Comprehensive Alpha 2 Feedback (Long Read)

BRAD_AoC

ChatGPT Summary (For those too lazy to read the whole thing)

The player, having reached level 20 as a Bard exclusively through mob grinding in a guild, shares feedback on various game aspects. They appreciate the responsive and satisfying combat and movement, though they find weapon skill trees lack depth and recommend more impactful passive and active abilities. The UI, while functional, is cumbersome, with small fonts and limited quality-of-life features. Grouping restrictions hinder social play, making it hard for players of varying levels to team up effectively. While group play is rightly incentivized, solo players struggle to progress meaningfully.

Questing lacks guidance, and leveling, though rewarding, is repetitive. Travel times across the large map, while immersive, could become excessive without faster, limited travel options. Mounts feel clunky, and the corruption system might be overly punishing. In crafting, progression feels slightly tedious and recipe acquisition is unclear to new players, while item drops, though thrillingly rare, skew towards melee gear, disadvantaging casters. Overall, key improvements are needed for a smoother, more inclusive experience across play styles.

Preface

I'd like to preface this post by saying that so far I only played the Bard Archetype and made it to level 20 in a single weekend exclusively mob grinding in an organized guild. Below I'm listing a collection of topics I'd like to share my opinion about. This however does not mean this includes absolutely everything, but rather the most obvious or most impactful point so far. As always, feel free to agree or disagree in the comments.

Moment to Moment Gameplay

Before we get into some of the negatives, I'd like to point out that the actual moment to moment gameplay already feels pretty solid. For the most part, combat and movement feels responsive, abilities are satisfying to press and class identities are strong when playing in a group. Obviously animations and VFX still need more work, but the initial impression is pretty good, especially for the Alpha state we're in.

Weapon Trees

While the Skill trees for Archetypes feel pretty robust already, the Skill trees for weapons feel extremely generic and uninspired. Considering how basic attacks play somewhat of a big role in your rotation, I think the current direction for the Weapon Skill tree is very underwhelming.

While some of the keystone passives like "Refreshing Followthrough" feel like impactful upgrades, a lot of the smaller "+1%" buffs probably need to be condensed into more gameplay altering passives, instead of minor buffs. I also think Weapons should provide a couple of active abilities to use, which not only would improve the currently extremely lackluster build variety, but also create distinct identities for weapons.

UI

The current UI is, bluntly said, really bad. Font Sizing is laughably small, UX is not very intuitive and a lot of UI interactions feel very unresponsive. The UI is also missing a lot of essential quality of life features like sorting or quick splitting. I won't go too much into detail here though since Steven already stated multiple times that the UI is still heavily Work in Progress. For now the UI is functional.

Restrictive Grouping

This is a big one. I'm not sure on the exact formula for grouping, but it is WAY too restrictive as it stands. If Ashes is supposed to be a social MMO where incentivizing grouping is a major effort of Intrepid, it should be made very easy for players to actually form those groups.

As it currently stands, this is not the case whatsoever. The level difference in the group needs to be absolutely minimal for groups to gain the full amount of experience, which means that if one or more players in your group is not available as much as the rest of the group, you quickly out level those players and are unable to form a proper group with them again without sacrificing a lot of experience.

When people were allowed to level as raid groups, the game felt extremely social because you were always able to fit in an extra player that might not have a group, but after this change you more or less have to have a perfectly set up group at all times. These two issues compounded into a massive feeling of exclusivity within guilds this weekend, which really hurt the first impression of the game for a lot of the Wave 1 Keyholders.

If I could adjust the current systems, I'd allow for 2 groups with a max of 16 players to level together and allow players within 5-8 levels with each other to play together, both without a massive XP cut. I get that the intended design is to play as party sizes of 8, but the way it's set up right now just doesn't feel good at all.

Solo vs Group Play

Another controversial topic that has been brought up a lot is the viability of solo play vs group play. Generally speaking playing as a group should be the vastly more efficient (and fun) way to engage with the game's various systems. However, I think there just needs to be a viable path for solo players to do stuff in the game and progress. It obviously should be inferior to playing as a group XP wise, but as it stands, playing solo doesn't feel like a very valid option for the vast majority of players.

I know there are people out there that manage to level up at a decent pace playing solo, but usually those players are more advanced players that have the necessary skill to pull off that more unforgiving way of progressing. Looking at more casual players though that the game will most definitely need to populate the servers, you can already tell how disheartening the current experience is for those types of players and I think that's a huge issue for the longevity of the game. We're obviously still missing a lot of key features like Questing that could help to alleviate this issue, but I thought I include it as food for thought in this post.

Questing

To touch up on Questing real quick. Questing is obviously unfinished, is not nearly rewarding enough, suffers from a major lack of direction and overwhelms the player with way too much unnecessary text. It might not fit the traditionally more classic approach of the game, but I think Quest NPCs should have clear quest markers above their head that also change based on the progress of the quest and varies visually based on the type of quest.

If questing is supposed to be a somewhat viable path to progress, there need to be a lot more Quality of Life and UI features to properly inform players where to start quests, how to actually finish the quest and where to hand the quests in.

Leveling

Leveling is truly a throwback to more classic MMOs and I personally enjoy the slower progress. Getting levels feels exceptionally rewarding and I think it's in a good spot. Obviously the activities you're participating in currently to level are very one dimensional, but that should be fixed with more systems coming online.

Soft Fast Travel?

The current Alpha 2 map already feels pretty extensive and as players have noticed it takes a good amount of time to traverse the map. I think generally this travel time really helps with immersion and the feeling of being in a big open world. However as the map expands with new biomes, I think it could slowly turn into an issue, where travelling becomes so excessively long that it disincentivizes people from ever moving around the map. If my friends are grinding in a spot that takes me 40 minutes to run to, is this really going to be a fun experience for me? Probably not.

That being said, I'm aware Intrepid is planning to add a very limited amount of fast travel through scientific nodes, and I also want to note that I'm not asking for instantaneous convenient fast travel all around the map, but rather a more reliant way to traverse large stretches of the map through a soft travel system. Think flight paths or Zeppelins in World of Warcraft (Maybe a form of faster Caravan on rails). The time to traverse would still be somewhat substantial (10m from one side of the Riverlands to the other side f.e.), but definitely less exhausting.

Mount Functionality

Mounts in the current state feel really clunky. I know there are plans to expand the Mount system with "equippable" items and other additions through animal husbandry, but I'm personally not a big fan of the way the mounts work in general. Having to summon your mount before being able to mount it and then having to dismiss your mount first before being able to summon it again to then mount it feels extremely clunky.

I can also imagine that the added entities through summoning mounts could massively impact the game's performance negatively. I honestly think World of Warcraft's or New World's Mount systems are a lot more fun to use where you instantly sit on your mount when summoning it, but I can see how people would have different takes on that.

Corruption

One of the things I've heard a lot is that Ashes is going to be a Gankbox. This is absolutely not the case. With the way corruption currently works, I'd actually say it's pretty much the opposite. Corruption is so punishing that you never ever under any circumstances want to get corrupted, which I know is intended. However, I personally feel like the first stack of corruption specifically is too harsh in a sense that you instantly become a sitting duck barely being able to defend yourself with the movement penalty and stat loss. And losing up to 3 pieces of gear for killing a single player seems a little excessive, especially since baiting people to become corrupted in PvP is so laughably easy.

I also experienced multiple scenarios where you want to fight another group over a grinding spot, but the enemy group strictly does not want to fight you under any circumstance. You tag them, they just heal each other back up and ignore you. And because corruption is so insanely punishing, you're trying to not poke too much to not get corrupted. This leads to complete stalemates that the system just does not account for whatsoever to the point where I think the way you acquire corruption needs to be completely overhauled. Definitely not a fan of how it currently works at all.

Artisanship

Because of the playtest extension on Monday, I spend a healthy amount of time looking into the various artisan skills. At first glance I feel like the New World - like progression where you craft many of the same T1 item even though they're basically throwaway items extremely unsatisfying. From a new player perspective it is also not clear how to acquire new recipes for pieces that make sense for your characters.

Gathering was overall a decently fun activity, even though a lot of the gatherables are very hard to spot from a UI perspective and some the resources seem way too rare for how much they're needed for basic profession crafts. Processing seems pretty straight forward, even though the idea of having to use other materials as fuel seems very awkward and does not feel like it makes sense either.

Item Drops

Item drops at the moment feel absurdly rare, which in return makes them also feel extremely satisfying to get. If the balance is right is up for testing, however I personally don't like the idea that exclusively humanoid and boss mobs drop gear whereas all the other mobs only drop Glint. This makes a lot of POIs on the map instantly not feel worthwhile to go to, because the idea that there won't be any loot drops makes it a lot less exciting. And let's be honest, as MMO players loot is one of, if not the biggest motivator for us to do anything. I really feel like trading in the realism of only humanoids dropping gear to make every mob kill potentially exciting is a fair trade.

Another issue that we ran into a lot is that there seem to be vastly more physical medium & heavy gear drops than magical light gear drops. Caster mobs are few and far between in the game and due to mob grinding being the only viable progression path in the game, groups tend to exclusively focus on easily grindable Melee mobs rather than very deadly and often over tuned Caster mobs. Once we hit level 20, the Tank, Fighter and Ranger in our group were completely out gearing our Mage, Bard and Cleric. Maybe this is because of the spots we specifically chose to level in (Oakenbane Keep & Citadel), but something that was definitely noticeable.