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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.
Comments
I've also kinda given up and am just playing idlers and Genshin now
MMORPG is the top complexity alchemy.
Even with a top lead, and top dev, it could fail at release, but could fail even easier while living with a major change.
the "it is the game i want to play" base development philosophy of AoC is not a so good news, even for steven himself. When you want various things in your game, it becomes a puzzle, where you have to include all those ideas, while sometime it is hard to get them in a shape to do the puzzle.
You like chocolate ? You Like Chiken ? You like Salmon ? You like Cola ?
Mix them all, and... ... ... It is not the worst thing, but... clearly not a good food.
So the "Steven is a gamer and he knows what to do" is not really the perfect sign...
This is the argument for Naoki Yoshida. This is a gamer, playing lot of MMORPG also. he played good one, and "old" one... To get a wow's clone, a "coop RPG" where all you do have no meanings, all farm is soft reset every 6-8 months, and hard reset every 2 years. . . Yeah, great MMORPG.
More than that, the game is done, and it is the best game of its genre ever. But development go on, with new idea to add in this complex alchemy. The gamers behind the game not only play theirs but also others, and find new idea, inspirations. things to adapt to their own game. Here comes many failure in MMORPG genre. The game has a philosophy, all things are quuite fine, with a good balance but a weak balance, anything could break it and suddenly, the game becomes just "decent" or even "bad" only due to one change which is a good idea, but doesn't fit in the game. The worst of it is that sometime, you see it was a mistake to add it only one, two or more months after the patch of this big new idea. Hard to predict all impact it will have.
The fear i have for ashes of creation (while still really optimist) is mostly the problem i saw on other game, mainly FFXIV : the lead is sacralised, praised, "he will save us"... And such cult of personality is bad for the game itself. It is the point where people will be too fast to defend mistakes as "it happens" or "a simple small mistake". Because of the praise.
We have to be cynic, cold, harsh, not allow anything we dislike even "just a little". be critic on all. The game has a direction, a global philosophy. And sure, would be stupid to try to defend to get out of those base pillars. but for any even small thing out of the pillars, we have to be really critic and cynic. Because why would we care what want devs (outside the pillars again) ? "the game would just be not for you" ok fine, but if the game is only for not many people because far too focused on what would dream one dude the game will fail. the "it is a niche" doesnt avoid to fail. AoC is a game that will need a certain amount of people on each server...
There is a third though. Not all people who enjoy the PewPews are gankers, far from. In all PvP MMOs youll often find large playerbases of anti-PK guild, groups and people aswell.
I live for a freat MMO with great PvE, PvP and a sense of purpose to things.
PvP is risk and conflict giving meaning and competition. I crave it.
I believe AoC has a high risk of being brain dead too since I do not see a lot of player driven content options being added, but I still think AoC is way more interesting than the average MMO since it is promising interesting systems
For now I suspect that AoC's Achille's hell is player driven content, AoC should be as sandboxy as possible the way I see it and still keep the interesting systems that were promised
I feel the most important part of game dev, aside from game design, is the ability to change evolve and ameliorate. Bad moves will be made, thats a given. Just like good moves. How they adapt and fix their mistakes will determine a whole lot.
ATM, they have been very much doing it in a "participation" perspective with the community. It's the right way to go generally. So this gives me great optimisim.
I enjoy PvP sometimes, but, if Steven is making Ashes primarily for people who like to play the way he and Margaret and several of his game devs like to play - hardcore, competitive, trash-talking, adrenaline rush PvP - that's not the game for me.
Anti-PK is just more PvP - that's not a solution for people who don't love PvP.
PvE also has risk. When PvPers say PvP is risk - all they are really saying is PvP is PvP.
But, yes... I get that PvPers crave competition. And Ashes is on track to be a great game for that.
have you tried rice with brownies? its amazing.
you're missing something btw. you are missing that those elements from other games get mixed following a game's direction and design principles. that's why good things form other games wont make it into ashes, because they do not reflect the design principles of ashes, no matter how much of a good fit they were for other games (example pve and PVP servers).
on the other hand, some elements of other games that weren't so great, can be incorporated into ashes with some rebalancing and tweaks, and be a great fit for the game, since they follow the game's design principles.
But i will certainly come up with "my upcoming suspicious looks, my sarcastic bitter comments, and my 'lemme see how I can figure out how to spell this out as a terrible idea without getting banned'." when i see intrepid messing up their designs/systems.
The only current design/system i have suspicions of are profession levels not being tied to character levels, but i keep it only as suspicions because:
"Progression within artisan classes does not directly relate to a player's progression in their adventuring class, but there are requirements that take into account dangers, locations, toolsets, and surveying options that are level dependent."
So, i will have to properly see those "requirements" before i start to directly attack this system's concept.
Aren't we all sinners?
All risks in PvE are learnable, controllable, measurable and/or easily predictable without pure RNG(which can dramatically improves PvE risk) due to AI limitations and manipulation possibilities. In other words, fake risk.
Open World PvP risk by itself is the complete opposite, and something that one can truly call risk.
Aren't we all sinners?
That's the gameplay I crave.
It's not more risk. Especially when death penalties for Combatants is halved.
It's more hardcore challenge, sure.
All risk in MMORPGs is fake risk.
Except maybe investing real money in a game you can't or won't play.
The only risk in an MMO is time.
Everything players stand to lose in every MMO ever can be simply summed up by the length of time it would take to regain. I challenge you to come up with a risk in a live MMO that can not simply be broken down in to time. As such, the very notion of "risk" as anything other than a period of time to arrive at a specific goal is simply an incorrect observation of gameplay.
Sure, "risk" in a PvE setting can be learned, but it takes time to learn, and you are still losing while learning, which means it takes even more time.
Your entire premise above is based on some false notion that once you learn the encounter, there are no more encounters to learn. If you assume that there is always a new encounter to learn, the notion that you can - with time - learn each encounter suddenly becomes a meaningless point to make.
In fact, it becomes counter productive to the factually incorrect point you seem to be wanting to make. Because learning an encounter does take time, because players are losing during this learning process, and because this learning process itself takes time, the entire process of learning an encounter is risk. It all takes time to do. Since this process is never ending due to there always being more encounters to learn (note; in good games), this essentially means a never ending supply of risk.
Yeah everything in this entire world has a factor of time, its probably the most broad answer one could apply to any scenario. PVP or PVE this argument is a bit like saying, "no" as your complete answer.
It's half-normal time penalty for Combatants. Less risk than normal.
In terms if someone asking if PvE or PvP has more risk, the answer I would give is indeed "no".
The argument presented above that PvE is less risk because you can learn encounters - completely ignoring the fact that there is then another encounter- can be parallelized to PvP by saying there is less risk in PvP because you can just avoid the other player. This is again totally ignoring the fact that there iant only one other opponent on the server, the same fact that the argument in relation to PvE missed.
Sure, that is your opinion, it's simple not a fact, you can believe that risk = time, and that there is no other risk than time loss, i simple don't, because many abstract concepts generate risks unrecoverable with time, making your assumption wrong.
You can use time to learn all current PvE encounter and for that duration of time before a new encounter is released you will have completely learned the games PvE and you can even learn a games PvP Match ups,
but you cannot use time to learn a pvp fight that is literally happening in real time.
Unique Limited time things
Lets say a 1 week duration event, with a special boss that drops something untradable unique to this event, it respawns in a 24 hour delay, your clan fails to win 5 of the 7 days, those 5 loses are simple forever gone and no time in this world can recover them.
FOMO (Fear of missing out) something very common in current MMORPGs specially related to cash shops, the risk of forever not acquring something you want in-game.
Losing by itself as a concept is something that can't be regained with time, you lost, its in the past, you can't turn back time and turn that into a victory, it's in your record.
I can go on but you get the point, it isn't rocket science.
Aren't we all sinners?
You seem to be looking at this from the perspective of lose as in win or lose.
As I said in the post, I am talking about what players stand to lose - as in a thing they had a minute ago, but have now lost.
From the perspective of what a player stands to lose, your post makes no sense, as you are talking about players failing to acquire items. If you fail to acquire an item, you cant ever lose that item, because in order to lose an item you must first possess it.
Sure, you may lose the competition in regards to acquiring that item, but we are not talking about that. However, even if you did want to talk about that, the only thing lost in attempting to acquire an item and failing is the time you spent on the attempt.
Since you never had the item, you cant lose it. All you can do is fail to acquire it.
Edit to add to the above, just to drive the point home;
In order for something lost in an MMORPG to not be able to be made back via time, the thing you stand to lose needs to no longer be available. Further to it no longer being available, there is a need that nothing better than that item is ever made available in that game ever again. I mean, it isnt exactly a permanent loss if you just turn around and replace an item with something better.
Now, since it is foolish to believe any item in any MMORPG willbe the literal best item ever available for that slot, it is utterly foolish to believe you cant get better simply by putting more time in to the game.
This leaves appearance as literally the only argument left to make to support your position. Since appearance is subjective, there is no real argument here to be made imo.
The reason the above is an objective fact in every MMO to date is twofold. The first is that time and money are the only things we ever put in to an MMORPG, and thus are the only things we ever stand to lose, from a purely objective standpoint. Since you aren't putting anything other than time and money in to an MMORPG, how can you claim the loss of anything else? Since money in Ashes is only for subscription and appearance, neither of which can be taken away from the player in PvP, the only thing you stand to ever lose in Ashes in regards to PvP is time, as that is the only thing you are ever putting in.
The second reason this is the case is because game developers dont want players risking something they cant replace, and so design their games in a way where this is the case.
If you and I were to face off in PvP, you had gear on you that would take a few hours to replace but I had gear on me that literally couldn't ever be replaced, what incentive do I have to risk that gear?
If an MMO saw players having progression(gear, abilities, levels, what ever) of any sort that is literally unable to be replaced, players would do literally everything to avoid being in a situation where it could be lost.
Unsurprisingly, developers develop their games to avoid this situation, which is why you cant find any actual examples in an MMORPG of where a players stands to lose progression that they are unable to spend time to reacquire.