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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
What do you love... Pls move to A2 general
nanfoodle
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
We have allot of decisions on what needs work. What though do you love and like to see them expanded on?
I really enjoy the balance of teams. Full balanced groups are a blast when it works. I also love duo and three player teams. Dynamics change depending on what classes you have on hand. Adjusting your role depending on what skills your team has. Have not had that type of fun since EQ.
If there is a way to make more content for small unblanaced teams. That would be epic. The game already shines for that.
I do love the options for class skills paired with weapon speac. Really is great to decide what you want to focus on. It's great you can also have phy and magic based weapons. I so love using a "magical short bow" on my Bard. I do wish there was a skill tree for armour. Really want even more options
they are just so fun.
I loving the risk of fighting mobs. Exping with level 9 and 10 mobs and level 15 one star bears you dodge for a few levels. Worried you gonna die. Then you gain a few levels and now you get your Revenge on the bears you have come to hate. I hope you keep up that design.
What do you love and what to see more depth added to?
I really enjoy the balance of teams. Full balanced groups are a blast when it works. I also love duo and three player teams. Dynamics change depending on what classes you have on hand. Adjusting your role depending on what skills your team has. Have not had that type of fun since EQ.
If there is a way to make more content for small unblanaced teams. That would be epic. The game already shines for that.
I do love the options for class skills paired with weapon speac. Really is great to decide what you want to focus on. It's great you can also have phy and magic based weapons. I so love using a "magical short bow" on my Bard. I do wish there was a skill tree for armour. Really want even more options
they are just so fun.I loving the risk of fighting mobs. Exping with level 9 and 10 mobs and level 15 one star bears you dodge for a few levels. Worried you gonna die. Then you gain a few levels and now you get your Revenge on the bears you have come to hate. I hope you keep up that design.
What do you love and what to see more depth added to?
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Comments
I'm here for the Nodes.
The rest is obv whatever at this stage, but Nodes, I can fill in the blanks with just imagination and a few proper named NPCs.
I want to see this really take off, and I already see signs that the designers know the little secrets to make NPCs work for what they're 'supposed' to be. Even if I don't like Lionhold, I love the design implications of Lionhold and really, really hope that they carry over to other nodes.
In the end, in this 'sandpark' we appear to be getting, that's all I need for my Node to feel right. Give a few NPCs a name, and a small life-goal that looks 'outside'. This isn't even a complaint about how 'modern games don't do this enough', because most of them get it right, at least the ones I play, except, oddly, TL...
Literally just a huge hashtable for names/NPC appearances based on some low-effort data lookup about the area they are in to semi-lock them, or go all the way to whatever Elite is doing and just have them all be consistent.
I'm imaginative, I don't need them to give quests. I can link to all that myself. Nodes plz. And names. The default can be 'Rose', because it's funny.
I'd second that. I care a little less about the NPCs than the story arcs themselves, and mayors/guilds/player alliances and node wars/sieges.
But recognisable NPCs that repond to the changes around them can really help put all of that to life. And work as the reliable framework when players' actions are too inconsistent to shape into a meaningful story.
I love weather in my mmo's and it can make an otherwise dry bland game like BDO have moments of pure whim and immersion that wouldn't exist without it. It's important to me that weather is dynamic. Even in the early days of mmos the fact that FFXI weather had enough randomness to it to be hard for the average player to predict made the system feel like a truly immersive part of the world. In FFXI's case it even had the advantage of directly effecting monster spawns making it feel both like the events of the world have progressed but that what advanced 'time' had a real in gameplay impact that mattered to the way the world worked.
The most recent mmo's have shifted to a more simplistic system. Or have they? I think what is really happening is that there is a fight programmers of these systems often have about how predictable and variable in visuals and effect weather should have. In TL for example the weather is fairly programmatic so to speak, but there is just enough randomness in it that while you can tell when the weather is supposed to happened most of the time you cannot predict it all the time and that is probably the right balance to make casuals and hardcore players happy. The fact that TL has player controlled weather adds to this unpredictability and while I don't want the same type of server wide effecting skills in Ashes I like the level of randomness in weather it introduces and the wide ranging effects it has.
Ashes as currently described by Steven as to how he wants it to work definitely reaches a lot of the impact I desire in a weather system. However, I'm not sure how much of it is still planned. Weather and seasons effecting crops has been planned but we haven't seen that system develop enough yet for me to say if modern Ashes still intends that. I also think it's important to have gradients of weather in Ashes and I'm unsure if the developers agree that is how they want the end product to work as well. Unlike TL and FFXI Ashes has the reasonable potential, given how high fantasy they have originally claimed they wanted to go, to have magical weather not just mundane weather. For more on my thoughts of how that could look like you can check this thread here https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/52513/underrealm-weather-and-magical-storms#latest
Overall I am looking forward to weather and seasons in Ashes, it makes some of the art choices I disagree with look genuinely tolerable or even magical.
No, actually, there's no specific implication. I'm very imaginative and I don't need that.
This is a thing I wish I could broadcast to every MMO developer out there. If you don't feel you can hit that space, that you can't implement dynamic NPCs, not everyone needs that. There are thousands of us out here RP-ing and PvP-RP-ing and whatever else.
What I need is a semi-consistent label to attach my imagined identity to, and just enough of a goal to naturally distinguish them from each other.
I don't need them to have a questline, I don't need them to have a function that applies to me, the player. I just need them to not be 'Resident' or 'Guard'.
My imagination/subconscious will do the rest, bonus if they want something in life.
"Do you think they'll bring in much Cod today?" - Remus, near the docks.
Done. Remus is now my BOY and I will bring him as much Cod as he wants if I for some reason get the feeling that there's too little Cod in his life. Or rather, I will fish Cod, sell it on the Marketplace, and imagine that he bought some. No quest/personal advancement required.
Reminds me of Overwatch. They didn't even have a storyline or anything, but a few flavourful comments between the different characters and a couple cutscenes was enough to create a rich imagination of what the world was like and who the characters were.
I would say that exactly what you are talking about was when I had the most fun. Groups of 2-4 with whoever I could find, killing starred monsters in Daragal or roaming looking for spots that made sense for the group.
It would be nice to have the "dynamic world" that was told to me when I first learned about the game. Where the monster spawns and difficulty changed day to day, and you might have to roam around your node to find the right grouping of monsters that made sense for your team comp/goals.
I get that type of association with NPCs if they stand out because they are, say, the only fish seller in the market, but a name on its own in a sea of names doesn't do anything for me. Even if they all voiced a particular goal, they'd be no different to me than nameless GTA NPCs that despawn when you turn your back on them.
Yes, but I'm wired like that. I've never checked/tested what the limit is, but I know it must be more than 1300 datapoints.
It's not necessarily that I always remember their names unprompted, either, once you get past about 500, but if their name is mentioned, e.g. by another NPC or text somewhere, I'll know who is being referred to.
I know that part doesn't work this way for others, though. The effect on them, as it's been explained to me, is different, but still positive.