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.
Why “Mayor” and not “Government?”
Rebutko
Member, Alpha Two
I’m not really sure there’s an answer here but why did the devs choose to make the governing structure so limited by choosing to go with a single “major” instead of a cabinet of individuals to make different decisions in the community?
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Also it doesn't need to be overly complex, and the mayor should 100% be able to be a dictator as much as they want without anyone to push back, besides the consequences of their own actions with citizens.
But otherwise mayor's will probably be a part of a guild or group that can supply them with funding or votes anyways.
Having the decision making be limited to a single person just helps expedite in-game actions.
- 5 Metropoli
- 10 Cities
- 10 Towns
- 20 Villages
- 45 camps and crossroads
while the only ones relevant for the mayoral system are Villages and up.
That leaves us with 45 Nodes that have citizens and a government system.
As part of the overall medieval leaning fantasy world of TTRPGs, mayors are often centers of power derived from smaller community heads like chieftains or villiage reeve/elder in which it is helpful to have a single figure govern a smaller group of people and because having a single person to approach makes quest design easier. Current example of that can be found in Baldurs Gate 3 where the Archduke of the City basically reigns supreme as soon as he is officially inaugurated.
From a perspective of effectiveness a council would also complicate things. e.g. ratifying the buying orders, mayoral commissions or caravans would slow down the process of doing so and with legislative terms being quite short compared to real life, I suspect to keep the speed of possible change high, it was concluded that going with a small in number political power center would be for the best.
Now with that being said: I think there is a point to be made that maybe a bit more variety would be nice, but maybe this is either realized in a different system yet to be shown (e.g. patron guilds) or the system is still subject to more fundamental change even during A2.
mark 1:20:48
But YES - there will be other "government positions" available, as Steven goes over, at that point in the video. Yours truly will play Cleric/Cleric AND be heavy into the Religion part of the game; Something like the High Priest of your local temple is a really cool side-way of entering into the local Node government.
Am eager to find out more about things (that aren't already on the wiki) SS mentioned like the "Chief Bounty Hunter", and the GL of the "Patron Guilds". Both intrigue the imagination!
The map feels to small and crowded imo to have multiple players doing politics in each node.
I was trying to figure out the player density on the map.
Wiki says travel time:
- from the center of a node to the center of its direct neighbor is 5 minutes (3.5 minutes mounted)
- from the northernmost to southernmost points of a continent is 75 minutes (50 minutes mounted)
Everybody will have mounts.
So if you want to explore, you will see cities everywhere. I cannot imagine players willing to stay confined in a 3.5 minute radius around their node and do what their mayor wants, for the greater benefit of the metropolis nation. And be part of governments and do elections...
Steven said he made the ocean larger to reduce player density:
"The purpose of it becoming bigger is as I said to make sure that density isn't overwhelming: that it isn't everywhere I look there is immediately something. I have no opportunity to see areas of the world that are expansive and are just kind of wanderlust adventure feeling. Everything was sitting on top of you, POIs and nodes and houses and everything. It was like an urban area everywhere."
Maybe he increased the land area too. And reduced the number of nodes.
But still it will feel like an urban area.
Would make more sense to have a mayor and government with fewer nodes, like 20 instead of 85 and much more isolated.
anyways, 5 mins running is kinda like going from windsward to the purple faction quest spot to the north. but running speed isnt a good indication of radius or size or amount of content because characters do not run at the same speed in every game...if characters in ashes run at the same speed as characters in nw, every node should be about the size of windsward
also, remember you have content underground (the underrealm, dungeons), and content above the ground (towers, dungeons).
also, this is the map at launch. im sure new areas will be added eventually.
Thanks for the video!
The 5 minute is from center to center without mount. With mount is 3.5 min.
From edge to edge is less.
It occurred to me that maybe the world might not feel so crowded if level 1 and 2 nodes are tiny and hard to notice. Will be at least 20 such nodes, maybe more if there are frequent node sieges and no metros.
But I found an interesting detail:
Players will be able to identify the type of a node at its first stage of development (Expedition) based on its NPC population.[13]
Node type. -- NPCs. -- Currency.
Divine nodes -- Priests -- Favor
Economic nodes -- Merchants -- no currency defined
Military nodes -- Guards -- Honor
Scientific nodes -- Scholars -- no currency defined
So only Military nodes will have guards?
Players may kill each-other in Divine, Economic and Scientific nodes without fear of guards?
Also, do we know if caravans move slower than a mounted player? Or maybe even slower than a non-mounted player?
NPC guards in nodes will kill corrupted players on sight, regardless of node type. https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Nodes (near the end)
no no, those are the vendors xD
the guards are just for the name for the reputation vendor in that type of node, not the regular guards that would fight that should be in every node.
they should probably be renamed to lieutenants or something to avoid confusion
Ok. I didn't expected this
So it probably means that even level 1 nodes, no matter of type, will have some NPCs which protect the players nearby.
And players who want to discard gathered resources, will seek out the closest node, which might be quite close, given that travel time is only 3.5 min away.
Ashes of Creation Livestream, 24 May 2017
mark 32:12
Steven's voice was much healthier???!!!??