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
From a theoretical perspective, this is true.
From a practical perspective, I don't see this working for a game like Ashes.
we not? we already have the tower of carphin, for example. we have open world dungeons (which are literally vertical/3d). we have the underrealm too .-.
What is it you think you are arguing here?
It seems like you are arguing me saying something along the lines of "Ashes won't have vertical content" - but as that is not something that has been said, I really have no idea what your actual argument here is.
In practice, if you are going to use the Y-axis as a means of adding content in a way where it lowers traveling time, you are talking about adding in content for flying player characters, not occasional towers.
We already have this in Ashes, because it's using dungeons as the main means of content presentation. And if we get more tower-like structures - we'll have even more verticality in the world.
Having a tower or dungeon that goes up or down is not using the Y-axis in a way that reduces travel - which is what we are talking about.
We are not talking about whether Ashes has vertical content or not, we are talking about travel times.
Also, we'll supposedly have air travel in science metros so I don't see why we couldn't have some way to go up the tower in a quicker manner (obviously once you've done some prep for this), and I definitely expect underground dungeons to have paths that can skip you a few layers, if you have the proper tools to access to paths.
This part of the conversation started with you saying "only way to have a small world and a ton of content is instances". I guess by "smaller world" you literally meant "a tiny piece of land with a shitton of instanced content", rather than "not a huge fields-filled world where mobs gotta be separated by at least several square meters of space".
When people hear "big world" they usually don't think "a huge vertical tower-like structure", and instead think of fields and sprawling landscapes. In other words, Breath of the Wild was a "big world" already, but then Tears of the Kingdom became "bigger", but in a vertical way w/o expanding the map outwards.
And they gave ways to travel vertically as well. I'd definitely expect similar ways in Ashes too. We could have air currents that we can ride on gliders, we could have mechanical machines that elevate us higher, we could have trebuchet-like throwing mechanisms (both magical and mechanical) and we could have some jumping "puzzles" that take us up a tower in a quicker manner, while also providing some fun in the meantime.
If IS will add a zone in a biome the entire map will rush to see that new content and then sharding will be needed.
And the other zones will feel deserted.
GW2 has such maps but those are designed with this concept from start in order to be fun. You cannot just add a layer above or below and make them work nicely together. If they are connected then is a single more complex map. If they are not, then they should be considered as 2 separate areas and with normal open world travel between them.
Elevators can also be portals.
We come through portals, maybe we will through portals to where the corruption comes from. But those could be just zones without nodes where nodes give us quests (commissions) to do.
Better to change existing areas gradually but often, with something new at each in-game year. And events could be triggered, not only by a dragon but also by volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, invasions from other planes, wars between the Seven and the Others...
After all this environment is for the inter-node interaction so is better to change that environment slightly with new "secret" passages and choke points and stories than move players away.
That's the entire point of the Nodes system.
You are completely missing the point - again.
You are talking about small scale. Oh look, we have *a* tower.
Take a game like EQ2, where Ashes might have a tower that you travel to, when I get to the door of an instance in EQ2 I am presented with this
Ashes has a tower, EQ2 has 4 unique zones, with the easy ability to add more.
Towers and dungeons ARE NOT what we are talking about here. It is like us talking about the capacitry of an A380, and you not really understanding the capacity of that aircraft and so chiming in saying you can carry a person along on the back of your bike.
The comment that vertical content could make up some of the shortfall that a smaller world has in terms of content amount over either a larger world of a game with instances was not in relation to *a* tower, to make up that shortfall the ENTIRE world would need to be build with vertical content - the air would need to be as densly populated as the ground.
This is simply the same exact location, but with just different triggers for the content inside. Ashes, supposedly, has this by the way of weather/seasons/storylines/probably some quests/node setups. All of those variables can determine what kind of content you'll see in a given location.
I'd assume those Cove types are either quests or refarmable bosses. And considering that success lockouts on the bosses seem to be almost 3 days, that means that you'd only refresh the quest part of the location, which means refarming the same mobs again and again on a 90min cooldown. Sounds like a completely normal room in an open world dungeon to me.
I'd assume EQ had better examples than that, right?
And if you say "well, those are instances, which means that everyone gets to get the content" - we've discussed this at length before. Ashes is not that kind of game and I'm pretty sure you said you were fine with that. So, at its core, Ashes can definitely have as much content in the game w/o having instances and w/o having layered skies.
If there are examples from EQ where it's not simply the same room/set of rooms with simply different mobs - that would support your argument in a much better way.
Though at that point I'd say that in the context of travel time, huge dungeons are in themselves part of the travel towards the reward. So again, unless you have all the instances in the game available to you right in town - travel times to instance entrances + traveling through the instance would = the same time as open world stuff.
If anything, the type of instances from EQ would have you travel through the same location several times just to get to a different reward. Imo that's not a rewarding type of travel and more akin to L2's grind. And if all instances in EQ are one-offs, then it's simply a question of content quantity overall, which brings us back to the second paragraph of this comment
It's as if you took one statement in a discussion out of context and are arguing what you think was said.
My comment was that a small world can't have as much content as a large world without using instances. A comment was made that you could use the third axis - to which I replied that wouldn't really work in a game like Ashes.
Where I don't get what your argument is - is the simple fact that Ashes doesn't have a small game world, it is quite large for an MMORPG. I'm not attempting to say Ashes won't have a good amount of content, or that other games will have more or less or anything like that. I'm just stating basic facts that you seem to have taken out of context.
I really just don't understand what the fuck you are arguing here.
Which is why I used the BotW>TotK as examples of "the "world" hasn't increased in horizontal size, but increased in vertical", and why I said that if you ask someone to think of a "big world" - they'll think about sprawling fields and forests.
And it seems that this is the same thing Akabear was thinking when they said "move to 3d worlds".
Because this is a thread about travel times.
Though iirc current wow can be pretty much played from town, so maybe current wow is truly a small world
And btw, even the "side to side" in your definition implies horizontality, so would having underground and overground layers make a world big by default then? And would the definition then be "a small world is when you can travel throughout the cube quickly"?
Again, I was talking in general, not about specific MMO's - or at least not until you came in and started arguing in a topic you seemed to have not bothered following.
So, to reiterate the point I actually made in this thread for you - the point of a large world is not to make travel times longer, it is to allow for more content that isn't using instancing.
There are assumptions to be made.
Minecraft had to optimize a lot to keep the game performance when they increased the world height because their chunks are only horizontal. They had to reduce the darkness limit where the mobs start to spawn. That reduced the number of torches player would place and also the number of mobs when they added the new larger cave biome.
An mmorpg which manages vertical movement in chunks, can as well be a space simulator, if flying is allowed.
My assumption is that AoC's engine will be more optimized for horizontal movement, which we will also test during Alpha 2.
AoC could later add floating islands and creatures.but those will still keep the map horizontal unless we will indeed fly up to the moons.
I wouldn't cover the map with so many floating islands to say that they doubled the map size. Else they would cover the sky completely.
Things in the air does not mean much more content just like increasing the empty area of the ocean does not add more variation to the exploration feeling. It is the same space.
The airships linking scientific metros can be small ships in the sky without players while players will see a cutscene with the map below. Or if will fly at low altitude, then it will not faster than the server can provide data with the visible surface, with all the creatures on it.
nikr answered for me, but I went back and checked. we arent arguing about traveling. you said:
if we are arguing about traveling times, then yeah you are right. but if you are talking about having a lot of content in a small world, then going vertical solves that (you don't have to instance it, but you can as well).
Second, I can see why you didn't want people to see that full post - here is the whole thing
That is some really selective quoting that you did there, that is incredibly misleading and borderline dishonest - this is ESPECIALLY true when you also look at the post I quoted.
I quoted you from someone else who quoted u...i just copy pasted his quote, that's it. ok here it is:
isn't this what we were discussing?
No.
And the post in question had the quote from myself in tact enough for you to click back to the original post. No excuses.
Edit to add; the reason that is not what we are discussing is because akabear was adding their thought to what I said - you can't just discuss that without also discussing what it was that they were adding their thought to.
Was hoping for some deep dungeons and a few tall tiered towers.
And let's say that tower has 10 floors up and 10 down. That's 19 more sq kms of space, while the horizontal footprint didn't change at all. Those 19 sq km can have all the content variance that the base has (and even more), so we have now multiplied the amount of content a part of the map has by a ton.
And like I said, Intrepid could add air flows that let us travel upwards in a quicker manner (either craftable at a high cost or magical at a high number of players required, or quest-related from an npc), and after we're done doing some quests or just have some proper tool - we could find a shaft that lets us glide down to the very bottom of the underground part really quickly (gliding done in-between the floors, so you could exit at any one).
This is the "small world, but ton of content" that I think akabear was talking about. And travel times in this situation would be WAY shorter than if those 19 sq km were laid out horizontally.
Also, I'm assuming that Intrepid would give us those methods of quick vertical travel, because as quite a few people here like to say "that's what smart designers would do". If a place that you've visited and "beaten" once needs revisiting for whatever reason - it's only logical to provide a way to travel there faster.
The obvious "abuse" of the tower having great content at the top and the players just gliding down with the loot from there (hence avoiding any potential PKing for it) can be addressed by having internal stares and no passable windows, so you'd need to go down a few lvls to jump off.
but I agree with him, that's why I didn't mention it. i quoted the part I disagreed with...
you can add content vertically. if that's not what we are discussing, then I'm out. that's what I was interested in discussing.
Oh, no doubt the game will have that - but Ashes also doesn't have a small world.
My point was more in relation to attempting to use the Y-axis in place of having a large world and no instances. In a game like Ashes (non-space MMORPG), that isn't going to work.
Here's a walkthrough of it (you can autotranslate CCs)
13 floors, with several rooms per floor, all filled with mobs and, on full servers, filled with people fighting mobs on each other. Several floors and in-between corridors have bosses on them and the last floor has one of the epic bosses of the game.
I'd expect UE5 to be able to support a tower like this, but on a bigger scale and going down as well. Afaik server structure and stitching is much better now than it was in 2004, so I'd assume you can load floors separately or at least in groups.
If Intrepid expect Metros and 500v500 sieges to exist - they sure as fuck should be able to accomplish this.
A single floor of your 1km² tower is 1,000,000m². 20 floors of that tower are 20,000,000m².
In other words, your example tower is only a little over 5% of what you were talking about.
My point was - you multiply horizontal area by the amount of floors/layers and you then give players the ability to traverse vertically in a faster fashion, which means that you're traveling big walkable distances faster w/o really traveling further away from your initial point.