Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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
Hint: READ THE QUEST!
A wizard is never late, he arrives precisely when he means to.
I think this game has the best system already in place. Needing a social community. So if some group of toxic players start trying to circle you up and bully you around, you call in your friends and allies to deal with it. Create a place that is good to you and can protect you.
Thank you, for your insight
@all A1 Testers, what were some of the "worst" bugs you ran into?
I've got some questions about some of the points raised there:
Playing a Cleric had some attacks and some heals.
When I duoed with a Tank, he killed stuff way faster... as in, I barely had time to get in an attack before stuff our level was dead, so.. I ended up just healing. That felt like what I might expect a Tank and Cleric duo would play out. We were able to find a spot were mobs were 2-3 times our level and mow them down at a nice pace.
This Alpha was really for testing core systems, mostly networking and optimization. Combat was fine for that. The Level 15 raid that Steven led us on felt fun. I think we played it like a zerg - we didn't need strategies to survive - we had enough numbers.
But, having a bunch of people on mounts racing to the attack locations and pummeling the raid boss was fun.
Everything needs a lot more work, but that is to be expected for an Alpha.
I had fun with what was there. It was more fun for me with the spear, because I like to AOE grind. I went straight into grinding for the best gear the vendor would sell as soon as my node became a town. I was able to solo a elite with 50k hp once I got that gear. It took like 10 minutes of me spamming my swing and managing my mana carefully, but I did it. To me that is fun.
I like to grind mobs though. Lineage 2 and FFXI were some of my favorite games because of the grind. I like Ashes combat so far better than L2 or FFXI. I imagine if someone only plays the newest most polished games they would not have had the fun I had. Ashes does look like it is going to be highly polished in the future.
Some of the dungeons are huge. I spent like a hour and a half in one just trying to get to the end and out. Once again very big Lineage 2 vibes with the open world dungeons. I checked out a handful of dungeons and they all seemed different enough. I did not find any bosses in the dungeons, just lots of elites. Some of the dungeons had more mob and scenery variety than others. The dungeons do look and feel great to be in. There was even one with pitfalls into the lower part of the dungeon like FFXI, but it was seamless instead of instanced.
I did not really die until day three when I was being carless with a group. I did not study the XP debt well, but I did rack up a bill on day three. Grinded off some of the debt. It did not seem that bad to me.
On death you teleport to a respawn point. It seems to work as stated on the WIKI, but I am now realizing I could have looked harder at my XP bar and inventory to confirm correct functionality.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Awesome stuff. Thanks for answering in detail!
Racked up a few deaths worth of xp debt trying to retrieve loot from my corpses being camped near a pack of higher level Bandits, but... felt fine working off the debt.
Combat is easy enough and streamlined for the Alpha that working off xp debt is not an issue.
Should feel like more of a pain when everything is balanced correctly. But, it's difficult to gauge now.
There weren't enough servers. There was a considerable amount of rubberbanding - especially in areas with a high population.
Other than that, it was fairly fun to test stuff out for hours at a time.
Most fun when we ran into people we know from forums and podcasts and APOC.
Getting messages about which Nodes had progressed to the nest Stage and which Nodes became vassals was fun. Getting an alert that the first vote for Mayor would take place in 15 minutes was kind of exciting in the moment because I was way across the opposite side of the map. Possible I could race to the Node in time to participate, but I missed it by a couple minutes.
I guess the exciting part is just seeing in person that they have some rudimentary features and mechanics implemented.
I went into it not even being sure the nodes were working. When I found out they were I was super excited.
Leveling a node really put the wind in my sails. I am excited to see node warfare, and be apart of a living breathing world. Up until now it just seemed like a idea that was really cool on paper, but now that I am have seen a glimpse of it. I want to see it all.
Like I thought "The last dab" hot sauce on spaghetti might be good when my friend described it, but I was not until I tried it that I realized spaghetti would never be the same again...
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
The combat was servicable. I had a good bit of fun with it. I went into it expecting the worst, and was surprised that it was actually decent. It really suffered from a lack of customized keybinds, though.
Didn't get to explore any dungeons unfortunately. Some of the world bosses were really cool though. Me and my friends managed to kill the twin raid bosses that Steven showed off a while ago.
I quickly learned to fear death
After the test, I'm super excited to explore the world! I loved the feeling that everybody was working on their own node and trying to make it their home, but in completely different spots of the map. There was a real sense of distance and discovery, and I wish I could have known everything that was going on in the server.
on the contrary, what was the worst part of your experience ? it's always interesting to see what points they can improve
But, for early Alpha...they were functional...mostly.
For me it was the look and feel of the game world. The environments were great, the music was great. It was a game world that just felt good to be in. We spend a lot more time in MMOs than in other games so you have to want to go there.
It was never supposed to be fun
Yeah I know, that's why I said it's alpha.
Trust me alpha 0 was waaaaay worse than this
The loot automatically goes into the inventory of everyone in the group if the mob is looted.
I'm sorry but I have to agree with Mushin. I am 100% optimistic still but this game is EASILY 2 years away. I wouldn't drop NDA if I was Intrepid. My 2 cents..
I did a lot of exploring and seemed to find some neat stuff that others missed, or at least I didn't see anyone on those spots. For example, some very nice ocean fishing spots and also areas where there were lots of minerals and other resources to harvest in hidden little nooks and crannies. As you got some experience harvesting you were able to buy higher grade tools (pickaxes, fishing poles, and the like) which enabled you to harvest higher grade materials. Once a node leveled up sufficiently, I realized that these higher level materials were not only needed in some of the crafting but also to build your caravans and to be the materials that you used the caravans to ship to another node. The caravan NPC worked well, giving you choices of what to ship and where to ship it to.
Once the nodes advanced and there were a lot of buildings, all of the doors were usable. You could go into the town hall, library, houses, barracks and other types of buildings. Even at the village stage, many of them were three stories tall and had beautifully detailed interiors. (This hinted to me that the game might be further along in development than seems to be the general opinion).
Quests gave much faster advancement than grinding, at least that is my opinion. The world is beautiful and rich in detail. Mob progression and placement was nice and the mobs could be dangerous if you weren't careful. Roads and paths developed as the nodes progressed, as promised. The world is huge.
I had a very positive experience. Clearly there is plenty of work to do, but it certainly beat my expectations.
We've given feedback the same for months, just because the verbal NDA has been dropped doesn't mean the months of the same feedback will automatically change unless change has been seen in the direction we want.
First though - Thanks for playtesting the game!
So how does the world scale? Like could I just spawn my new character, pick a random direction, and run forth and find quests and mobs I can level on no matter what (a system like ESO's "One Tamriel" or WoW's Chromie Time) or will I be kind of led from Quest Hub A to Quest Hub B with mob levels kind of dictating where I can go?
And later when I'm higher level or max level are lower areas trivial AOE trash farms or do they scale up with you or do you scale down? I'm not really sure how I feel about scaling, but this is a concern for me since the group I play with is a mix of hardcore and casual players and were generally far apart in progression after a few weeks.
Also... will the world be big enough that a small group of players, say 10 to 20 strong, can realistically tromp off to one of the far corners of the world and start a small community there without much threat of assaults or hostile takeovers? No aspirations to be the next Winterfell, but I wouldn't mind being the next Karhold or Bear Island.
Thanks again for your time!
As to your second question, not having tried that I can only speculate. Probably you can, at least to a large extent, though others would find you eventually. The world is huge. Even not too far from the first node to reach Village level, I found a rich spot with lots of resources and only one other player ever wandered in.
Last weekend, there were plenty of mobs - not a ton of variety in the mobs. Maybe a dozen types of mobs from Level 1 to Level 15. We players maxed at Level 10.
There were also small pockets of areas where we could harvest...herbs, trees, minerals and fish.
Generally challenging to find those locations.
Seemed to me less than 20 quests available, but the quests I had were basically enough to keep me preoccupied while I explored the world and tried to figure out where I needed to go and what I needed to do to complete the quest.
The Alpha One map is about 20-25% of the world map. People would probably be able to find the Node if they also wanted to set up camp where you are...once the Node hits Stage 1. They might not be able to find 10-20 people running around trying to progress the Node, but 10-20 people cannot progress a node to Stage 3 by themselves.
- I had fun and the world is immersive due to the content being in the world, no super easy fast travel from one side to the other of the map, meaningful decision making, looting players corpses for materials
- I think the combat is decent and fun given the stage of development (some weight and not overly rigid or floaty)
- Was cool to see a level 3 node
things I'd like to see before the full NDA release to give a decent first impression:
- more networking fixes for rubberbanding issues which I know is currently the main focus and is improving test by test
- There were a lot of bugs around quests. It won't give a great experience if people go to a quest location and it's not there/doesn't work or you complete a quest and can't hand it in. I understand there will be these bugs but hopefully a lot less.
Overall the community around this test has been great and fun which I believe is in part due to the immersive world so the core values are holding true from a player experience point of view for me.