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.
Name taken? 10 years till launch?
PompousPeasant
Member, Alpha Two
On the fence about buying the package that gives you the opportunity to reserve your name. What if name is already taken? I'm also still quite jaded about Star Citizen and worried this may be the same setup i.e. just buy things but game never comes out. Thoughts?
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Speaking of names, imagine one in like a little waterfall cave that just says "Vissox the playa" on it. That would be somethin special.
Age of Conan left allot of players with a bad experience!
You have the best name for this thread by far.
There's just too much work already shown/proven, and too many monthly updates for it to be a hoax. AoC is certainly no Chronicles of Elyria....
Huh, I thought Age of Conan changed their acronym to PoS.
epic
Definitely not comparable. They are opposites in many ways. Star Citizen had problems from the very beginning. It promised WAY too much. It was overly, insanely ambitious. And that was at the start. After the initial crowdfunding, they kept adding on. They added a completely different game with the first person ground shooter (Squadron 42, a single-player game in the same universe). They kept adding more and more features as well. That is why they are in a perpetual development period that I believe will never end.
Oh, and get this. They already announced a sequel. They are starting on Star Citizen 2. Even though the first set of games hasn't been released and are in a barely playable, extremely buggy, and non-supported testing phase. (By non-supported, I mean that their tutorials and help files actually consist of a suggestion to ask other players for help. I wish that was a joke.)
Look at this article:
https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-doing-bedsheet-deformation-physics-now-because-of-course-it-is/
Let's then look at Ashes of Creation. It promised a game with a pretty typical scope. It's a large game world, and the node system is very innovative, but most of the rest of the systems are inspired by other games. They aren't reinventing the wheel with everything. And that scope has not changed since it started. They aren't adding more and more and more and more the way that Star Citizen is. It has been steady and they've shown a lot of progress. They are already closer than Star Citizen.
A typical MMORPG takes anywhere from 4-8 years to develop. If you are making a limited indie-type game, it might take less time, but for a real, polished AAA title it generally takes at least 4 years. 5 or 6 is pretty typical. 8 years is a long time, but not unheard of.
Star Citizen has been in development for 10 years now. It's already years past what is considered a long development period for an MMORPG. It is still in Alpha testing. There is no end in sight.
Ashes of Creation has been in development for about 5 years now (half of the time Star Citizen has been). It is still in Alpha, and it is at the stage where many MMORPGs would normally release. (World of Warcraft, for example, took about that long to develop.) So it is going a bit slow, and had a couple of setbacks (Covid was an issue, and they had to redo their infrastructure and start over with a lot of systems early on when they realized it wasn't stable during very early testing). But if it releases in the next couple of years, it would be a long development period but not unheard of.
The only time I was concerned was when they started the "Apocalypse" test. APOC was a battle royale game using the same engine as the MMO. It looked like feature creep and was the first whiff of something Star Citizen-ish (again, that project started developing a different game when the original was still in development). But ultimately, APOC was just a crude thing quickly slapped together just to test some combat features and stability, it was short-lived, and abandoned once it was done. So my fears were groundless.
Ashes is taking a long time, yes. Some of us have been around since the beginning and you can lose patience over the years. But it is already past where Star Citizen has gotten in half the time, and I don't see any reason to be concerned. They are nothing alike.
Many tightly bound systems must succeed in the face of unanticipated emergent player behaviors.
I think the planned short Betas may be optimistic.
As the dev team would say. Then don't buy it