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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Obviously some people will be similar to you and not interact with pvp most of the time, but sooner or later all the pvp losers will leave, which will either make the winners leave because they no longer have someone to fight or they'll move onto all the other players (in some shape or form) and then even more people will leave. So imo there should be at least some system that minimizes those losses. If you have a better system, I'll gladly support it.
You could still have the holy trinity design for classes and make it so that each fighting point on the boss' body requires proper tanking (the tank moving around and blocking hits with their shield), proper healing (hitting precision casts onto the other 2 dudes) and proper dpsing (precision shots on weak points and other similar stuff)- all while there's some environmental hazards that make you move around even more.
And I think UE5 would definitely allow for smth of that scale work fine enough and look just fucking incredible.
"The future is now old man!"
There is no respectful response to give to something like this...
'Roleplaying game' does not mean "rainbows and daisies, no toxicity verbal or actions" or "chill out sanctuary". I'm sorry but I'm not settling for people trying to drive the genre into 2nd rate entertainment.
Honestly, if you're after a positive and toxic free enviroment read a book, I'm trying to speak to people who actually enjoy a game and every single massive popular game on planet earth is about competing with others, no exceptions!
"New World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Amazon Games Orange County and published by Amazon Games released on September 28, 2021."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_(video_game)
ok dygz...
They are not the same, they just happen to share a title of being MMORPGs that have action combat(even tho as Noaani said Lost Ark is most likely more of a Action RPG than a MMORPG.)
Aren't we all sinners?
So, here are the issues with this (it is a situation I have already considered, so my opinion on it is already fairly well formed).
First, if you have 20 people all each taking on a part of an encounter by itself, you aren't raiding. You are soloing together.
If you take those 20 people and break them down to 4 groups of 5, and give each of these groups a part of the boss to deal with on their own, you are still not raiding, you are grouping in parallel.
These are VERY different gameplay types.
The second issue with this is how limiting it is for content.
In the time I played EQ2, I took on well over 500 raid bosses. If a game were to try and create 500 encounters using this one mechanic where it splits a raid up in to smaller chunks since the combat system sucks with many players on one target, then you are going to find raid content in this game very repetitive, very quickly.
As a single mechanic, there is nothing wrong with requiring people in a raid to solo or to group. I can recall encounters in EQ2 where each of these was needed. One was a giant worm thing that would swallow a player who then had to solo mobs in its stomach in order to get an item key to defeating the boss, and then get let out (pooped out?) so you could carry on the fight against said boss.
Another was a dragon that would spawn an add periodically that would only be able to be taunted or damaged by a single group within the raid, but would deal massive damage to those not in said raid. Your group would have to pull the add away from the raid and take it on as per a group encounter, and then go back and join the raid proper.
So, this is why your suggestion is overly restrictive. It is a mechanic that a developer can put in to raid encounters at will, yet under an action combat system, all encounters would essentially need this design element.
The reason these encounters worked in EQ2 (those above) was because they were a rare mechanic, and when the group or individual that was asked to take on the specific task in question was finished, they went back to assisting the raid proper, on the target proper.
Have you tried Path of Exile?
It's an online ARPG, not an MMO, but it does achieve exactly this.
And on top of that you have different class combos, trinity or non-trinity systems, agro mechanics, dps rotations and all of that other shit that comes with a huge group of people working together in one place.
If anything, I'd say the same thing Nish said to Dygz - "the future is now, old man!" Why should we limit ourselves with preexisting notions of what's a raid and what's not a raid. The genres can evolve and add things to themselves w/o changing the core principle. A group of 40 people working towards a singular goal of beating a singular target by overcoming several different mechanical barriers sure as hell sounds like an mmorpg raid to me.
And when it comes to the design difficulties of boss variety - the sky's the limit. Underwater bosses, sky bosses, horizontal bosses, vertical bosses, tight internal movement bosses, elemental being bosses, swarm bosses, fractured but whole bosses, mechanical/nature-based/magic-based/ether-based/void-based/gravitational/etc-ional bosses. I could probably come up with several hundred unique bosses with fairly unique mechanics within a day or two. And those types of bosses would be considered "epic" in the game, I'm not saying that each and every single boss should be a ginormous being (though that would be quite cool). The only thing that's stopping me from making those ideas come true is money
Again, that's an OK system for an MMOFPS.
Ashes is focused on Objective-Based PvP.
Amazon Games does not describe New World as an RPG. For a reason.
Lost Ark is an MMO Hack & Slash. And it's probaby a good MMO Hack & Slash.
Lost Ark is not a good MMORPG because it's not designed to be an RPG. It's designed to be a Hack & Slash.
Or do you think that all casual players will never interact with the caravan system or will never live in a node that gets sieged and destroyed, with both of those systems removing some of their resources and with destroyed nodes making those losing players go to another node (except they'll probably just leave the game because they'll see moving to another node with high freehold costs too much of a hassle)?
And, that loss is either normal death penalties or half-death penalties.
In Objective-Based PvP/Battlegrounds/Events there are no death penalties, so... I don't know what you are referring to as losing a ton of shit.
Main thing that needs to happen to ensure that PvE-focused players don't leave is for Corruption to work as well as Steven intends it to.
Your assertion that casuals will consider moving to a new Node to be a hassle is just a baseless claim.
It's not at all convincing because you have no supporting evidence. And you can't have any before Alpha 2.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Node_sieges#Node_destruction
Both of those are objective-based pvp events. Both of them lead to resource loss in the case of a loss. Both of those will most likely have a decent amount of player resources. And depending on respawn mechanics during both events, any casual player might keep repeatedly dying which will decay their gear, so they'll be losing mats that way too (gear degradation quote is 64th reference on the caravan page).
Yeah, I did say while I played. However, if that is no longer the case, all I can say is that the game had a melee class as the OP, uncontested king of PvP for half a decade, and now it has a mage class.
What was the point again?
And you know what? I agree. An encounter that sees you having to solo along side a whole lot of friends could be considered a raid.
What I am saying is that a game that has that as it's only raid content does not have raid content.
You yourself seem to get my point here though,the key to having a good raid game is having a multitude of content. The more variation in combat the better.
Because analogies always cause people to argue, I'm going to use one here.
Imagine a game is like a cup. Developers can fill that cup up with a combat system, and with content. If they put too much in to this cup, it overflows - obviously. In game terms this is basically saying a developer is able to throw more at players than players are able to handle, and it is up to developers to decide how full of a cup they want for each content piece.
Now let's consider the combat system to be the ice. Tab target combat is somewhat simpler than action combat - from the perspective of a player playing the game. So, tab target may just be 4 or 5 cubes of ice in the glass, while action combat is filling that cup up three quarters of the way with ice.
Now imagine you are a developer wanting to fill that cup to the brim for some top end content. You have many, many bottles of liquid you can use - everything drinkable known to man.
However, there isnt all that much room left in the action combat cup, so you cant put all that much liquid in it.
The tab target cup though, it still has plenty of room for all sorts of liquid, in all sorts of combinations.
Thus, the less full the cup is with ice, the more room there is for content-liquid.
This is why action games have so far never focused on content - they simply have no room left to do so very well. Now on to this part.
You are basically say"MMORPG's are changing, because the tech available is now greater than it was when they started".
The problem I have here is that this is just not how it works.
Turn based strategy games started off as just strategy games on computers (we are talking back in the 1980's here). This is simply because the very idea of real time strategy was not only not possible, it wasnt even conceivable at that time.
When the tech became available for a turn based game (Dune 2 was the first I know of), people didnt tell turn based strategy fans that they need to get with the times, and it is all about RTS now. Rather, the tech that made RTS possible meant that a new genre of game was developed. Strategy games took on the turn based affix to the name, but the genre remained strong (and is currently stronger than the RTS genre it spawned).
Same when RTS games spawned MOBA's. No one said that this is just how things are now, and RTS games need to just all become MOBA's now.
Same with FPS games when it became feasible for them to be played online. No one said that all FPS games need to be online now, there are still single player FPS games to be had.
So why then should the fact that action combat is now possible mean that all MMORPG's need to be action combat? Why is this the exception?
I would submit that the online ARPG generous already the result of action combat being viable in an online setting. Rather than action combat taking over the MMO gener, it has spawned it's own genre already, as is right for it to do, and as is proper according to history.
So why are we asking for action combat to also drastically alter a genre, instead of just allowing it to exist in it's own one?
To me, it seems a perfect fit for online ARPG's to be the home of action combat in an online setting. They are games that are - by design - focused on combat rather than content, which is what action combat needs. So why then attempt to take a genre that has always been about content first and try to turn it in to something that already exists?
We would only know if the cup will overfill once someone tries to push it to its limits. And I'm pretty sure no one has tried yet because it's too risky, and we currently live in the age of no risk. The sheer fact that Steven decided to make something that goes against the current trends so much is the proof to that "no risk" rule.
Any other big company with investors can only see the success of wow and ff14 and them being tab "so that must be the secret sauce! Devs, go make a game like that". And any action-based game from korea/china is either too p2w for the western audience or relies too much on low ping, and west has been notorious for having problems with that. But I do think there's ways around that issue, but, again, it'd take a lot of risky money to even try and prove me wrong or right.
I'm not asking to make literally all mmos action. Hell, if I was in fact asking for something I'd ask for L3, where it's literally the same game but with better graphics
What I am saying is that mmorpg can mean more than just a wow-clone or whatever Ashes is trying to be.
I'm personally not too into isometric games so I have no clue how good or bad they are as mmorpgs. Which is exactly why I'm suggesting having a 3d action mmorpg (w/o removing or replacing any potential tab mmorpgs).
Once again, I'll say Noaani is completely right. The only outcome of more Action-y games in big properly difficult PvE is to tune the encounter so that it is less Action so that you can get the max possible 'space in the cup'. Particularly in complex raid content.
Now, this isn't actually bad, and I honestly would bet that most people would like it. But at that point the difference between Action and Tab Target (assuming the type of Tab Target you described from Lineage) is so minimal that it no longer matters.
Which brings us back to the explicit goal of the 'Lineage 3' (Throne and Liberty) devs. To just... do that. 'Pour some ice out of the cup for the sake of a challenging group encounter'.
But any game can do that, and probably while keeping Action stuff otherwise. In many ways, I consider it impossible for Noaani to be wrong about this. High level 4-man Monster Hunter showcases it pretty easily because it IS what you described and yet would NEVER work with more than 6-8 players total except on the largest of enemies if they were planning to actually use their mobility and other special skills, rather than 'one person get control of the monster and everyone else just wail on it with little or no real threat of damage'.
Since the analogy about the cup was in relation to individual encounters this limit has indeed been reached in almost all tab target games.
Both EQ games and WoW have all released encounters that simply have too much happening for players to cope, and said encounters were literally never killed in their original state.
When the developers took just a little liquid out (stopped them overflowing), many if them were killed soon after (after players had spent weeks or months learning the actual encounter - keep in mind).
While it is true that this has yet to happen with action combat games, this is because action combat developers are still two decades behind in terms of content development experience. They are still trying to figure out how to just make a good raid encounter, let alone making one that is right on the cusp of possible/not possible.
I have no doubt it will happen one day, but the thing is, when it happens, the encounter will still have less going on than a tab target encounter on that cusp - because the action cup has more ice.
Now I obviously haven't participated in the "proper difficult pve" so I'm probably missing some requirements that make that pve truly difficult and complex, but from the outside looking in it just looks like "make correct rotations of skills while moving around ground hazards". And I definitely feel like I could come up with a similar kind of boss fight, but with action combat. Now my definition of action combat might differ from other people's (and I think it does), so that might be another point of contention and why we're disagreeing on this point.
"There's going to be gear degradation that occurs on death. In addition, there's obviously a time component. And also there's going to be an associated quest system." Which tracks each participant's wins and losses.
---Steven
Although, gear degradation conflicts, I think, with:
"There will not be death penalties applied to event-based deaths (Caravans, Guild Wars and Sieges). The penalties are in the outcome of the event.
So your number of deaths is likely going to impact your ability to win that particular event and that's going to be the penalty.
This is to encourage players to opt-in to the events because the more participation we have the more fun it can be and we understand that the community at large... there's already a risk versus reward component to these events. We don't need to stack on additional risk vs reward to increase the barrier to entry for players who may not be as interested."
----Steven
But, in any case, no one is forced to participate in a Caravan run, so repeating after a loss is a player choice; not something players are forced to do.
Node Sieges do not occur week after week. Players are not forced to participate in those.
And the particpants of Caravan raids and Sieges will run the spectrum of casual and hardcore. They aren't casual v hardcore.
If you prefer the guide version:
This monster is not 'hard' for most Monster Hunter veterans, but it is much more 'active' in Monster Hunter games, 'more action' is happening. Perfectly timed dodges, whiff punishes on its attacks, etc. By the nature of a Tab Target game, it 'becomes what you refer to'. 'Correct rotations while moving around ground hazards'. The 'Extreme' version just 'applies the Monster Hunter ruleset'. Only 3 people can fall, tanking doesn't work the same, etc.
Aaaand it's boring. Because by the nature of what a Rathalos is, you can't add more 'complex puzzle elements' if you want to represent it properly in a Tab Target game. Encounters in harder PvE content in Tab Target games require you to know and respond correctly to a massive number of mechanics, in unison. Various games have different styles (adding adds, creating area debuffs from the mob, requiring you to have and use specific items, or just spawning kill-zones that you have to dance through, or sometimes multiples of these, obviously).
That's 'what they think of to do' to make Rathalos even start to approach a 'Raid encounter'. Because otherwise it's just this (watch like 1 minute from 10:20 if not familiar with the game):
Now, that player is using a long range weapon, but the point is that once 'complexity' is encoded in 'movement and evasion', you will get a tier of player who will be able to overcome almost ANYTHING you throw at them that is physically possible to do. So what do devs do? They rightly make combat where there's stuff you can't avoid and therefore damage is taken. But these games are based on healing and mitigation too. The numbers don't work out.
I'm not saying these can't work in Ashes, I've outlined an 'Ashes Rathalos fight' before as an explanation to someone else somewhere. But that wouldn't be 'hard', just 'engaging'. It would barely become hard as other players showed up to PvP. But devs almost always find themselves thinking 'Ok this is proper hard content now, nearly no one will be able to do THIS, they'd have to play PERFECTLY'. And then someone will do it.
Full raid encounter difficulty is literally ABOUT overwhelming your players' mental stack while also threatening them with the DPS and Mitigation checks. Action games that aren't frustrating by design almost cannot threaten with the Mitigation check without being a serious pain to play for a large number of players. Not 'to win the encounter'. Just to PLAY.
If you've played Monster Hunter, I can probably successfully explain it, but if you haven't, it would be harder. Just take my main point as 'Given relatively free action ability, developers are constantly surprised by just HOW good players can be at games'. So their better bet is to design things where your ability to act freely is not the key aspect of success... and then we're back to 'might as well be Tab Target'.
But I think at that point we're having a discussion of what's fun and engaging. Obviously there's people who're ready to bash their heads against bosses in both Souls games and in smth like wow mythic+++++ or ff14 ultimates. And in both of those cases the encounter will be beaten sooner or later. And both of those cases usually only appeal to the hardcorest parts of the gamer player base. So I think that as long as the base action game is fun for your rando casual - the top content can still provide difficulty through boss rng ability usage (within limits) or the same dancy mechanics that tab games use, but in context of an action game and its dodge/block mechanics.
But yes, at the end of the day, any action mmo might as well be tab. Except younger players come to dislike it more and more so I feel like the genre will shift towards it on its own sooner or later.
If you play an action combat game, you are experiencing 50% of what the games combat has to offer in the first few minutes. Sure, you may have more abilities to follow, but the basics are laid down immediately.
In a tab target game, when you get to the top end, the "basics" can change from encounter to encounter. I mean, I have taken on one encounter that required the raid to find instruments and literally play a song with them during the encounter.
Since encounters like this generally only happen at the top end of the game, it means players dont actually get to experience what is good about that system until they have put dozens of hours in to said game.
This results in many players new to the genre (that do not have a guiding hand telling them what to eventually expect) considering the combat - and thus game - to be somewhat dull compared to action games which are better out of the gate.
As an issue for developers to tackle though, I'd rather this than having a combat system that is very quickly going to prove to have a limited duration - which is action combat.
Your train of thought is so much up EQ butt, again I say, a game that isn't popular enough to be talked about in such massive detail without there being other players for possible conflicting opinions, that you're naturally refusing to see eye to eye.
Arc Lightning, with 50%+ casting speed, is a 1 sec cast time, guaranteed to hit long ranged nuke, that will one shot any class bar tank that doesn't have a shield or above 12,000 mdef (which is hard!).
And THIS is the limit of tab target, where it devolves into nothing but concluding a player contest from stats alone.
Keep being ignorant.
"limited duration"....
"One thing tab target has going for it, picking up and playing instruments".
This isn't at all, any constructive argument for why tab is better or has more longevity than action. All this is, is you purposefully limiting action combat/player input to big up that tab is somehow infinitively versatile, this is complete nonsense.
You're going on about raids and all kinds of qwerky things that can happen inside them, I'm finally glad I got the overview on you, you're a PvE only co-op player and this is restrictive to the online space.
Right.
But again, what is the point of this?
Are you trying to say that tab target will always beat action? Because that is not the case.
Are you trying to say that a developer can set tab or action to be the best class in PvP as and when they wish? Why would this be an issue?
Again, I am asking you what the point of bringing this up even was. This aspect of the discussion here has nothing at all to do with EQ, or with EQ2, I am asking you what is the relevance of the fact that Archeage now has caster as top PvP right now.
I mean, you can't really even say that this is an action vs tab thing, because calling Archeage action combat in any form is something of a stretch (which is why I referred to Darkrunner as a melee class, not as an action combat class).
So again, I am asking - what is the point here?
"Are you trying to say that tab target will always beat action?"
I have nothing else to say if it's too complex, carry on with EQ nostalgia....
Although New World may not have been incredible with it's PvE content, it is 100% an MMORPG.
This is exactly why the BNS PvP crowd left. It was dwindling for a while because of the lack of new content and proper balancing, and then they cemented the grave by implementing changes that weren't asked for and helped no one. Eventually, I stopped drinking the coolaid and left myself, because even though the rewards were good, what's the point of free shop currency from wins if you feel empty playing the game? Fighting the same people, waiting ages to get into a match (even during set hours they implemented to keep PvPers in the same timeframe, limiting when you can find a match), and not being surprised when you see leaderboards anymore because nobody new is playing the game enough anymore to get good enough to see that level. It became all so frustrating and eventually felt like just as much of a chore playing arena or 6v6 as it did to do daily quests.
Agreed. BNS performance and netcode was an absolute nightmare outside of Korea alone. Even topend systems with incredible internet access could struggle sometimes in both of these aspects. Eventually, they did away with 4 party alliance raids and limited it to 12 man, and raids still ran like wet dog shit.
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