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.
QOTD: what part of the dev stream 2 days ago excited you the most?
Yuquiyu
Member, Alpha Two
hey guys im back! 
apologies for the day off yesterday, this time it wasn't a horrific injury or anything but rather my 18th birthday!!!
im officially a big boi and i plan on making full use of these new rights i posses to completely dominate and sink thousands of hours of my life into ashes of creation when it launches!
for my 18th birthday i wanted to ask a question that isn't what i would usually ask, which is of course the title of this discussion! id love to know what little tid bit of information got you the most excited from over an hour of heaven on earth that was the dev stream!
so yeah let me know and maybe talk with others in here to hammer out details you may or may not have missed!
also send nodes please tyvm!
apologies for the day off yesterday, this time it wasn't a horrific injury or anything but rather my 18th birthday!!!
im officially a big boi and i plan on making full use of these new rights i posses to completely dominate and sink thousands of hours of my life into ashes of creation when it launches!
for my 18th birthday i wanted to ask a question that isn't what i would usually ask, which is of course the title of this discussion! id love to know what little tid bit of information got you the most excited from over an hour of heaven on earth that was the dev stream!
so yeah let me know and maybe talk with others in here to hammer out details you may or may not have missed!
also send nodes please tyvm!
2
Comments
However in hindsight, that's an absurd idea for several reasons, not the least of which is the death penalty (or in this case, bonus) that you receive for being purple. Steven's idea of flagging to merely allow you to hit other players, and only turning purple upon actually attacking them, makes far more sense. I don't know why I didn't realize it earlier, but it certainly changes things.
Edit: Here's a clip for anyone who hasn't seen it yet to clarify - this is different to what many of us thought before so it's big news. https://clips.twitch.tv/ModernEnergeticPepperoniTheRinger
I really liked the forest dragon, winter costume and "send nodes".
Eternal Guild
( Web | Discord )
1 - Jeffrey confirmed that they are now big enough to form sub divisions
2 - There's now a team working specifically on combat and that we will be able to see some of their prototypes by March.
I'm really glad we got to cover this one in the Q&A section as well, since it was definitely a big topic here on the forums lately!
I was excited to hear the little bit of talk about the potential harbor location. It sounds like a lot of attention is going into the nodes and imagining all the weird things players might do.
Yes, yes, I know, but I like traditional Dwarfs and they are seriously knocking all those Dunir designs out of the park (and somewhere out there, there are designers that need to know these little details are appreciated
Ancient Forest Dragon is a close second - only less excited about it because odds are I will probably never see it in game.
Hearing that there's a team specifically focused on combat has me hyped to see what they'll come up with!
I have seen so many games change scope overtime to appeal to a wider audience and thus appeal to no audience.
It might seem small detail to some, but it is big to me.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Beat me to it.
The brief discussion on lighting was interesting ... seeing the different cloud effects based on the sun's position in the sky.
Agreed, @Leiloni.
If the Dev Team is taking flagging questions as part of the Livestream Q&A, that's a good sign they're having a healthy discussion about how to roll it out. It's definitely encouraging. Especially after a few long threads in the forums with many different player views.
I agree with this, I just wish they would nail down exactly who it is they are aiming the game to.
When I first signed up and put some money in to teh game, there was a lot of talk about PvE raid content, what they wanted to do with it and how they wanted there to be a solid progression in that area.
There hasn't been any real word from Intrepid in that regard for over 2 years - which would be about like them starting to talk now about PvE and not mention anything more at all about PvP until 2023.
And now with the plan of adding a summons in order to facilitate casual players - something this game was never aimed at until a few months ago - I really can't put my finger on exactly which group of players it is that Intrepid are trying to make this game for right now.
That said, it was comments made to this effect back in 2017 that convinced me the game was worth putting money in to, combined with the lean on raid discussion (and the fact that a large number of the development team are familiar to me).
This makes sense to me. A lot of our disagreements on here are because we see two different games in AOC. I will admit. Before the lazy peon video a few months back. AOC was not on my radar, I think I heard the name once. The only games I was excited for was "Dual Universe" and "Crowfall". Maybe Star citizen, if they ever pulled their heads out of their asses. I have looked at some of the early stuff, but have not seen much about end game raid progression. I have heard Steven say that having the boss adjust to the number of players present would could address boss zerging. I have also stated that thinking this type of scaling will satisfy raiders is naive. It shows me a lack of understanding of what people expect from progression raiding. I firmly don't believe that progression raiding is possible in the open world. The good news is Steven actually addressed this to some extent in the live stream this month.
At about 1:16:00 he starts talking about the downsides of open world bosses.
At about 1:18:00 he straight up says that he they might invoke the 80:20 rule to confine the number of players to a given encounter. Which is fantastic news for progression raiders.
These talking points were helpful in proving to me that end-game progression raiding is not the lost cause I once thought it was. You simply cant have a fight like this in an open world.
This, and the last few bosses in a wow mythic tier are the apex of progression raiding. The difficulty comes for having a fixed number of players, with the encounter tuned to best current gear in the game, and masterfully designed encounter mechanics where everyone always has a mechanic outside of their party role to respond to. I don't think Stevens statements this month will give AOC hardcore raiding mechanics, but it might bring it one step closer to this.
Full disclosure here. I love hardcore progression raiding, but I would be 1000% fine if AOC was just a fantasy version of EVE online. I don't know if AOC should lean into this type of gameplay. I don't know if it would be right for AOCs economy. The fight I linked basically only drops cosmetic loot. That could be an option if AOC was to put a fight like this in. Maybe they can balance it all in a way where it don't hurt the economy. I don't even know that Intrepid even cares about this type of raiding, but when someone says end-game progression raiding. That is what I think of.
All this to say, I too really think they should be more firm about what kind of game they are making.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I'll be honest I've been following the game since Kickstarter and never once did I have the impression they were planning on doing a serious WoW/FFXIV style PvE endgame. Perhaps some comments were misunderstood?
I gave you a few quotes in another thread, but here is another quote for you. Link
Obviously there is no expectation that Ashes is going to "crush" WoW, these comments simply do not square up with your assumption (as well as the assumptions of a few peopel that have liked your post here) that Intrepid have no plans for a serious top end PvE game.
As I said above though, there are other quotes in another thread for you to read to get an idea of what has been said in relation to raiding in Ashes.
The tl;dr version of it though, is that top end raiders have every reason to assume this game will be as suited to us as PvP players have to assume it will be suited to them.
The problem is, for the last two years, there has been no new top end PvE information.
well they keep adding new mobs with every update, and they are about to rework their stats and combat system. I believe we can agree It doesn't make sense to make top end PvE stuff if you still don't have a definitive combat system.
This is perfect. This is exactly what I have suspected all along. They are not trying to make raids like FFXIV/WOW at all. If you watched that clip, and came away from it thinking that they are going to make raids anything like Mythic/Savage raid progression. You were not paying attention.
I'll use another genre I am familiar with to try and make this point. I basically play three genres of video games. MMORPGs, Survival Sandbox, and Shmups. Not FPS, the mostly 2d games with the little ships. Shmups come in two flavors basically. Manic and Methodological. Manic is the type of game most are familiar with. The game sends wave after wave of faster and more complex enemies and bosses at you. This flavor tends to be more random and unpredictable. Promoting a more reactionary game play. Think Galaga, Space invaders. The Methodological games are nearly completely scripted. You know what is going to happen down to the pixel nearly if you do everything the same as your last play. These games tend to focus on more complex mechanics and intricate patterns. The game has a clear way it wants to be played, and playing that way is the only true path to success. This is more like WOW/FFXIV bosses. The only random bits that are thrown into a WOW/FFXIV fight are order changes on the mechanics to make sure you are paying attention.
The raids Jeff and Steven described sounded more like manic fights to me than the Methodological ones from current WOW/FFXIV. They want the bosses to change from encounter to encounter and be something that you can't 100% plan for. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. I honest think it is better for AOC to have the more manic style raids. It makes the world seem more real and immersive. What makes the Methodological FFXIV/WOW raids so compelling in the modern era. Is progressively learning the fight. Taking something that is way too complicated on the first pull and nailing it down over a few hours of progress, perfecting the "dance". If the fight did not take a few hours to learn or more. It was not hard. There is more of a focus on DPS rankings and the race for world first/realm first. This is all cool stuff, but it is a different style of raiding.
what Steven and Jeff are proposing are far less Methodological, and thus might not be as difficult, but will be great in their own right. Because the fights will be different every time they will be more reactive. This is more like what fighting a boss should be. You might be able to learn and preform the fight in a handful of pulls, but that don't mean the fights wont be fun or engaging. They will also have more replay value. In WOW/FFXIV once you master the fight and farm the gear. The only reason to do it again is to parse or help someone else gear. In AOC there will always be value in farming bosses and the materials and recipes gained will always be worth obtaining. They are just two different styles. I am think the direction they are going is not competitive with WOW/FFXIV, but it doesn't have to be.
TLDR: The fights Steven and Jeff described are not what I would consider to be progression raiding, but I would consider them to be a better raid style for AOC.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
You are talking about the style of encounter, not whether they are progression based or not.
WoW style is basically requiring players to choreograph specific player actions, EQ2's style is to require players to make order out of chaos, and AoC's style may well be to throw wave after wave at players.
These are all perfectly valid ways to design a specific raiding style in a game - and none of them proclude the notion of raids being progression based.
Progression raiding isn't about what the individual encounter requires from you, it is about the fact that the next encounter will require even more than this one, and the one after that will require even more still. If what is required from the encounter is more choreography, more chaos to make order from, or more waves to deal with, all of them allow for progression raiding.
I'm not too concerned about what style the encounters in Ashes take, I am concerned that there is a sense of progression within that style - which is something Steven has said he wants in Ashes.
I mean, I totally agree with you that Ashes will not have WoW style raid encounters - and this is a good thing as I generally do not enjoy WoW raids.
However, once again, the encounters being a different style does not mean there can't be raid progression.
The problem is the the style AoC is going for, and what I have been able to find for EQ2 raids. I did actually look into this. I did everything short of leveling a character to end game to see EQ2s raiding for myself. EQ2, and what I have seen of ashes has that "manic" style as I called it. This tends to be more trivial in practice. You get to a certain skill level and nothing is challenging anymore. To me, and this is my opinion. The whole Idea of progression raiding is the the raids get progressively more complex and take progressively more practice. That fight I linked. The "Alexander Ultimate" From FFXIV. Takes the average player that can even get to the entrance(which means completing that entire raid tier, a feat on its own for some.). It takes most players 60-100 hours, sometimes up to 150+ hours to learn that one fight. Which is why I called it an Apex raid boss in the modern era. If we are not progressing towards something like that. In my opinion. There is no progression raiding.
I don't think AOC will, or even should have that. The manic style does, and will work for AOC better. I am just trying to explain my interpretation of what progression raiding is here. I understand that I used a unconventional analogy. I have seen a lot of miscommunications on the forums, due to the lack of shared vocabulary. I wanted to try something new with the Shmup analogy.
I think we both actually agree on what AOCs raids will be like, that they are the better direction for the game. We just differ in what we would call progression raid. That's fine, I don't think its a term with a universally accepted definition. The games you have played will for sure color your opinion on what progression raiding is.
Actually really excited about progression raiding myself right now. Due to bad scheduling between blizzard and square enix. I am actually going to attempt to raid both Castle Nathria(Normal/Heroic) in WOW, and Eden's Promise(Savage) in FFXIV next week. Three days per game... Never tried to progress two end games at once. I bring that up to point out. That we are all free to play more than one game. I don't even like WOW as a game, but I plan on hitting all the raids with friends as long as they keep making them hard.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
You are surely aware that I have been assuming for several years now that Ashes will have a raiding game that is more similar to that of EQ2 than any other game - even though I expect Intrepid to take it in a different direction.
This is because of a few points - the first being it fits the description Steven and Jeff have given us of what they want from raiding in Ashes. The second point is because much of the senior staff at Intrepid - including Jeff - worked on that content in EQ2.
To me, if you are talking about raid content and how you want to implement it in a game, and what you are saying comes across as if you are describing the previous game you worked on, then the expectation of those listening should be that what will result from that will be at least somewhat similar to what you have done in the past. If your intention is to have it vastly different, then you would naturally be highlighting those differences between what you are doing now and what you have done, so the differences should be obvious to a casual observer.
If I look at Ashes, and I look at what the game is supposed to be about, I don't think that progression raiding should have an apex like you are describing.
In many games - EQ, EQ2, WoW, and I assume FFXIV - the game kind of leads players in to raiding, and that raiding path leads to what I would consider any content cycles marquee encounter. Basically, these games all lead players to raiding - even if not all players take that journey. The games could be said to revolve around that raid content. The apex of raiding in these games is the apex of the game itself.
Then you look at games like L2, Archeage and BDO. The game leads players in these games to PvP, these games revolve around that.
Ashes doesn't fit either of these. In Ashes, the game revolves around the concept of nodes. PvP and raiding are sidelines to that, and should be treated as support for the node system rather than being the focus of the game. Individual players or even guilds may focus on one aspect, but the game itself should treat both of these as support to the node system.
As such, I do not think it is appropriate for progression raiding in Ashes to have an "apex" encounter. There can be progression, and there can be marquee encounters in terms of progression raiding in Ashes, but the apex of raiding should be something that is directly related to the node system, rather than something that is involved in a piece of content that supports that node system.
This point is actually something I have not put much thought into, but makes sense. It makes me feel like ashes is more like... "Twitch plays", but with "Settlers of Catan" or something. How much PvP or PvE you do is going to depend on your node. At least at a marco level. At a micro level its just going to be you and your guild trying to get ahead. Could be that you have to escort caravans all day, could be that you have to farm hard mobs in dungeons. Its probably going to be all of the above. Which sounds good to me. I keep thinking the most well rounded players are going to get the most out of Ashes.
I also agree with most of what you are saying. I think we know where we disagree by now. I should try to clarify my terms more, because most of these MMO related definitions are not 100% universal. The beauty and curse about ashes is that it seems to be attracting every type of MMO player.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
It does have a wide arc of appeal for a game that claims to not want to make a game for every MMO player.
If my basic assumption about the game being focused on and around the node system with content in the game there to support that - as opposed to games that focus on a specific type of content - then I can actually see Ashes being a good fit of a game to much wider array of players than any other MMO.
Happy Birthday Yuquiyu
Biggest stand out for me was the reveal of the green elder type dragon. Sooo many people thought Ashes' version of a "Dragon" was only going to be those more slender Wyrm type dragons and it was bumming alot of folks out and I would tell them bigger more beefy boi elder dragons will be coming but this makes it easier to prove. Now we just need a dragon pet skin. We have Pseudo dragon skins already, (2 legged kind) but need a 4 legged dragon pet version.