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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.
Comments
Which may or may not have been a contributing factor for financial backing and monetary support.
For some that has not eventuated as of yet. So we are making an effort to voice that opinion...whatever parameter of invalidation others might interpret that to be.
So far we have seen an rehash of an EQ1 easter egg. Not really breaking other design molds are we so that argument is rubbish.
The Alpha tests are currently system based so the artwork is "somewhat malleable' right Dgyz.
I'm not buying the whole 2+ years development spiel sorry.
"community polls mean nothing" excuse me the community is number 1. No community, no long term game success. The poll is not biased, there are 2 options of already accepting and indifferent. So the results even at a lowly 100+ contribution still give relevant information. Even if Intrepid don't see or use it the people who voted did which gives us the community feedback justification...
https://strawpoll.com/xzzpjg4yr
This is feedback, Ego is not a valid argument and never will be. They offered transparency to grow community involvement and input, there are pros and cons.
Should intrepid bend the knee to a loud silent minority...no
Should they be held accountable to the information they openly provide for the overall betterment of the end product...yes
the more participation the more the post gets bumped to the top so in the end the overall message is getting promoted.
All of this ^
Never said the community means nothing, I said community run polls mean nothing.
While there could be an argument that the poll itself wasnt biased (there could also be an argument that it was), that is not the point was making. The point I was making is that the polls respondents are not random, and is basically a poll saying "if you dont like the way Dwarves look, press this button".
People that dont care either way (whose opinion is still valid) wont even read this thread, let alone click on an external link.
As such, this is a petition at best, not a poll.
Seems about %10 of the vote are people who didn't care either way and did read the thread...So absorb that information however you feel.
Last time I looked it's called Straw poll not Straw petition.
But if you understood that, there would be no need for a poll.
“Behave like Intrepid’s flavor text” is subjective. There is nothing in the flavor text that states, “Dünir would never flip.”
You are interpreting the flavor text as behaving 100% like Tolkien’s Middle Earth Dwarves.
The flavor text does not state that.
But even if it did...it’s an Alpha...for all we know, the devs are just testing the flip for Niküa before they’ve implemented Niküa base models.
Just because you hate the flip doesn’t mean most people hate the flip. The devs will figure that out in due time.
Because....it’s an Alpha.
What we have now for Dünir is pretty close to the Dünir armor concept art. It’s also pretty close to the Pathfinder Dwarf you said is legit.
I have been saying all along - go back and read what I’ve written - expect the base model to look like the Dünir armor concept art. It’s unlikely that Dünir will be MUCH wider - it’s unlikely they will be as wide as Warhammer Dwarves.
Again, here you argue as if I said, “No changes! The current models are perfect and unmalleable. Any changes will result in vaporware.”
I haven’t said anything like that.
I don’t understand what you mean by “2+ years development spiel”, but you don’t have to buy it. I’m not trying to convince you of anything.
I’ve shared my prognostication - now we just wait to see whether we get Warhammer Dünir and, if we do, what the release date ends up actually being.
And we’ll revisit to see who says, “I told you so.”
We agree the design for the Dünir base model is somewhat malleable. That falls in line with my initial statement “it’s unlikely to get MUCH wider.”
Unlikely to get results that are as big and wide as a Warhammer Dwarf. You’ve said it doesn’t have to be as big and wide as a Warhammer Dwarf, so there is no contention there.
You also said that the Pathfinder Dwarf is legit. And I said I expect that we will be able to get close to that with sliders. The Pathfinder Dwarf is not MUCH wider than the current Dünir model in the Alpha. That also falls in line with somewhat malleable.
So, yes, again. We agree.
The poll is biased and irrelevant.
What we’re debating in the forums is enough to spark change if there is time in the schedule for change. Whatever change doesn’t happen will be because there isn’t time in the schedule to make the changes.
If they have the time to give you Warhammer Dünir, they will do that, regardless of what the poll says. The primary limiting factor is time in the schedule. And it is unlikely that they will have Warhammer Dünir time.
They did offer transparency.
And, already Steven has realized that he cannot be as transparent as he had hoped when he was a gamer transitioning into a game dev. The initial transparency is more opaque.
Again. No one has said don’t give feedback.
No one has said don’t ask for change.
All I’ve said is it’s unlikely that we will be able to make Warhammer-sized Dünir.
We agree. And...we are in Alpha.
Expect the goal to continue to be what we’ve seen in the concept art. It’s like making a poll to try to push them to add Niküa and Orcs into the game because they aren’t in yet.
The devs are going to strive for that anyway.
The message that in the Alpha One PREVIEW, the Dünir look close to, but not exactly like the concept art??
And...you think the devs don’t already know that?
And actually, I think the...coast dwarves? I think? Should be kept as they are and instead called something that would be familiar to fantasy players...be it halfling or hobbit etc. Tbh, I dont even see the point of having 2 dwarf races. Might as well call them children of the earth and have 2 different races.
If Intrepid wants dwarves to be picked the least, for all I care, keep the dwarves as they are. However, if Intrepid wants to be sure that dwarves being played as is common, they should certainly change them. When people want to play dwarves they look for those awesome depictions of them. Hell, a lot of ppl now play DND. They will think "wtf is that??"
And it’s Alpha so, expect the base model to be tweaked over time, too.
Patience is a virtue.
A change is gonna come...it’s just a matter of how much.
You can only play the contrarian position so far.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
10% said they didnt care, yet cared enough to vote, and several hundred didnt even care enough to vote.
When developers run polls, they get four figure responses. If you want to consider this a poll, you need to assume that all people that didn't respond dont care - not just the people that responded that they dont care.
As such, all this can be looked at is a count of people that do care. There is no accurate count for those that do not.
A count of people that do care about wanting a thing to be changed is not a poll, it is a petition. It may be called a poll, but that doesn't mean it is an effective one.
The funny thing is, this is almost an effective petition - so arguing that it should still be called a poll seems somewhat self-defeating.
Opinions in the forums can matter.
Neither will matter if they already agree with the current dev plans.
And neither will matter if there is insufficient time in the release schedule to accommodate a recalibration.
The forums are here to share opinions regardless of any of that.
Unless we get Runes of Magic sliders, I HIGHLY doubt proper dwarves will be possible and either way would be way too much of a work for adapting the armours to it. Otherwise you could easily expect armour to be stretched and unnaturally looking. On the max sliders dwarves, IF that will even be possible in the first place. You're assuming a lot without actually having seen the character creator.
While Intrepid is still in early alpha, they have the chance to change the Dwarf models and make them proper before it is too late. And while I don't expect them to change the dwarves this early, certainly at a certain point they will. Probably when proper customization arrives
And you base this claim how?
Agreed, also the idea that the majority of players, who seem to be wanting the more stereotypical dwarves, will have to be the ones to put in the extra work to make a dwarf resemble what they think a dwarf should be is odd.
As I said on the elves thread, I should not have to fidget and tweak with sliders for a race to look like that race.
I think it's much safer in this case (seeing the majority of people on this megathread is in favor of the beefier dwarves, and that's not even talking about the poll) to have the default template be the beefier one, and then for the minority to have to tweak it to make it look like a gnome.
Total current size of Ashes community - 157 (current vote count) = people we can assume don't care.
And lets not even get in to how easy it is for people to vote multiple times.
Do you honestly think people that don't care are voting here?
Community run polls are pointless.
I also highly doubt that what you refer to as “proper Dwarves” will be possible due to how the armor sets have been designed and crafted, among several other factors.
Where “proper Dwarves” equals Warhammer Dwarves.
It is already planned do the character creator to create Dünir somewhere in-between what is currently in Alpha and Warhammer Dwarves.
How close we can get to Warhammer Dwarves depends on how negatively the release schedule will be impacted by accommodating Warhammer Dwarves.
It’s already too late “change the models to proper Dwarves.” The time to do that, if they were going to have “proper Dwarves” as the base model would have been 2 years ago.
The devs have established their base model and will continue doing iterations to allow options in the character creator which can achieve results as close to Warhammer Dwarves as time in the schedule will allow.
Again, there should be no question that at launch there will be Dünir that are beefier, wider and more stout than the base model currently in the Alpha - likely somewhat taller, to.
The question is how much beefier, wider and stouter can we get within the timeframe of the release schedule.
Warhammer Dwarves are unlikely at this late date. But there is a considerable variety of size in-between what we currently have and Warhammer Dwarves.
We will very likely be able to get Dünir that look like the Dwarf in the Pathfinder race chart I posted because that is fairly close to the current Dünir model.
It’s unlikely we will get Dünir the size of Gotrek in the Gotrek and Felix image Nerror posted. But, expect the devs to try to give us that - if there is time in the schedule to do so.
You don’t have to convince the devs to strive for that. If they don’t do it, it will be because there is not enough time in the schedule to accommodate Warhammer-sized Dwarves.
Most of BDO's focus is on facial features and deformation. Body wise, everyone I have seen mostly stuck to the base one, at most increasing height and broadening the shoulders a bit.
This ^ actually forgot about it.
BDO doesn't allow big changes to the body
You are true about the BDO Character Creator. The BDO Character Creator does not have extreme sliders but you can make grotesque proportions. PSO2 is a much better character creator but IS want to have the same as BDO so you will have to hope IS understand the limitations of BDO's Character Creator.
That’s the way game development works.
This is why Steven talks about the dangers of letting gamers in too early. And being too transparent. 🙄
By the time we get to launch, we don’t know what they will offer as “default”.
Based on the current character creator, we should expect to be able to choose from a number of presets and then adjust the preset we liked best, so... whatever “work” there is in the final character creator to get the physique you desire, it will be about the same for everyone. Rather than there just being one physique available that everyone then has to use sliders to create the desired physique.
Most likely, in the final character creator there will not be one default. Most likely, there will be several presets.
Letting gamers too early thing was due to the game being unstable and shit which would impact player viewpoint.
I have no idea where dwarves have anything to do with it. This is an alpha, everything visual is not final yet. Otherwise we would have tulnar already
Those are the current base models. The presets will likely operate more on the face than the body (kinda like Tera I'd imagine).
Now. To perhaps rephrase what I expressed earlier, let me put it as a scenario.
Let's say your audience is 100 players. If of those 100, about 80 want a model to look a certain way, it might behoove you to have the base model to look that way. And then let the remaining 20 work the character creator to get a different thing.
As this thread (and the fact they had to merge 3 threads of complaints about the aesthetics of the dwarves) would suggest, people would prefer the dwarves to look a certain way.
Thus, it would likely behoove Steven and the whole of Intrepid Studios, to create a base template that is more akin to what people have expressed here. It won't happen in the alpha because it's not the time for the focus to be put on that. But a good thing to consider going forward.
Consider that a number of players at launch will want to jump into the game as quickly as possible and will likely not spend hours lovingly crafting their dwarf to look like what the majority seems to want them to look like.
Why should the game punish the gamer who wants to play the game by giving the player what they consider the inferior version of a specific race?
This applies to most of the races as well. I want them to be unique (from other games) in their own way, but still retain the visual identity of that race, so that anyone watching the game might say: "Oh cool dwarf/elf/orc/tulnar etc."
I fully expect a number of people to not play the game based on what the characters look like.
One big (and admittedly dumb) example of this dynamic is Asmongold and his entire chat. Have you ever seen them react to any video from FFXIV? One passing Miqo'te and suddenly everyone is cringing and shouting weeb.
Now imagine if they see rolling potato looking dwarves, and humans/elves/and orcs that look too "femboyish" for their taste (literally ran into that terrible opinion on reddit once).
Steven states that the Alpha One costs $500 because he wants to ensure that the people testing the Alpha One understand that they are in to test, rather than to play and that EVERYTHING is early iteration that will change over time.
Steven has stated that the final character creator will be as good or better than the BDO character creator.
Anyone in the Alpha One Preview should understand that the current options in the character creator are less than 5% what would be available in a character creator as good as BDO.
Again, this is like assuming Orcs won’t be in the game at all simply because they aren’t in the Alpha One Preview and then starting a poll asking if Ashes should have Orcs as a player race.
Exactly.
And if you truly understood that, you would not have made the same statement about Elves where the primary difference between Elves and Humans will be facial.
That is gamer logic (and flawed).
That is not the way game development actually works.
If a game has a release schedule of 2 years and is going to base their default models on what the followers want, the time to have a poll on race appearance is immediately after the Kickstarter, before any assets have been created.
If you have already missed your original release date by a year or more but if not yet created your Dwarf default model and you are going to rely on the followers to determine the default model, the time to determine what the followers want is months before the concept art is turned into a 3D model, given animations and tested to see how it fits in the game in relation to mounts and architecture.
Going back to the drawing board months after your default model has already been turned into a 3D model, given animations, tested for its relation to mounts, etc. is a quick road to vaporware. Especially if the devs are relying on player-made polls to determine whether they should revamp their 3D model rather than relying on dev-made polls to drive their decisions.
The default base model is already in.
That ship has already sailed.
Just as they started with European facial features and hairstyles as the default base models and are introducing non-European facial features over time, the same will be true of variety in body sizes over time as they become available.
I didn’t need to make a poll to get the devs to add models with African features to the game. That hasn’t been available in APOC and it isn’t currently available in the Alpha One Preview.
No poll is going to change their plans to include a model with African features.
The last time The Ashen Forge interviewed Steven, I voiced my disappointment that we still don’t have models with African features even though it’s 2 years after APOC and we’re headed into Alpha One soon.
Steven recently has shown on Twitter images of new Aelar models which include non-European ethnic features, including African facial features, skin tones and hairstyles, which he hopes will be in the character creator in July.
Again, no poll necessary. Mostly because that was planned all along and the primary limiting factor is time.
Given that Mat Broome, who is African-American, was the lead character artist, I was disappointed that he once again chose to use Europeans for the default base model rather than Africans. It would be nice to sometimes use Africans or Asians or Arabs or some other ethnic group as the default base model rather than always starting with Europeans.
But, just because they aren’t the default base model - the one that is used in early Alpha - that does not mean it will be the only model available at launch.
You have to be the snowiest of snowflakes to be whining if the first option available in the character creator is not the exact model of -whatever- you like, when there are plenty of options for you to choose from to get the results you want.
Steven has stated that Ashes of Creation was born from his homebrew Pathfinder game. There should be no surprise that the default Dwarf base model looks similar to the Dwarf in the Pathfinder race chart I posted as well as similar to the EQ/EQ2 Dwarves, since most of the Ashes devs are former SOE/Daybreak EQ/EQ2 devs.
It’s absurd that you bought into a game being developed by devs inspired by Pathfinder and EQ/EQ2 and then want to demand that the game design must change to be exactly like Warhammer and Middle Earth lore four years into development.
The poll asks if Dwarves should be changed to be more stout. The response is overwhelmingly yes.
But, that is not enough for you.
Not only must the changes be made to suit your imagination, it must be used as the default version during development. And it must be the one default version in the final character creator.
That is how we know the poll is biased because you think that a poll that merely asks if the Dwarves should be stouter must also dictate what is the “proper” Dwarf is.
It’s not just about allowing you to be able to create a Dwarf that fits your imagination it’s about having the power to claim that everyone should agree that your vision of Dwarves is THE primary vision that everyone should adhere to and that other depictions, like EQ Dwarves, are aberrations.
The snowiest of snowflakes.
It’s also absurd to be told by Steven that the character creator will be as good as it better than the BDO character creator and then assert that the character creator will probably be like the Lineage 2 character creator.
No. What this thread shows is that some people demand that Dwarves look a very specific way, while others want options for Dwarves to be taller, beefier, wider and more stout.
The devs already plan to include options in the character creator that will allow players to create Dwarves that are beefier, wider and more stout.
But this is Alpha, so the vast majority of those options are not yet in the character creator.
No. It would not behoove the devs to do so.
The devs will continue to use the default base model.
As development continues, they will iterate and make more body physiques available in the character creator.
If the final character creator is as good or better than the BDO character creator, people will be able to jump into the game and quickly choose presets they like.
Based on your narrowminded view of what each race must look like - even when that is different than the devs’ vision of what the races look like.
🙄
Yeah. I’m sure you also expect Armageddon is just around the corner.
It’s Alpha, so... how do you know what the characters available at launch will look like??
Based on your logic, also a number of people will not be playing Ashes because Ashes will not have Orcs or Tulnar.
That is a very dumb example. We agree.
Wouldn't a visual NDA lift include video? I'd imagine the poor impression people would get from server crashes and rubberbanding videos.
As long as options are there for players to select, everything should be fine. Those options have to fit within the limits of the modeling and gear cosmetics, whatever those end up being. This is not an impossible situation and nothing is set in stone the way some are depicting it.
No one is depicting set in stone, as far as I know.
both humans n dwarfs here seem to lack muscle-mass that make your character look powerfull overall.
dwarfs are short muscle mountains not weak-armed midgets.