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
Seems the right answer
Overall, I prefer the direction AoC is going, I like the camera on top and running smoothly
Not really. His fanbase are mainly MMOers, anyway. The game will go ahead if he existed or not. Its practically free to play at launch, there will be no shortage or players. Any success will be down to Steven's vision and recruitment of smart, experienced people.
His fanbase are mainly WoWers. Everything isn't WoW, they trash about it. But when Blizzard announce another expansion for their 2004 favourite game, they get mad.
As for Asmongold, I think he generally has good takes on game philosophy. He's had some solid ideas/feedback for Ashes too. Every now and then he'll say some wild shit that makes no sense. When it comes to PvP specifically, terrible, but he's not a PvPer. He admits that. Hes a WoW PvE raider so of course he sees things from that point of view. He's an entertainer that has a large following. His feedback should be treated no different than everyone else's.
True and real
No box cost does not mean that people do not put a cost on how to spend their time playing games.
And as much as people don't like to admit it, the billions of dollars put into advertising across all industries, not just video games, is put in for a reason.
I think we should all be happy that we have arguably the most influential mmo gamer wanting to see Ashes succeed....because his influence and the weight that it has to bring in people that would not otherwise give Ashes a shot, is what's going to help it succeed.
His support is essentially the best advertising which comes in the form of free advertising, that Ashes can get. We can all try to be edgelords and anti establishment about it or we can recognize that for what it is and be happy that he continues to give Ashes a great amount of interest whether you agree with his opinions on game design or not.
If anything, him watching the game and commenting "this would probably not work, cause people are dicks" will simply enforce the already negative opinion on mmos with pvp in it.
And I can't even imagine how much he'll complain if he happens to play Alpha2 when pvp is on, and he gets PKed on sight by his own viewers. I'm sure that's gonna be a great ad. PvPers already know about this game, so I doubt that Asmon will suddenly attract the kind of audience that would be interested in the game but have yet to hear about it.
There has never been any good action combat for MMORPGs.
And what does the combat you want look like? Does it look like 2 people clicking on each other and then pressing buttons?
It's pretty easy to over simply what is happening on the screen, especially if you haven't played the game and don't know what's happening. Chess looks super boring if you don't understand the game, it's just 2 people moving around pieces. It's only when you understand what the pieces do that you understand the how good a move is.
Subjective comment and false.
That's debatable but also brings up a point that outside of MMOs, there are a lot of games that use "action". If tab was such a great combat system, wouldn't you see it being used in more games besides dated MMOs.
How many online games can allow the server structure to support a ton of locations with near-instantaneous ping, while also accounting for that support in their mechanical design?
Shooters usually need to only calculate a few dozen people at most and only bullets (which are usually hitscan as well). Fighters had to literally come up with a new ping-accounting feature to have good online play, and that shit's for only TWO people in a super limited arena.
BRs are probably the closest thing to mmos, but even then afaik not a single one of them is anywhere close to the amount of effects/abilities that mmos have.
New World was infamously laggy and broken during even just 50v50 fights and BDO is mostly aoes and soft-tab, so it's not like it's "true" action. Though I haven't really looked into the western side of BDO's servers, so I dunno if its sieges are also laggy as fuck.
We all want to have perfect ping across all players on all servers, but that is simply not the case with the current internet setup world-wide. And good and deep action combat relies heavily on that shit. Tab makes that reliance way easier to design around and account for.
Or at least that's what I've heard/seen about this stuff. Maybe all of that has changed in recent years, but then I'm sure that all the actionlovers will get their action mmos sooner rather than later. I'd imagine they would still require good server support across all regions and I'm not sure how much of that Intrepid can get w/o going into the red. Riot's mmo might be the biggest indicator of where the genre will be going in the future, but that shit's also years away from now.
We really doing arguments we need tab because games can't handle things. You can apply the same argument to any mmorpg tab or not large wars in TL don't run well either. So by that means we should cancel all mmorpg or keep battles very small?
This doesn't hold up in any way reasonable way to suggest we need tab because of ping or action games can't do large thing. Technology has actually advanced its actually the other way around we can be doing more action oriented stuff now and not have things be tab.
Also im unsure what you are talking about with NW. Their wars run fine, yes they had issues at launch but that had to do with other bad elements with the game and why again NW should not be used as a standard for something didn't work in it so it is a negative on it being done. As that game again had a ton of other connected issues.
Also this games makes your point make no sense.
I hope that Ashes works out, but we'll have to see how successful they are on release.
And like I said, if that is in fact the case - Riot will most likely be the mmo to prove or disprove that.
And what other recent mmo is there? BDO is from 10 years ago and was also aimed mostly at korea.
And as the local biggest BDO supporter, are its sieges less or more laggy than TL's?
Yes, Planetside is great, which is why I pointed out that shooters have nowhere near the same amount of stuff to track, when it comes to huge battles.
Smth like Elite Dangerous might be close to the complexity of a fight, but I'm not sure how big fights really get there.
I'm mostly talking from someone that played in the siege in TL as I've not played it myself. BDO sieges are pretty mid since the game isn't meant for giant wars so it wouldn't really play well. I was doing more node wars when I played, unsure how siege has been since I've played years ago. I can only go off what i hear from people where it just runs badly do to too many players.
Also im not the biggest BDO supporter i can just look at games and elements of them that are good and not write things off like some other people do because they don't like a certain thing about it. *ie people that say BDO has bad combat because of effects, but ignores all other elements about the parts of the combat. Or can not separate animations and look at them as being good because their bias against effects.
I can look at any mmorpg or game and take elements that are good.
It's all just MMO to them.
More specifically, they want everything to just be a generic MMO Open World "action/player skill" PvP game.
I see a lot of rolls and only 7 skills.
I'm specifically talking about MMOs, not other genres. Bringing up other genres doesn't apply to the conversation, because the conversation is about the system I like for MMOs. If tab targeting weren't a good system for MMOs, it wouldn't be seen in the majority of games of this genre, and the reality is that it is the predominant system.
I like the combat for NW but I don't consider that to be an MMORPG.
I like some Active Dodge and some Active Block - feels more cinematic.
But, RPGs need some of the stat boosting for Character Skills. Because RPGs are really supposed to be about building Characters with fantastic/heroic skills and abilities.
In an RPG, I should be able to build a Ranger with better aim than my own personal aim or a Rogue with a better Dex/Dodge than my personal dexterity.
And, yes... in an RPG, some of that is going to be handled by RNG + Character Stats.
In an FPS or Fighter games or MOBAs - pure action combat is OK.
This statement doesn't make any sense, its more even if anything between action and tab mmorpgs. You are trying to make a statement that pretty much talking about the bulk of age of gaming and saying because of that bulk of time its mainly only tab mmorpgs.
You are ignoring the current tread of gaming as things have evolved and gotten better. Idf recently it has been 50/50 roughly between tab and action you can't say because all older games are tab and use that as justification that makes no sense.
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If unreal engine 3 weren't a good engine for games, it wouldn't be seen in the majority of games of this genre, and the reality is that it is the predominant engine and not Unreal engine 5.
~~
That is the same energy.
The combat system doesn't really change how things are rendered.
Yes, this is a potential reason but I don't think you are in a position to make this argument since you don't know what's possible. This is something the game engineers can consider. Things have changed over the years and with modern culling algorithms and server architectures, things aren't what they used to be.
Yes, I agree that Riot will probably show us what is possible. Riot uses AWS for their servers and with some of the stuff they say they are doing for their fighting game, i look forward to seeing what they do with their MMO. The thing for me is, Intrepid is also using AWS for their servers (last i checked) so they have the same tools. Maybe not the same people and connections but the same services are available to them.
I was asking you to show what you consider good combat so I could make the same over-simplified observation.
If you played the game, wouldn't you think you would have more of an appreciation for what is happening?
Why does it matter if it's an MMO or not?
It's a third-person, active combat system. The difference in combat systems is one you click on a target first and the other you aim each skill. They aren't that far apart.
A lot of the games in the genre are old. Don't you think they would be made with a different combat system if they were developed more recently? Yes, if we had a brand new tab MMO that came out last year and it was popular, then I think you would have an argument but all the popular tab MMOs are older games that have managed to hold on to a playerbase.
I don't ever remember him saying literally use this system
He talks about Ashes needing to be fluid and responsive and then talks about games that are just that. And I think he is right, the combat should feel fluid and responsive.
He seems to really like all the combat show cases so far, which are not showing pure action combat.
He talks about action style abilities being Aoe's and a small sprinkling of skill shots. I agree with him there too.
I've never heard him say to literally use what you are showing in that video.
This seems more like an eat the rich thread, than it does anything else.
Exactly this, if you look at his chat while he is watching anything AOC its just pure hate towards the game and ridicules comments made by man children stuck in 2004
As a person who does actually mostly know what's possible, this pretty much isn't true.
If you know something I don't (i.e. less publically available) about Project L netcode, glad to hear about it.
AWS has practically nothing to do with ping or netcode solutions even with multi-actor ingress.
I believe you're unaware of the dynamics of how massive MMORPG combat works on a large scale, but if you I'm saying this because of a technological limitation in the past, you are very mistaken.
The action combat system was not and, is not ideal for massive PvP (zerg vs. zerg) not because the technology wasn't as developed in the past, but simply because even today, having hundreds of players on the screen consumes a significant amount of resources and affects performance. Moreover, when you conduct massive-scale combat, you need to make it tactical enough so that massive PvP doesn't turn into chaos (or more chaos than it already is). Throne and Liberty opted for a more static combat system precisely because it's designed for massive PvP. The developers have already stated that this choice was made intentionally because it allows players to execute tactics more easily. Additionally, having a system that doesn't need to calculate projectiles consumes fewer information packets, unlike in a tab-target system, which operates on probability rolls.
You can think whatever you want, but Ashes' system is tab-target with a "pseudo action combat" where you actually perform tab-targeting by aiming with the mouse at a large hitbox. And if this decision was made, it's for a reason.
Explain what isn't true?
I don't know anything about the game that they haven't said publicly. They have talked about how they are going to reduce ping in a past update.
AWS isn't the netcode but it is the server architecture (and servers) so it impacts ping and performance. Yes, they still need to write efficient code to run on those servers but my point is they are using the same servers are RIOT so RIOT doesn't have a server advantage.
I disagree and feel like this is probably the biggest reason I don't like tab. As shown in the most recent live stream, it's very easy for people to be focused down in a tab system. If enough people click on you and press a button, you're out of the fight. In an action system, some people will miss or their abilities might hit someone else who gets in the way. It's harder to finish people off which allows people to stay in the fight longer and experience it. You are also able to crank up the range on abilities in action systems so the engagements can happen over larger areas which makes them feel more cinematic, at least to me.
Everything affects performance including having fancy looking things on screen not a reason to make garbage combat though. Else you nee to start arguing for down graded graphics and there is no where of anyone saying AoC is going for TL siege numbers. They are going for large wars but at the same time making sure things run fine.
You mean that garbage static combat in TL that made the game DEAD on ARRIVAL that everyone hated. This is like 20-25 years ago where u want combat to be a simple dice roll and pure tab target. Just because you can not keep up with things isn't a reason to dumb down the game for everyone else. Last thing we need is a curated mmorpg designed for people older people and lower skill ceiling to make i less chaotic and simple and about running a skill rotation than actual combat.
"pseudo action combat" I get you really don't play any games anymore than a mmo maybe once in awhile and stop but you literarily do not understand what action combat is in a mmorpg. So long as they make the game where you have a large enough selection of skills revolving around action combat where you have a cone or you have soft lock, and can dodge attack. That is action combat in a mmorpg obviously the degree is more towards tab as it is hybrid but the skill ceiling is still there and can increase depending on how their further develop the content and what other action types of skills they add in.
Final note just to make sure you can understand I can see you don't know what soft lock is in a game. It means that when you are aiming near a person your attack will go towards that target that your aim is over. That means you have your cursor aim and a secondary one that tracks the closest thing to your target. This is why i get so frustrated with people that don't play any games and make weird ass comments with most their gaming experience being from 20 years ago.
Put your foolish ambitions for a pure tab target game to rest saying modern games still can't handle projectiles in a larger scope so they need to dumb down the design of the game. And start you know exploring new games even ones you might not like for once.
But RPGs are really not supposed to be player vs player - rather they are supposed to be character v character.
Which means there should be significantly less reliance on "player skills" than in a truly player v player game.
And Tab Target + RNG facilitates that.