Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Only when the game is bad as known as being "MMO RPG", but when the game is a sanbox or at least very sandboxy then everytime you travel is another experience
I'd argue that this is more about the dynamism of the environment and politics than the sandbox nature. I know you probably mean this too, but I'm just being picky about any potential semantics arguments.
An MMORPG designed with a simplistic overworld doesn't encourage travel, and offloading dynamism to players I feel seldom works, personally, because most players just aren't that interesting.
I'd prefer a skill or spell for Cleric classes to add value to the team work and potentially selling the service. Let's tell 2 destinations to save maximum that you can learn with a quest (that requires some few items to farm/buy).
The more there are quests that delete some items from the game, the more the economy will be good.
Who's "we"? Speak for yourself and don't presume to know what everyone else wants.
No, it's perfectly appropriate to say it, but people need to understand that a genre death takes years or decades, not weeks or months as was the case back then.
As to Albion Online hitting a peak of 350,000 players - that is specifically for Steam. As of writing this, there are 7,458 players playing the game on Steam.
Don't use Albion as an example of anything good for the PvP focused MMORPG sub-genre.
As to your comment that the basis of this game is that PvP changes the world - I know, I was the first to phrase it like that (before Steven did).
The problem is, PvE is supposed to build the world, and the PvE is shit. Why PvP over the PvE building blocks if that PvE itself is shit?
Ashes core design - the one you are talking about where PvP changes the world - it requires thst Ashes have better *PvE* than any other MMORPG out there.
but damn i am surprised if there is any Topic still where People actually truly want to answer on each other with the Main Topic addressed.
Even the Meme Topic is as dried out as the Sandsquall Desert
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
I am in the guildless Guild so to say, lol. But i won't give up. I will find my fitting Guild "one Day".
🚫 Why Ashes of Creation Doesn’t Have Global Fast Travel
1️⃣ Maintains the Integrity of the Economy 💰
In most MMOs with fast travel, markets become centralized, and resources lose value because players can instantly jump to farming hotspots.
Ashes prevents this by making resource transportation an actual gameplay mechanic—you need to physically move goods across the world, leading to trade routes, caravan escorts, and PvP ambushes.
2️⃣ Encourages Meaningful Conflict & Strategy ⚔️
Without instant teleportation, wars and sieges require planning. A zerg guild can’t just teleport their entire force in seconds.
This means guilds must strategically position their members, reinforcing Ashes’s vision of regional control and player-driven conquest.
3️⃣ Supports the Node System & Player Settlements 🏰
If everyone could teleport instantly, most of the world would be ignored, with players clustering in a few key areas.
Instead, nodes develop based on where players actually live and play, making every server’s world unique.
✅ What Travel Options Do Exist?
While Ashes doesn’t have global fast travel, there are several travel systems that make movement easier without breaking the game’s core mechanics:
🔹 Scientific Metropolis Teleports – If a scientific node reaches metropolis level, it provides limited teleportation.
🔹 Flight Paths & Airships – NPC-controlled transport between major hubs.
🔹 Family Summon System – Limited group teleport for small parties.
🔹 Mount Breeding & Speed Upgrades – High-tier mounts will significantly reduce travel time.
🔹 Caravan & Ferry Systems – Transport not just goods, but players as well.
🎯 Balancing Player Convenience vs. Game Depth
I completely understand that some players don’t want to spend half their play session traveling. That’s a valid concern. But Ashes of Creation is built around deliberate, strategic travel, where choosing where you live and play matters.
Rather than teleporting to any dungeon instantly, players are encouraged to establish local bases, use guild coordination, and plan their adventures—just like in a real living, breathing world.
🔥 Final Thought: Would Fast Travel Kill the Experience?
MMOs like New World and ESO rely on convenience mechanics, but at the cost of world depth and immersion. Ashes aims to create something different—an MMO where travel isn't just a loading screen, but a meaningful part of the adventure.
It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay. But if Ashes of Creation can successfully balance travel mechanics, while keeping the world engaging and dynamic, it has the potential to be one of the most immersive and rewarding MMOs in years.
Would love to hear thoughts—what travel mechanics would feel balanced to you without ruining the game’s depth? 🚀
TLDR: All forms of fast travel are bad for PVP/PVX games
Fixing the "it ruins PvP" situation is pretty damn easy. You simply prevent anyone from engaging in PvP if they've utilized any method of travel aside from their mount. The amount of time would depend on the distance between you and wherever you're traveling. Problem solved.
Now you can't engage in war unless you hoofed it the entire way at some point, and I don't have to spend the large majority of my time staring at the map and my mount's backside.
Edit I will say this right now - this is still my number one issue as to why I'm not playing much at the moment. "Oh hey guys, where are you leveling at?" "We're in the south desert." "Great, I'm at Winstead. I'm gonna go play something else, call me if you go somewhere that isn't 30+ minutes away."
As opposed to now, where I'm residing around a specific city or location because it takes too long to get anywhere else?
Plus I want to stay around where I'm a citizen anyway?
Further, without some form(s) of faster travel the last majority of the map will be empty anyway. Look at New World's start where fast travel cost was prohibitive, and we all walked everywhere. Everybody congregated around Windsward, Everfall and Brightwood. Why? 'Cause they were in the center of the map, they were where everyone started, and they were the first places that got built up and had any chance of staying that way. Places like Ebonscale were ghost towns. Nobody wanted the far away nodes, nobody built them up, and there was no economy in any of them. You can see a similar thing happening in Ashes already - you go to one of the desert towns and you see, what, maybe 3-4 pages in the market on the high end? But when you're at Winstead, you have 40 pages.
I agree with your reasoning, but feel you need to take things one step back.
Before getting to that though, I want to establish two fundamental truths.
The first is that running content (specifically dungeons and bosses) is the core of an MMORPG. It is what defines the genre. It is what we seek others out in game for, why we form social bonds in game. It is where the bulk of MMORPG players derive the bulk of their fun from. One could go as far as to say that the content *is* the game, and everything else is there to support that.
The second is that travel generally refers to time taken to get to a given piece of content.
Now, I agree that in a game with open world PvP with some form of stakes at hand, fast travel is bad for the reasons you state. I don't think anyone is arguing that.
The problem is, not having fast travel is the same as decreasing time spent on the core of the game - decreasing the amount of time players spend on the most fun aspect of the game.
Any time a game is faced with a decision where one of the options is to decrease the amount of time players spend having fun, and it isn't blatantly obvious that this is the wrong decision, the actual bad decision has already been made.
In Ashes case, caravans are the main reason fast travel doesn't work well with the game. They are the only thing of note that will have zergs enabled due solely or mostly to fast travel. Boss encounters are not a factor here, as the determining factor as to whether they are able to be served is their spawn mechanism, not travel (and static spawn is always able to be zerged, a random spawn is not reliably able to be zerged).
Thus, the issue is in the design specifics of caravans, not in whether the game should or should not have fast travel.
Archeage is a good example of a better way to do this. It had a system similar to caravans with that games trade packs. However, they still had fast travel (an absurd amount of it).
The thing is, they designed the game so that the major profit aspect of trade packs was in crossing the ocean with them, and there is obviously no need for fast travel in the ocean. Thus, fast travel existed to get players to content, but it didn't interfere with the caravan equivalent in any way at all.
The bad decision in Ashes is having caravans be equally viable to attack anywhere in the world. Instead, have areas of the world where they need to travel through (or are more profitable if they do), and make this the area where you want to attack caravans. Then you can have fast travel in the rest of the world - and you then just keep the actual games content to the parts of the world with fast travel.
That is how you make good decisions. You don't just stupidly, blindly carry on with ill-concieved early decisions even if that means making specific decisions that are objectively bad for the game.
You're exaggerating!
In many other games, people spend 30 minutes just leaving town and chatting on Discord. You're trying to spread fear among the devs just because you're lazy and don't want to travel, and are afraid of PvP.
People are happy to waste their own time.
They are not happy for others to waste their time.