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.
Comments
The only thing that I am not fond of is the seasons lasting a week. Too short, unless they've changed that. But that's another topic.
Helping other people rediscover Verra (via quests) should be especially fun in Ashes of Creation.
Questing is for immersion, though.
People are just bad at writing quests because it's not the sort of thing they teach you when you want to learn these things.
Game design courses don't seem to have quite gotten to things like 'RPG quest design', and TableTop games don't teach the same principles so even a good "DM" doesn't come up with good quests just because you hire them to work on an RPG, they make 'narratives'.
XP for fighting mobs has an entirely different purpose and the design stuff around that isn't the same. The part that is similar is simple. If quests are not immersive, they are just there to waste your time. If the things you do to level aren't immersive, they're also just there to waste your time, but the thing stopping them from being immersive (outside of the preferences of a subset of the population that should probably be playing different games') is developers being brought on who don't know how to make it good, but the game getting released anyway.
In earlier WoW expansions - especially post-Cataclysm - it often felt like I was just being run across the map to do busy work, with a minimal amount of creativity to try to disguise a generic kill quest or fetch quest.
that's subjective. i prefer staying in one spot killing boars for 10 hours, no quest (or maybe one like the more kill the bigger ur rewards) than moving around delivering stuff lol
I think a good designed encounter tells the story itself passed a cinematic.
In my Original Post i mentioned Exploration is an essential part of a good gameplay experience, But Is it really exploration if your accepting quest> go to area do quest> Accept another quest> go to area do quest> Rinse repeat.. To me that is not exploration that is just linear quests leading along rails. This is as opposed being led to an area because you need a certain resource.. and you find a dungeon entrance or special event that happens at this time of day only type of thing.
I think a lot of people don't even really read the quests. Im not saying the option shouldn't be there but i would rather have a majority of the story be within the gameplay as opposed to not playing the game and reading quests. Weeklies and Dailies are typically HIGHLY Repetitive and boring, are not immersive, and end up feeling like chores rather than being immersive.
Really everything should give"XP" if there is an overall level, But if im stuck grinding out questline after questline of linear story in a sandbox game it is not as good as interesting encounters based on location and time and story made by the players and environment.
Turning your brain off and grinding is kind of the same as traditional gathering. They have talked in some of the dev streams that if you kill off a population too fast it may not respawn as quick so they have some interesting mechanics to troll opposing faction using this.
You can ignore quests and just grind by killing stuff if that's what you prefer to do.
Exploration is exploration, regardless of whether a quest is associate with them. Quests primarily add more xp - so everything does not feel like a grind from minimal xp. Also, quests ae likely to provide more detailed info about the places of interest. Sure, it can be fun to stumble upon ancient statues whle out exploring - but it's even better if there are people who will send you out to discover ancient statues and reward you well for doing so.
I'm going to explore anyway. Might as well get some neat stuff for people in the game who are interested in the stuff I've explored.
If all you care about is the rewards - sure - you could just focus on picking up quests and ignore all the lore and story associated with the quests.
People can choose not to read the quests.
Since I play RPGs for the story - I'm going to want to know why the NPCs are asking for my help... if the quests are well written. WoW quests were not well-written for Pandaria through Battle for Azeroth, so I only played a level or two of those expansions. The quests were well-written for Shadowlands and Dragonflight. Especially Dragonflight.
How tedious weeklies and dailies are depends on how tose are designed.
In some games they can feel like chores - and I choose not to do them.
In games where they don't feel like chores - they can be a fun way to kill some time and quickly gain some cosmetic rewards I like.
Typically, weeklies and dailies feel like a chore if the design is such that you restart rewards progression if you miss a day. Where there is pressure to log in everyday, rather than just being rewarded on the days you log in.
Killing stuff with no quests is about as repetitive as can be. Especially after max adventurer level.
Sure. In the vast majority of modern MMORPGs, pretty much everything gives some xp.
Quests aren't really grinding. Grinding is doing stuff that just gives minimal xp and minimal rewards.
Sandbox games don't have many quests. Questline after questline describes a Themepark game.
Gamers suck at creating stories, in my view...
Which is why Ashes is a Theme-Box.
OK.
If you are having fun - it's not really a grind.
Playing with others and seeing them racing to level up makes me want to do that too.
I tell myself that I will read later the story saved in a journal, but I never do. Also the story would have more impact in that place and context.
Playing slowly just for story makes you want to play alone and also to be protected by PvP-ers.
In any case, even if Steven manages to achieve a balance to protect such players, the game content still does not remain relevant for a 2nd play-through. One will not roll an alt and go again slowly through the same content again.
And the story does not really need leveling up.
I think because AoC is a PvP game, skilled players who just roll a new character should be able to defeat a character who played one year, if both get the same gear. Acquiring the gear should be the part which takes time, not leveling up.
I do agree they should make leveling harder and take longer. Grinding mobs and basic "kill x amount" quests are very boring and shouldnt be the way to level.
They should base level more on achievements, unlocking new raids, getting a house, leveling up nodes, leveling up crafting, and main story quest lines, than just pure grinding and boring quests, IMHO.
I don't think you can reach max adventurer level before progressing a Node to Stage 6. Almost certain you can't have gear appropriate for max level until there is a Node at Stage 6.
If you don't read quest text when it appears, it's unlikely you will read quest text later... when it's pretty much unimportant to your current experience.
I don't even know what you mean by "playing slowly".
I agree that Ashes is a hardcore PvP game. More importantly Ashes is an MMORPG.
It's also a Themebox - with a focus on delivering dev curated stories.
"Second play-through" is not really a thing in Ashes, since it's a dynamic world rather than a static world, so... you cannot repeat all of the quests - lots of quests will no longer be available.
Whether or not an experienced player with a new character can defeat a new player is going to depend on a lot more than just having the same gear.
But, no. In an RPG, the focus should be on character skills and experience, rather than player skills and experience. Each new character is new to Verra and their experience and prowess should reflect that.
If it's some other genre of game, like FPS or MOBA - character experience is not necessarily relevant.
Sounds like your complant is that you just want to play an MMO PvP game and you'd prefer it to be some other genre of MMO than RPG.
(Ashes doesn't have an end game. Ashes is a dynamic world, rather than a static world... and will always have dev curated quests and stories as well as player-driven stories, for all character levels, including max Adventurer levels.)
The idea is pretty simple for every "level" you get, you get a stat point or skill point -possibly both- when your "XP" green bar reaches a check point.
WHY
People want to grind and feel as though they are chasing something, that they are the best at something right? But, people also dont want to feel that the grind is impossible to reach. Take WoW for example, WoW got so bad they had to do a level squish (lv 120 to 60- now back at 70 again with Dragon Flight) because they couldn't figure out what to do every expansion.
Take bdo for example, the gear grind is rediculous because every cycle they have to increase player power by adding more higher tier armor. BDO has the system in place where they have levels but you have a soft and hard cap on levels after a threshold (awakening). So they have two distinct forms of progression that counter each other. The armor that never stops tier chasing, and the levels that never stop. They should have only had one of these, in this case the levels should be kept while the gear chase done away with.
Why for AoC
1. One it prevents the rat race of never-ending higher tier gear chasing every expansion
2. It term of player power, the devs don't need to think of new things every expansion to give players the feeling of personal progression in terms of power.
3. this will prevent the wow mistake of getting all the way up to lv 120 and having to squish.
4. by giving people stats/skill points to distribute on their spells/skills or stat points (strength, intellect, wisdom) instead of levels people will never have to feel like they are "falling behind" everyone else, because levels won't matter.
5. Devs won't feel the need to hit the drawing board every 6 months and figure out what can we do for players to make them feel a sense of progression without bloating the game, when from the very first launch day all the player power we will ever need to "chase" is in term of soft/hard caps on stats points/skill points
Implementation
So basically just like in bdo when you would reach max level you could still level up, it would just take longer (soft/hard cap) and give players the means of being able to stay on their mains wthout making alts. When players in AoC reach "50 stats/skills points it becomes hard capped. So If I have 10 constitution 20 strength 10 defense and 10 movement speed and now I am hard capped, I could get 21 strength eventually, but it may take me one hour for the next increase in player power; and gets progressively longer the more levels you gain.
It reminds me of that old South Park episode of WoW when the fat geek was so OP because he played on that one character for years and the four boys all had to train for weeks to take him down, and it was still a 1v4 that is what I want. Every mmo I play I don't make alts at all. When I reach max level I just wait for next expansion or play another game. I want to be a healer (high priest) and put all my 50 points into intellect (whatever the healng stats is) and when I reach hard cap; after years of traing, I am a Master High Priest and I am the head bishop of the games holy religion (one of the games 7 religions) and I have only played my main and been subbed for four years, my intellects is... let's say 84. but it took me 4 YEARS, (shows how progressively the leveling gets when you just focus on one stat, on one character).
it reminds me of the anime (isekai) BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense.
A wizard is never late, he arrives precisely when he means to.
But my concern is not related to server start only.
The game is supposed to be fun also if you start 6-12 months after the release of the game.
What I want to see is a healthy population evolution and the game stay alive many years.
After AoC release, other MMOs will be launched too and the influx of new players will slow down.
Those new players who would join later should not feel pressured by the game mechanics to level up fast, in order to be useful when teaming with veteran players.
The new players should instead constantly see players of their own level around who are actually alts of veteran players. And those alts should not all of them just try to reach max level.
You heard maybe about "power leveling". That is fun too, the game to allow finding ways to level up faster, maybe with help from other players. You can even pay for their time to help you on this. (I am afraid of the mentor program though because is a way Steven to say: you like to do that? I make it an official game mechanic! I control what you are allowed to do!)
But you can also level up naturally by choosing activities which might not reward so much. Like making money or exploring or doing artisan activities.
I don't know if the artisan leveling is horizontal or a separate vertical leveling but spending time on that takes away from the one which allows to fight NPCs and PvP, which I consider the main character level.
Yes. And that is a content which should not be enforced. I don't want to wait for NPC characters to finish walking from place to place to chat with each-other.
I would rather see them in a separate view which I can close by hitting a button.
No, I want to not be forced by the game mechanic to level up because I feel less useful as a mid level character. I am fine leveling up my main character over 2 years.
But because I like PvP too, the game seems to force me to reach max level.
Or in Elder Scrolls games, players were running into a wall while afk to level up the running skill.
Losing those levels when dying as a corrupted player or killed by NPCs feels bad.
In AoC I would maybe add the lost experience when killed by NPCs to an XP pool though, to give it back a bit faster. Or maybe not. Depends if I look from PvE-er perspective or the PvP-er one.
"grind" is used when you do something which you do not like.
Even if the activity is not repetitive but there are more different things which you dislike, I would still call them grind. Ask a PvP-er if leveling up doing various PvE activities is grind or not.
If you like an activity, is not grind. Is play.
New expansions should not add new levels. I would rather see new classes and new ways to play.
The map changing gradually every 6 months with local disasters, with resources fading and new ones being introduced would be a better way to keep things new.
They could maybe rotate and add old ways of playing back eventually.
There are many progression paths in the game besides just Adventurer progression.
"Server start" is mostly irrelevant since Nodes can be destroyed - Nodes don't always remain at Stage 6.
No guarantee that there will be a Metro with the desired Node Type or Racial population to help new players race to the end of the progression paths they are seeking. New players may need to destroy existing Nodes and help rebuild to Stage 6. Some new players will certainly need to do so.
We agree. Pretty sure everyone agrees.
Ashes has a Mentor feature which helps lowbie characters power-level.
I suppose you could pay someone to Mentor you, but... that's a player decision - it's not part of the Mentor feature.
Both Mentors and Mentees gain rewards from Mentor quests.
Artisan progression is mostly separate from Adventurer progression
OK.
You may or may not get that wish.
Can't please all of the people all of the time.
Which means you want to play an MMO, but you don't really want to play an RPG.
I don't know what you mean by forcing you to reach max level.
Ashes is an RPG, so it includes character levels. You don't have to reach max Adventurer level if you don't want to. You could have a bunch of alts - all of which never reach max level - if that's the way you want to play.
But... if you play the same character for several years, it will probably eventually reach the original max for Adventurer level.
this is why I wish AoC / Steven took the Everquest approach on questing.
Hard to find Quest Givers - you gotta actually type in key phrases for them to give out quest. Therefor it forces players to read the story.
No Quest Guide UI that gives you the answer. you actually had to remember what the quest is about and decipher the context clue as to where you might need to go.
People ended up paying attention.
Now - you can still SKIP ALL QUESTING - but if u wanted to quest - risk/reward.
Risk - OMG U GOTTA READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Reward - good shit with good XP
The only way to avoid that is to completely randomize word/action requirements of personal quests. The main quest line could be the same and simple, but every other quest would have random details that can't be put into a guide.
But I'm, like, 90% sure people would COMPLAIN at length if this was the case
let them complain.... "this game isnt for you" will be the respond.
Funny enough - EQ quest guides still has you reading practically the same thing what the npc tells you.
example:
https://wiki.project1999.com/Nillipuss_the_Brownie
You still have to read the guide and the NPC DIALOG, type in the phrase needed.
Both NPC and the guide doesnt really give you a exact location - just a general area.
All a guide does is bookmark when you forgot what your quest is. Same thing as if I just wrote a note for a self reminder.
We know AoC isnt gonna give us the Kill 10 boars bullshit quests. As long as there isnt a quest log / ui that gives out the item/location/direction - PEOPLE WILL READ or just not bother with questign and simply grind - which many people did in Everquest.
Everquest had long quest chains but not that many quests in the world unlike Vanilla WoW had 10000 quests off the bat and you level mainly off questing.
Both of those activities take a fair bit of time, while pretty much 99.9% of the oldschoolers have families or at the very least full lives, so their playtime is limited. And when you add the potential of someone else attacking them while they're reading quest text or grinding mobs - that time becomes even shorter.
And at this point we gotta ask ourselves, do we tell the biggest potential target audience "this game is not for you" or do we cut a few corners here and there to at least not drive those people away. The corruption system is supposed to cut the corner on the grind side of content, so imo it'd be only logical to cut a corner on the questing side too.
There's obviously the artisanal part of the equation, but we got 0 info outside of the "you can cut wood and rock" stuff, so it's hard to determine whether there's corners that need to be cut.
"Risk vs reward" is also one, but I think offering the story as a reward while having the risk of being attacked is not what Steven has in mind
The corruption system will offer a lot of protection even if no story reading is involved.
If that is not enough, there are ways to handle this. I would show an indicator above the player's head, to notify potential attackers that the player is reading the story and if is attacked, the game will buff and heal him, giving an extra advantage in battle.
Also back in the city, while safe, players should have a better way to review story elements, than games typically offer.
I don't know why people would be upset really.
The killer get corruption and the guards are really close. Or maybe not every city has guards? Then maybe bounty hunters.
Bro - AoC has Loot PVP - that line has been breached. This game has never been intended to be the WoW Killer or accure a shit ton of players. Steven on record hopes for the best but is aware this game isnt gonna be everyone cup of tea. Slow pace, grind pve, full loot sea, open world pvp and very little fast travel spots.
Nowaday gamers addicts who wants their dopamine hits every 30 seconds arent gonna like this game at all with it's current direction.
Steven audience isnt the mass audience. HE WOULD LIKE IT TO BE but is building on the notion of "this game isnt for everyone". He isnt here to make money - if it does - icing on the cake for him.
And like I said, the corruption system is there to prevent mass killings of people who're just chilling and as for grind, Steven did say that they want to try and move away from the repetitive design of pve grind. And the sees are not full loot, they just have no corruption, though I do think that sees will be more of a guild type of thing rather than a solo one.
My point is mainly about how small the target audience will be if every single part of the game pushes people away in some way. We all know that the game will be niche, but there's a scale of how niche it can be and I'd prefer Ashes to be closer to the top than to the bottom. And so far it seems like Intrepid are trying to achieve the same thing, and I think that having super complex and hard to parse quest design would be detrimental to the game in the long run.
The Task system is most likely what will handle this for many people.
RP-ers can figure out how to view the semi-randomized tasks and emergent narratives for themselves.
Everyone else just gets a basic thing to do and can go around never even thinking about any underlying meaning.