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
But, I'm loving Nightingale.
I play it like it's an RPG.
I love the High Fantasy, Gaslamp setting (a close sibling to my favorite genre: Steampunk)
Sound design is immersive. UE5 visuals are , of course, stunning.
And it's a Themebox, rather than a Sandbox.
I don't know that I've noticed a difference in the immortality and ability to log out in both MMORPGs and Survival Games. I'd say I'm not as much of a fan of full Inventory drop that tends to be a staple in Survival games.
Or are you mostly talking about the sheer possibility of the rare griefer choosing you as his next target and hunting you until you leave the game?
Typically, the point at which I'm driven off of PvP-Optional servers is after I've already spent an hour in PvP and had my fill of an activity that I consider to be more hardcore than I usually want to play.
I want to do just about anything else for the rest of my play session except PvP. But, I'm stalked by someone who recognizes me from that PvP battle or someone stumbles upon me while I'm waiting for the PvP flag to cool down.
The PvPer attacks me. I tell them, "Hey. You know, I've had my fill of PvP for the day. I just want to pick some flower right now. If you want to PvP, we can do that for an hour tomorrow."
And, of course, they respond, "Why are you flagged for PvP if you don't want PvP!??! Why are you in this PvP enabled zone if you don't want to PvP!??!"
I experience that as if I'm a photographer or referee in a boxing ring and a boxer punches me in the face.
I'm all, "WTF. I'm not here to fight you. I'm just taking pictures (adjudicating the fight)!"
The boxer screams, "Brah! Why are you in the ring if you don't want to get PUNCHED in THE FACE??? I'm gonna PUNCH you in the FACE!! Step in the ring - I'm gonna PUNCH you... in the FACE!! RAHR!"
Even if I'm able to knock the fucker out, I'm still going to be pissed off that that encounter happened.
I might like taking pictures of boxing or refereeing boxing, but if the rule is going to be if you step in the ring you auto-consent to getting punched in the face, I will take photos or referee for some other sport where there is no chance of me getting punched in the face.
One example (by no means the only from that game) would be if you were harvsting logs or water for Archeum or regrading. If you saw someone else going after the same thing as you, you didn't jusg chase them off - you hunted them and killed them.
If all you do is chase them off, then they will go to one of the other spawns for that same resource. Since these resources spawn in clumps of 8 and have a 75 minute respawn timer, you didn't want that person going after the resource you were going after next.
If the player in question was pesky enough, it was fairly normal for players to hinder their activities in those zones to the point where the player moves.
The closest thing I can think of that Archeave would have similar to the concept of a single camp spot that you are talking about is in the form of game fishing.
Game fishing location would move around the map, and when you find one (assuming you are looking for one), you would park up and, well, go fishing.
Depending on how many people you had with you, and how far away you were from somewhere you could drop your fish off, it could take you a few hours to clear that fishing location. You would potentially defend that spawn location like you would an L2 camp spot - but even then you had to go back to a storage location to drop your fish off fairly often, so you would want to kill any other players nearby that may take your spot while you have to stow your fish.
I have 0 interest in instanced fishing.
I enjoy fishing in the Open World in New World. Especially with PvP toggled off.
So, I expect to play more NW than Ashes - if NW is still available to play when Ashes finally releases.
Why would there be more more "complexity" to the Fishing in the Open World?
And why would I desire more complexity? Other than an obsession with PvP combat?
I think this, again, is a key difference between the original 2nd Pillar of Meaningful Conflict and what it's been replaced with; the obsession for Risk v Reward.
I consider fighting over fish to be petty and meaningless. I have no desire for Fishing to be "more complex" due to "Risk v Reward".
Again, here, "Risk v Reward" just means, "If you want to acquire (highly valued) Fish, you have to be willing to engage in PvP combat." Which, of course, does not suit my playstyle.
But that can be great fun for gamers with Steven's playstyle.
If that's what Dygz is talking about - ok. But it seems like it's not? And considering Dygz' non-competitiveness, I'd imagine he wouldn't care much about that specific type of the material, as long as he can get the material in some other way or in some other place.
Also, did people in AA control all respawn spots at all times or was player respawn locations so damn far away from the resource that killing a competitor would stop them from coming back in time? Or was it more about "if I move/act in just the right way, I can gather all the resources right at the time of them spawning, but if there's even a single competitor - the timing is off"? Cause I definitely had those kinds of situations in L2 and killing the competitor over and over until he was made sure that he can't win was definitely the answer (though this was still in one general location, so I wouldn't call this "the chase").
I would love for Ashes to have the same depth to their Crafting, but...
Nightingale is a co-op Survival Game. I don't think its Crafting system would be good for Player Economy in an MMORPG.
(I'm a commie/hippie and not a fan of Player Economy because gamers are too greedy, but... lots of people love Player Economy, so...)
Correct, the idea behind that would not be aimed at your playstyle.
"Instanced" in the way I meant it could still take place in the open world, I intended for it to be more of a catch all term that includes "safe zone" where you can be in the open world and have your experience uniterupted from things like non-consensual pvp, within the context/point I was making in that post. So basically "fishing in the open world with the pvp toggled off" was an included potential option, within my statement there.
Spot defending where there are literally player houses in the middle of that spot that you don't care about at all?
Spot defending when there are multiple rival castles in that spot? (not that castles meant much in Archeage, but still).
I think you're overestimating the value of raw numbers. 10,000 players in one instance of an open world is MASSIVE. You don't need it to grow arbitrarily. If you played with 4 friends, and you guys did some kind of epic 5v5 for some open world resources for an hour every day, you could fight a new group of 5 players every day and not run into the same person twice in 5 and a half years.
Arbitrarily growing population just means there will be other players playing on other servers that you will never interact with anyway. Similarly, as is obvious to everyone, casual players are the largest market in the world. Every profit driven corporation is going to dumb down its games to make them "fun and accessible" to the largest possible audience. I kind of thought the whole point of Steven & his attitude was to make a game that wasn't just seeking the most players and the most profit.
I don't mean this to be callous; when I played FFXIV, the game kind of felt like it was designed in such a way that a 5 or 6 year old could successfully play it. It wasn't mechanically challenging, it didn't take planning, there was no economic challenge, there was no intellectual challenge, no social challenge. I spammed MSQ alongside my duo and doing all the dungeons/raids at each expansion, and I think we may have died one time total. In literally hundreds of hours of gameplay. More of my focus was on my second monitor watching YouTube videos than was on the actual game.
The questing "system" felt downright insulting, just navigating to circles and question marks on the map. Anyway, this isn't a post just to crap on FFXIV, it's mostly just some frustration seeing masses of people taking a game that explicitly markets itself as NOT wanting to cater to them, where people funded millions of dollars on the original vision, the owner puts up millions of his own dollars to fund his vision of an MMORPG, and the internet is just flooded with people who want FFXIV v2 or WoW v2.
Which is why I asked how it was in AA. Because that would directly link to the discussion of "the chase". As I understand it, Dygz is talking about an attacker who just hunts you no matter where you go, because he chose you as his target for the day. He does so regardless of his previous goal and regardless of your goals. You are talking about different people having the same goal and simply fighting over it.
If Dygz meant the same thing - ok.
Ashes gamers are going to want Risk v Reward to be a Pillar of everything they do.
OK. I mean... instance is signifcantly different from safe zone.
But, you meant safe zone.
Thanks for the clarification.
I was talking in hypotheticals with Azherae regarding some possible design approaches regarding the topic of macro-competitions and micro-competitions. Basically I was suggesting the possibility to design basically different games that live alongside/amongst each other that offer different combinations of macro/micro experiences to appeal to a broad and varied audience, through things like risk vs reward/comlexity in the open world for types of players who enjoy that, as well as more niche options with safe zones such as the fishing hole example.
And I don't quite mean - wherever the vicitm goes.
The PvPer's goal could be to make sure other players do not farm "their" spot.
That's a common motivation for PvPers to attack others.
But, it's also common for PvPer's to be much more tenacious about the chase than mobs are. Because mobs have tethers and PvPers don't.
I don't think I've necessarily experienced being the victim of the day. I have experienced attempts to corpse camp me for 20+ minutes.
And my example was about just having an easily found target for 20 minutes.
Could be their goal was to PvP for 20 minutes. Could be that their goal was to exclusively dominate the Fishing Hole for an hour.
And while, sure, some people will have "I want pvp" as their goal, there's waaaay more much better sources of good pvp in the game than chasing random greens.
And this is why the "common" part of your comments stands out to me and why I was interested in learning which game this was common in. Noaani gave an example from AA, but that's a same-goal-based interaction, and you seem to be talking about a "I tried running away from the attacker, but he kept chasing me", which usually implies that the goal wasn't the same for both players.
I definitely agree that spawn camping shouldn't be a thing, and gave feedback on this several times already.
And if you mean "I want to get my loot back from my corpse, but they keep killing me" - this just comes back to my personal dislike of players dropping stuff on death, so to those players who stubbornly want to get back their loot (that is if it wasn't even looted by the attacker) - this game would definitely not be for them.
This then kinda relates to a comment I made for Azherae, about guards protecting people.
If that kind of system was in Ashes, would you be more willing to play the game in a deeper way than just running around as lvl1 just exploring?
My example was a bit more simple.
I was mostly thinking of just the one area rather than a large farming circuit with multiple spots.
IMO - players don't own farms - they are communal.
I'm more likely to move to a different spot with the same resource rather than attack another player, but my deceision to move would depend on how far away I'd have to travel in the time I've allotted for the play session. And also depends on whether I think I need return to try to retrieve something I've dropped - if I've dropped loot.
(Also might depend on how good my Stealth works)
Doesn't seem to be a victim of the day thing. Just confident they will eventually catch up to me.
You know....people who are chasing me are probably not interested in "good PvP".
I'm not sure exactly what that means. Sometimes the motivation was to exclusively dominate a resource farm. Sometimes the motivation was, "You're an xxx!! You're Race killed my parents! You are all KoS!! RAHR!!"
And sometimes it was, "Oh! Hey! I see you are flagged for PvP. I'm gonna kill you!"
Ashes is designed to mitigate that to a great degree because we only drop Resources.
But, it's possible that we could drop a Legendary Resource.
Risk v Reward
In this case, hypothetically, it would depend on how long it took me to acquire that Legendary Resource - and might depend on whether I think I could retrieve it before another player.
But, as things stand now, I won't have any Resources on me, so I won't be dropping anything (well, for Release).
I have 0 interest in player character "guards".
But... *ack*
It's after midnight and I can't find your reference about the guard system you proposed.
I'll try to find it again after I take a nap.
Clearing all as a solo player was about 180 minutes.
Clearing all as two players was still about 150 minutes.
Point is, it isn't always the case in PvP games that when you decide to leave someone to a location, they leave you alone.
What was definitely quite common is removing a person from the premises. Usually it'd take a few strong hits, and if the target realized that your hits were stronger than theirs would be - they'd leave. If they stayed - you just PK them and keep farming your mobs. If they come back and don't move away again - you PK again. Rinse repeat until one of you is tired or moves onto other content.
The only chasing I've experienced was in those locations where the farming cycle would take you across several rooms or spots in a given location. And this movement was perfectly synced with your preferred mob's spawn timers, so you'd kill one - move to the next - move to the next - etc. And if anyone else was going for the same mob - you'd want to remove that person from the location as a whole. But this was rarely achievable with just one attacker, cause player respawn-returnal times were way quicker than mob respawn (unless we're talking deep dungeon spawns).
You say that this resource had a spawn of 75 minutes, but clearing everything was 180. I assume 180 includes all the travelling you'd need to do. But then I'd have to ask, was there a way to optimize your travel in such a way where you sync the spawn of the next resource with your travel time. In other words, maximizing the farm to a point where you physically couldn't farm more of them by yourself. This is the kind of farm I'm reference from L2 and the kind of farm that could require a complete removal of a competitor (cause they mess up the perfect sync).
When you say this was a common thing, do you mean "every gaming session"? More/less often?
I dunno about the other games you listed, but afaik WoW had "pvp" locations where the chances of the other race seeing you were higher. Are you talking about those places or just "I was minding my business in my own race's location and then a dude started chasing me"?
Cause the former is closer to what I expect in Ashes, while the latter is just the product of having faction-based penalty-less PKing. And while both situations will definitely happen in Ashes, the former will mostly happen in highly contested high value areas, while the latter will be a rare occurrence for any unguilded green player.
Not players and not "guards". I was talking about literal npc-guards. Here's the comment.
In a game designed with single point content where players only want one such point, it would be uncommon.
In a game with moving or dynamic content, content large enough that players can't see the whole thing at once, or point based content where players want more than one point, it would be common.
In this context, content that moves in a manner where players don't necessarily know in advance. In Ashes, this could be any number of events - we don't know where they will go, and if we have reason to want to exclude someone from said events, killing them is the only method.
Are you talking about smth like that broken caravan showcase, where new people came in and instead of fighting they all cooperated? But that stuff was system-based, so unless Intrepid lets us kill allies - we won't be able to do anything about it.
And if you mean something completely different, then I still don't really understand your point in this context.
Is this not the whole idea of this game?
I don't know.
I feel like I'd maybe prefer a little if Ashes wasn't so cutthroat, but if AA2 is less so and has more 'positive non-guild relations', I don't mind 'swapping'.
This ties directly into the question @Ace1234 asked me, and the current discussion going on, actually.
My problem with Ashes is that its individual parts don't seem to fit together design wise. Each part is, for some person, appealing, or at least not terribly flawed, but combined, the experience appears to have issues.
Issues that in my opinion aren't present from 'just the base principles described'.
The Economy seems like it needs to be very player-driven in order to keep people having a clear sense of risk v reward and when they will encounter combat, yet there is Glint.
The Quest systems seem like they are very organic and drive player action, but then set up a lot of situations for griefing and conflict.
The Combat seems to be conceptually too swingy to be tactical, but then ties a lot of the combat points to non-tactics based locations (such as Caravans).
The 'balance' is claimed to be for group vs group, but the skills chosen and designed so far, don't indicate to me that balance will be possible for that.
The PvE targets are supposedly going to be challenging and open world at the same time, while that swingy combat-base is installed.
The leveling journey is supposed to be longer and let people feel like they are achieving something as they go, but levels themselves are a form of empowerment at odds with the economic states shown so far.
The PvP incentives are great for increasing PvP, but the game is supposedly about nodes and social relationships, so it's unclear which 'side of this equation' is actually important (and I don't think that making this 'Node dependent' is a good idea for another long list of reasons)
The designs around Gathering and the Territory/World manager imply long term effects of actions, with no fast travel, but like all reasonable MMORPGs, you can just 'take the negative action for as long as you feel safe and then log out/switch to alt.
The Corruption system (core principles) has issues related to the overall premise of this thread.
The value of grouping and getting into large guilds is set to 'high' with no currently-known drain, but the game is full of fiat (basically, if you have an immortal army that is bigger than anyone else's immortal army, your army doesn't actually have more incentive to break up than others, EVE tends to do it manually from the Dev side, for example)
And finally, we have a lot of systems that rely on all the above things, which we haven't seen as much of, while seeing 'signs of pain points in those systems created by other systems'.
So, as a team lead/developer, this is 'red flag territory' for me because in many similar projects, what I find happens is that some system gets entrenched because no one tore it down, and then everything else's form gets warped around that and the original product you were trying to make doesn't materialize.
Then someone gets the job of selling the new, changed product to the customer, by providing all the reasons why it 'is better that way', and just handwaving questions about the entrenched system that caused it.
It's like if Intrepid came and told us:
"We had to lower the TTK to increase the risk of running Caravans, which are the lifeblood of the world."
No, in that example it would actually be 'we don't want to remove Glint because itemization is hard, so we incentivized Caravans using it, creating a Gold Faucet, and now we need to manipulate players so that they don't all just form a continent-spanning trade alliance to print money'.
But people would be focused on 'oh well I guess if TTK had to be the compromise for a good game, we should accept it', and the 'real problem' (Caravans, technically Glint) wouldn't get resolved.
If you imagine a more complex version of the Stormcaller thing, does it make more sense?
But yes, I believe that you would simplify it down to 'moving farming spot' or 'defending bigger area', SCP-NUMBER.
Semiohazarding since DATE, never gonna [REDACTED].
It's not that it is 'better', it's simply my preference.
Ashes TTK looks too low (I've been PKed in TL, so I know exactly what the feeling of that is), Ashes skills are designed in a way that will lead to a combat type/focus that I personally disprefer, etc.
Entirely a preference thing with a ton of sub-aspects. I can describe it in another thread, sometime, or maybe talk about it a bit in my feedback to the Fighter Preview regardless of how that turns out. TL just seems to, currently have a better handle on 'the basics of combat required to achieve a balanced combat experience in a tactical situation'.
Ashes A1 was also like this, but based only on what I've seen they've been steadily moving away from it.
If you can't see the whole thing and you just chase someone off, they will just go to a part of that content where you can't see them.
Would we get that kind of complexity, when the previously shown event was implied to be binary as hell? I dunno. And I don't remember if we've been told that we might get that kind of complexity.
But if we do get that - great. The game becomes deeper, more interesting and way more varied in terms of player approach to any given task.
Hell, have events that are triggered by people artisaning. Someone's catching fish in a particularly good way? Get an event around them with 3 sides: go fish with them (there's now more content at that spot), go do an adversarial action (say, drop a bomb-like item into the river to spook the fish), and go stop adversaries (maybe those bombs gotta be picked up from an npc and this third group can either kill the npc before that or become exclusively flagged against people with bombs). Have an internal tracking system where it can't be just adversaries (or if there's a choice on the player side - adversary choice is greyed out until there's a helper) and you got yourself an intricate event with several points of access for several kinds of people.
Will we get this though? I sure hope so.
But this would then return to what I was talking about before. How does killing them prevent them from simply going to that spot afterwards? This is the "immortality" Azherae keeps mentioning. Killing a competitor doesn't do shit, especially in this current context, if they simply respawn and go to another locations with the same content.
Or am I still missing something in your point?