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.
Comments
lets say i play a game and i rpg as a tavern owner. all im doing is stay in my tavern offering people drinks and making sure there are no unsavory individuals in the tavern. there is no story, no questing and no progression, but im still roleplaying, arent i?
80% Open World dungeons; 20% Instanced dungeons. Instanced dungeons are primarily associated with dev curated story, rather than emergent story from PvP.
"If Design has a specific reason for which they want you to only be able to encounter this area with 8 players, or to only do this boss with 8 players, either from a story perspective, a class progression perspective or racial storyline, whatever... that's where we delegate a majority of the Instance use to. Not necessarily for places you can grind or farm repeatedly. So, these are specific story-arcs we want to give containment to the encounter."
---Steven The Big Cheeked Giant Episode 100
You could do that while playing chess if you wanted to. That would not make chess an RPG.
You would be RPing. That doesn't tell me whether the game is an RPG.
If it's an RPG, I would expect there to be quests associated with running the tavern. And some of those quests would probably involve killing some Rats.
If you said, "I like staying in a tavern and playing chess."
I would also say - "that sounds like a chess sim". Hopefully, the other features of the MMORPG are engaging enough that it's not common for people to want to spend the bulk of their time playing chess in a tavern.
And, yeah, in an RPG, I would hope it's designed that people would want to stay in a spot farming mobs about as often as people would want to stay in a tavern playing chess.
I don't know what those words mean anyway
With or without sand, there might be chaos. If you shake the box and is the theme instead of sand which gets mixed up, it's fine. Maybe even better.
I do not oppose instances as long as they do not end up dominating the game.
Instance for me is a space which has a loading screen.
That space can be only one or can be created more times.
Some players may want one such instance only for themselves (to be safe). That would be against Steven's risk vs fun vision. A few instances would not hurt. They have to see how many players would go there, why, how often, how long they stay, what they get there. Only knowing such information I could think what impact it would have onto the server. Because if most players are in instances, then they are not outside them. In the end, moving the balance you get a more mixed or a more specific player base.
I can addapt to both extremes.
Also depending on what the objective of the game is, instances can be adjusted and we could see some kind which we never seen before in other games, because they were not needed.
Definitley, i dont think that the dungeons need to be instanced to a degree where it is basically solo content, or one team enters and cleans the entire instance, but i think it needs to be managed vs the size of the dungeon, if there are to many people to compete against i feel as though this is ruining content and not the best design, so yes i would say that dungeon caps at maybe 60 ish players before a new layer is formed could be a good work around, they could code it that there are more players per dungeon than bosses/mobs so it will still be contested without it looking like a cross walk in tokyo having to compete for regular trash mobs because there are pushing 500 players per instance
we will see in time
A dungeon that you TP into ("instanced" in other words). No limit on people inside. lvl40-55 (out of potential 85) content.
A purely open world dungeon for lvl20-40 content, with a very important boss at the very bottom.
A fight right outside of a top lvl dungeon, with the goal of preventing the enemy to farm said dungeon (and the very important boss inside).
You see how massive all of those are? That's what "open world dungeon" means to Steven, me and some others. That's the content we want to see.
this looks terrible lol
i mean are we making an MMO here or trying to bring back life to an old game that a couple of people miss, there are always ways for games to improve and just because i dont like one aspect of it does not mean the game is not for me, maybe it means some of the dungeon content is not for me, but please tell me how that is good game play
firstly there are literally hundreds of people in the dungeon, witch totally removes the risk vs reward aspect of it, no mobs will be up more than a few seconds including bosses, if pvp breaks out its going to just be an aoe fest, no real combat no real skill, no outplays, just a big aoe fest of 500 people, and most likely who ever has the biggest raid group will win, every single player wanting to go in and test their skills as a 5 man or 8 man party will have next to no chance competing
secondly, i cant even appreciate the dungeon with this many people, now imagine this with the flashy spell animations ashes has, most peoples computers will probably just shut down at this point,
like i said i dont think dungeons should be instanced to one group but 500 players in one dungeon seems like it will cause more issues than it will fix, and with corruption it will be almost impossible to even pvp your way into a farm spot because as soon as your group flags you are just an easy target for the other 500 players already standing ontop of you that can kill you with no downside, obviously we need to test this but like i said, is ashes of creation a new MMO or is it just L2 being brought back to life because steven misses the game, they can have their own systems
The 3rd video is literally a solo group against over a hundred people. They distract that whole zerg, kite them and pick off quite a few enemies. With just a few more groups you could outplay that whole zerg easily (as that guild has done in the past btw).
As for the few seconds for mobs/bosses. Mobs don't matter during the pvp itself, because you're fighting for the right to kill the mobs. And bosses are tuned to take that kind of dmg w/o dying in seconds. Also, loot is not given to every participant, so just bringing a huge zerg to a dungeon is a waste of time, because you're spending way more manhours on getting smth that's worth a fraction of that effort.
Intrepid want sieges to be 500vs500. With node sieges potentially having even more people, if they somehow stay non-instanced. If the game can't handle just a few hundred people in one place - it will have failed at its core goal.
As for people's PCs - Intrepid have already said that we'll have extensive graphics settings and they'll try optimizing the game to the best of their ability. If your PC can't meet the minimum requirements - bad for you (I'm quite likely in this camp btw).
Corruption has nothing to do with being flagged. It does have smth to do with you just running through a crowd of flagged zerg though. Mainly in the way of that zerg being scared to kill you, because they'll suffer huge penalties and you'll be able to kill them for free in return.
Also, as I wrote here before, AoC's dungeons will be huge. Having just a few parties in them would be an absolute waste of dev time and game space. And making all those dungeons instanced would just create a participation trophy mechanic, because guilds would just immediately fill up those dungeons and would farm them for absolutely free.
You'll either choose to let them be stepped on, be the ones stepping on toes, or shove them off your feet.
Can't wait!
It's crowded because they know approximatively the respawn of the boss. (Or already spawn)
So the world needs to be large enough to handle all those people, which I'm sure their developers are working on that and expectations so it will be in line with modern standard when it comes to content.
Steven and Jeffrey said they are not really trying to recreate the wheel. Ashes is mostly fairly safe in using pre-established MMORPG concepts.
Nodes is the feature that is novel for MMORPGs.
Its not definitive, its just "game" technically anything can be an RPG its super subjective, if you want to add online roleplaying game sure you could but chess is also online lol
One thing you have to remember- L2 developers didn't make up some bullshit marketing term in an effort to convince PvE players that the game may be for then. L2 was just a PvP MMORPG, and didn't need to pretend to be nothing else. It was talked about as a PvP MMO, and marketed as a PvP MMO.
Intrepid are trying to tell us that Ashes is not a PvP MMORPG, and dungeons are the only real place they can prove that point.
If what you have posted above from L2 is what players hold expect from dungeon content, how well do you think that would go down with people that believe Ashes is a PvX MMO, not a PvP MMO?
People know that kind of thing (people that have been around for a while, at least) as being a PvP thing - not a PvX thing.
That may be what open dungeons are to you, but L2 is not the only game that had open dungeons with PvP.
yes, i meant RP oops, typo. and while i could play chess and rp as a tavern owner, thats a different story than the game being an rpg and allowing you to rp as a tavern owner...
i didnt play eq but afaik you would spend 2-3 mins killing a strong mob, then 5 mins sitting down cuz you had no mana plus you had to wait for the mob to respawn. at that point im spending more time not playing my character than playing it.
i rather have rooms full of mobs so i can aoe farm. kill everything in one room, move to the next and aoe farm.
also, if you have a bunch of rooms with bosses and every room is a boss room, then they arent really bosses (by definition)...bosses are stronger than all the other monsters in the same area, have much longer respawns (usually) and are very scarce. its like fighting soldiers vs fighting a general. you dont have generals in every room.