Vaporware ala Chronicles of Elyria?

Does anyone think this is going to see the light of day? Great concept and this was very interesting 2-3 years ago.

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As a CoE survivor (wasn't in for any money fortunately, just emotional investment) I can safely say AoC is not on the same planet. AoC puts out more tangible progress weekly the CoE would every year. CoE never showed a single second of live gameplay, everything was pre-rendered. Most people do not realize how common pre-rendering of 'previews' are in the game industry and how easy it is to fake development.

My assessment of why CoE imploded was that Caspian had absolutely no skills as a producer. I worked briefly in the game industry doing UI programming and got to see how important producers are for successful software development, they keep a project on track, find and correct where there is slippage and prevent feature creep from the designers from endangering the project.

Caspian on the other hand would constantly gut and major underlying engine code effectively resetting his team to square one. At the same time in had no ability to set or communicate timelines internally or externally and would reportedly just pass on the expected completion dates that his developers would give to the public with no padding and then announce delays on the promised delivery date despite having known for weeks that it was going to be missed. You can imagine how terrible it must have been to work for such a person. Caspian was a creative guy with some very nice ideas but ultimately sabotaged himself by refusing to hire a proper producer to discipline his own excesses. Basically, Caspian was to CoE as Elon Musk is to Twitter.

I'm not familiar with AoC upper management but they clearly did not fall into as similar hole.

Ludullu

Lodrig wrote: »

I'm not familiar with AoC upper management but they clearly did not fall into as similar hole.

They did. But Steven saw that they did and hired a good producer. That's kinda why we're several years behind the initial promised release date and why we aren't getting any promises anymore (well, relatively speaking). So Ashes wasn't too far from CoE, but it kept moving away farther and farther with time.

Lodrig

NiKr wrote: »

Lodrig wrote: »

I'm not familiar with AoC upper management but they clearly did not fall into as similar hole.

They did. But Steven saw that they did and hired a good producer. That's kinda why we're several years behind the initial promised release date and why we aren't getting any promises anymore (well, relatively speaking). So Ashes wasn't too far from CoE, but it kept moving away farther and farther with time.

Oh, sorry was not aware of that history, was just going off the present pattern which looked productive, how long ago did the professional producer come in?

Laetitian

TreVerity wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

Decent. Did you see the Mage Showcase stream?

No, I have not taken the time. I thought this game was coming out way prior to the current time table, and I honestly wonder how relevant it will even be 3-5 years from now. I wish I had not heard of this game back in 2017-18.Like if I just heard about it this year, I might have more hope. But ,they had a playable demo of the pvp back in 2018 and it felt like things were not far from being done, then poof, nothing else for 5 years.

As someone who wasted some money on Camelot Unchained and wasn't surprised or disappointed, I think this mindset is incredibly immature. They make it fairly clear to you in every presentation that the project may basically end up taking a decade, and yet here you are expecting to be surprised by a launch around the corner every time you happen to think about the game again.
Just how many times can you hear "It's done when it's done" without realising that you have to find something else to spend your energy on if the development itself isn't fulfilling for you to watch?

As far as "relevancy" at launch is concerned, if the game is good enough, it will change the landscape of what's relevant. And if it's not good enough to impress people 5 years from now, it wouldn't be that big of a benefit to you as a consumer if you got to play that game today anyway.
The playerbase who's only in it for flashy animations at the height of technological advancements is it's own worst enemy. They will never be served a community-building, engaging MMO, because the scale of good MMO development will always cause the genre to lag behind by a fair bit.

Ludullu

Lodrig wrote: »

Oh, sorry was not aware of that history, was just going off the present pattern which looked productive, how long ago did the professional producer come in?

Iirc 2019 or somewhere there? @Noaani you've been here a long time, do you remember when they got the producer?

unknownsystemerror

They have hired multiple producers in the intervening time. Intrepid has had stumbles to be sure, and challenges. Nothing unexpected during development by a new startup studio.

To the OP and others trying to compare this to COE, it is weaksauce at best. Jeremy Walsh never put out anything but words to support the money he took from his community. At the end he gave them store bought assets with some sort of on the rails demo that game development intern could put out in a week to try and put off the eventual lawsuit, he then went to work on Kingdoms of Elyria, a game none of his backers asked for or was needed in Unity, to give him something to show a judge that he was still working on a game, and thus could not be charged with fraud. If you want a chronicle of this (pun intended) I suggest looking at the various videos Kira has put out covering it over the years.

Ashes has produced iteration after iteration. I have tested in every iteration that Ashes has put out externally. I have a couple hundred hours in an actual game. While it won't be the final "release" version of that game, it is disingenuous at best to try and compare the two.

Depraved

i REALLY wanted to play COE, ugh so sad it didn't happen. in fact, I found out about nw and aoc while looking for info on COE hahaha. someone needs to make a game like coe or caspian needs to finish and launch it ugh

Lodrig

Same, the 'vision' of CoE was good, I particularly felt the ~1 year character lifespan with inherited property and skill buffs was a brilliant idea as it would allow for a lower stress skill progression system like that of EVE online while soft capping power levels and providing an alternative to monthly subscription models. Maybe someone will revive that idea in the future. For the time being AoC is the last best hope for an indie MMO.

Ravel

I hope this game will be released some day. But I will not be checking on it on a daily basis. That would be just too exhaustive for me.

truenoir

Ashes is going to be a great game as someone who played during the alpha I have no fear that it will be vaporware. Honestly too im glad AOC hasn't adopted a rush release it makes sense that any game that hasn't spent atleast 7 years building a mmorpg is probably going to flop. Problem with most is they have all these great systems planned but as the game developers attempt to program them they realize the budget needed to be 10x what they planned.
Aoc has shown us every stage of development its really the last hope for mmorpg for a lot of us. Even if there was another game to compete they would be starting from now. And indie games won't meet the players standards or have the development team for it. But I know you guys are dying for a game but be glad development team is going for quality over quantity. They could have choose a quick 5 year turn over and had less then 40% of all promises like black desert or half of the games released. FF14 is still going strong but the game was garbage when it released and the storyline being jrpg style is torture so lots of people pay to skip it. So it really isn't a contender for fun replayability compared to what Aoc is offering. Just some things to consider. Also if you don't want to purchase anything you don't have to here. I have and I don't regret it but I see a valuable investment for mmo future.

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