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
As you can see the thread is a year old. In the meantime there are NEW spelleffects as bright and flashy as the ones before. So it's a totally valid point
have you guys considered that maybe that feature isn't added yet because its not important right now?
steven also explained how many of these things are done later on, so they don't have to do double the work, or undo previous work when they change global lightning etc...
But that's the thing, there is sooo much, that you cannot even see the enemies character model anymore.
O . P . T . I . O . N . S
We need simply - Options.
We need to be able to got into the Game Settings - and adjust from "SUPER-Low" or so - to "SUPER-High" or so, how detailed and present we want to have all those Particle- and other Effects.
Problem solved.
And i won't believe anyone who is going to tell me, that Unreal Engine 5.4. or higher can not do this.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
The problem with too much variance in options in a pvp game is that one setup will become advantageous over the others. If it's a huge advantage then it pretty much becomes mandatory for everyone in a competitive setting.
A far too extreme example, but shows the point, is Ark. Having the settings cranked to the bottom is required or you are toast. Better that we settle on a happy medium for everyone and let all of us adjust the usuals, like bloom, ambient etc. That way everyone is on the same playing field.
For me WoW and SWTOR are happy mediums, or maybe a bit flashier. FFXIV is way too much, Darksouls is way too boring (and slow) for a magic focused MMO.
Darksouls animations perfectly fit it's slow, heavy combat style. I don't want that combat style in an MMO.
I think perhaps FromSoftware should make a Darksouls MMO. Everyone seems desperate for it. Although I don't know if people will actually have as much fun with it as they think they will. Your average MMO player definitely wouldn't.
There should be a good and working standard for a pvp game. It's just not good if everything is full of flashes and explosions. You can't read the battle or the enemy group at all.
Sounds like you've just never played games with more than 8 players on each side, tbh.
When the battlefield is large, there will be times when a lot of important high-tier abilities will be happening at the same time. That doesn't mean the visual clarity is insufficient, it just means there's a lot happening; and different players are going to have to pay attention to different aspects of it, so all of them are going to have to be visible, and you'll have to mentally filter out the parts relevant to you. (That usually happens automatically after a while, anyway.)
Bs, I played warhammer online, daoc and gw1 and two and in all games it's better. What is your reference? Some Asia game?
Even assuming you're right and it's better 95% of the mmo (not true), than it's still bad. There are no reasons for fighters having some glowing flashy cleave effect on every hit, there is no reason that a ranger is firering green neon bolts. They're not magicians
I get it. ^.^;"
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
I mostly played Regnum Online - a DAOC clone; western RvR MMO - when it comes to 3d, and got very quickly bored of most modern titles. The only aspect Rengum had an upper hand on DAOC in was graphics updates. Game looked pretty crisp for a niche title of its time. And still it wasn't much more restrained in graphical fidelity of ability effects than Ashes in its current state. [ 1 | 2 for context from a random channel with high-res gameplay footage.]
Mentioning DAOC here as an example of a standard that made you reject bright effect animations is...certainly a choice.
Bonus unicorn puke
The cleaves aren't that big of a deal in games with character collision, and weapon effect trails are super easy to turn off in settings in the vast majority of MMOs that have them; that'll be the first thing that will be customisable.
As for archers, your argument is just weak. The game isn't meant to look realistic, it's meant to look engaging, fun, enticing to join the battle, and most importantly animations are supposed to communicate clearly when big important cooldowns have been used, and the current AoE animations do that, and their bright colours make sure the abilities are easy to identify.
Again, I do hope they will refine the colour palette to repalace some brighter colours with more muted/pastel and darker tones, but other than that, the skill design is very clean compared to many modern games where everything blends with the environment, and if you turn down the resolution the slightest bit, everything is just pixels, because the overly detailed shapes, high opacity, and mud colours fail to compute into anything identifiable.
So in your opinion this is fine and my argument "weak"?
IMO the level of flashiness should be at about 50% of where it currently is, if not slightly less. Also do not want a slider on this at all. As others have said, this creates a settings meta where it’s too optimal to run the game with very low settings. They should find a good balance that the majority of players are happy with and run it.
just curious, for how long did that last on the screen?
Partical effects are to large and colorful. This does need to be scaled. It's way to busy and worst of all, it will be hard to tell what class is doing what in the battle.
I was pondering not sending the screenshot in order to avoid this type of a response, but I figured I had said so many other things to reply to, and trusted that no one could be disingenuous enough to get distracted from all the other points by a single screenshot.
Yet you somehow managed not only to ignore all the other points, but also misconstrue the one made by the DaoC example. And the superficial observation you chose to respond with was *also* already addressed in my comment.
So idk, guess if you don't want to make any effort to have a good faith discussion, I'll stop replying to you.
But it proves that you have no argument in that. In no game stuff like that should be possible.
In Ashes however this isn´t the case imo. The environment looks rather desaturated and a bit more realistic but the effects, such as the red wall or the green particles that are shown in the image above look rather cartoonish.
And even if these particles are just visible for a part of a second how it is with the green ranger ability... Now think of a node war with maybe hundreds of players fighting against each other. You´d probably only see huge blobs of colors here and there! One spell in red, the other one in green, etc...
Imo the glow AND the amount of particles have to be reduced a lot. And another thing that´s on my mind here:
Ashes uses UE5 and with the environment AND the characters shown in the last livestreams they seem to aim for a more realistic approach (remember that stream where they recreated Asmongold? ). So the spells should look like they actually belong in a game like that but in their current state they remind me of games like Blue Protocol that have a completely different style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0AM5KqiGFc
Sure, that´s a bit exaggerated but if you compare these spells with the ones in New World for example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBm8Xip3mCI) you hopefully get what I mean
The colors and the color intensity of the spells rather match the spells in Blue Protocol and not the ones in New World imo. And I know that Ashes doesn´t want to be New World but as I said: The spell effects should at least match the environment and the effects of fireplaces, torches, etc.
bruh, the green effect lasts for 0.2 seconds. it disappears faster than blinking lol. you just chose to pause the video at that moment and screenshot it. that's why I asked how long does it last xD it literally doesn't interrupt the fight.
Its entirely possible that these spell effects are tuned for the Node War and Siege scenarios specifically. Without high contrast color coding in a setting like this, it's impossible to see what circle on the ground is damage from an enemy vs damage from an ally.
Of course, this is just one example. It's always the case that players are covered, the big flashy aoes don't do any damage and you have no idea who casts which spell. This is not a good visualization for a pvp game. This is a very simple truth.
1- pretty sure these effects arent final, as steven said so like 10 times lol
2- even if they were, once you know the archetype skills and all that, its not that hard to know whats going on during a fight.
No ty
One of the fighter abilities causes a very exaggerated bleeding effect (I think it was called rupture?). It makes Mortal Kombat look realistic by comparison.