I really don't like how players turn into ash when they die

I just want to say I saw one of Ashes of Creation streams a couple months ago and there's one part that really bugged me. I really hate how players turn to ash when they die. I honestly think that is going to make a very boring and empty battlefield during encounters. I really hate disappearing corpses in games, obviously they need to disappear at some point but WoW does it really great, your corpse turns into a skeleton after resurrecting which I think is super sick. I feel like ashes would be better off just leaving corpses or bones instead of ash for a more gruesome and epic aftermath.

I really like to see the aftermath of a battle, it's almost as fun as the battle itself for me and seeing the carnage really amazes me a lot of the time. Leaving some dust and shadows after a raid wipe or a big PvP event sounds very lame to me and not at all exciting and I'd really hope that you guys would consider having actual corpses instead of fading to ash, thank you for reading my post.

Edit: To compromise with the people disagreeing, just keep the current animation because I doubt the devs will remove it. Instead of fading to dust, have the skin, meat, etc burn to ash but not the skeleton. This way we can have a very satisfying aftermath of a battle or raid wipe and it will also make the animation look even better.

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Vhaeyne

Dreoh wrote: »

Well, that depends on if the ash trail stays after you're revived or not

The expectation is that active players are going to be fully animated and killing each other as hard as possible. The DEVs should not have to rely on a performance gain from dead players.

Recluse74

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Dreoh wrote: »

Well, that depends on if the ash trail stays after you're revived or not

The expectation is that active players are going to be fully animated and killing each other as hard as possible. The DEVs should not have to rely on a performance gain from dead players.

Why not though? In Lineage 2, like Steven talked about in the stream.. we used to throw gold on the ground to lag out people with weak PC's... it seems to me that if you have, let us say, 100 bodies laying on the ground with different armor sets on that have to be rendered when you enter an area, it will slow down PC's quite a bit.

I mean.. this is the reason they do not want people to be able to throw items on the ground in the first place, it kills a server when it has to start accounting for people throwing random items on the ground all over the server or in one particular spot... so why is it so far fetched that having people turn to ash is doing it for the same reason?

So if player thrown items on the ground can hurt things server side and on the user side.. why is it hard to believe that players bodies laying on the ground during mass PvP does not have the same effect?

Noaani

Recluse74 wrote: »

Why not though? In Lineage 2, like Steven talked about in the stream.. we used to throw gold on the ground to lag out people with weak PC's... it seems to me that if you have, let us say, 100 bodies laying on the ground with different armor sets on that have to be rendered when you enter an area, it will slow down PC's quite a bit.

In large scale PvP, we are all going to look the same.

Recluse74

Noaani wrote: »

Recluse74 wrote: »

Why not though? In Lineage 2, like Steven talked about in the stream.. we used to throw gold on the ground to lag out people with weak PC's... it seems to me that if you have, let us say, 100 bodies laying on the ground with different armor sets on that have to be rendered when you enter an area, it will slow down PC's quite a bit.

In large scale PvP, we are all going to look the same.

Depends on if they force that on you or not. In GW2 it was an option in settings, and it was up to the player to use the setting best suited for their PC.

Vhaeyne

Noaani wrote: »

In large scale PvP, we are all going to look the same.

That is the worst case scenario. I think the goal is to have the network code good enough so that you don't have to make compromises like that if your internet and PC can handle it.

@Recluse74 So are you just expecting the start of every battle to be a lag fest. Then only the survivors get to duke it out with good performance? If so that is pretty low standards.

Y'all, need to keep in mind that they have ambitions to push PvP to 500v500. In order to get there that means that 1000 people will be able to control their character fully animated on the same battlefield. A moving animated character is far more complicated than a corpse or some ashes. This is with or without the character having a generic appearance. Players are still going to be spawning in new particles and objects with every move they use. Pets are going to be running around. It is going to be a lot for sure. That doesn't mean we just accept that the fight doesn't get good until X amount of people die and performance increases. If the server can only handle 100 v 100 with fully animated characters. They should not be allowing 250 v250 fights. Ideally they would stress test something like 600v600 to know that 500v500 could work.

Recluse74

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

In large scale PvP, we are all going to look the same.

That is the worst case scenario. I think the goal is to have the network code good enough so that you don't have to make compromises like that if your internet and PC can handle it.

@Recluse74 So are you just expecting the start of every battle to be a lag fest. Then only the survivors get to duke it out with good performance? If so that is pretty low standards.

Y'all, need to keep in mind that they have ambitions to push PvP to 500v500. In order to get there that means that 1000 people will be able to control their character fully animated on the same battlefield. A moving animated character is far more complicated than a corpse or some ashes. This is with or without the character having a generic appearance. Players are still going to be spawning in new particles and objects with every move they use. Pets are going to be running around. It is going to be a lot for sure. That doesn't mean we just accept that the fight doesn't get good until X amount of people die and performance increases. If the server can only handle 100 v 100 with fully animated characters. They should not be allowing 250 v250 fights. Ideally they would stress test something like 600v600 to know that 500v500 could work.

I do not know what I am expecting, But I know I am hoping it works the way they want it to.

As of right now, we have no clue how sieges will work.. In Lineage 2, just because you did not sign up for a siege, did not mean you could not participate. We did it all the time to make the defending or attacking clans guess what they would be facing. Meaning.. 1000 people sign up for attacking/defending, and then you have a ton of extras who show up.. meaning body counts will surpass the 1000 planned.

All I said in my first post is, is that I would bet that is what it is. Does not make me right or wrong, just that, this is where I would put my money if they gave me an option as to why they are doing it. If I was asked to put my money on 1 of 3 reasons.. Lore, Looks good, or PC performance... I would choose option 3... that is all I am saying.

When I heard 250 v 250.. I was quite shocked.. and when 500 V 500 was mentioned... I could not for the life of me figure out how they would pull it off. Just based on games I have played in the past, this number just seems to far out there, and I can only hope they prove me and anyone who else thinks like this, wrong. Because the more they talk about it, the more hope I get.. and I do not want to get to hyped about it before it is proven they can do it.

Vhaeyne

Recluse74 wrote: »

All I said in my first post is, is that I would bet that is what it is. Does not make me right or wrong, just that, this is where I would put my money if they gave me an option as to why they are doing it. If I was asked to put my money on 1 of 3 reasons.. Lore, Looks good, or PC performance... I would choose option 3... that is all I am saying.

When I heard 250 v 250.. I was quite shocked.. and when 500 V 500 was mentioned... I could not for the life of me figure out how they would pull it off. Just based on games I have played in the past, this number just seems to far out there, and I can only hope they prove me and anyone who else thinks like this, wrong. Because the more they talk about it, the more hope I get.. and I do not want to get to hyped about it before it is proven they can do it.

I hear ya,

500 v 500 seems like a really tall order to me too. The DEVs put that number out there. 250 v 250 is the goal, 500 v 500 is the hope I guess. I would have been fine with like 24 v 24 or something.

Just saying that no matter how many players can participate in a siege. The expectation is that the siege should be able happen with good performance with everyone alive and doing all of the things that players do. If players die and get turned into a less resource intense object that is fine, but it should not be relied on. If a siege goes on for its entire duration and no one dies because of good healing and smart plays. The server should be able to handle that. So I am skeptical that they choose the animation for a performance gain. I do expect that they would be happy with any performance gains from the animation though.

Noaani

Recluse74 wrote: »

If I was asked to put my money on 1 of 3 reasons.. Lore, Looks good, or PC performance... I would choose option 3... that is all I am saying.

I would chose option 1 here, because there are better ways of doing both of the other two - but ashes as a theme are kind of core to the game.

Dreoh

As someone who had done game development and worked with spawning entities and such. Even simple entities with minimal logic build up memory usage more than you would think. If the ash piles have any sort of logic tied to them, being anything from "do spells interact with them at all", to "do they keep memory reference of the player that died" will eat up memory.

Though the 5000 bears event does show that they've optimized considerably in that regard.

Recluse74

Dreoh wrote: »

As someone who had done game development and worked with spawning entities and such. Even simple entities with minimal logic build up memory usage more than you would think. If the ash piles have any sort of logic tied to them, being anything from "do spells interact with them at all", to "do they keep memory reference of the player that died" will eat up memory.

Though the 5000 bears event does show that they've optimized considerably in that regard.

That bear spawn was impressive. Would love to know his PC specs lol, and what the game looked like through his party members PCs.

Dygz

George Black wrote: »

I would rather the animation play on a dead body on the ground, when the player hits the respawn button.
With the current animation, skeletons zombies, cemetarys should not exist. Everything becomes ash.

But I think Steven is very into it so I don't think there will be a change.

Before leaving Verra, corpses did not immediately turn to ash. Could be that what Necromancers summon are fossils.
I'm not aware of the devs stating that Necromancers can raise skeletons and zombies of the recent dead.
Also, for all we know, what Necromancers do is use resurrection to partially reverse the turning to ash process - stopping short of recreating healthy flesh.

Vhaeyne

Dreoh wrote: »

As someone who had done game development and worked with spawning entities and such. Even simple entities with minimal logic build up memory usage more than you would think. If the ash piles have any sort of logic tied to them, being anything from "do spells interact with them at all", to "do they keep memory reference of the player that died" will eat up memory.

Though the 5000 bears event does show that they've optimized considerably in that regard.

I forgot about the 5000 bears. To me that is more evidence that the animation is there for the coolest, and not for any functional reason.

Dygz wrote: »

Before leaving Verra, corpses did not immediately turn to ash. Could be that what Necromancers summon are fossils.
I'm not aware of the devs stating that Necromancers can raise skeletons and zombies of the recent dead.
Also, for all we know, what Necromancers do is use resurrection to partially reverse the turning to ash process - stopping short of recreating healthy flesh.

A fiery dust skeleton or zombie could be cool. They could even be incorporeal.

--A unworldly smell of brimstone enters the air as a distorted fiery figure of that which once was slowly starts to emerge from the pile of ash. It picks up the weapon it once used in life and stares you down with eyes like that of a fiery sunset. As it moves forward towards you it leaves burnt footprints in the path behind it...--

Not sure it would get approval from Nagash...

Dygz

Nagash will transmute ash to bone if He needs to.

Asgerr

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Recluse74 wrote: »

I would be willing to bet it is about system resources, and making even larger scale battles possible. They are striving to get 250 v 250 or higher when it comes to large scale PvP, and that would not be possible if you have to have dead bodies still drawn at the same time. The graphics lag would be a nightmare for people who have PCs that run the game on lower end graphics just to play PvE stuff.. let alone participate in large scale PvP.

I am very skeptical about this point. When designing a mass combat system you assume that all of the players are going to be active and animated as much as possible. Dead bodies or ashes is going to be easier to handle than the full roster of active players that are expected.

It is not like the designers are hoping that as combat goes on performance of the game will improve.

I think that will depend on the server capabilities. Just remember the anecdote that Steven himself tells from his time in Lineage 2. He would litter a battlefield with coins, just so the game would crash on his enemies' end when approaching it.

Although I would wager it wouldn't be out of place for large scale PvP to not leave a pile of ash and you needing to worry about finding your pile again to loot your own materials. That mechanic shouldn't be present in a siege battle. Thus there should be no need for any remnant of your prior death to linger on the field.

Vhaeyne

Asgerr wrote: »

I think that will depend on the server capabilities. Just remember the anecdote that Steven himself tells from his time in Lineage 2. He would litter a battlefield with coins, just so the game would crash on his enemies' end when approaching it.

Although I would wager it wouldn't be out of place for large scale PvP to not leave a pile of ash and you needing to worry about finding your pile again to loot your own materials. That mechanic shouldn't be present in a siege battle. Thus there should be no need for any remnant of your prior death to linger on the field.

They also said they are very unlikely to let us put items on the ground. That I 100% would agree is mainly for performance. Preventing griefing and "Extra Creativity", is a side bonus.

Still if they are telling us sieges are 250 v 250. The servers should be fully able to deal with 250 v 250, and a reasonable amount of summoner pets.

Not sure if loot-able bodies will be a part of sieges. If so the answer is simple. Don't bring everything you think is valuable to a war zone. I would just bring my gear, a mount, a little buff food... Not anything worth losing outside of gear.

Hemlocked

The ashes looks cool imo, feels a bit more original and literally fits with the game's title. Also on a 100v100 battleground, or even 250v250, the number of skeletons on the ground would just end up being ridiculous, especially if players are respawning and dying multiple times. Performance-wise that would get bad pretty fast, unless you have the skeletons disappearing, which kind of defeats the point.

I do agree that seeing a battleground after the end of a battle littered with hundreds of skeletons would be cool. But I also think it'd get boring quick.

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