Hot Take: Why waste time on races no one is going to care about?

Talking mostly about Niküa here. We know they are never going it see their architecture in a major node. I have already seen people complain about it and propose wacky systems to make the node architecture more balanced. Tulnar and Empyrean will dominate, and we will see a good amount of humans. Only Dünir if they fix them.

It's like, why not just scrap Niküa? Less than 5% of the player base is going to pick them... The orcs and wood elves are going to be less than 10% for sure(better but not great). They could hold off on these races for now.

Instead of having things come in pairs for no reason. Why not just scrap the races and put stuff in, people like actually later? Or not put them in at launch all together to save budget and development time?

We all know in our heart of hearts that some of these races are a just not going to see much play, and better races could be put in their place after launch.

I would rather see more exciting races down the line in an expansion personally. They could do polls to see what races to add or remove from the game. We don't need nine whole ass races at launch, when realistically only five are going to be hype.

Feel free to tell me how crazy and wrong I am.

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Merek

I think half of the races in fantasy games aren't very appealing to begin with, however, I'll use whatever is statistically viable. That's the way of the meta-maggot.

Gaspard wrote: »

I am disappointed that the developers do not have more creativity

This is far more apparent with the aesthetic choices of the cosmetics, they aren't creative, just disconnected from a consistent overarching theme. They're honestly gross.

"B-b-b-but that's the pooooint, each pack is a different theme!" I understand that, but aesthetically, their quality is so turbulent it's gross. They go from looking interesting, to outright Google Play, mobile MMO.

Vhaeyne wrote: »

Keep in mind that the decision to have the visual aesthetic of gear is locked to each race is still in play. Even if you liked the facial features of a Niküa the theme could be a put off. Dulnir will be wearing steal and stone while you are walking around in bamboo and bone. Again, I just can't see it being popular enough to exist as a player race out the gate.

It's a very strange decision. I don't get it, personally, especially when the game is still so early into development. They should definitely look into changing it because the only reason they'd keep it would be to promote cosmetic purchases.

insomnia

And i'm tired of seeing people making posts, as if they speak for everybody. Where did you get the %'s from?
Most people that will play the game eventualy, proberly didn't participate in poll (if there is one). It doesn't have to be evenly devided.

Gaul_

Intrepid Studios has already said that they think it's a great idea to develop parts of the game that a minority of players will experience. So that would apply to less popular cultures as well as rare questlines and bosses. It's not a waste of time to create content that will not be experienced by the majority of the player base.

Vhaeyne

Gonna try to be short here:

@JustVine has the best argument. I mean, I would hate for them to have to refund the six people that like the race... XD Jokes aside. The race is kind of a promise. I can't be mad at that.

@Nerror I like the spirit of having more verity, but it could be better verity. It's why I used Khajiit as an example. People like their cat races. Why not just give them that Polynesian flavor? Something people would be excited about.

@insomnia I linked the metrics for popular races for other games. I have been on this forum for a while and seen plenty of polls for races with Ashes. Niküa always come out on bottom. It's common knowledge. I am not speaking for everyone by making a "hot take" thread... I know it's a hot take. XD

@Virtek death animations it table tops... It's pretty simple. As a DM do you think Steven was describing character and NPC deaths to his players with the way the death animation works in Ashes in the OG table-top custom setting? I don't. Just thinking as a DM, the world would be entirely different if people turned to ashes when they died. Cultures and beliefs would change in mass to account for such a thing. Its no trivial change. Not if you want your world to feel believable.

@Merek The race armor thing is one of the few things I hate about Ashes... Thant and family summons. Most things I am happy to put up with. I don't think it's going to ever change, but thinking about it really showcases how much extra work a single race is. If they are going to put forth all this work, I would want them all to be bangers.

To all: I had a lot to respond to with this one, so if I missed some finer points of your post, I apologize in advanced. I am not trying to discredit anyone's argument by ignoring a point. Realistically, I don't expect a random "hot take" thread to change any minds. I just wanted to put it out there to see what others think. Justvine is ultimately the winner here. More than anyone, I think his post illustrates why nothing should be done about my take. I still wish all nine races were so cool, it would be hard to pick one... Right now, I am looking at two, maybe three of nine... I have also never player a MMO where all the races are compelling choices... If the faces were not so ugly on every race, ESO might be that game. XD

Anyway, thanks for the responses.

Mxyzptlk

don't forget racial skills, weapon or crafting bonuses.
This point will really decide which race we will play.
devs can make sure that all races are played
example
i don't like elves, but i want to play archer, and only elves have the bonus i want on the bow, so i will be forced to choose that.
my consolation will be that the armor will hide the appearance.

Vhaeyne

Gaspard wrote: »

don't forget racial skills, weapon or crafting bonuses.
This point will really decide which race we will play.
devs can make sure that all races are played
example
i don't like elves, but i want to play archer, and only elves have the bonus i want on the bow, so i will be forced to choose that.
my consolation will be that the armor will hide the appearance.

It's been brought up. I just think the primary reason to like a race should be the aesthetic. At least for MMORPGS.

Why play an Eleven ranger if you like dwarfs? Maybe Elves have better accuracy, but Dwarfs might use bows that require more strength to aim. The stats and abilities could be balanced to the point that people should be picking the thing they want to look at for the next few thousand hours they are going to spend with their character. Not what plays better.

If the game had awful graphics, I would care less. Since, ashes looks fantastic playing as a race you don't like the looks of will be more noticeable. I would be pissed as a tank to learn that Niküa make the best tanks by a margin that makes other races an awful choice. I think most tanks would not like Niküa's style when they are trying to be a big armored mofo...

Ehrgeiz

Gaspard wrote: »

I am disappointed that the developers do not have more creativity
elves, orcs, dwarves, humans ...
we see this in all the games, it's boring, it's not interesting.
for this reason i will play tulnar, it's the only race that stands out from the crowd and that is unique to ashes of creation
I would have liked to see something else
races never seen before
original things ...
not a copy and paste of what you've seen before.
less breeds, more originality

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Please someone have to do it?
What about you?
Oh nono

Ehrgeiz

I want undeads

Vhaeyne

Ehrgeiz wrote: »

I want undeads

Yeah? Sounds cool!

Except, undead in Ashes will likely just a swirl of dust because we turn into a pile of dust instead of a corpse on death...

So unless you want to be like a dust elemental of some kind, I don't think it's going to happen. XD

McMackMuck

I don't think we can assume that 'no one' will care about some races just because they are less popular. A percentage will still want to play them. There have been some polls covering the distribution. From memory, no race or archetype was less than 5% (? - I have a bad memory)

Steven owned the September 2019 release date broken promises really well.

Steven also promised 8 +1 (KS $2.5M) races. A lot of people would be entitled to 'bait and switch' refunds if Intrepid don't deliver 8+1 races. Intrepid is 'wasting time on races no one is going to care about' because they would damage their relationship with the community if they didn't keep another promise. How many promises can a developer break before the community loses faith? Not many, I think.

McMackMuck

I agree that the selection of races could be more inspired, but they were set in stone before kickstarter.

Vhaeyne

@McMackMuck

Yeah, I already agreed that Justvine was right about how damaging broken promises would be for intrepid. I am not a fan of broken promises myself. My hot take thread was never expected to see anything actually actionable happen. I just thought my take might be worth discussion.

I think you still might miss some of the sentiment of my take. Yes, technically 5% is not "no one". (I do think 5% is an overly optimistic estimation for people who would like Niküa, but we can role with it.)

Anyway, they could let 5% of players down with no Niküa, but how many people would be lifted up if they replaced Niküa with a race type that would excite 15-25% of the player base? What if we were talking about like a heavenly opposite to Tulnar? Pretending that Tulnar are Thiefling and Aasimar were on the table in this analogy? I am pretty sure the prospects of a very customizable angelic race would get more than 5% of players excited. It doesn't have to be that It could be undead, vampires, catpeople or any other manner of popular races that seem to do well in every MMORPG they are in. The point is they could do better, but for weird duality there is two of each race and some of them are not gonna do so well.

edit:
Anyway, I just wrote all this out only to see that you posted and agree... XD In which case cheers.

Only leaving this response in case some lurker feels the same way you do and wanted a full response from me.

Nerror

9 races equally distributed = 11.11% that play each race. 5% isn't that small a percentage with that in mind.

Vhaeyne

Nerror wrote: »

9 races equally distributed = 11.11% that play each race. 5% isn't that small a percentage with that in mind.

11% would be nice.

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/45378/playable-race-poll/p1

https://www.strawpoll.me/20697226/r

https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/45547/races-poll

https://www.strawpoll.me/20710068/r

Now I know we are never going to have good data. I just searched polls and linked the first two I found. Not exactly an in-depth meta study of the subject, but it shows some of the sentiments I see with Ashes races. Oddly, lacking the simping for Tulnar that is ever present. I wish we had a poll with thousands of responses.

I have nothing against some of these races. If I wanted to be racists against a fantasy race, I would just make fun of the Tulnar or the lalafell(FFXIV). One is never alone in their dislike for these races.

5% is that small when a handful of races are pushing like: 35-30% and the rest are all 5% or lower.
Dünir could be greater than 40% realistically if they get the proportions right.

If they had a system in place where making a new race was not that bad because it did not involve an aesthetic variant for every armor/gender and building in the game. Then I would be on team "put D&D PHB and all the supplements in the game.".

Kesthely

Vhaeyne wrote: »

It's added work that could go into polishing other areas of the game.

Lets discuss this shall we.
Ashes of creation has a development team. In that team people have different roles and specialities. You have gaphical designers, 3d artists, people that build up the terrain, and programmers that put code and assets together.

So what needs to be done with a race
First of all we need tocode the racials.
We need to make assets that are used in nodes and in gear.

All other work needs to be done regardless of what or how many races are in the game. While you may think "all that art work is going to take a tremendous amount of extra time

But thats most likely not the case. A lot of what you will see in the node, will actually be templated. Animals, Food, Water, common building materials, they all share with each race. So whats left is the furniture and the houses.

Repetiveness kills a game
We've seen this as a perfect example in New world. The game is boring. Everything is repeated, or feels repeated time and time again. There is to little diversity, and it makes the game boring and unfun. In order to not feel repetetive, you need to have randomizers and a lot of different assets. If we for an arbitrary number say you need 90 of each type of asset to avoid "boredom" then each race will have 10 of them. The amount of assets still need to be made, there is actually little to no extra time in having x amount of races at LAUNCH of the game.

On Expansions on the other hand you have a lot more work. you will need to add a lot of extra assets, and then implement them beeing used. This is more work then having the additional race at the start

"We won't see or nobody will play this race" Some races and class combinations will be more rare then others. to claim they will be non existant is absurd. If "only 3%" of the player base is going to play it, thats still 300 people concurrent on every server. People will definatly rig and trigger, or band up special race orientated nodes. Ashes is a pvp and community based game. If a community decides, were going to play Nikua, and were going to kill every non nikua in the node zoi to avoid them from contributing xp, you will get a nikua node.
Some server(s) will be known for harboring particular races, people will migrate to it if they want to live in their racial structures.

Atama

When the game was first proposed I was 100% ready to play an Empyrean elf.

Once we got a little more info about them and I saw how more races looked, their gear, architecture, and so on I fell in love with the Ren'Kai. I am all about them now. I might have an Empyrean alt but that will probably be a distant second fiddle.

I might make a Nikua. It depends on what their benefits are and how impactful those are. WoW has been cited in this thread, and I know that a lot of people pick their race in that game based on what bonuses they get.

Vhaeyne

@Kesthely

You have said nothing new or interesting. You just reworded what other people have already said. The only difference is you "tried" to explain how development job roles work, as if freeing up all the time those roles have to work on Niküa would not allow the devs to work on the other races more, or just come up with races people actually like instead. Which is certainly not true. They have a team size and a time budget. Every minute spent working on Niküa is a little less time they could spend on anything else within their role. It is not like they have a team that only works on Niküa, and I am asking to put them out of a job.

300 people will not be enough to "band up" and get a node. That is just wishful thinking. I also already made this point myself. When I said that the only way we would see a Niküa node is if there is a massive effort to do it for the meme.

@Atama

Again, I think it is utterly shitty that people only thinking about playing Niküa for stats. To me, that is a failed race. It could have been any number of fantasy things people do like. Instead, it's: "well I hate the way my character looks in game, but I love the way he sims on this spreadsheet!".

I want everything about Ashes to be good. I hope you guys are seeing that.

Kesthely

@Vhaeyne Your presumptous about a lot of things. First of all, pre launch statistics say nothing about how many people will play, or how often a certain race's nodes will be used. Second, you know nothing about the storyline or lore related to each of the races. The races might be an integral part of the storyline. Third you asume because you don't like a certain race, nobody does. and again you know nothing about developing. Creating assets is something they can scale up indefinatly, the other programming they cant. Assets don't need to be tested, they are just made. We already know they have randomization algorythms to randomize assets in a node, as well as items on tables, in closets etc. You fail to realize that the biggest hurdles are not assets, its programmming, Server structure, classes, augments, weaponskills, encounters, they all need to be put in and they cost the most time.. I've worked in game development. Asset creation has never been the thing that delays or moves forward a release. Its building the underlying systems, and testing that takes the most time and effort. and while some of the team work on those aspects the rest works on different things, including creating more assets.

Vhaeyne

@Kesthely

You can't just not read the whole thread and decide I am presumptuous. No one is denying that some races are going to be 5% or lower in population.

Everything you just said has been addressed in the thread.

Except that the Nikua "might" be integral to the story. I will address that now:
Not even Intrepid cares about the story if it means they can make a better game by discarding parts of the lore.

I don't think I actually said: "I don't like Nikua". You decided that was my position for me.(you are wrong)

I have been saying not many people going to play it. Which even the fans of the race don't question. They say things like: "I like playing the underdog...".

Tragnar

I definitely do not think they should scrap any race, but to work on them in order to make them more appealing for people to choose.

If a race is supposed to look beautiful then they should be actually good to look at - especially the females

If a race is supposed to be unorthodox or straight up ugly, then it should at least look badass in some form

Like this was totally nailed down back in 2003 by the original wow dev team, you had some races that were looking really good (considering the standards back then) and if a race like tauren or undead were per say ugly, they had a certain coolness to them - like the undead guitar dance or just the intimidating huge look of the tauren - even the dwarfs had that drunkard type appearance

What I want is for the races to have character - otherwise it will be just a bland character creation option that is chosen by people that are desperate to stand out at all costs

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