Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
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.
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.
Comments
In Ashes you can already wear two sets of equipment, Crafting + Regular. Maybe they could make it so the transmog applies to the crafting gear. You can wear that around town and chatting etc. Who cares about whether your gear matches your appearance if it's just crafting?
Or transmog goes away the second you activate offensive abilities. Anything that breaks Stealth breaks transmog.
In PvP, it's also not a problem for a game like WoW, because there are no real consequences for winners or losers. It's all match-based for points and currency. If you're doing battlegrounds, the PvP is casual anyway, so who cares what gear other people are wearing. You see someone who looks like they're wearing rags totally crush you one time, then you respawn and avoid them for the rest of the match. No biggie. In Arenas, you don't have a choice who to fight. You're either fighting 1v1, or against a very small number of people, so you have to just automatically assume the worst of all your enemies.
In a game like Ashes, PvP events have real consequences on the day-to-day gameplay. Your caravans can be destroyed, costing you many hours worth of effort in one fell swoop if your team can't coordinate on who's most efficient to focus fire on in a large offensive push in a short period of time. In war events, you can lose node XP, gold, access to certain content features, or in a siege, have your node de-leveled. It's always serious.
I know Intrepid currently plans to have some sort of "gear quality identifier" system to justify the existence of their cash shop, but I'm highly skeptical of how well that will work and how seamlessly it will transition into the visuals of the game world. I think it either won't convey enough information clearly enough, or it will convey the right amount of information in such an unnatural way that it will make large battles look like a total mess on-screen. I'm sick of relying on an overuse of UI elements to play a game properly.
This same system is what they'd have to use for people wearing Transmog, and I'll believe in its quality as a solution to a slew of pretty obvious PvP gameplay problems when I see it.
So although I do love transmog as a system, I think it presents too many problems in a game like Ashes where gear does have stats and PvP does, in virtually every occurrence, have serious consequences for its winners and losers.
If you’ve collected a gear piece, you should be able to use its likeness on other gear. Sensible restrictions of cloth-to-cloth and 2H-to-2H are really all that’s needed.
Without transmogs or style-changing features, then everyone ends up in the same gear by endgame and that’s just a dull experience.
No free transmoging tho, either the piece becomes "in use" or it's destroyed on applying the appearance to another piece of gear.
But with that being said, i would also like if there's a variety of settings to disable visualizing transmogs from other players in certain situations.
A few examples:
-Never Disable
-Disable Outside of Nodes
-Disable if not in Group/Guild/Alliance
-Disable in Declared War/PvP Event/Open Seas
-Always Disabled
I do understand that people enjoy transmog because they like to play dress up and roleplay or even just to make their character look cool.
In a perfect game I guess transmogs/cosmetics would be something that you could only see inside like... taverns and guild halls or something. And the rest of the time you'd have to make yourself look cool by actually wearing good gear.
You can only put cloth looks on cloth armor and plate on plate, etc.
Deceptful appearance transmogs would be a pain indeed but then again... a way of treat assesment can be to just look how much healthpoints a character in itself has. At least this is how it is in WoW.
You can pretty much see if fighting would pay off or not.
In 1-vs-1's as well as in group battles in general.
WoW PvP felt like garbage to me since Burning Crusade first released and I stopped caring.
But dayum has it deteriorated since then. People became worse players for all kinds of reasons most probably and to say it how it is
" You play Alliance to look fabolous and s°°k in PvP.
You play Horde to be an ugly mofo but rule the battlegrounds. "
I know a person who played WoW ever so often when I didn't.
And since 10 years or so, Alliance just kept spreading their buttcheeks for the Hordes long & hard... weapons
Dunno what awaits in Ashes.
But I doubt treat assesment will be done primarily by looking at someone's highlevel gear or lack-off.
even better if we get an option to disable them
Personally, I don't know how to feel. I see a lot of compelling opinions, but there is rarely a solution that satisfies all players when it comes to divisive topics
I'd love to see more examples of systems that people like or dislike in other games, and why that is!
This way you could decide to destroy your old gear and keep the look that you like OR destroy a piece of gear that you could have traded instead. Either you get the Transmog or you get to trade the Item, you choose.
Give players hard choice
The fact that costumes exist make all worries about wanting to see if a person is wearing plate vs cloth irrelevant. If you want to see how much armor they are wearing, just hit them. Other games that don't restrict armor by class work just fine. After a couple attacks you should know how tanky they are.
Next, people necessarily don't want to wear a costume to hide their armor type, but they will have to wear one if that's the only way they can hide it.
Lastly, the whole idea that you can look at someone from a distance and see exactly what armor they are wearing and all of their ability bonuses seems made up. Possibly as made up as a hobbit unexpectedly surviving a spear thrust because he was wearing a chainmail shirt under a cloth shirt
In the second case, I, who hate the Transmogs, would accept it much more readily if I could get rich off the backs of faschionistas ).
So I don't want to see a warrior with plate armor running in a speedo.
Costumes are already a done deal. They've been paid for and are not going away. There also won't be speedo or bikini costumes (until we hit the cash grab point of the game's lifecycle)
Costumes should not be allowed in places where combat might happen, that's the point.
That would be, like, 97% of the game space.
Personally I believe this follows the same ideology as things like LFG tools and server shards, if you allow anyone to transmog anything your giving the player the entire 7 course meal without asking them to do anything.
It is pretty important for players to have earned the gear and any subsidiary requirements to equip it BEFORE they can transmog it. Please ensure that looks matter by placing the above mentioned requirements on transmog, its important to a game like this.
Also, typically, you have to earn the Gear before you can use it as a transmog - in MMORPGS that include Gear as a transmog.
For decades we've had games with transmog in pvp, including transmogs of differing armour types - it has 0 impact.
All of these games (ashes included) have clear and obvious specific mechanics that tell you the effects from the armour that your enemy is wearing. There is absolutely zero effect on combat from the visual obfuscation on the character model - drastically moreso true for a group fight oriented tab mmo, but it's true even for small scale action combat games as well.
Transmog/style choice is important for games in general nowadays, it's a bare minimum expectation to have it, and really it should be striving to have a more expansive transmog system than prior games once that stage of development is reached.
If someone is incapable of seeing the <tier 7 light armour buff> on the enemy and is incapable of noticing that the enemy is <insert potential armour interactions with dodges / stamina related things> and is incapable of connecting the dots of playstyle and spell usage, that's both a skill issue and a basic visual data comprehension issue on their part.
Everyone looking the same as they all wear the same 3 meta armour sets is dumb - and in terms of recognizing the status of your opponent, you have ingame mechanics + buff icons + name recognition and guild tags for that. Heck, you can also be recognized specifically for your choice of style. When I see <person wearing X unique transmog> in the distance, before the tags and nameplates are rendering in, I can go "oh wait, I know who looks like that..." and react accordingly.
Is a massive improvement to the social elements of an mmo to have transmog and a massive improvement for visual enjoyment in an overwhelming part of the gamer population.
You still have a visual representation of "achievement" in that if you want the <main content boss of the day> transmog, you have to kill it to unlock it.