Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
What nursing homes have the best internet?
Dreadphul
Member, Alpha Two
I feel this is important information we all should know so that we'll be in a better position when AoC releases. As a side note, I also think it's a good idea to pick a family member to will your AoC key to. (it's going to be hilarious when AoC does finally release and it has bugs. because it will. or all we play when it releases are VR games because we all have a VR room in our house where we used to have a couch and a tv/monitor. the walls, floor, ceiling is all plugged in to VR. and AoC comes along looking like an Atari game next to that.) It doesn't have to be perfect, Intrepid. Because it won't be and we've been well prepared by AoC predecessors to realize that's just a fact of life when it comes to brand new games. Or maybe I've just been hustled out of $250 bucks that i gave to some dude and his buddies who made a small game and figured out how to maximize it's earnings by making it appear much bigger than what it is and never actually releasing it.
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Comments
While we heard about Ashes in 2017, it didn't get in to full development swing until 2020 or 2021.
However, even if we assume the game started actual development in 2018, if you look at other MMORPG's, the development time should be expected to last 7 - 10 years.
This puts us at a release of 2025 - 2028 being actually reasonable and in line with other MMORPG's - keeping in mind that this is if we assume development started in full earlier than it actually did.
Having an expectation that the game will release sooner than that is unreasonable on your part.
Yep pretty much this. An ambitious MMORPG (like Ashes) taking 10 years to complete is completely within reason and the norm, compared to other MMORPG projects.
I have zero issue with people being ignorant of this, and of how long it takes to make big games in general. We can't all know everything obviously.
But it takes all of 5-10 minutes of searching for and acquiring this information. Instead, some people like to spend those 5-10 minutes or more on completely misplaced rants on forums or other social media platforms, making themselves look stupid, and wasting other people's time having to correct them.
The sarcastic joke about nursing homes was funny though because my career is working in them and some do have good/horrible internet, haha!!
https://intrepidstudios.com/careers
Perhaps it would help if you compare contemporary games. GTS San Andreas took 21 months to develop, and was released in 2004 (the same year as WoW).
GTA5 was released in 2008, and took 3 years to develop - almost twice as long.
So, the development time from 2004 to 2008 almost doubled.
GTA6 started actual development in 2015, and is still in the works now - so it can be assumed that there has been another doubling (at least) since 2008.
So, it WoW took 4 years to develop, that means the average MMO from the late 2000's should have taken 8 years to develop, and the average MMO today should take 16 years to develop.
Clearly, that doesn't quite track, so perhaps we should look at a linear addition of time to develop a game rather than a multiplication.
GTA;SA took 21 months, GTA6 has taken 84 months so far. Thus, there has been an increase in development time of 63 months.
If we apply this to MMOs using WoW as our base, with WoW taking 48 - 60 months to develop (best guess), that puts MMO development time today at 111 - 123 months (about 9 or 10 years).
Either way, while you think you are being reasonably here, you very much are not.
Expect Ashes in 2025 - 2028. That is reasonable. Complain if it hasn't been released by 2030.
Edit to add, it is absolutely worth pointing out two things with the above numbers, just to illustrate how harsh I am being on Intrepid in the above.
GTA6 actually started development in 2012, it just didn't hit full swing until 2015. This is the same as how Ashes "started" in 2017, but didn't hit full swing until 2020 or 2021.
Also, Rockstar is an existing studio, with existing infrastructure, existing systems etc. As such, they are more easily able to get in to the swing of things than a new studio like Intrepid. As such, even the above dates are not actually fair on Intrepid.
However, you, OP, are being completely unreasonable. Like, totally, completely unreasonable.
Well, probably over 5 years. Development started in 1999 and it released Nov. 23. 2004. Let's keep the numbers correct here.
Full disclosure in case any new players wander into the thread:
The pre-order packs are not required to play Ashes of Creation ... they are optional.
If a player wants to purchase a pre-order pack that's totally fine and their choice.
However, leveraging that purchase to hold Intrepid hostage on a release date isn't acceptable behavior.
Yeah, I'm planning on rebuilding my PC with a 6080Ti or 7080 on release! (Just poking fun at the people who are impatient.)
VR is a meme for a reason. Much like the success of Google Glass, VR is something some people really want and everyone else doesn't.
Yeah, it was.
As I pointed out though, game development times have more than doubled since then.
As such, if you want to use that game as a bar, you NEED to factor in the increase in development time between then and now.
That is why an 8 - 10 year development timeline isnt unreasonable. That timeline IS using WoW as a bar.
Your clueless point about how it "doesn't have to be perfect" was completely shredded apart, and yet you still feel justified in trying to sound condescending. If you're so old that you're worried about your retirement age or even the functionality of your body, develop some dignity and sit down when you're being schooled.
The a vast difference between WoW and Ashes in the challenges of
- the scope (WoW at release was essentially a dungeonrunner with some cheap themepark distractions and enough network code to mash buttons for PvP. The world of Ashes will develop into different predesigned directions depending on what players do in it. Not to mention obvious stuff like territory ownership impacting how versatile and malleable the world has to be. That's a pretty volatile and extensive system to program and fill with assets and stories.)
- the company origins (Warcraft 2 had already been released by the time WoW came out. Blizzard had an existing infrastructure of teams and coordination.)
- and budget (Articles online cite 60-200 million - 200 seems to include marketing, but don't forget that Ashes will have those costs, too. And again, WoW's budget was spent on an existing office infrastructure. That's a ton of developer manpower you can just throw at the problem until it's taken care of.)
makes you look so fucking naive for thinking you could use 4 years as even just a reasonable reference point for your expectations.No, you're completely missing the point. The game isn't not in alpha 2 because the devs are striving for "perfection." The game is not in alpha 2 because the game doesn't exist yet. The work that needs to be done is too extensive for alpha 2 to make sense. They aren't at the stage of beautifying the world, hunting bugs, and polishing the network code and class balance. They are making the game. Not just asset and map design (Which is a huge dev time sink, let's not disregard that) but also just writing stories, populating a world with people and creatures, and setting the world up to be the environment of flexible nodes the game needs to consist of when you play and test it.
Which is not to say that they haven't been making the game in past years, but it's just not a process that you can just assign a bunch of people to, and after a set amount of work hours it's completed; that all depends on the game's scale and complexity, and how far along the background systems (Which are more than just the engine at the foundation) are by the time the world design starts.
Eventually, that work will be done, the game's release will be a little closer, and alpha 2 will happen.
And yes, part of the reason they aren't rushing the alpha is to make sure it looks good enough that the hype won't break and they don't get bad publicity. But really, that's just the other side of the same coin: Ultimately they need to put their time into making a game people want and showing that they can do that. Rushing player testing stages would only slow down that task.
Would there be enough of a game that they could run alpha 2 tests in the background to keep you entertained while they keep doing that work? Yes, but the purpose of alpha 2 isn't to entertain you, it's there to help the devs get feedback for the next design stage and refine their direction from there. They are not at that next design stage, so there's no reason to host the next alpha test phase.
@Dreadphul can you please do that for me and post the results? I'm curious
Should definitely start using this reply more on the forums, as some posters genuinely do make me wonder...