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
For me it was my experience in Dragon's Nest.
Almost everything was instanced dungeons in that game.
The entire world felt fragmented and disconnected, there was a storyline involving a kidnapper on the run - who kept appearing at the end of each instance to run away.
It was 1 step away from a lobby based MMO, and that undermines the whole point of an MMO.
For once, a new MMORPG try to bring back the content in the open-world but here you are, asking for a new "instanced competitive content" game.
AoC is not an another themepark fully instanced MMORPG and it's totally fine and why i'm so hyped about it.
I really really hope Steven will never follow this path.
I am a massive fan of instanced raid content. I very much enjoy the progression aspect to what WOW used to do. That being said, it doesn't seem that AoC will offer anything even remotely close to what we want out of true PVE. It's up in the air how enjoyable the end game content will be. I really hope zerging doesn't end up being the way to go via end game. This would cause the game to fail quickly.
Almost same thinking, but don`t mind the hardest dungeons being instanced IF entry to that instance is gated & contestable by pvp. Safe entry, then defeats all other aspects and takes away challenge. And associated drops, mats from those dungeons / raids etc being contestable.
I don't want to see people running around all over the place if its content around their level, you should die pretty fast. I don't want the scenario where one guild kills another guilds group deep into a dungeon and the guild that got killed calls their buddies and suddenly the dungeon is filled with an unorganized stream of players running into the dungeon pulling everything along the way and not dying.
I would love it if dungeons were around the EQ or Warhammer level of difficulty when it comes to full group content. I wouldn't call this a hardcore dungeon, just a regular dungeon.
Even if I think they suck. I played UO, EQ, DAOC, Meridian 59, Gemstone 3 (lol). I’ve played open dungeons. I know the advantages and the pitfalls..
Instanced dungeons are both great for storytelling and give you the real “A party of heroes set out with a Ring/Horn/Sword” feel. Personally I’d love to see single party dungeons and Two Party Raid dungeons (basically 6-12 person range) I like the smaller size raids SS they are more personal and honestly easier to get the same people together multiple times a month. I personally would rather see open over 25+ man raids. I say keep the giant bosses like that and then build equally as challenging smaller content. See an OPEN dungeon is a one time build. Those smaller little things are able to be done by just a small group of designers. Personally I’d love to see Quest for say a Miner to get a special ore and run to X location with a group you hire or know and the miner has a scroll to open a small mine (say 10 random builds you can get) the group goes in, clears trash, bosses est and waves of mobs disrupting mining etc.. they don’t have to be Mechanar each time. Small teams can build these easily with today’s engines.
No loading time or loading screens between regions.
There will be open world dungeons and raids. The aspiration is to maintain the open world feel while being able to capitalize on the benefits of instanced mechanics.[4]
Instancing is only going to happen in certain dungeons where the desire is to have greater narrative appeal. Outside of these and arenas there will not be too much instancing anywhere else.[3]
There will be an 80/20 split between open world vs instanced encounters.[2][5][6]
There is no instancing in Alpha-1.[7]
We're probably going to do instancing only in certain dungeons and in arenas. You probably won't see instancing too much anywhere else. What you see is gonna be what you get.[3] – Jeffrey Bard
The PvP flagging system presents an opportunity for open conflict.[8]"
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Instancing
About "you can do difficult fight in open world" yes... you can design it to be hard. but can it be hard ? ... Maybe if you do a fight like AV or PW in FFXI yep, sure. And would be happy to see this and be proven wrong. Aside from those 2 the hardest PvE boss fight were instanced, for a simple reason : No way to get far more people that needed. Kelthuzad in vanilla, Arthas 25HM, Argus mythic. they were designed to be really tough for 40/25/20 people. But put the same bosses in open world, and lets go as 200 people on them... Same goes with ultimate fight on FFXIV, designed for 8 people, do it open world with limitless people...
This is were the only bosses hard in open world i know in MMORPG were Pandaemonium Warden and Absolute Virtue. They were not design for X people, but to be nearly unkillable. So adding more people was not enough to kill them.
The difficulty on AoC is not to be in PvE itself, but because PvE will include risk of PvP. And PvP can always be difficult at some point
I'm not sure I understand why that means 'build an unchallenging encounter'. But maybe you meant 'build it as hard as you want, but unlimited numbers renders any challenge useless'.
I don't think the fact that other people can kill you or kill steal necessitates less strong or interesting bosses. If the boss is hard the pvpers still have to beat it. If they go for kill steal style instead they'd have to have gotten there in time to do more than half the work. If people want to Zerg 1. There isn't limitless people in an area at any given time 2. There are mechanics that can make the number advantage have a diminishing returns.
For example, what If ashes of the fallen heal the boss and give it a boost to some of it's special abilities, like a fire dragons heat aura or increases the strength of it's mirages abilities. Perhaps enough player deaths increase the number of mirages. Now you have a situation where the Zerg /needs/ more organization or tactics because random player death negatively effects everyone. A smaller well organized group could do better. Give the boss a decent set of telegraphed and untelegraphed aoe abilities and an intelligent enough decision-making ai and now things can get interesting plenty of ways to build complex strategic bosses AND have a difficult interesting fight.
Additionally, terrain has a huge effect on limiting how many people can be in a place at once due to collision boxes. This allows for Intrepid to build single file corridors, steep and narrow mountain paths you can lise your footing on, small spaces to maneuver in to avoid the aoe attacks etc. Yes you can have a steady stream of people but it's slower. Get crowded enough areas and someone is going to die. Combine that with boss benefiting mechanics on player death and now you got a real grind house. How long can you keep a zerg confident enough to keep going and racking up xp debt. It will eventually balance out I think.
There are ways to fine tune these mechanics for a good open world experience. Dumbing down the bosses isn't required. Just make sure your terrain and mechanics are fined tuned enough relative to each other.
As a side note I too hope world bosses can get as rediculous as AV and PW.
Ain't this gonna be interesting. And by interesting I mean what gonna be player reactions when they will have absolutely zero chance to fight back and take a role of environment prop mob to be stomped due to 'social skills' from outside the game environment.
Although what's more likely is that streamers will get sniped and killed preventing the game to ever getting enough gravitas in that department. As the game will simply be 'unstreamable'.
It will be an issue either way with no flagging for pvp. If pvp is always on then streaming is suicide xD
PvP is indeed a limiting factor to how hard you can make an encounter.
If you take any top end raid encounter from any game that actually has top end raids, and you add in one single player with one single ranged attack, that one player with that one attack would be able to prevent any guild from being able to kill that top end raid encounter. This is a statement that is not being exaggerated, nor is there any use of hyperbole, it is just an outright truth.
People that do not get this are - in my observation - people that have never taken on such encounters, and so it is understandable that such people do not understand. It is always harder to understand that which you have no frame of reference for.
What Intrepid can do is chose between an encounter that is able to be killed with PvP happening, or an encounter that is so hard it can not be killed with PvP happening.
One of these will result in people fighting until they see that it is pointless, and then all leaving, the other will result in people fighting until the content is killed. The first of these is decidedly unfun, the second is far more enjoyable.
Clearly, one of these fits Ashes design philosophy and goals, and the other doesn't.
Yeah granted I haven't read all of them, but whenever it comes up I see the same argument being made. I think it partially stems from you having a very specific definition of what hard means due to your raid centric point of view.
We probably don't even have a real disagreement ultimately. Raids have a lot of fine tuning. But this fine tuning to me isn't necessarily what makes the raid hard, it is what makes the raid stat and execution dependent. The mechanics, decision making, and teamwork tactics are whatmake a raid hard in my mind.
So when I am talking about 'a hard boss' my mind goes to things that make the fight difficult and interesting from that point of view. Where as you are probably thinking about the gear, fine tuning of boss dmg and hp, time to kill requirements etc. These are equally important and valid perspectives of what constitutes 'hard'. Just a different value system due to our different life existences and conception of fun.
Therefore I agree. With your definition of what is important to making a raid hard. PvP does in fact make a boss design less hard because what get's fine tuned is different. Hence all of my suggestions being focused on what is controllable from the other side. Mechanics, decision making, and teamwork prerequisites.
Or because there is an enrage, forcing people to give the best DPS possible (won't be case on AOC with the "combat tracker are creation of satan" mind) Or because fight are long, hour or even hours long (and there, just watch old FFXI fight, even more true with PW/AV). In this second situation, the longer the fight is, the more possible a PvP will just destroy your hope to kill the fight.
Even with collision you can't have limited people on the fight, even more in hour/hours long fight where you can totally rotate healers to make them burst heal. (and other kind of support who could this way burn their mana "too fast". maybe also DPS).
A hard fight, is about execution, time, perfect DPS (not only big stuff so... but perfect mastery of your character.) global tactics and strategies. the hardest fight would be a hours long enrage timer, needing people to output crazy DPS like needed in fights like Algalon (which also had many need of boss mechanic management, teamwork, etc). With global strategy as crazy as was PW/AV. and there you get the toughest fight MMORPG ever (for now
But longer is a fight, more possible a guild comes, not for the boss, but to keep you away from the kill. If you are on the boss, a rival guild should totally consider it is better to kill you to avoid you to get kill and so the stuff, than saying "meh... will get it for ourselves on respawn"
Shorter is a fight easier it will be. Take any boss from any MMORPG, reduce 20% its life bar and it will be easier.
Again : would be happy to be proven wrong, while what i says is from 20 years of MMORPG history, it is possible maybe, to do new kind of design to reinvent the genre.
Yeah duration of a fight has an effect on difficulty and PvP intrusion. I think there is a fine balance Ashes can have with good dungeon design. Pop mechanics, dynamic terrain, soft lock gates, variations in mob pop, difficulty, and mechanics depending on dungeon progression etc.
I wrote a very detailed hypothetical dungeon scenario yesterday but haven't posted it yet since it got super long and complicated which didn't usually go well with the forum crowd here.
If we are talkiong about hard PvE raid content, and whether or not it could exist in Ashes, is there a perspective that is any more valid than a raid=centric point of view?
I do, howerver, also have a comment on this portion of your p[ost above; Tuning of raids determines if you actually need to even worry about the mechanics of the encounter.
If the tuning is done so that there is a lot of room to move, you can simply ignore specific aspects of the encounter and just brute force your way through them.
I've seen this happen on a number of encounters in a number of games - developers put a really interesting mechanic in an encounter, but players literally just ignore it because they can heal through it, or just DPS it down.
As such, those interesting mehcanics that make a raid encounter what it is are absolutely nothing (literally) without propper encounter tuning.
The raid centric point of view for PvE is useful in informing the games design relative to PvE. I would even agree in a very limited fashion it is 'the most valid.' I think it is the most valid when considering: time to kill, gear progressions, dps floor requirements, and coordination requirements when it comes to clearing the dungeon pieces before the end boss. WoW and other games have a lot to teach Inrepid about those fine tuning points.
However I think the things I listed as my personal perspective on difficulty, let's call it ' team strategy centric' for lack of a better word even though team strategy is obviously core to raid fundamentals either way nor am I claiming your perspective neglects those aspects. I think those factors are more relevant to PvX AND PvE situations in dungeon design because they are more broad. It is a perspective more able to take PvE and PvX needs into equal account.
So here is a more clear version of what my concept of 'walking the line' is based on my mulling over a hypothetical scenario.
1. Raid design and dynamics have an executional difficulty relative to mob design and mob placement.
2. The better your team is at this the faster you can get further in the dungeon.
3. Navigating a dungeon optimally itself is a challenge.
4. In Ashes I think Raids should look a little more like races to clear with the dungeon opener having a significant head start.
5. I think the mobs and terrain should as a rule be dynamic relative to how far in the head of the pack gets in.
6. The more deep in they get the more challenging the mobs are relative to tactics and execution.
7. The boss chamber should probably be soft locked so that team A gets time to complete the boss if they also managed to clear the dungeon significantly well and require the pop item used to open the dungeon in thec first place
8. Node populations, travel times to dungeon, paying off other guilds, pop item design, and terrain are inherent factors in limiting how much competition is even possible.
9. Variations in escape routes help further split the population requirements to thwart a raid group significantly.
10. Some PvX boss mechanics still work for PvE content, some scaling and unlocking of more PvX boss design can be built in relative to the boss gate being opened twice are probably useful.
11. Team B and opportunists (Team C) have rewards in the realm of pop item progression or maybe even some lesser crafting materials findable as rares in lower level/difficulty dungeons and farming as secondary rewards they could aim for instead of simply thwarting team A.
12. Terrain dynamism and timers can naturally limit possible size of team b population inside the dungeon.
13. Minimum team compositions for team A happen out of pop item usage efficiency, but require a big picture design focus difficult to say if is possible to balance in accordance with Node progression (but I think is an Ashes unique feature that is a wild card.)
There are more points but a baker's dozen is already a long list. These are a bunch of wholiatic points where I think Intrepid needs to focus its fine tuning. I think you can agree with most if not all this list as a hardcore raider, but the definition of challenge and difficulty gets more fluid as a result of the 'race' dynamic and I am not sure how compatible that is to your Raid perspective. But I think 'hard' encounters relative to 'team strategy centric' points are possible here.
I somewhat agree with your last point about raid cheesing and bypassing mechanics happening . Strict fine tuning is a powerful tool to preventing this and Ashes by nature has some limitations on how much they can do that. I still think a fine line is possible, but it would probably take trial and error to get there. This is why I think your hardcore raid perspective needs to be a vocal part of the design team. But Ashes probably needs a mix of voices to get what I perceive will lead to dynamic challenging raids in a PvEvP experience. I also think it's why some instanced raids are a necessity to the holistic design of raid content since pop item design is directly linked with raid progression and they would provide islands of stability and scarcity for certain dungeon progressions.
'The group who opens the door to the dungeon.' Team A. Not all dungeons will probably have this, but for harder dungeons I think it is a necessity as it is what causes pop items to be a core part of the overarching holistic design of dungeon progression.
The core design of Ashes will not have this - nor anything like it.
Dungeons will be just like every other zone, they will always exist, even if no players are in them. There is no "first" group or raid in to the dungeon (other than the first on the server, I guess).
Essentially, dungeons are the same as the rest of the world, just with more walls.
People that have done instanced raiding but no open world raiding really have a few things they are going to want to consider. The notion of raids not being in dungeons that need to be "opened" is one thing, but so is the notion of base population respawning.
The thing with base population respawning is that it is also a perfect signal to other raids in the dungeon as to where you and your raid are. If I come to a passage in a raid dungeon that is empty and shouldn't be, I know a raid has been here in the last 15 minutes or so (every game with open world raids I have played has had base population respawns at around 15 minutes - there are reasons for this but that is another discussion).
So, I see your trail of dead base population, I now know where you are and you don't even know that I am here. In a game like Ashes, there is a single obvious course of action for me and my raid to take in this situation.
Why?
That sounds like a pretty big design oversight on Intrepid's part. If they exclude what I will reffer to as soft lock gating and pop items then yeah you are just flatly correct. PvEvP raids will be unchallenging (and probably suck?) From a PvE point of view. Why they would exclude tools like this given the type of game they want seems needlessly hamstrung.
Dungeons with soft locks 'always exist' it specifically does /not/ require instancing.
Mob respawn is a fine tuneable aspect in a race scenario. But given you telling me this is essentially not possible to properly design in ashes it is lind of a moot point (and one example of why excluding those design tools is a bad idea)
Most of the information from live streams isn't really categorized. Only about 10% ever makes it on to the wiki (though lately, live streams have been less than 10% new information).
This means there are dozens of live streams from 2017 and 2018 (and 2019 I guess) that have information that isn't really on the wiki. Some of it was just comments made in passing - but these comments are where you get a real insight in to the game, or in to Stevens thinking in regards to specifics. Often, you need to take many of these small comments together to create a picture of what the idea actually is.
This means I can't point you in any one direction for a definitive statement here (and if you knew me, you would know that I wouldn't do that even if I could).
Now, I am the first to say that my take on some of what has been said may well be colored by the fact that I have played games with both open raid dungeons, as well as games with open raids in a PvP setting. However, when you listen to how Steven talks about dungeons in Ashes (which includes raid scale dungeons), it is fairly clear the intention is for multiple groups to be running around at the same time, happening upon each other.
As with most of the game, there is no intention of restrictive mechanics like soft locks. The intention is that these encounters are to be fought over - during the encounter itself.
I don't think any of the points in the things I listed exclude the definition or feeling of the raid being 'fought over.' So maybe this type of model will be considered. Or not.
I mean, if Intrepid had any plans at all along the lines of what you are suggesting, do you not think they would have said something about it by now?