenshot of an adventure, a crest or just an appropriate image you wanna look at.
Lastly i like the in-game achievements idea I've seen posted already...trophy, weapons etc. Say i'm an archer and got this beautiful bow and quiver, maybe i can hang a decor clone of that above my fireplace. Or i tamed a Raptor or killed one...get a trophy head to display. Doesn't really require much more artwork just maybe a frame or plaque it's mounted on.
Anyway those are my thoughts and in most ways i guess my answer kinda speaks to the immersion discussion last month... inside the game, some choices in my space to feel comfortable, that also helps immersion...
Amar...
Wall of weapons like a Bond movie. Or armor sets like the Batcave.
The ability to add floors, stairs, columns, rope ladders, nets that hold barrels or traversable.
Indoor nature/rock areas not just potted plants but similar to Spanish or Japanese gardens.
I know taverns can have gaming. Hoping for something like Tak.
Ability to have guild pool/hot spring parties.
Lookout towers/observatories
Libraries with the ability to have stacks of books, bookcase ladders, sages tables. Bonus points for being able to place a book purchased from the node library.
Allow pets and (hired) NPCs to roam within. It pools me out when the environment is lifeless.
I think It will be cool to create a wall picture in my house from ingame screenshot.
I think that we should be able to hire a local NPC from the node. Say on my freehold I have a mini farm or some crafting system. We can go to the node city or above and hire a fake "worker" for aesthetics. Everyday at 9am he will "leave his" instanced house and walk a structured designed pathway out of the city and towards my freehold.
INTERACTION
He won't actually be farming my crops or smelting my bars, but he will have the appearance/aesthetic of "working" and when it is 5pm/x time he will walk designated path back to the city and into "his instanced house" where no one can actually interact with him until he/she leave "their apartment" the next morning for their shift. As the NPC travels the path to and from the designated path you may come across him and he could have a script that says "whoo! hard days work for a hard days pay" or " Boy it sure does feel good being employed at X freehold [insert name]" little self promotion from random NPC.
WHY THIS SYSTEM!!
Because it make the world feel lively. Like we can interact not just with the players, but also from NPCs without them just being a general store merchant. Even if the hired NPC just walks around your freehold and looks to be picking up stuff or sometimes goes into the home and cleans or walks around, it is something that make the freehold system worthwhile and not just a place to store extra items.
A wizard is never late, he arrives precisely when he means to.
Of course the ability to put crafting stations, farm land, mailbox, auction house & chest access... etc (AA did that part right).
Other than in Wildstar I never felt the need to decorate my house beyond the useful.
For guilds I liked the gw1 system where gvg and alliance battles were accessed through it, whereas the gw2 guild plots were mostly useless. What if they could build their own dungeons or jumping puzzles for other players to go into? Could generate some guild income maybe.
The system should be closely linked with the rest of the game in both inputs and outputs. Crafting should be able to produce decorative items of all kinds, from textiles to metal decorations, utility items like furniture and others.
Also, if at all possible, make it a seamless part of the world, not a separate instance. With players free to visit (based on restrictions set up by the owner) and NPCs for hire, like maids, gardeners, and so on.
In short, the system should be closely linked with the rest of the game, with equal parts of the decorations and items coming from NPC merchants, player crafting and in-game activities (siege loot); the system should have simple but powerful tools to configure and place the decorations with as much freedom as possible.
Maybe the 'Scribe' crafting profession could do this, since your other professions are making your furniture, metalwork, etc.
The 'Scribe' profession just seems a bit weak, to me. Will be interested to see what it actually does.
For example you killing a raid boss and he has a small chance to drop his head as a wall decor that provides some minor buff.
Just amaze us please.
I just want a wealth of items so that we can decorate our homes in any way we chose. I look back to EQ2 favourably. I was able to decorate the top floor of my home as a forest in that game. I wish I knew where the screenshots were, but I know I had a vraiety of plants, one big tree and a little path that wound through it. I believe I even had a small pond.
I'll also be very happy if we can have pets that wander about. I had that in my EQ2 home. With the advance in years, maybe we can have pets that will greet us. Could a cat come up and miaow, for example?
Judging by what we have seen so far, I have every faith the Intrepid artists will do us proud.
1.) give me a cellar please. I just want a cellar
2.) no matter what furniture/design options there are, I want there to be plenty of tough to get items/paint colors/whaterver design options are given. make some stuff buyable from vendors, some stuff craftable by other players, and some stuff drop from the world, all 3 types with a spectrum of rarity/cost.
edit: I should add, world drops should have specific mob types/areas/dungeons/bosses that they drop from. I don't like random world drops from a huge variety of mobs with a super low drop chance because that essentially makes the item just something you buy from players with no real way to farm it. I think developers are less likely to think about those kinds of things with cosmetic stuff like house design as they are with weapons/armor, but i think many playes like to have a "mission" to get certain design items and a clear path to doing it, not just "work with whatever RNGesus decides to give you"
Crown- MMORPG Survivor since 1996
As for what types of housing things I'd like to see? Functional stuff. Forges, beds, cooking spits, etc. Trophies and other ilk are nice, but I have no reason to visit my home if it has no function.
I created a trophy room, boasting the severed heads of every boss I'd ever slain, and started an arena emulating marshlands, but I'd do none of that if not for the crafting bazaar I made right at the atrium; complete with merchant, storage and bank.
The closer you can get the house editing tools to actual level editing tools, the better.