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
I'll keep it short.
I am extremely skeptical that any of what you just said will happen the way you described.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Features that were integral to the design during Kickstarter cannot be feature creep.
I think it depends on the node. Realistically I think large guilds will monopolize the power positions.
If you consider guild leaders discussing tactics and politics when dealing with other guilds RP, then there will be plenty of this. To me, this is all just logical emergent gameplay/storytelling that comes from a competitive open world environment. People are doing this as players not as characters.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Feature creep and happen at any stage of production.
Originally WOW was intended to have a darkness mechanic, hunger system, and campfires were needed to rest periodically. All of these features were cut from the game because they were not good MMORPG features.
All of those features are great in a survival game, but not an MMORPG. Survival games like Ark and Conan:Exiles are examples of games that do not call themselves RPGs, but fit all the classic criteria to be an RPG. Custom characters, builds, gear, stat systems...
Some systems are better for some game types than others. Ashes can't be everything.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Its not a make believe thing , this stuff has happen in mmos before , Ultima Online and Star War Galaxies both had heavy player interactions on a social level , its just the 'living world" gameplay hasn't been done in a longtime for a mmorpg which will make it new for a lot of players. Its this kind of gameplay that will bring pve players that not too keen on the pvp aspect into the game. If we don't get these people, it will be a empty shell of a sandbox game where we just have a niche group of pvp players talking smack to each other in pvc.
Hour-long Siege. Which was pretty fun.
I typically only like PvP for about an hour, so it ended just as my interest was beginning to wane.
I was able to see that my podcast co-host, Legendary Neurotoxin, was online via the chatbox, even though he wasn't near me. Stumbled upon him during the Siege. We ended up at the same Ballista.
So chat bubbles are in the test?
Really? That is very uplifting if so.
Are there any options to alter them in any way? Include / exclude options, and do they have a visible range between characters?
And I didn't really pay attention to visible range.
I guess we could try to test that next week.
If you could, i would really appreciate it. I don´t want you to set aside any amount of time specifically of course in your test phase, but if you are using it and happen to take notice, i would be very interested. Thank you for the offer.
Heavy social interactions and RP are not the same thing. I am more than willing to party with you, war with you, trade with you, crack open a few beers and chat on discord with you after downing a raid boss. All great social interaction made possible in any MMORPG and reasons why I love the genre.
I am not willing to RP as my character in game. If I were to do that, I would not need more than the baseline tools such as chat channels, emotes, and chairs.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Performing a role in game , rather you go around being a merchant , raiding ships on the sea as a pirate, trying to get yourself elected mayor enticing people to vote you , or just going on raids to slay a dragon as a adventurer all makes Ashes a game focus on role-playing because the game systems are design for you to do many different things that all cause social interaction. You don't have to act a character personality in game for the role-playing to happen , just by playing the game causes that because everything you do has a effect on everyone else in the game , your actions causes change to happen from little ripples to big ones. All rp tools do is make this interaction more immersive for people that want them.
We are talking about tools for role players, not normal player activities.
I don't have a problem with normal player activities.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Player personality could be very close to the character personality for RP.
It's really just a matter of whether you're going to include talking about what's happening in Florida, which Kickstarter package you bought, the minimum specs of your PC or how 133t your guild is in WoW. That's not RP.
Tools for RPers are anything that help players play the roles of their characters in a more immersive manner. Especially out of combat.
What a character looks like.
Achievements and server firsts.
Info on a player's class.
Character's back story via journal entries (that are shared publicly by the player).
Traits can be applied that describe a character's history.
"You will have a unique homepage for each character and that homepage will be able to be customized by the user to display unique information. It will have a small out-of-game RPG component where you can construct background and traits and stuff like that."
---Steven
The character page will be accessible in game by opening a browser through the UI.
"That's part of the character sheet desire for us which hopefully will be accessible in game as well by opening a browser through our UI where you can get back history of a character that that character has input themselves into journal entries that they may choose to share with others... For role play perspective we want people to be in depth with their characters."
---Steven
The player can manage what info is shown on the character page.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Roleplaying
"A MMO lives and breathes on its community and we don't really want to give short shrift to any one of those types. All of them are important: the RPers are important, the people who just want to hang out in the Inn and talk are important, they all add to the game and so we want to make sure that we take care of all of them... You can run a business based on RPing."
---Jeffrey
But i would like to see a boxing tavern brawl of sorts, it would be tons of fun, and would definetly add to the game!
These guys in here don't want to hear it from me, but I always encourage people with even a passing interest in RP to try to find a D&D or Pathfinder group at a local comic or game shop.
There are a handful of online games I have seen with decent RP potential. Space Station 13, GTA V RP, and Atlas or Conan Exiles, have some great RP opportunities. These games just don't have the full potential of table-top RP. Most good servers will have an application and whitelist process, but if you can't find a D&D group, these games can be fun.
I did not list any MMORPGs on here because in my experience, RP in an MMORPG is one step up from a MIRC char room. This would explain why you have found RP to be dull. I might come off as a snob here, but when you have had a superb version of a dish it is hard to want to eat the fast food version.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Roll 20 is a good software for roleplaying on a virtual desktop via chatting or voice in Discord. Foundry virtual desktop is also a fantastic tool. If you want to get into more RP before Ashes, many games offer this in it´s own way. Do you have any other MMO you play today? I would say ESO ( Elder scrolls online ) is a nice easy way to get into RP. Ashes is not out for quite some time, so i would say a lot of us are roleplaying in other games until then.
Just make sure you take it easy, and don´t feel stressed about it. You advance in your own pace.
It would be more accurate to say that Ashes, as it is, is fully baked into being an RP tool.
It's difficult to explain this fully without the visual NDA lifted. The environments and spaces in the game, along with the intended methods for the economy (defeating monsters who drop things that you use, rather than just easy money) and the way that the quests and NPCs are set up, all drive a situation where your immersion can remain unbroken for long periods.
You don't have to do anything. They don't have to do anything more than add the Taverns. Nearly nothing else is required. You walk, and you 'are yourself and at the same time your character', and you can blend them as much as you do or don't want to happen.
You meet someone in the world and you take them at face value, and unless they push back and refuse to be taken for 'the entity they have chosen to play as', you probably won't break your immersion.
Like I said, it's really hard to explain. If you walk past a certain area with a person fishing and you ask them 'what is past here in these ruins?' and they know, and answer, you've had an RP interaction at least a bit.
If you were looking for... idk, some crystal that grows on a creature, and you ask 'have you seen this creature, I'm looking for the crystals from them', that person could answer 'they're down there', or 'be careful, the person who collects those is territorial', or 'we collect so much of those, you should be able to buy them in town'.
A spiderweb worth. 'Tools' are not really likely to be a focus due to being so unnecessary for many of the interactions.
"They're coming through the South gate! You, man the ballista, we'll hold them off!"
Roleplayers should be fine because if they don't push on other non-roleplayers, the game itself has no obvious incentives for a non Roleplayer to break immersion. Aside from 'declaring that you're pathetic and asking your question in terms of the game is cringe', of course.
And you can just imagine that person to be crazy and touched by the Corruption.
But, if what's being asked for is a character bio page and chat bubbles - Ashes will have that.
Bio page is not in Alpha yet, but it's in the game design. There could be more stuff not yet revealed - though I have no clue what that might be.
An easy to organize chat is also a great idea that we will explore more as we get deeper into development. 🙏
---AshesofCreation
Mate, im gonna outplay and smack you so hard you get deleted, then im gonna roleplay all over your deceased body like a true gamer.
If you want to play systematically and without any soul in a fantastic world created for you, that's your problem, it's gonna hurt you more when you realize you are still bad.
Honestly I think the only request I've seen from roleplayers (after the whole speech bubble argument awhile back) was a chat command or checkbox that flags yourself as In Character similar to how you flag yourself for PvP.
Most everything else that a roleplayer would ever want is already planned for the game
It's not that people don't want to hear your opinion dude, it's that "I personally don't like roleplaying in MMOs" isn't equitable to "roleplay in MMOs is bad." Roleplayers have always been a niche within a niche and your entire argument is pure confirmation bias.
* You think roleplay in MMOs is pointless
* You don't participate in it and thus don't know where to find it
* You don't see it everywhere you go b/c it's a minority activity
* So then it has to be a waste of time
On top of that one of your examples for good roleplay games, GTAV, wasn't even a great place to roleplay until after modders added systems that you would call bloat in AoC.
Lastly, instead of saying "Even though I prefer X I can understand some prefer Y my primary concern is feature creep" you've opted for "RP in MMOs are bad and even though I haven't expressly said it, it strongly reads as you're bad for liking it" and what makes it exceptionally frustrating that so much of this thread has been dedicated to this one conversation is that no one here has actually suggested anything that would constitute feature creep.
Most everyone has just been talking about features already planned for the game.
I have actually said "I prefer X I can understand some prefer Y my primary concern is feature creep". I have expressed that concern in the past year on the forums more than once.
Yes, I have been hard on roleplay in this thread, but there has been much more depth to what I have said in this thread than this:
That is a disingenuous oversimplification of what I have said. I have said some of those things, but with a long list of reasons to show why I feel the way I feel. It would be nice to have a little more candor.
Having reasons to explain my arguments is not confirmation bias. I stated in the past that I have wanted to like RP in MMORPGs. I just don't see the potential.
One of the big points I have made is that I don't think MMORPGs are a great canvas for roleplay. In addition to that, I don't think that Ashes is a game centered around Role-play.
Which is why I can say that in addition to not having some of these larger asked for features like proximity voice chat. I am also advocating for the removal of features that are confirmed, like tavern games.
To me, If you took all the roleplay focused features out of Ashes you would still have a great game. As Dygz has said many many times. The game is late. He worries about things like changing the way races look effecting the game's production timeline. I worry about excessive RP features effecting the game's production timeline.
I will concede to you that GTV RP is a bad example for the reasons, you stated. Still, adding those RP features to Ashes feels a bit like adding them to a game like Smite or Leauge of Legends. Both of those games have chat and emotes yet they are intended to be compeditive games. Putting GTA V RP's features in a moba would be a bigger disaster than putting them in Ashes for sure, but it still does not seem like they are a great fit for Ashes. I just don't seem compedtive enviroments as good environments for roleplay.
Like you said at the start: What is also a niche within a niche is competitive open world MMORPGs that focus on Risk Vs Reward.
Even if we are mostly talking about planned features, I will still voice concern when I see things that worry me. The family summon system is at the top of my list of worries.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I would argue that w/o immersive elements such as tavern games, or even something like horse taming in BDO, that Ashes would be more MOBA than MMORPG in which case why not just revert development back to APOC?
The very things you don't want in the game are exactly the things that separates it from all the other hyper competitive games that AoC is specifically trying not to be. WoW is an excellent example of what happens when you continually strip features to focus solely on the competitive parts of the game...it's a subpar esport on it's best day while it's players beg for features that are standard in most any other MMO.
These features are a lot like ambient parts of real life. You might not be one to stop and smell the roses...but it's notable when they're all suddenly absent.
Even of the things already planned they're really not that involved. Hell, I'd say the inclusion of underwater content before launch is doing WAY more to slow development than anything in this thread.
I don't consider immersive elements and RP tools to be the same thing.
The tavern system as Steven describes just seems like a bit too much for Ashes at launch. I would be far more receptive to these things if it was a "Lets talk about Ashes 2.0" six months into live.
To be clear,
I consider immersive elements things like having a believable world, realistic graphics, ambient sounds and sound effects, weather, day and night cycles.
I consider RP tools to be emotes, chairs, mini-games, Proximity VoIP, Player run gambling, traveling faires, weddings.
Some of these features are just a bit much. Especially for an Indy game breaking into the industry with a niche concept.
WOWs current situation is a complex combination of problems.
The sentiment of what you are saying is something I agree with, though.
Without these RP tools, Ashes is looking like it will be more featue rich than WOW at lauch.
Some of these RP tools just seems like a extra tacked on features. In a already ambitious project. Which is very worrisome as someone who has watched good games die to feature creep.
I agree 100%, Underwater content seems like perfect expansion material. I would be fine if the seas just had a little vegetation and a handful of mob types to start.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Can you ignore it when people are constantly asking for races to be fixed?
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.