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
Though do think transportation works well in MMO's.
Riding for ages is all well n good at the start, but once you know areas well its a pain in the ***
I was just wondering about jumping puzzles the other day. I wonder if they’ll have some “bubble” type invisible barriers around them that prevent players from gliding halfway through them or just getting past them entirely. One could argue that’s just playing smart. But it does diminish the effort put into the puzzles if anyone with a gliding mount can circumvent them. If metro mayors and guild kings/queens get actual flying mounts, it would be a bit silly for them to get a whole month just to cruise around and beat all the jumping puzzles.
Learn to glide? So you’d purchase a gliding mount, but then have to walk it up to a high point to learn how to glide on it? Seems like you’d want to start with small hovering, like little dips in hillsides, logically, if you were learning how to “fall with style” for the first time. Not sure I’d want to climb up a mountain and jump off as my first attempt at riding on the back of a gryphon lol
That being said, WoW’s new implementation of dragon riding was actually pretty cool. They strategically placed hovering tokens up in the sky to be endurance challenges for players. If you glide right and time your boosts well, you’ll just barely be able to reach the tokens, and gain a new point for your dragon riding skill tree. I’d be down for a similar system in ashes, if there is a skill tree for mount mastery. Also - gliding time trails. Those are lots of fun.
But, something tells me gliding in Ashes won’t be anything like WoW’s dragon riding or GW2’s flying with the realistic flight maneuvering, speed boosts, etc. If I’m right, and it’s just a simple elevation drop dependent on mount quality and near pinpoint cornering with no speed boosts or momentum-based speed gain, some of those systems might be pointless and boring if implemented.
Also, if actual flight works like old world-WoW flying where you just hover in place indefinitely with no flight endurance or momentum, I don’t think it’s worth bothering. GW2 and WoW’s (new) flight systems are just too much fun for anything else to be particularly valuable or considered much of an incentive for player effort. Sure, flying when virtually no one else can technically presents value in a vacuum, getting a mount that can move in precisely measured units at whatever speed you want in three dimensions and drop fire bombs on your enemies is pretty powerful, but it’s not very fun in and of itself anymore, at least not by modern gameplay standards. I think most gamers who’ve tried modern MMO flight mechanics would agree.
I can't comment on how true flight is going to work in Ashes because we simply do not know but with those being limited to approximately 20 people on the server, I doubt this will me relevant to me specifically anyways. But I agree the GW2 flying system is very good.
I guess my main point in mentioning WoW’s new flight system in addition to GW2’s flight system is that WoW’s dragon riding isn’t actual flying. I think that once you max out your skill level, people have found ways to min-max flight angles and boost usage so that you can technically fly forever, but if the boosting was limited a fair amount and not designed to keep you in the air indefinitely, WoW’s dragon riding would basically be fancy gliding with limited capacity for upward movement. I think having an almost-but-not-quite flying system would be really engaging and encourage the world designers to play with verticality in their designs a lot more.
Thanks to the team for selecting my related question on the QA thread for the stream and to Steven for answering so transparently. It's nice to hear that there will be the potential for animal husbandry-related gliding skills that the player can use to more actively control their gliding paths, speed, and distance. I'm not sure if maybe Steven didn't understand my question perfectly, but it sounded like actual momentum based gliding will not be a thing - more so a hard set of flight speed data based on species and genes regardless of flight trajectory. Might be wrong, but that's the impression I got. A bit disappointing, but overall the gliding still looked like a lot of fun and certainly a useful asset in world exploration.