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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.
Idea for Travel - Scientific Node Lore Audiobooks
Cathartidae
Member
A big part of what I think is exciting in Ashes is the planned scale and the significance of travel. I think being 'bored' by travel is a really interesting experience that's an important part of capturing the feeling of exploration.
There's always an itch, though, to switch over to the second monitor and open up some music or a video, at which point the traveling becomes something you are half paying attention to, keeping an eye out for bandits as you curse the scale of the world.
So how might we be able to keep attention on the game and maintain immersion? What if, instead of switching windows to queue up background noise, you were able to satisfy the same urge from inside the game?
We've seen some glimpses of how rich and layered the lore for Verra is, and we know that scientific nodes will contain repositories of that lore as well as other knowledge? Whenever you visit a scientific node, perhaps you could copy some of their information to your own tome. Then, any time you're looking for sounds to fill the void, you could queue up an audiobook narration of some juicy bit of lore.
This is not to discount the value of reafing, of course (here we are in a forum.) But I think that an audiobook satisfies a different need for stimulation that can slot nicely into Verra's large travel times and keep a wider portion of the audience steeped in the lore.
I also have seen the notes that Ashes isn't initially going the route of voice-acted quests. My gut tells me, though, including long form story narration is an easier tier of difficulty than trying to assign and maintain actors as NPCs. If the narrator changes halfway through (or even by piece) perhaps it is simply the hand of a different scholar and hero.
What do you think? Is this something you'd make use of?
There's always an itch, though, to switch over to the second monitor and open up some music or a video, at which point the traveling becomes something you are half paying attention to, keeping an eye out for bandits as you curse the scale of the world.
So how might we be able to keep attention on the game and maintain immersion? What if, instead of switching windows to queue up background noise, you were able to satisfy the same urge from inside the game?
We've seen some glimpses of how rich and layered the lore for Verra is, and we know that scientific nodes will contain repositories of that lore as well as other knowledge? Whenever you visit a scientific node, perhaps you could copy some of their information to your own tome. Then, any time you're looking for sounds to fill the void, you could queue up an audiobook narration of some juicy bit of lore.
This is not to discount the value of reafing, of course (here we are in a forum.) But I think that an audiobook satisfies a different need for stimulation that can slot nicely into Verra's large travel times and keep a wider portion of the audience steeped in the lore.
I also have seen the notes that Ashes isn't initially going the route of voice-acted quests. My gut tells me, though, including long form story narration is an easier tier of difficulty than trying to assign and maintain actors as NPCs. If the narrator changes halfway through (or even by piece) perhaps it is simply the hand of a different scholar and hero.
What do you think? Is this something you'd make use of?
3
Comments
But you need to remember, that scientific node metros will also have teleports to nodes in their ZoI. ;D
With the exception of listening to Bear McCreary's music for AoC. Something I am excited for. I plan to have something on the other monitor to watch/listen to at all times. 45 days to cap is not going to happen on in-game music alone. Not for me anyways. The same could be said for your, suggestion. If there was some audio books set in AoC, I would definitely listen to them. Just not in game.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I would enjoy watching a passing Caravan, with it's occupants trying to create some melody while traveling towards their destination.
Steven Sharif is my James Halliday (Anorak)
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
-HPL
I'd be more likely to listen to a podcast (or if I'm honest: have youtube open in another window hahaha)
I like events and interruptions along the journey:
This comes at the expense of reducing the 'boredom' of travel, but in my eyes that's a good thing (in moderation). That's not quite what you're talking about though, is it?
Legend of Zelda: BotW did a good job on the exploration side of things. Genshin impact took note and expanded it further - they did a fantastic job of putting something at points of interest - be it a chest, a sigil, etc.
This means that as you travel across the world, you take slight detours to reach the top of the hill beside you, or go through that tunnel going off to the side, etc.
As long as they're not so slow that it makes you want to murder them.
3 minutes into the journey:
"Oh nooooo... one of the wheels broke. Could you please defend us from 5 waves of attacking wolves while we repair it?"
[accept] [back]
I certainly don't think that including lore information would come at the expense of good world design - and I love the list you made. Open world RPGs have a pretty good record for including intetesting random events, I wonder how they might translate to an MMO.
I saw this as something that helps to fill the void in the inevitable empty spaces. With rough estimates of 15 days /played to level cap, I figure there will be some grinds or running across several ZOIs to turn a quest in that simply cannot be avoided. Perhaps I am unusual, but that seems like one of the defining features of an MMO while playing solo - long periods of a satisfying but monotonous task. When I sit down for a long grind for a rare drop or to cap off a level, I don't want to be interrupted by random events, I'd rather settle into the rhythm of combat.
It's also intetesting how many people like the idea of lore but want nothing to do with an ingame tool, haha. Surely it could be designed to be at least as convenient as your alternate program of choice. In any case, I feel that publishing it all online has merit, but misses the point about the potential spatialization of information. By attaching it to in game libraries, you can imagine such situations where you tell a guildmate about an interesting story you heard (or you want them to join you on a treasure hunt based on its contents) which requires them to travel to the appropriate city to acquire a copy.
I love the idea of the scientific nodes being repositories of interesting and sometimes useful information, I just had my doubts about how many people would dedicate time plopping their character down inside to turn the pages of a book. While I am certain there is a minority who would love that (myself included) I fear that it would be a minority, and the fewer players take time to use a system the less reason Intrepid has for including content. So, in the interest of wanting a lot of information to peruse I thought this might broaden the appeal
What has been your experience with long stretches of fun monotony (a long grind, traveling across the map because you forgot a turn in, going to pick something up from a neighboring auction house, etc)?
Regarding travel: I know what you mean about the spaces inbetween - it really is part of the pacing that keeps the game fresh for longer and avoiding burnout. However, I'm not sure this is still sustainable on its own because the average gamer is numb to the sense of wonder in traversing videogame worlds and they actively seek instant gratification - rather than bearing with the mundane. I really like your followup question - will get to it in a moment.
The enthusiasm for lore I think is grounded in the expectation that good lore provides cohesion to the design for a more believable and thus immersive experience. BUT I think the disconnect happens when lore is implemented by exposition (ye olde "show don't tell" - but for videogames it's "do it don't show it"). So this goes back to how to implement lore - a record in a library is still stuck in boring exposition.
I wonder how important lore is in AoC given that it's aiming for a sandbox experience. Adhering to a strong storyline will naturally lead to theme-park design. So your questions about lore tools are really important for the sandbox genre - since players will be the agents of lore, what tools can you create to make this as effective as possible?
Ah. Actually now it makes a lot of sense to have scientific node libraries - as a basic tool for lore. I want to ponder this more though.
I love this question and was asking myself the same thing recently.
I played on a private server where doing raids awarded special tokens and 30 minute experience boosts. The tokens were great for getting stuff to enhance gear, but the exp boost made me WANT to go out and grind because I had earned an opportunity for advantage to do so. Furthermore, my raid partners also had boosts, so it made sense to go grind together - and community is a huge boost to any activity. So we'd do a bunch of raiding, collect ~2 hours of exp boosts and then grind together for 2 hours straight. It made raiding more fun AND turned grinding from a chore into an opportunity.
I think you could implement something similar for travel: accepting a delivery quest gives a 20% boost to mount travel speed for 15 minutes.
tl;dr Turn chores into opportunities.
I had a pretty good chat on discord about these ideas that helped me unpack the different implications of lore in a game.
A themepark game, like WoW, has linear narrative arcs that you participate in as an actor. Not a lot of agency, but very cinematic and structured, experienced through quests, encounters, and cutscenes. Ashes seems to be planning some of these, mostly tied into stuff that unlocks with node growth (events and raids and such.) This is where the 'main story' of Ashes will unfold, which I think is about the resettlement of Verra. This makes for great stories, but cannot really flex outside the predetermined story (besides a binary pass/fail.)
A true sandbox game (I've been referencing Eve a bunch) doesn't really have any significant story built into the world, but gives players so many tools to interface with the world that they makes their own stories out of the ongoing intrigue and politics. I think this will be the style of a lot of the big emergent narrative, in the form of big guild wars, sieges, and razing/leveling nodes. The problem, though, is it is troublesome to record this history inside the game itself. There are a couple small mentions that the Libraries in scientific nodes will record this stuff, but it's unclear as to how. A dedicated team of staff writers? Player written texts? Bullet points ("On July 1, Blackmoor was sieged and razed")? One idea I heard was a combination of the second two - automatically generated key events, with the mayors being able to add a short explanation.
Something I was struggling to wrap my head around though was that Ashes is shaping up to be a world with such a rich and detailed backstory - hence my thoughts on the importance of conveying that information somehow. An important realization for me at this point was that both of those are talking about the 'story' of the game moving forward, as distinct from the worldbuilding that can be uncovered slowly over time.
I think unraveling that will require a much deeper dive into the real practices of archaeology, but I think I can glean a few key points about the way the open world content is set up that ties into exactly what you were saying about experiencing it. Throughout the world I can imagine small fragments of a much larger truth in the form of inexplicable artifacts, mysterious ruins, fragments of literature, etc. I can imagine things like a pattern of ruins spaced across a continent which form a pattern revealing a secret vault, or having to gather enough samples of a dead language to build a translation.
In short, the backwards facing lore comes from having small fragments that, when properly collected and examined, reveal some new understanding, while the forward facing narratives come from a mixture of setpiece quests and emergent player narratives, that will all be recorded and stored somehow.
So the 'average' player should be able to glean the state of the world, major events, and emerging conflicts as a function of the quests they do and chatter that goes on in the world. The deep mysteries of the world, though, are a challenging smaller piece meant for a dedicated segment of the population, not unlike raiding, or sieging a castle, or chasing a mayorship. The 'endgame' of the explorer player type, if you will.
Bringing it back to my original thoughts about layering on top of the travel system, I agree now it doesn't really seem like the right place for big lore dumps. I think my original conception was more akin to the travel in the recent Assassain's Creed games, which you have to travel from one side of of the world to the other by boat on occasion. On the journey, your companions will tell you a story - either an ancient greek myth or norse tale depending on the game.
I think a system like that might be a better representation of what I had in mind, and could still tie into my better understanding of the exploration system. For example, maybe as the exploration community unravels a particularly juicy nugget of old world lore (all these ruins align into an ancient communication network!) it could unlock a short story, stored in the library, that you could queue up and listen to next time you're on your steed for a quarter hour. Stuff that, you won't be missing anything to skip over, but might give you a new appreciation of your world.
Your points about incentivizing 'good' player behavior I think is great, though distinct from where I've dragged this conversation
I actually enjoyed this in God of War 4 - especially because the lore drops might hint at something you could do. Sometimes I'd pause before landing to finish listening to the drop hahaha.
It would be awesome if your archaeology idea could unearth ancient artifacts to store in the city's reliquary! And the citizens could benefit from it!
I've been thinking about the differences between backwards and emergent lore over the weekend and I'm really eager to see what's in store. Archaeology sounds perfect for what I hope to do in the game, wandering around finding interesting things! Maybe it's some kind of generalist gatherer, that alongside the useful information can find special crafting materials for a breadth of crafters. I'll have to start another thread sometime in the future to talk about my hopes for the backwards lore exploration.
I know exactly what you mean about putting the gameplay on hold to hear the end of the story! I'm less convinced it'd be worth the development effort after this conversation but it'd be a fun inclusion should it show up. Maybe it's akin to some other thoughts presented hear, where maybe it's idle chatter by your caravan guards or quest NPCs or something...