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
This is one thing I have issues with. I gathered a fair amount of herbs and wanted to give Alchemy a try. It takes 40 minutes to craft a stack of 20 Novice Mana Salves from scratch: 20 for grinding the Daffodil Powder + 20 turning them into the Salves. I can cope with a minute when making a permanent piece of gear, but consumables like potions are meant to come and go and are created en masse.
My understanding is it's supposed to get faster at higher skill levels or with better artisan gear, but this leaves incredibly bad first impression. It means 40 minutes of mindlessly staring at the progress bar, or being AFK. This is antithetical to engaging gameplay and discouraging from leveling the artisanship in the first place.
I'm not a fan of the current experience of going from level 9 -> 10. It feels like it creates a bump in progression, and the slow leveling curve on its own is enough to make leveling feel rewarding. I understand it leads to a huge powerspike due to level 10 gear, but if its intended for level 10 to be that kind of power spike, I would expect more than just access to that new gear.
The caravan event system is not good IMO. It announces to everyone that there is a caravan in the area, preventing any chance of doing stealth or hidden route runs. It creates unnecessary bloat in the UI and it feels super gamey and not immersive at all. (There are more problems but those could be fixed without changing the system so I won't bring those up)
I suggest an alternative caravan system: To become a defender, you must approach and interact with the caravan. To become an attacker, you must either hit a defender or the caravan. You can have a radius around that caravan in which if someone leaves this radius for a certain amount of time, they are no longer attackers or defenders. It's simple, it doesn't require a UI middleman, it allows for stealth runs, and it's a seamless way to implement it without feeling "gamey"
Prismatic beam: You should be able to aim the beam up and down with the action camera
gear: I like the design of a higher tier lower level gear being equal to a lower tier higher level gear. It makes it so you can compare in force with a higher-level player just by farming properly and getting a bit lucky. It also makes sense that if you get lucky with a rare drop, you won't be trading it for a gray item a few levels forward and your luck really matters. If you have a legendary level 10 gear, it should stick till you get another very rare drop from higher levels. I still think the jump in power from gear tiers/levels is a bit too high though.
For instance, starting out, crafting should require players to remain at their crafting stations, encouraging hands-on interaction and an invested process. As players and their nodes progress, this could then evolve with upgrades that allow for more flexibility and efficiency over time.
Here’s how I envision improvements that would make the crafting system both engaging and rewarding as players advance:
Node Crafting Stations: Early on, players could be required to be present at the station, which creates a sense of commitment and immersion. But as a node grows and is upgraded, the mayor could eventually hire NPC helpers or specialists to assist at crafting stations. These NPCs could help reduce crafting times and enable “off-station” crafting, allowing items to continue producing while the player engages in other activities. This setup would reward dedicated players and invested communities by gradually increasing crafting efficiency over time.
Homesteads: Similar improvements could be applied at player homesteads. By advancing their personal property and investing in specialized retainers or crafting assistants, players could achieve a similar “progressive crafting” system. Retainers stationed at homestead crafting tables could help manage production, providing flexibility in an immersive and earned way rather than as an automatic convenience.
Progression Paths for Faster Crafting: In addition to NPC helpers, there should be a range of options available to players for reducing crafting time. Upgrading nodes with specific crafting stations, equipping artisan gear, using powerful artifacts, and accessing guild buffs would all contribute to faster crafting, allowing players to specialize and customize their experience. This would let players feel more invested in their character’s profession and see meaningful results from their dedication and choices.
By requiring players to interact with their crafting stations at the beginning, they experience a rewarding journey that grows into a sophisticated system over time. This approach encourages players to interact closely with the world around them while allowing earned convenience and flexibility in the long term.
Overall, I had a positive experience in Phase One. I'm looking forward exploring more what Vera has to offer.
Long Answer:
Combat
- Transition between Tab and Action feels fine.
- Basic Attack and Block taking up two keys that I'm used to for movement feels silly. In the sense that I start swinging my sword or raising my shield when all I meant to do was move left and right. In some ways, I feel like my movement has been hindered by these two buttons.
- In Action, I would love it if the RMB acted as the block button. There's an awkwardness that your LMB becomes your basic attack instead of "Q" but the block is still stuck on "E".
- Not every creature needs a unique fighting style. I think this should ramp up in difficulty as you level, sure, but levels 1-10 (Minus named quest creatures and elites) should be a tradition tank-n-spank.
- Possible I missed it but it needs to be easier when tabbing onto friendly targets to make healing more efficient. I've found myself accidently healing myself instead of a party or raid member because my buttons were sticky (Yeah, yeah. I hear all of you... "git gud" haha)
Artisanship
- There needs to be a unique quest for each Artisan class to help ease the player into it. For the Alpha, what's there now makes sense but in the long term it doesn't nearly cover the base it should with all the different ways for crafters to explore the game.
- Material sizes in the bags feels very off. You can't tell me that a ruby is the same size as a horse or even raw ore haha.
- Early crafting needs to have a level of independence. If I want to make a sword, I shouldn't need to go out of my way to learn Stonemasonry to make a single mold to craft. It should either be something I can already do as a smith or the mold should be reserved for higher tier items or maybe for different aesthetics (i.e. Wanting a Dunir style blade instead of an Empyrean). I believe ESO does this well with their Rune system.
- Finale note: I'd like to see unique quests for each level of advancement in the Artisan classes. Something immersive and engaging like assisting an NPC master smith with crafting or gathering a material in the wild.
Solo Content
- There needs to be a balance between group and solo content. Group content is fun but you can't expect your players to group up every single time they come online or for every quest.
- Early levels (1-15) should be easy enough to do solo. That's plenty of time for a player to get their feet under them and have a basic level of understanding of the game. Especially for those late comers who aren't there at launch and now have no one to group with
- Adding on to the last point: This game isn't designed to be alt-friendly and until majority of players hit max level and established in their nodes/guilds/etc. you're not going to see many lowbie players running around three months in. Imagine how new players would feel coming into the game late only to not play because there's no one at their level to do quests and NO ONE enjoys being carried through content.
Skill Trees
- I like being able to respec on the fly and I hope a version of that stays through to launch.
- Additionally, I would like the ability to de-select a single talent choice and swap it for something else rather than having to reset all my points and do it manually.
- I know the players are going to do this on the wiki but I'd like to have a preview of weapon choices. i.e. Pros and Cons for what you pick like "Great Sword: High Damage, Low Defense" or something like that.
Congratulations to Intrepid Studios for reaching this milestone we've been waiting for years to get to. Now that we are here, I love doing my part in making this a game I can come home to every night and forget about life for a few hours. Keep up your good work! No other studio can hold a candle to you with your passion, communication, or desire to make a game we all want to play.
Summary of 2nd weekend:
I've been focusing a lot more on gathering this time around with copper and zinc being more readily available. I did some combat stuff, but I mainly wanted to dive into gathering and crafting.
Here are my two cents for this second weekend:
Crafting is still very bare bones it seems. I know the main focus of this test was stability and my overall stability was A LOT better than last weekend. I was still mainly on the NA realms while playing from EU but I did take a little detour to the EU realms to try to see if I can notice the latency difference and I can say, I barely noticed it but I am also not too sure if that was still server side or if it actually was latency (since I have no way to see my latency to the game servers). I had people talk about how the EU servers are more stable than the NA server but I cannot confirm this notion as I did not notice a significant difference that would warrant this opinion.
But going back to gathering.
I am overall happy with what I have accomplished over the weekend. I spent quite some time mining and chopping down trees, I did craft a couple of shields to increase my weaponsmithing skills but I do have a few things I would like to say.
The community seems to be very focused on LEVELING. Purely leveling. The gear I can craft after spending more than 12 hours a day of gathering, is nowhere near the level where it would be useful to other players.
This is either solved by people changing their mindset and focusing less on leveling or getting the craftable items to a comparable level to the drops. I do understand that enemies drop recipes and gear (at least if they are humanoid) and I can turn these recipes into items that are significantly better but that would require me to go out there and grind for the recipes. As of now no one is trading recipes, everyone is keeping them for themselves, etc. Going out there to get them myself, makes me have less materials, makes me lose out on spending time on perfecting my craft but it would give me exp and glint, which then would make me want to be even better at crafting to get gear that I actually can use. Hence it's a devilish circle that somehow needs to be addressed.
If the guild does not play ball and helps their life skillers from top to bottom, there is only pain on the horizon for crafters and gatherers. I think this needs a very big mindset change for many many players.
On the topic of tools: I dislike being unable to unequip my gathering tools. I cannot craft tools for others, only for myself. Not sure if this is a bug but I went back to the Samir's Hope to get a second horse from the "Sweat of your brow" quest and it destroyed my novice pickaxe when I got the crude pickaxe. I reported it as a bug but I overall wish I could craft gathering tools for others. My guildmates did ask if I could do so and I had to hand them materials so they could do it themselves. I think this should change or get fixed, however the status on that is.
Artisan gear:
The different shirts are quite cute but they didn't feel like there were doing anything - besides the bonus EXP ones. The quantity one for mining didn't seem to provide any quantity increase whatsoever. Maybe bugged, maybe too low in stat. Not sure because it was hard to tell what the stat actually does even in the character artisan window. Looking at the stats there is nothing telling you how much 135 mining speed rating actually is. My heroic novice pickaxe didn't feel significantly quicker than the common one but it had almost 3 times the stats.
Which is the final point I wanted to make:
I wish there was a way to get more detailed information on STATS in general. What do they do, what are they used for. How much rating do I need per % increase, etc. It is very unclear and I think advanced tooltips should be introduced for these stats somehow. The last thing I want to do is break my immersion and look the information up OUTSIDE of the game.
That being said, I had a blast once again!
so much love from Germany,
frogbound
PS: I still have a bone to pick with this scythe wielding mfer. I didn't get to it.
Lets prioritize exploration, quests, and meaningful interactions.
-Professions-
* Introduce a streamlined professions tab with clear progression paths.
* Offer group profession quests that reward both XP and let you craft valuable items.
* Balance profession XP to match mob grinding, encouraging a more diverse playstyle.
-Enhance Quests and Call Boards-
* Provide quests that offer substantial XP, encouraging exploration of Verra's stunning landscapes.
* Implement a dynamic call board system with time-limited quests, fostering community and competition.
-Reduce mob xp-
* Reduce the excessive XP gained from mob grinding to incentivize other leveling methods.
Leveraging Events for Community and Progression
The current event system is a fantastic way to bring players together and offer unique leveling opportunities.
* Strategic Event Placement: Continue to scatter events across the map to prevent player caravans and encourage exploration.
* Let's have events that are very hard but give you opportunities to improve the nodes in the region or give you a temporary buff.
I want a more immersive and rewarding leveling experience by prioritizing exploration, community, and meaningful gameplay over mindless grinding.
Anyways that's my gripe and suggestions. At the end of the day maybe this game isn't for me. But I do like a lot about it.
Had the opportunity to join a 40v40 pvp and it was a very smooth, no lagging experience. That really was a very positive surprise.
The game still has a lot of improvement to be worked on but the less obvious change I'd suggest would be to totally remake the interface visuals. The inventory, the character equipment page and the menu (maybe even the skill tree). It all just feels like a game made in 2008.
But overall I'm very glad with the game so far. Congratz to the team
Dear AoC-Team,
Preface:
I learn english by watching O.C. California years ago.
Lags, disconnects, grafics, animations, flora, fauna, style etc.will not evaluate in my first alpha report.
Started playing ultima Online decades ago and playing always supportive classes.
I played twelve hours, watched many streams and rewatched the Bard Archetype Preview.
Questing
I love the Idea of Townboards with little „to-do“ in terms of questing, gathering and crafting.
More quest variety would be nice and maybe a way to split your questbar in gather-Quest and hunting-Quest.
In gerneral i strongly dislike any story-quest just for the reason to have quests.
Or to tell me i am the chosen one, also the other millions of players are chosen too....
Quests for opening a dungeon, get a new skill, get a horse, evolve to the next class or lean some new artisans are fine to me.
Bard gameplay
I like the ability to move while using skills, the sound of the skills are mesmerizing and unique.
I loved the knee-slide, also the future plans with more instuments and sounds are nice.
I slightly dislike the Tomoto-throw-skill, the magical book and the Q-skill at start.
It doesnt fit in the bard theme imo.
I would like to see an real Instrument, fireing strings of melody or notes to damage enemys.
I dislike the amount of healing-skills in the first eight levels, also there could be more varity in the buff effects, so every build is more unique but impactful.
I strongly dislike the Saga-skill Apocalypse (Dragon-AoE-fire spell). It is out of place i think.
I would be nice to see that skill as a Magician (Bard-Mage) or maybe Songcaller (Bard-Summoner) but the basic bard should do another visualisation. maybe Screaming AoE attack or just somethink more neutral or music-related?
Artisan
Everything feels greate, no complain.
Just one request: please add a highlight-button to show your current recipe in the HUD. I keep forgetting und running back and forth.
HUD & HUD-manager
Just love it!
Last but not least:
Sidenote:
The water has flowdirection, my character floated away...
What an insane detail, i was impressed to have this in an alpha.
Thanks for the game, i needed to stop myself to save some time for next weekends.
Greetings
Kpy
will make trying to locate someone/something easier..
will make raids much easier to follow plans..
same with transport and pvp and other things... like war.. the real world lets us do it, let us have the freedom and fun plzzzz
Loving the movement of the combat mode (z) but feel that it could be easily improved with a three stage toggle that allows for pve, pvp, &, pve/p targeting for easier combat and risk mitigation when targeting.
First press of Z would be Pve targets only, second Pvp only, Third Pve/p.
I found it difficult to not attack other players when ganging up in mobs but not in the party.
I'll be continuing to add to this post for other suggestions/feedback.
1) I do not feel any incentive, other than overwhelming generosity, to help my fellow players that are being attacked by mobs. When I come in and kill these mobs for them, even if I do the most damage on that monster, and receive no experience or chance for loot, it is not a rewarding experience. Therefore, I always bypass my fellow adventurers as I play rather than looking for people that might need my help and developing a possible bond that might lead to a party.
2) It is infuriating having to wait for a mob to respawn that is needed for a quest only to attack it first but not get credit because I did not do the most damage or whatever metric the game uses. Especially when people spawn camp these mobs, seemingly even when they have gotten the credit or item they need. It simply blocks my progression. And this is as a Ranger where I at least have a chance of putting out the most DPS. As a tank or healer, the only way to deal with this situation would be to party up at all times and, sometimes I just want to grind things out on my own. I am all for systems that encourage social gameplay but I am adamantly against those that make it a requirement, outside of group content such as raids or dungeons.
Please do something to change the way kill credit is awarded. Partial experience for assisting in a kill and not having required mobs be "all or nothing" would make the questing and grinding and even social aspects of the game much more enjoyable.
I like:
1. Character Customisation...the sculpture is SWEET!!!
2. The world is BIG and very beautiful. Seriously very cool. Monsters are awesome. Graphics smooooooth even when set to Max....Nice!
3. Trees...that aren't made of branches of flat textures!
4. MMmmmm sweet spell effects!
5. MMmm the artwork is GORGEOUS!
6. Visual Impairment assistance with red border. YAY! Thanks!
7. The water looks fantastic...though the ripples made by the horse...That horse has force! XD
8. Chopping the trees down looks great, except the cut looks like it's done by a chainsaw and I don't get to chop the rest of the tree up once it's felled to harvest it.
9. The seasonal effects. Just yeah!!!
I dislike:
1. Zooming in only takes you to an over-the-shoulder view instead of first person. Even in Toggle Action mode, you can only zoom into a back-of-head view. I prefer to zoom into first-person rather than over the shoulder/back of head.
2. Single name only. Most people have a first and last name, not even spaces allowed? That's pretty harsh.
3. When Action Mode is toggled, the camera view raises and lowers slightly when zoomed out for no apparent reason.
4. Moving towards the target when attacking with the LMB and holding the RMB down. Even when I have set the RMB to something else. If I want to move forward, I have a W key for that.
5. Target Closest Enemy...even when they're dead...not particularly your enemy anymore.
6. An arrow pointing towards the currently selected objective would be nice.
7. When a quest is completed, highlighting the quest giver on the map would make it easier to turn stuff in, rather than hunting around trying to find the NPC.
8. "Shift" activating a set ability ie dodge, when typing in the chat window instead of making text uppercase.
9. Toggle Action mode not Toggling on a horse.
10. Character in the Character Sheet looks nothing like my character.
11. Limited amount of spell "flavour", yes the spells get bigger booms...but...(DnD player here).
12. No acid spells?
13. Things don't seem to be spawning where it is indicated where they should be on the map, I sent way too long looking for Wilted SNowdrop in the area indicated, but it was further up the road. This also happened with Heartwood Trees. I got to the spot indicated...nothing.
14. Relogging in...last used server is not selected by default.
15. Deep sea diving horse...lol Yeah nah, horse don't swim under water XD
game crashed at %5 of loading screen
that was my first time experience. which isn't too bad for an alpha game.
But now, my computer turns on and doesn't display. my monitor says no display then goes black.
I spent all day trying to get it working again.
-reseeded the ram, multiple times in different variances.
-pulled out the power supply and tested it, seems to work.
-pulled out my video card to see if it could use the onboard display port, still just black screen.
-removed all the wires to the mother board and pull out the cmos battery. put it all back together and still nothing.
One of the saddest days ever, due to the fact, I was extremely hyped for this game for years.
Then, to lose everything.
(looking for rope)
how to prevent spawn kill at shrines. Myb give players who spawned lets say 1min invisibility(it breaks if you do some action), make 5m around shrine safe zone so other can spawn ground target abilitys.
I think albion online have something similar.
The scale of the world is incredible.
I'm loving the little out of the way quests and features that add to the world's story and lore. Only sadness here is that many of them have yet to be finished.
The feel of the combat (I'm running a dps cleric) has been a lot of fun.
The speed of leveling is working well. I don't mind that it's slow, it feels good to get a level, it feels meaningful.
Visuals - The world looks washed out, like everything is gray toned or hit with too much light. If it needs to be a sliding scale option, that's fine, but more color would look a lot better. Visuals, in general, need significant work.
Character Models - The character models need improved. I won't belabor this, because I'm sure this is in the works. Please give me eyebrow options that don't look pissed off.
Character Movement - I use keybinds on everything rather than a mouse for movement and movement isn't quite as responsive as in other games I've played. I would highly suggest more options for how you can set up character movement. I would prefer WoW or SWTOR style movement & character. Others will have other preferences. The more you can provide options for how movement and cameras are set up, the more comfortable and accessible the game will be.
Fishing - It's so bad right now. Mini-game and better visuals needed.
Map, markers on map - all of that needs improved.
The Accept/Decline buttons don't always work; there are times when Accept/Decline don't make sense.
Wandering through the world does not feel dangerous. Mobs are missing from a lot of areas so the world feels empty. I've also been able to ride my horse (as a level 4) right over level 16 3 star mobs without them reacting. That shouldn't happen.
I'd like to go into more of the buildings. I'm assuming this will be something that's added later - but doors that open and chairs you can sit in are so helpful for immersion.
Minor Bugs/Issues:
- Overloaded with quests in Lionhold. Just give me like 3 to start with.
- Restarting the game made all the quest markers on the map disappear. Only new quests had a marker/guide overlay added onto the map.
- Completed 'Rosewater has been taken' event. Couldn't loot the reward chest.
- Default look sensitivity (middle mouse) is way too low. Could not find setting to adjust it.
- The settings Menu text is too small, at least on the righthand menu
- Last realm played should be auto-selected at Character select screen
- Could not hand in the quest 'The Sweat of your Brow' to Tradesrep Deshaun.
Movement/camera settings:
-Add an option for the "smart" camera style from world of warcraft for the tab targeting mode. Essentially, when stationary you can move where the camera faces with left click and it stays there. However as soon as you start to move your character it rotates the camera to look in the direction you are running.
-I'm a weirdo and rebind A and D to be rotate camera left and right respectively instead of moving that way. This works well for me in WoW because when I do this I can hold right click while pressing A or D and it changes to moving in that direction instead of rotating the camera. So I can still easily move left to right. Ashes doesn't have this. It still rotates the camera when holding down the right click. Please add an option or just make it default behavior when holding down right click and pressing A or D to move the character left/right.
-Click to move would be a nice addition.
UI:
-Right clicking on mobs that are alive should target the mob if its not targeted already and do nothing if targeted already. If the mob is dead, right clicking on it should open up loot UI. It should not bring up the option to mark it like it currently does. To mark a mob, you should have to click on the mob and right click on its portrait to bring up the mark UI.
I just spent my 1st 3 days in game, with a QA/tester mindset and a bit of prior knowledge from twitch.
The list is not structured (order is literaly how I experienced these stuff) and I understand many of these are not a topic for now. So please consider it and prioritize in your team as needed. I've put > to points which might be more important from my perspective. And P&S to those which I consider critical for current phase of performance and stability testing due to performance impact.
- missing unzoom keybind (after changing the zoom to + and -, you cant unzoom and have to reset to defaults)
- let user keybind weapon swap to mouse wheel scroll
- Moving UI windows across the screen is not fluent and window jumps around
- > in Action camera when you open inventory, the mouse is missing - you need some way to display the cursor whether on keybind or automatically (this, combined with horse, is making players to not use action combat)
- HUD editor is scuffed / elements disappearing, grid not working very well
- > better support for other keyboard localizations ie CZ - I had to switch keyboard setting when entering the game to be able to press abilities which is inconvenient setting for me as it changes the layout of other keys.
- in skill tree when zooming, zoom to the mouse cursor, not to the center of the window
- displaying advanced tooltips should be and overriding feature to the default keybind. When I put sprint on shift, I should still be able to read advanced tooltips while in skill book when pressing some of those main keys
- keep the action camera even on horse or at least give the player the choice
- > share the xp in event to players who are not part of group
- P&S Add movement to NPCs in wilderness. Most of them are just standing still (and facing same direcition) making the world feel "wrong".
- when clicking on name in chat, open the DM msg to that person
- In chat when you press up, it should "repeat" previous message
- Add some progress bar to the events to notify player about the state of the ongoing event on map. And then also remove it from map once its over, do not display it for whole expected duration. (Info word "success", "phase1" etc. are easily missed and phases do not make sense when players dont know how many of them there are)
- > display on map "event starting soon"
- interrupted gathering should continue where it stopped, not from start
- after logging in, the last chosen realm should be still chosen - now it resets (not everytime, but it does)
- inputting the 2FA code every single time player opens the launcher is quite tedious imo
- turning with right mouse while gathering should not break the gathering process
- P&S Event scaling - update the difficulty of events based on the amount of ppl participating
- add the optional HUD with your horse HP while you are mounted
- LFG tool would be great (not sure if desired by design tho)
- arenas, battlegrounds, duels. Basicaly instant PVP on demand with no necessity to run and search for 30 minutes on map (maybe its planned, not sure)
- display gathering level, its missing in skill tree (I found later its under P key... still a but confusing)
- add buyback option to vendors
- when moving usable item A (i.e. Rations) into action bar on slot where there already is skill or item B, move the current B into "mouse" and let player reassign it.
- while waiting in queue, let user access the settings of game without leaving the queue
- > Improve a player's noticeability of won roll. Only chat is not enough (or put the item directly to their bag instead of them having to search the corpse)
- Use horse speed ability on same key, that is binded to character sprint
- Add setting option to make the text larger. I'm not that old yet I would need a microscope to see the stack numbers in inventory. There are UX/UI best practices for that, please follow it.
I did not write anything for quests as you mentioned it will be focus in phase 3, but the list would be even longer. There is a lot of areas I have not touched yet.
I was starting to play around with moving things on the UI and noticed that there are some things that were not able to move. The noteable ones were the casting bar and the interact ability. I moved my party frames to the bottom center and not being able to move these cause the casting bar to be over the party names
8 man party view- As a main healer I 1000% perfer to use raid frames over normal party frames. Please ad the ability to use RAID frames as the party frames
I probably played close to 10 hours over the weekend. The game felt pretty confusing and buggy (totally understandable as an alpha test), but the potential has me feeling super optimistic! - I have purposely NOT done a lot of reading on specifics. I went in mostly blind.
What I liked most was the general old-school MMO feel. It’s not a theme park on rails experience. I’m all-in on tab-targeting. The world feels big, with tons to explore. Bugs and glitches aside, the combat and movement felt good. It felt just fast enough. It wasn’t classic EverQuest slow, but it certainly wasn’t souls like either.
I leveled every class except a fighter to lvl 3-5 to try them all out. Ranger was my first choice and felt kind of lacking. Maybe great in a group, but trying to solo kite just felt kind of weird. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s because I’m used to a WoW hunter with a pet? Or maybe I expected to shoot with a bow and then use a spear or something when the mob got up close (New World-ish)? Where other classes had lots of choices early on, it felt like ranger didn’t have as much.
Mage felt exactly like a mage should. Super squishy. Had big spells that took a while to cast. I LOVED being able to go down very different paths right from the start with fire, lightning, and ice. Fire mage felt super OP.
Bard felt good, but maybe not great. Definitely felt a lot better in a group (obviously). The buffing / debuffing was fun. I loved being able to try out the different songs. It seemed the closest to jack-of-all trades but master of none. Next weekend I think I want to try it out as a melee and see how it goes. Something about the book just didn’t feel right to me.
Tank felt pretty good. I’m usually not a melee fan, but I liked it. Skills felt super customizable. It definitely had the tank feel. Big dude swinging a sword slowly grinding through mobs. I want to level this guy some more to see what it really feels like as groups mature.
I think cleric is my favorite, which I didn’t expect. This will be the class that I start with next weekend. The battle cleric (wanna-be-paladin) felt really good. Judgement + smite + smash with a scepter definitely felt the best for soloing. Group healing was good. Pretty quickly built up a kit with different options. Hopefully you can customize the UI, or at least move party bars around. Honestly I didn’t try. I definitely want health bars front and center as a healer and not off to the side.
I ran into the kind of bugs that I’d expect. A couple random crashes. Every now and then I’d stop running because of some little pebble or something on the ground that I couldn’t walk over. The animation riding the horse seemed to mess up a lot.
Gathering felt very incomplete, hopefully this is being worked on more. There were plenty of trees to cut down, but everything else just felt like I was running around endlessly searching for something that didn’t say I had to be an apprentice or journeyman.
1) Mob training (pulling mobs into other groups zone in order to have the mobs overwhelm and kill them) to grief is common at every popular grind spot. Corruption is currently too strong to make it worth a kill. I realize this is temporary, so I will skip that part. Bigger issue is that higher levels are going to level 10 grind spots just to grief groups by training large pulls.
2) A level 7 roaming around the level 1-2 spot, not killing players but hitting each one to low health as they exited Lionhold. Seems like there could be a threshhold for total damage across multiple players that could generate corruption, especially to players more than a few levels lower.
3) Levels 1-3 were the worst part of the experience. There needs to be more of an introduction including combat quests. Maybe you hunt some Gremlins and Ravens in exchange for your first pieces of armor. There was a moment in Samia I just didn't know what to do. Running out from the area I was immediately greeted with high level mobs (for a level 1). I had to look online to figure out where to find level 1 mobs and actually start playing the game.
4) The flagging system is clunky. I hear this is temporary and have seen this said many times already, but here it is anyway. If I target a player and launch an attack that lands, that should be the flag. If I'm targeting a purple, a green shouldn't get cleaved. If there's a toggle, it should be more like a safety switch to not accidently attack a player.
5) Item drops are easy to see but glint drops are often hidden by the bodies.
6) I was confused when my group was talking about getting a tank. I thought maybe we needed a container for mana water or a giant armored mobile cannon of sorts. Turns out we were looking for the Guardian archetype, plz fix.
The good:
1) The world feels dangerous. I stopped on the road to take a screenshot of the sunlight reflecting off of Steelbloom, and a 3* Golem just wandered onto the road from behind my camera. Bandits tollkeeping the bridge, etc. Even the relative safety of traveling the roads isn't boring. But it's also not completely overwhelming to travel or gather either.
2) Combat is awesome. A combination of movement fluidity, good class design, and not target-dummy mob behavior. Even basic enemies have attack patterns. It hits all aspects. I heard it was good going in, and it still exceeded expectations.
3) Weapon types and systems. I was last playing as a spell greatsword Cleric. Fighters were throwing frost grenades from their energy spellbooks. There's a lot of fun.
4) The ambience of gathering. The trees falling and rocks crumbling are quite satisfying, sounds and visuals.
Having recently played Throne and Liberty, I think there are a few things that can be stolen from that game.
One very minor thing that I have not seen in other MMO's is in regard to targeting. They have a system which shows how many of your party members have a mob targeted at any time. This is a very subtle UI element that is HUGELY beneficial and I think would fit VERY well in AoC.
First of all the settings for all the combat options were more than I expected, but they could have been explained more thoroughly what they really meant. Maybe adding an additional textbox while hovering the setting or short gif or a picture to visualize what certain combat options do. The action combat has option to add the handy red dot to show what you are targetting, but it's not always clear what you are targetting when multiple monsters are tightly packed and it doesn't look pretty or immersive. Other than that changing the target with action camera was frustrating and it didn't work for abilities that needed target to use. Additionally the action combat camera could use a toggle that switches between friendly and enemy targets and a way to self target without having to switch to tab for selfhealing as bard/cleric. I found it inconsistent how opening inventory kept your camera in action mode but every other window and ?using a mount? switched to tab mode. Closing the non inventory windows and dismounting also had delay or some action requirement when returing to action camera, which made the action camera feel even more janky.
Other than that I'd hope to get more tactile and visual world polishing at high traffic areas. It doesn't matter if some stones in the middle of nowhere has no accurate mesh yet, but the node centrals, starting area and points of intrests that people are using spending significant amount of time to grind could be way more accurate in their terrain in terms of what you can stand on or climb to and the general vibe. Some open world dungeons were just really bland and way too half baked in terms of layout, lighting, textures and other details. The church of Seven Stars and Halls of Judication had some really generic and depressing stonebrick construction, the verticality, room layout and scale felt off. Other similar offender was Oakenbane keep. While being more detailed and having more character in it's design already it too had similar problems with scale of walls and objects and enemies were just evenly scatterred around making these POIs less connected to the world and lore and more just places where you can pull optimal amount of decent level elite mobs. Even New World with its countless downsides had some better feeling and looking POIs. Gemspring with it's unique style and and Daragal Estates (minus the grey brick monstrocity) had much better feeling especially with large variety and changing monster types in the Estates. The development team has a gargantuan undertaking on their way in building this massive world and seeing this poorly designed POIs makes me wonder if the large world is going to be mostly empty space with largely unfinished or rushed areas to fill some of the void.
TTK in PvP is also absolutely ridiculous right now I've gave extensive feedback about this before... TLDR power creep from weapons is crazy you can kill people in 3 seconds theres no skill in combat its all about items - 60s to 30s ttk that was once mention is not even close to being a reality and gear is ridículously strong players without large guilds have Zero chances of fighting someone with high tier gear when they get killed with 2 skills this feels VERY BAD
PvP sucks at the moment, corruption baiting is TERRIBLE having an option to dont hit white players wont fix it - players from enemy guilds using mounts to bait and staying unflaged while talking shit to you while you cant do nothing about it because you will get red and their friends can kill you without flagging and get your loot ansolutely sucks.. guild wars also doesnt fix it they will drop guild to grief you and you cant do nothing about it
non combatent players should NEED to flag to attack reds, and a single stack of corruption should not drop gear AND WORLD BOSSES / RAIDS SHOULD BE PVP ZONES
even in Mo2 as hardcore as it is you CANT loot corpses without flagging for PvP same should be in Ashes if you want to loot a corpse you should NEED to flag up and get purple when looting
Alt F4 during combat is still a thing... combat logging should not exist you should stay ingame for 60s if you log out
you can lose your combatant purple state MID combat someone can start attacking you and mid fight if you dont hit you go white and the guy gets corruption this is stupid
you can relog to reset your flagged status and go back being non combatant
A recent example of this issue was observed with the streamer Asmongold. After creating a new character and entering the starting zone, other players began creating secondary characters solely to kill him repeatedly. This created a frustrating experience and an environment that is unfair for new players entering the game.
I suggest that corruption penalties should be shared across all characters on an account. This would help discourage toxic behavior from players who create additional characters purely for disruptive purposes.
Overall I found this weekend to be pretty decent for what it was at this stage. After working a few hours through the technical bugs to even get into the game, it was pretty smooth after that.
I enjoy the resources growing aspect and how the town systems work, super cool stuff there (albeit unclear how exactly it will come into play, but I like the concepts with legacy and whatnot)
I find the monster killing stuff aggravating though as it's super difficult to stack up those quest Kills and loot drops and lack of XP if someone finishes off a creature. Might be a good idea to have a system where players gain exp based around the percentage of damage done to them and/or how effects were used against them, so not purely damage based. That way everyone gets rewarded for contributions and loot drops can be based on a similar structure (ex. Killing a goblin has a random drop of glint between 5 and 20, so say a player did 25% of the damage, they would at maximum be able to loot 5glint outta it) so locking loot I think would be much better than anyone can loot the corpse. I don't think it worked for Ultima online, and I think for this game it won't help in the long run.
I think we are also missing details or at least intro quests in how to use some the mechanics such as hunting and what the deal is with spawns that have a crosshair on them that you can't attack, and maybe some direction into how does one be able to do hunting type gathering would be very helpful. This would also be helpful in explaining how towns work with more details as to what does what for town building. Maybe setup like donation centers with town specific rewards for player contributions could be a thing too, makes it feel like your actually helping to build the town up and can create more engagement for town dwellers.
Since there is a town growing mechanic, have you considered letting players build their own shops with their own merch/materials that they can say, hire an NPC vendor or something to operate it? Just take a percentage off the sales, essentially representing paying your staff on commission. I think that could be a really neat feature to have :-) and there's other things too that could be worked into township and being a citizen/merchant/town guard/whatever.
Respawn times for quest required entities could use a boost as well. One of the early quests took hours for the 1 guy to respawn, though it think it was adjusted during the testing period in that instance.
Jumping into the game as a new player could really use some direction as to what to do and who too talk to in order to get things going would be very helpful as well. Myself and others were running around the start area trying to figure out what the heck are we supposed to be doing lol
So far I like the inventory system with intown storage options as well as the amount of loot you can carry starting out.
The mini map was kinda annoying to navigate as well when your character was in motion to different directions and zooming in and out stops the toon from moving every time you click on it
Quest indicators and stuff definitely needs to be worked out more, but it's on the right track and I'm sure it'll be smoother out and more accurate. But again, respawn rates for required quest materials and such really need a boost. (The early quests where you are supposed to find the tree splinters for example were pretty much impossible to find for the level of the quest)
The combat systems works nicely so far, and the animations are decent for being in alpha, no real complaints there.
Character leveling and skill tree is intuitive, seems to be looking like a solid system this far.
Character creation could use more customization and variety, but I'm sure it's one of those things that will be boosted as we continue testing.
Again, overall was a decent experience and I look forward to continuing being a part of the team!! Games looking to be great!
Surely there are those who use this type of autorun, but there are also those who only use the single button (in keybinds option) and having the character move when you press the 2 mouse buttons at the same time turns out to be annoying during the fight
The Map - Looked and felt great to run around in. POIs and Terrain was dense enough and well scaled by distance making the world feel really good. I did report seem-breaks and floating trees, but that is all understandable for a Alpha. It was really good to see a vast open map; reminded me a lot of the bigger zones in EQ1 (but much better of course).
Crafting - As a long time crafter going back to the launch of SWGs (and alpha in that game). I was a little disappointment on the simplicity of crafting (how items are combined) but again understandable at this stage. I'm sure it's been echoed by others, but some raw resources seem extremely rare (copper/zink). I have yet to actually 'craft' a finished product. I'm sure this will all get sorted in time. It seemed easier to just buy starting gear and/or get the drops. Crafting Queues is interesting but I wish we could actually Queue a few in a row instead of one. I know about batches but having an actual queue would be nice in addition.
Classes - I did get a Wizard, Healer and Bard to level 5 and enjoyed my time. I was happy to see that Bards were more then just 'song wizards'. I need more time with the classes to give better feedback. I am highly concerned that pvp will boil down to hard 'CC' dominance; which always feels bad (early days of DaoC anyone? I doubt it will be 'that' bad though.)
UI - Feels like a placeholder?
The game looked better on "low" then on "high". My card is old but not too-too old being a 3060Ti.
Overall, I got < 6hrs of play in, but I'm looking forward to playing a lot this up-coming weekend!