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Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest news on Alpha Two.
Check out general Announcements here to see the latest news on Ashes of Creation & Intrepid Studios.
To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Feedback Thread - Alpha One Testing
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Comments
Alpha general feedback regarding the subject asked on first login.
Login/Patching
- Logins and patching always went well without any trouble.
NPC Ai Behaviors
- I noticed that typically cat and humanoid creatures had trouble facing me when attacking. I reported which types I encountered during gameplay.
Chat Systems
- I dislike that the chat window disappears on itself after like a minute or so.
- I also miss different chat filters allowing me to write in percey world/server chat, to actually talk to other people on the server.
Mount & Vehicles
- So far I only had enough money to test out the normal White horse mount, which looked great, the sprint spell was working really good.
- I find mounts a little to static, it would be nice with a more fluent movement and especially some kind of sidestep which reacts a little quicker.
Spawn Tables
- Regarding the spawn time for a mob I’m really satisfied so far, depending on how many servers you plan on having during release it maybe should be even quicker respawns the first couple weeks.
- Regarding the actual spawning of a mob on your screen compared to minimap view is bad, I encountered a couple times, where I saw the mob on the minimap but it took the game 5-10 seconds to actually spawn the mob in front of me.
Server Stability
- I had several crashes, where my launcher said that the server was down, and my game got shut down. But I was able to start the game right away and join back in, seemed like some stability issues of some kind.
Player Progression
- I find the progression really slow during ALPHA ONE, after you hit level 3 it becomes hard leveling up.
- I do not find any gear and getting gear during quests has not occurred to me yet. Which means I lack some satisfaction on that end, getting better gear usually gives you a motivation boost.
Basic Crafting & Harvesting
- Crafting Seems to be fine only problem is, its PURE cancer to gather materials for it.
- I like the idea of gathering, but it should be implemented in a way, so you never feel a lack of resources. During this ALPHA it’s just horrible, there’s not enough resource nodes everyone is trying to find one. People start killing each other for resources.
- Tools for gathering should be made more progressive, it makes no sense to buy the cheapest tools which are basically useless. I could only use them on 1/3 of all the gathering nodes I encountered in the starting area.
Player Density Stressing
- If there are to many players at one location the game stops functioning, release yesterday was horrible. I was not even able to move or fight mobs due to the high amount of player base at the starting location.
Skills and Abilities
- Warrior (Javelin) has some issues, sometimes when you pull mobs towards you they run back to where they were pulled from. And what happens then is really random, some mobs go a few centimeters back and suddenly attack, some attack directly and others just reset their aggro.
- The other skills and abilities from the warrior seemed to work fine, but the animations/effects are a little to glamorous, eye disturbing, to much (can´t find the right words to describe it).
- Cooldown timers in general seem a little to long, and should be shown in a more obvious way. I have a hard time seeing when my skill JAVELIN is up and ready. It´s almost impossible to see the shade shifting.
Questing
- NPC´s should have an obvious marker on top of their head or something else that indicates that they have a quest for either turn in or giving. It´s annoying to watch the mini-map to look for quests in the area.
- It is confusing that some quests show a big blue arrow/waypoint for where to go, and other do not have anything to guide you.
- It´s irritating that most of the time you have to walk with your world map opened, until you reach your destination.
- Already at the beginning of my journey I started to get high level quests, it confuses me a little that I have level 15+ quests at level 2 in my quest log. That put aside, I generally find this feature good as long there is no cap on how many active quests you can have in your quest log.
- It would be nice to encounter more gear through quests, it takes a lot of time to actually get some.
- Quests should be shown on the world map, that way you can plan quick and easy where you wish to travel next.
- Your active quests should be shown permanently beneath the minimap, instead of them disappearing after a few seconds of no interaction.
Combat
- Feels really static, every time you do an attack you have to wait until the animation is done. Some kind of animation cancel would make it more fluent.
- The idea of continuously have to click Q to do your single attack is frustrating, it would be nice to have some sort of auto attack so you won´t have to use your Q-key all the time. The only thing we get out of clicking the Q-key all the time is a keyboard which dies quicker.
General feedback/issues
- The distance for being able to click on/target a mob is way to short, I often see the mob in a far distance. But I can’t target it until I am in ability cast range.
- I can’t close the options window with my escape button, that is really stressfull. (I know this is a small issue, but it sure does get to my nerves…)
- It should be possible to set your own waypoints/-markers on the map as a traveling guide. This marker should also appear in the open world or on your minimap atleast, so you know in which direction to move depending on where you wish to travel.
No issues for me personally.
Client performance:
Specs- i9 10900k, rtx3080 32gb ram
settings- 1440p on high quality setting
Stats as per task manager- cpu %20-25 utilized, gpu %100 and 9.5 gb/10gb of vram used.
When out in the world away from towns/villages id average 100-120fps with some drops from minor stutters every now and then (when this happened sometimes the foliage on the ground head of me would disappear, grass very small plants etc.)
When in pre made towns eg the small fishing village east of winstead and nodes at encampment level fps was similar to above but when in node villages fps would tank apon approaching the village to 50-60 and sit around that value unless I was looking from inside the village out into the world. From what I could tell the amount of players present in the village didn't have much of an effect on this. (fps would still drop in villages even if unpopulated)
Server performance:
Should clarify I'm connecting to a US west server from New Zealand so id assume my ping is higher than most.
I would often get hit by a mob even when I should be out of range of their attack (like when teleporting as a mage it feels like I've moved faster than the server can keep up with and the mob would still hit me)
Mobs would delay when spawning in around the player, I initially thought this only happened when coming to a stop after traveling on a mount sprinting but I have witnessed this happen when walking on foot too.
Generally just feels like sometimes I'm desynced from what I'm seeing on screen.
So the problem can be lead too both sides. If you are way ahead in progressing your character and if you are more or less "too late at the party"
Guild Wars 2 has a good solution "more or less", based on the number next to the boss, the boss gets more tanky and does more dmg (sadly it doesnt get more mechanics and you won´t get better loot) So you can do most stuff alone if anyone is around, but as soon people join stuff gets harder.
2) We are at the moment in Pre-Alpha/ Alpha 1 and I ask myself already about the punishment system later on if you die, especially as a melee class, currently tank. You are in most cases the person/class which dies first for several reasons, while caster (especially in the openworld, like the current lvl 15 drakes) can cast almost relaxed from the range and should the tanks die, they could just leave and regather with them . At the current point it seems like casters have a way lower risk to die and get a xp loose which makes melees way more unattractive to play at least at the moment.
Party invite without actually clicking on a player. A command similar to:
/invite [name]
Quests give too low xp, done almost every quest i could find that isn't bugged/group quest + grinded 2 lvls on mobs and got to lvl 13. I feel like there isn't enough quests to get to lvl 15 even if you did all of them.
Mobs do too much dmg, was only able to pull 1/3 mobs at a time solo (tested cleric + tank, pulled more on cleric) and give too little xp.
Jumping should interrupt spellcasting, so you could jump mid cast and interrupt it.
You should not go ''in-combat'' when a mob aggros you and not be able to sprint, that should happen when the mob lands an attack on you instead.
Sorry about the negative because this game really is awesome and I can’t wait to binge the f*€k out of it. Keep up the good work Intrepid, there’s something special here!
Was a bit slow, but that's fine, it would be nice to know how much data im downloading X / X gb etc
could use clearer language on some of the options, i wasn't sure if pressing Restore was going to make me re-download the entire game again or not
doesnt remember my server selection between sessions, had a panic because i thought i lost my character
Client / server performance (im too stupid to know what is done on the client end and what is server, so i will combine these
was pretty good performance, clearly a solid engine, lighting is great
the map / icons / mini map seem to be out of sync, especially running along roads and the minimap has the roads off to the side (server Kal)
running through with my mount is too much for the rendering culling to handle, mobs will pop into existence, mobs will bug with crazy attack speed
takes a while to register i am out of combat
i have issues where, its like the animation of a spell isnt over until the projectile hits the enemy? so if i fire any of the projectile cleric spells at a mob, and i press Q to start attacking too early, or i do a different spell, it cancels the first spell even if the projectile has already been fired and is nearly there / has hit the mob
the projectiles seem to want to travel to the mob itself which is really cool, but it gets janky over terrain, especially if i jump around a bit
overall really good though for where we are at
*Download/installation process*
Not fiber in my town yet (matter of months) so download is pretty long.
If I had a previous client installed, after choosing "repear" the new client would start to patch then stop/crash two seconds later. Have to use the "remove" option and download/install again (which takes a long time with a VDSL connection).
*Client performance*
Sunday morning patch looks stable.
*Server performance*
Being in France, I'm using EU - west server
Just a few lag to notice (fight actions/moves responding normally but life bars and dmages/healings showing 2 seconds later).
it would be amazing if we could press a buttom like middle mouse button to be able to rotate the camera without effecting the character. im used to do that stuff from other games so i can run straight but see my surroundings. especially nice if you are looking for stuff while running from a to b
When I get to the screen in the launcher setup where I have to choose the prerequisites to install first, only the second option is checked for me (DirectX 9.0c Web Installer). The first option is unchecked, saying I already have version 10.0.19 installed on my machine.
I click the Next button, and an error pop-up appears saying "Failed to correctly acquire dxwebsetup.exe file: CRC error."
I continue the install anyways. I get through the entire process and click on the "Launch Game" button. I get two more error boxes that pop up stating that an audio driver is missing, as well as the same error message noted above. I cannot move further.
I also don't know if I'm uninstalling the game correctly to try again. I go into my programs, choose the Intrepid Launcher and choose "uninstall." However when I try to reinstall again (with the same error popups), the actual download part of the launcher is already done. The top bar says "merge progress 100% complete" and the bottom bar says "applied changes progress" - so is there a different way for me to remove ALL the files to try again?
Thank you for the help.
However I have said this on every test I have taken part in so far so once again:
Still no option to invert y axis on mouse look, makes game unplayable for me I have left feedback to intrepid about this before. Its a very basic option available in every game I have played for the last 30 years so hopefully they will have that option soon.
I use a Razor Naga Trinity mouse and there is no way to Macro this or anything. You can hack the Windows registry to do it apparently but I dont want to be doing that right now really.
Really looking fwd to playing the game more once the very basic option is available.
Thanks
Installation went smooth, and patching went without a hitch. I was able to log in, create my character and play without an issue. The communication is fantastic through the discord. Was able to know what was going on.
Performance
On first log in, as expected, I definitely had some choppy movement and rubberbanding. As soon as I was out of the starting area, it was high framerates and smooth sailing. From purely a client perspective, I was happy with my framerates and fluidity of the menus.
Specs
Ryzen 5 1600
RTX 2070
32GB of RAM @2933MHz
500GB M.2 NVMe
Issues/bugs
Most of these are already either mentioned, or in the known issues I believe. But I want to share anyway.
1. When action combat mode is active, when you are trying to navigate menu's, you lose the mouse and have to exit the menu and switch to tab targeting mode to be able to fully explore any menu options.
2. Im not quite sure what animation looks like the white video buffering symbol over your head like a halo. But that animation was stuck on my character after combat and until I relogged.
3. Multiple times I was stuck in combat. Specifically noticed it most after PVP. I wish there was a way to manually exit combat to flee or just be able to control taking out and putting away my weapons.
4. For some reason, random item descriptions in my inventory kept popping up and floating around my screen. I had to open my inventory and hover over a blank space to clear it.
5. Floating mobs and resources.
6. NPC's spawning in multiple times. There were times where 3 or 4 of the same NPC was just standing there.
Personal Feedback or changes/improvements for my own experience
1. I think the speed marks/screen effect is a little much. Its very anime like but the game doesn't have an anime aesthetic for me. Maybe if it appeared on initial press for a quick moment to give the illusion that you sped up drastically, but didn't stay the whole time while sprinting.
2. I know that player collision needs to be there in certain times like for sieges and what not. But I wish in cities or near crafting tables specifically, they weren't. I don't mind this, could cause people to be more social when waiting there turn. But I know that someone will not like this.
3. I would like to be able to move while looting. If there is a still animation for looting, okay. But the ability to move while looting just helps everything feel super fluent.
4. Attacking while jumping. This one is huge for me. Not that I want it to have its own animations, or even variants of attacks. Just the ability to do a basic attack in the air.
5. I desperately hope there are ranged and spell collision. Please allow us to use our surroundings to protect us from projectiles.
6. My party member was able to complete a quest for both of us. I didn't like this. I think we should be able to progress quests together, but taking in new ones or completing them should be separate. Reason being is that he handed in a quest and it caused me not to visit the NPC who had more quests. The marker was gone and I didn't know who I was supposed to talk to to pick up the next one. Something to consider when setting your pacing for the game.
Overall thoughts on Alpha One Preview Weekend
Steven, you are a legend. I just want to say that I appreciate and listen carefully to what you have to say. What you are doing by sharing this with the world in such an early state, not caring about how it looks but to show how dedicated you are at making this happen. It really means the world to me as a small time casual gamer who means almost nothing. Please don't stop! Intrepid, you have become my favorite dev team!
The conceit is gold! Everything is there at it's core. Systems, while could use some fleshing out, are all in place for something great. The core combat is satisfying to participate in. The visuals are above normal for an MMO in my opinion. I imagine that the visuals are also not final either, but even if they were, I like them so far.
Cheers to a fun Alpha Preview! I cannot wait to participate in all future tests. I hope my feedback is helpful and I am beyond excited to be involved.
Leveling seemed consistent up until level 6. After that everything felt more like a hard grind, due to either bugged quests or quests that state they were one thing but the enemies in the quest were much higher. Many of the quests were missing their trigger or NPC, and sometimes the asset was below ground to the point the player could never reach it. This coupled with the lack of quests made it difficult to advance in some areas. I feel if any more tests are done, there need to be more quests with consistent levels, that allows the players to take them on when ready, or repeatable instance quests that allow the player to grind like some of us had to do, but with the extra incentive of potentially more experience and feel they are helping out in the world, and not just standing in a field killing tons of the same enemies.
In regards to the Node system, all seemed to be going well for most people, however, on Resna we noticed that NODE_I aka Na'ala node was not gaining any levels even though many people were playing for hours and it never got past crossroads. The closest one near us was a Village level so we should not have been affected so hopefully that will be fixed in the future.
On the plus side, the game is very graphically pleasing wherever you go and gives the player a good feel as to what is in the area. When you are at the beach you can fight off crabs and stare at the ocean, or if you are walking some of the paths, just hearing the different sounds of the jungle. Everything felt in place, and the atmosphere of the dungeons felt terrifying and awe-inspiring.
I just hope that in the future the gathering system gets an update and we see more progress with the quests so that as players we can make more progress in the game at each stage.
Much faster, but still, unless you got all of the patches, you're always better off getting a repair/restore. Some guildies had 4-hour downloads before I told them to hit the restore/repair button.
Client performance/server performance (I'm sorry I do not know how to differentiate the two).
Healing felt pointless because having an accurate number on your allies' health bars was impossible. Often I would call for heals because I was at 20 HP and the healer was confused because he was seeing me at full hp (my hp loss was gradual, not all in one burst).
Otherwise, still laggy in densely populated zones, I only rubberbanded 1 or 2 times.
Some enemies appear when you're right next to them, especially when riding a mount.
I would say the download / installation process was fairly straight forward. I only ever had a few hiccups which was easily solved with re-launching the launcher. Other then that, the speed was sufficient but seemed slower then some other launchers.
2. Client performance
I run an RTX 2070 Super, paired with an i7-9700K CPU @ 4.6GHz, and 32GB of RAM. I thought the game ran surprisingly well on Ultra. Even during the two siege event tests that took place on 7/11/2021. I still think the larger scale battles will definitely need some optimization given the intense amount of particle effects.
3. Server performance
The server performance for me was honestly a 6/10.. A soft 7/10. It seemed to run quite well when it wanted to - but I also experienced an extremely annoying silent PC shutdown after a server had dropped 'Offline'. I know AoC caused it because it happened exactly at the same time. There were also some other issues that came up like being kicked off, then being unable to load back in; etc. I also found a slight delay in some things such as mounting / mount skills, among other miscellaneous actions.
I like you can open and close the quest log. It keep the screen uncluttered, I don't like the mini map. I hope for more detail in the future with better quest locations.
I hope to see improvements in the chat log also .
Right now the game looks like Neverwinter to me I really hope it improves and changed.
Other than that I really enjoyed it. it played really well for an early Alpha. I can't wait to see what you have in store for us as time go on. I am not regretting stepping up to the Alpha one bit.
download had to restart download cuase it stopped at 30ish% may be cuase due to me doing otherstuff internet conection useing. and i also had to redownload on the 2nd day but then it went without interruptions.
Client performance:
Was smooth but during loading screens it froze other progamms running on pc that were internet related
Server performance:
Some flying mobs had low fps where kinda clunky flying in air but did fix itself after a while after first loading them and when i wasnt moveing around. did get killed in the cryp entrance 2 times instandly without anything doing dmg was wierd. but other than the flying mobs that did not flat smooth i didnt expirience lags or disconnects. on stuck in battlemode or stuck in swim mode and falling thru the map
so a very good performance for alpha one
Download could have been faster, but it was alright.
No Issues with the Installation Process.
Client performance
Game was running mostly smoothly on Ultra settings with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor, and 16 GB Ram.
Occasional small frame drops happen, and the ms spiked up.
The Sieges ran okay-ish for the most part, at least in small fights, just when the bigger battles happend with all attackers and defenders clashing, that's when it became more difficult to play do to performance going down.
I still had between around 10 and 20 FPS when the 1000 Bears got spawned into Winstead, with about +100 Players there. But the MS spiked up quite hard from about 15 - 25 to about +80. And Moving the Camera to look around became rather difficult during the inital spawning of the bears.
Server performance
Some rubberbanding at the beginning of the testing weekend on the Tenok EU Server.
I didn't notice any major rubberbanding during the later stages of the testing.
No issues downloading the Game from the launcher. Download was a little slower than anticipated - 20 mb/s compared to the normal 50-80 mb/s on other platforms.
Client performance
I like to dock the client to my taskbar, but the icon disappears and is left with a 'blank file' icon - would be nice if the launcher has a persistent icon.
Server performance
No connectivity issues for me from Australia. Would like to see a server latency indicator in the future, particularly for someone far away like myself.
General Feedback
Before I provide my feedback below, I would like to acknowledge I am aware that this is a technical alpha, howbeit I would still like to raise some non-technical QoL topics:
Melee Combat
I was keen to focus on melee/tank as my source of combat for AoC as I have always been a ranged DPS role in other MMO's. I found that melee has been very underwhelming compared to the other two options right now, Mage and Cleric. The melee auto swing locks the player in animation would push the character to clip into the mobs and feel extremely clunky. I understand this is a type of game mechanic in other games such as Dark Souls, where you would decide how much of the combo you would undertake before pulling out. However, the NPC's attacks are too hard to predict, the melee feels like you need to spam auto to kill the mob. I would like to see a way to freely move while undertaking each attack of the auto-combo.
Cleric
This class is insanely fun, mostly due to how powerful the class is. I ranked up my Castigation (whip) and Regen (heal over time, HoT) abilities first, and once I had these two, I could conquer any foe as a level 5. Yes, I was farming level 15 mobs as a level 5 for 1000 exp per kill with zero downtime due to how well the Regen ability sustains along with the mana return from the whip ability and passives. Once I reach level 6-8 and was leveling up my passives and gaining some additional damage abilities, I was unstoppable. Stacking HoT's regens too much health for the cost of so little manna.
Although the Cleric is already super powerful, I couldn't imagine how much more it would be if some of the other HoT abilities were not bugged. I tested using multiple HoT's which proved successful in certain scenarios but not others (I have raised bugs) - The Devotion skill (throws healing ability into air and lands on target) would not land properly on a moving target and thus would not provide the heal or HoT from the rank 3 upgrades. I am unsure if this is a latency thing or not. To receive the heal the target would have to predict when the ability would land and stop moving (only tested on my own character, not others). Also, the rank 3 upgrade to provide a HoT would not work if the target was already affected by the Regen HoT. However, if the Devotion HoT was applied to the target before the Regen stacks, both HoT's would tick perfectly fine.
Cleric Sieges
I played Cleric for the Sieges and it was really good. I find it incredibly difficult to heal my teammates as it is really hard to see what their health is without targeting them individually. Sometimes it was too difficult to target them, particularly if they were on a mount that has a very weird hitbox. If I am going to use an AoE heal like Radiant Burst, I would like to see some sort of indication as to how many of my teammates around me are low health to determine if it is even worth using. Half the time I had to spawn AoE heals in large zerg's, guessing that AoE heals were needed.
I had a few one-on-ones with opponents throughout the sieges and was undefeated as a Cleric. The only counter I have is if a warrior would CC me and I would get piled by multiple opponents. A one-on-one against a mage or warrior is just too easy. I had a couple of 1v1's against other clerics and if they knew what they were doing, the fight would last forever until we just canceled the fight and ran off. The cost of healing spells is so cheap that mana doesn't run out. I could only imagine how absurd a party of 5 clerics would be considering how the rank 3 upgrade of Castigation works. Mind you, I believe the issue is with how cheap the healing spells are, not the return of mana.
Questing
I'm gonna say it - the questing so far is not fun, painful to track, and painful to find. I would like to be able to track individual quests rather than my tracking (on the right of the screen) have quests that are 15 times my level and not achievable to be hidden. I would like to see some sort of world map guide to help direct players to where different questing hubs can be found. Once you have completed all the quests in the starting area, you should be around levels 4-5. After that, it is very hard to find quests - one here, one there. The only way I could level past 5 was to grind mobs. I understand AoC would want to go for a more adventurous route, but any sort of assistance to provide knowledge for questing hubs and rough level would be awesome - even if the nodes had a level range for the average level of mobs around them.
Keybindings
I'm glad to see keybindings available now. However, these keybindings are still activated when typing in the chat box... Please please please add a sensitivity modifier. The biggest issue with sensitivity I've found so far is the sensitivity changes depending on which perspective you move your camera. If you're in a 'Bird's eye view' it would move very differently to horizontal.
FPS Performance
I feel like the FPS would drop way too much when players were around. I hope to see much smoother frames in sieges, cities, and other places where you might see 10+ players. Even having 30 people trying to kill one of the dragons in the Seige was frustrating to dodge mechanics.
NPC Communication
Sometimes I would be able to talk to NPC's while on amount, other times it was really hard unless I ran over the NPC several times until the option was available - increasing the range on talking to NPC's would be preferred, particularly if you cannot clip through other players - it was annoying trying to sign up for siege with 30 people blocking it, especially with mounts.
Sieges
I would like to see how well each player has individually contributed to a siege. This is a feature in almost any large-scale game/mini-game.
The catapults show the rider's name as 'white' making it look like they are friendly. It is a little deceiving.
The Attacker and Defender teams are not balanced in matchmaking - Would be nice to have some sort of conditional matchmaking to only allow guilds to join a side that will not tip one side more than 10% larger than the other. This would allow some flexibility for individuals to choose any side, but a guild to commit to the underdog side.
Summary
I had a lot of fun playing and these are the things I'd like to see resolved:
- Cleric heal abilities mana cost increased
- Regen stacking removed or regen heal reduced by x3 or heal ticks slowed by x3 times
- A way to see friendlies health around you without having to individually click their names
- Melee swing adjusted to allow movement during the animation
- Quest hub indicators
- Modify quest tracking
- Improved performance around other players
- Seige improvements as per above
- More settings sliders, particularly mouse movement
- General smoothness added for higher FPS
Download went a bit slow (3-30MB/s when I can hit 95 MB/s).
Client Performance:
Running settings at Ultra 4k I believe I was getting at least 60 FPS (couldn't tell because the FPS counter wasn't working), but with my specs, I should hit that mark.
Server Performance:
When I run around on a fast mount there will be some enemies that pop in a couple of feet away from me. The big dragon battle with over 100 players ran very well, much better than it about a month ago.
Great work so far I really look forward to the finished game!
Computer Specs:
RTX 3080
i7-11700KF
64 GB RAM (3600 MHz)
SSD
Download/installation process -- The instructions and links were kind of all over the place, though not to hard to find. Love to see 1 post with all of the information and links on it.
Client performance -- I played a good bit over the 3 days and had few issues.
One issue I did run into was falling threw the world on respawn..happened only a few times though. Did have an issue with the mounts (put a ticket in for it). I rode my mount through deep water (swim depth). Exited the water and could not dismount..kept getting cannot use spell while swimming. I tested this a few times with the same result.
Another issue I had was when looking at an item in a window (shop/skills etc) the tooltip would stay up if I closed the screen. I had to open the screen and actually hit the X to leave the screen so the tooltip would leave.
Server performance -- No real issue with the servers. I did not notice much lag. I did notice the draw distance on mobs was sometimes weird/to short file sprinting/mounted. There were times I would dismount to mine and mobs would suddenly appear.
General --
1. Would like to see a gathering skill tree (Gathering wood and ore was terrible for the make a weapon quest). Perhaps the skill tree can effect time to gather or amount gathered etc.
2. Would love to be able to add markers to the mini map for myself (kind of like waypoints).
3. Would love a few base line abilities without having to buy them. I played a Cleric and invested most points into healing others. This left me for the most part spamming the Q key alot...not alot of fun for a new player that is not in an alpha.
4. Love to see a better system for follow up quest hubs. I rode around alot (tbh just to look at all the cool stuff lol). I did find after about level 5-6 most quests i could find were in the 10-15 range.
5. Love to see multiple chat windows (or the ability to make them) Local/Region/Guild etc.
6. Love to see a mini map that was always up. Perhaps options to remove of minimize as a personal preference.
7. Fishing..I hope there is a more robust fishing mechanism planned.
8. Love to see (perhaps in a gathering skill tree) the ability to track herbs/ores/wood on the mini map.
9. Just an aesthetic thing for me lol..love to see some more under water assets coral/kelp/fish etc.
That's the short list atm. Like to thank you for the hard work and so look forward to the future in Ashes of Creation!!!
PC specs
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3600 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
Name NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Asus 6GB)
Description
When being hit with by an enemy Javelin while mounted, I took the damage but I was not pulled. When I would dismount I would fly at the speed of the javelin pull toward the enemy that pulled me while I was mounted. (distance did not matter. I was pulled from the Siege castle-- passed the poison dragon.)
Bug Reproduction Steps: This occurred 3 separate times all basically the same scenario, I'm running by on my mount, someone pulls me, I take damage. I dismount, bug occurs.
Expected Result
To be pulled off of my mount or have myself and my mount pulled toward the tank that cast Javelin
Bug Report - Actual Result
What was the actual result of the action(s)? Please be sure to include any error messaging or relevant diagnostic information.
Download/installation process:
No issues at all.
Client performance:
Very long load in times, but no issues once finally in game.
Server performance:
Honestly, very good. Obvious massive FPS drops when there were hundreds of players around waiting to get into sieges. It was unplayable for me while waiting to get in.
did some very large group activities and all went well, FPS dropped to about 45-50 and then had some random stuttering. My PC is only about $1250, its not the latest and greatest but its solid.
download took forever as im from SEA and the download servers clearly are far away
Client performance:
Okay, occasional stutters but overall good performance
Server performance:
yeah I'm from asia and connect to either America or europe, is there any option that APAC servers will be available for any of the future alpha / betas or only for retail?
Big FPS issues
I've talked with a couple dozen of people while playing, and boiled a FPS issue down to possibly be an AMD hardware problem? (specs posted bellow). I didn't meet any players that that had FPS issues similar to mine. And all of the people I asked had Nvidia GPU's.
The problem for me is that In some areas, due to assets that I haven't been able to pinpoint, my FPS drastically tanks.
It's worse the more certain assets are present on the screen it seems. Relogging, Closing the game, and resetting with CTRL+T does nothing to alleviate this issue.
Also, while playing for a very long time, my FPS would gradually degrade slightly, compound and become an issue after many hours of play. (Separate topic. But this was fixed by closing and reopening the game.)
-Expedition/Crossroads: Playable*. The FPS would drop and fluctuate around the 50 mark.
-Encampment/Camp: The FPS fluctuates, but will remain mostly be playable*. It will at times swing down to
-around 10 FPS with more frequency
-Village: Unplayable. Stable FPS at around 15-20. Will often drop to bellow 10.
*Playable: Consistently above 30 FPS. Not ideal ofc, but at least it's not lagging.
Furthermore. It's not just nodes, but certain areas that give these nasty spikes. This was remarkably pronounced at the Jumping puzzle areas for the quest: "Narrative: Yolga's Wrath". I tried turning my settings from 1440p ULTRA, down to the lowest possible resolution and low quality, and yet that didn't improve on the FPS at all.
While looking towards the Jumping puzzle asset, my FPS would literally be 1, or less. It was a slideshow. And the FPS would immediately sky rocket and normalize if I looked away from this area into the distance. Also, if I panned my camera down to get a birdseye-perspective of my character and the terrain, I could avoid some assets, making the FPS better (1-5 FPS). Sadly I do not have a recording of this
Specs:
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz 3.60 GHz, overclocked to 4,9 GHZ on a basic water-cooling system.
GPU: PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil - 8GB GDDR6 RAM
Memory: 32 GB G.Skill TridentZ RGB DDR4-4133 C17 DC - 16GB @3400 Ghz
Storage: Force Series™ MP510 960GB M.2 SSD @3480MB/sec read speed.
Please let me know if I am missing something, or if you have any questions.
Specs: GPU: 1070, CPU: i7-6700K 16GB DDR4
Download/installation process
No issues at all.
Client performance
It was mostly good. When I was loading into the game from the character screen, it would freeze my PC for like 10 seconds each time and the load times were a bit long.
Server performance
Rubberbanding only happened to me like twice, the rest of the time was smooth.
GPU 1070 i7-6700 16 GB RAM
Download/installation process - Had a few hiccups due to aformentioned internet but went very smooth. When connection is lost, launcher quickly resumes download at previous state. My launcher had to reinstall/update mid download but I believe I was installing as you were carrying out a hotfix on the launcher.
Client performance - I didn't test the game with full settings, but on low I had a very smooth experience. In a few circumstances specific models didnt load, I believe this again due to connection at specific times going low. The only thing was a long wait time to log in, long loading screens and the like. I believe my Graphics card is certainly the cause of this.
Server performance - As above I noticed nothing major wrong. I did have someone ask me why I was rubber banding but I myself didnt even notice I was lagging nor did it stop me from fighting alongside them and providing a wee rejuv here and there.
Overall an incredibly good experience for an alpha one systems test. I was expecting to test more but I kept having too much fun and just losing myself. Cant wait til Wednesday as didnt get half as much time as I would like
edit: 970M changed to 960M
No problem here. The launcher is a bit “root” to my taste but the aesthetics are not relevant. Obviously it is not an easy task, but I thought a lot about WoW’s installation process, which is pretty much unequalled (with optic fiber you can launch the game after 2 minutes and have pretty much no performance issues in game, maybe juste some bigger loading times). You could gain a lot if you could get to the same kind of download process.
Client performance :
The client ran ok on my end, although maybe a bit lowish fps. I suppose optimization will come later.
One thing that was feeling weird was the animations for creatures and characters that are a bit far from the player : the client seems to skip some frames from the animations in order to gain performances, but it looks really weird when you see it. Perhaps you could do that trick only on creatures that are not in the players field of view ?
Server performances :
Here in Europe I didn’t have much server performance issues. Only things I could quote are some issues of going through the ground and below the map (probably both a client issue and the server not reacting to it) or getting told I can’t use skills while swimming when I’m on my horse just chilling outside any form of water (not sure if it is client side or server side though)
General feedback :
Overall, the game felt both empty and filled with life. Obviously this was not a content test so I’m ok with that. Although big issue to me was the quest system being pretty broken, having the map tell me I gotta go 100km away to kill cats, even though there were some 100 meters south. Or just some quests being bugged, but that’s ok it’s not finished.
Also, crafting professions felt kinda boring but I’m guessing there is still a lot of work to be done there.
Anyway, thanks Intrepid for the early look, and good luck continuing to polish this game to make it a wonderful gem ! I put my hopes in you guys