It's a hostile world we live in

loveliss

How hostile/hazardous will the World/NPCs be in the open World? Most mmorpg that I've played even in the last 10 years have made it very trivial when it comes to traveling and exploring the map. I find this makes for a VERY boring game.
Will Ashes be way more challenging in this regards?
Just some thoughts
1) Make NPC AI smarter and harder to kill. Better to have quests killing 5 challenging mobs instead of 50 easy ones.

2) Making NPC AI smarter and more challenging can add more depth to the game when traveling/exploring. Will make you think twice before running into that group of mobs or taking that shortcut if you're not well geared.

3) Having the option to solo grind or group grind on tougher mobs to level would be nice. Kinda how you could in Everquest 1.

Sathrago

Well players have been asking for "better A.I." for many years across all sorts of games. I don't think it's lost on developers that this should be addressed. In my mind, they could do it but such an endeavor takes a lot of time, testing, bug fixing, tuning, etc. You could do that or have a form of open world pvp so that players are the danger.

This is honestly why I like the Monster token system and If you think about it, it would be really cool if they expanded it past attacking Nodes.

Imagine, if you will, player controlled npcs. You go to some location in the game that lets you spend Monster Tokens and you then get to queue up and play that type of creature once one gets into combat with a player. When you play one you cannot see player names, they all look the same visually, and you have no special tools to tell where you are on the map. Due to how aggro works you would not have full control of the monster but be able to target where abilities and special effects happen/target. (Ex. You keep throwing projectiles at the healer during the last moments of their cast to try and interrupt them) If you defeat a player you gain some sort of currency, reputation or other rewards that encourage you to try and win the fights.

Before you say it, Yes I'm sure someone can figure out a way to game the system and that would need to be addressed as best as the devs can. I don't expect it would be perfect right from the start but It's an interesting addition to an MMO and has, in my mind, the potential to keep many faucets of pve fresh and exciting.

Is this scope creep? Absolutely. However I am not saying this would be a solution added in at the release of the game, a feature for the future if anything would be the best.

JustVine

Better mob ai; It's a prerequisite to not having a trash puppet class in a nonoptional pvp game.

tautau

They have given an example where the NPC in a tavern (or maybe it was a notice posted on the wall) gave hints about some lost treasure hidden in some rocks in a remote mountain valley. If you go after it, you find that it is an intentional trap. A band of NPC bandits are waiting to ambush the treasure hunters who go looking for it.

Nerror

There was a certain jungle area in A1 full of spiders that poisoned you from range and rooted you with their nets. They were quite deadly, even to characters of their level, if you just tried to ride through the area as a shortcut, instead of following the road around the bend. 1v1 they were no problem if you fought them, but there were a lot in the area.

I would like to see more of that all over in Ashes, where you can't just ride on your mount through everything and expect to survive unless way higher level. Make off-roading dangerous again.

TrUSivraj

Nerror wrote: »

There was a certain jungle area in A1 full of spiders that poisoned you from range and rooted you with their nets. They were quite deadly, even to characters of their level, if you just tried to ride through the area as a shortcut, instead of following the road around the bend. 1v1 they were no problem if you fought them, but there were a lot in the area.

I would like to see more of that all over in Ashes, where you can't just ride on your mount through everything and expect to survive unless way higher level. Make off-roading dangerous again.

Remember maps like that in WoW, but they just didn't have mobs spawn in roads. I like the idea of risking your life with "shortcuts", makes you wonder if the effort to cut through was worth the time you probably didn't even save just following the road.

Atama

Alpha 1 was terrifying to get around. In a good way. Travel was slow and lots of enemies could make short work of you if you weren’t careful.

Quests took you through places with enemies beyond your level frequently. It was refreshing to play an MMORPG where going on an adventure didn’t feel like picking up milk from the grocery store.

McShave

I enjoyed WoW Classic leveling where the mobs weren't dangerous by themselves, but if you fight 2 or more it could kill you (unless you were a mage or hunter). Bringing a friend was incredibly helpful and made mob farming quite easy, but it did increase the amount of mobs you had to kill cause they only dropped one of the thing you both needed (and dropped rarely most of the time). Oftentimes an area with mobs had elites wandering around too, so you had to keep your eyes out or it would kill you.

Vaknar

I'll just drop this statement here - which ofc applies to AI and all things regarding the dev process in and out of the game:
Our team is always looking into the latest technology to see what would make sense for us to implement in-game!

I'm sure the team is looking at how best to program creature AI, what makes sense, what is possible, etc

Happymeal2415

Atama wrote: »

Alpha 1 was terrifying to get around. In a good way. Travel was slow and lots of enemies could make short work of you if you weren’t careful.

Quests took you through places with enemies beyond your level frequently. It was refreshing to play an MMORPG where going on an adventure didn’t feel like picking up milk from the grocery store.

That one goblin camp north of na'laa was great for that