[Feedback Master thread] Alpha Two Phase One | First Weekend Test Impressions

This is a master thread for general feedback coming out of the first-weekend test for Alpha Two Phase One! Feel free to leave your multi-topic, all-encompassing feedback posts here

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northie

I scoured the wiki because I was sure I had seen much of the exploration mechanics I complained about being planned. I hope these will be a thing in the future as far as exploration goes.

Utility skills exist that can help players discover hidden paths and entrances and may lead to discovering hidden quests.
Certain relics can only be discovered through exploration.
Constellations may only be seen at certain times at specific locations
Jumping puzzles will occasionally feature in the world
Darkness as an environmental obstacle is being considered as part of the game mechanics
Death by drowning is possible.
Treasure maps are used to help to pinpoint the location of hidden treasures
Treasures may also be obtained through fishing and by exploring naval content
Achievements record things of note that happen in Ashes of Creation

Detecting traps and other hazards, climbing/parkouring, and stealth were specifically mentioned as utility skills and that some of these are class specific. Spyglass and grappling hook for items. Currently everyone seems to be able to parkour but maybe this changes?

Honestly though I'd like to see these more as utility skill options available for all classes than them being exclusively locked to a specific class. Especially if the tradeoff will be spending skill points on utility instead of a class skill. Just give them class flavour.

For example if there's a "light" utility skill the light could be produced through a spell (caster) or through an implied item such as a torch (non-casters). Maybe just make some classes better at it. For example "stealth" could be achieved in a similar way through a spell (concealment spell) or through ability (camouflage). Just make rangers and rogues inherently better at it through complementary class skills or something.

Apparently there are also already jumping puzzles (I just either didn't recognize or find one). That being said I hope there is some type of "reward" at the end of the puzzle even if it's just an achievement because otherwise it's not much of a puzzle.

Speaking of achievements. Apparently they will be a thing. I'm looking forward to collecting exploration achievements.

Also I think I found a treasure map while exploring. Certainly I found something that started a quest. The thing with them is just that questing is kind of boring atm because it's only another source of glint as I mentioned.

Essentially I'm withdrawing my exploration complaint until I see more of this being implemented in the game. I'm not gonna withdraw the "world feels dead" part tho.

northie

Ambience is another thing I hope gets improved a lot. This touches the "world doesn't feel alive" thing. City of Heroes used to do this really nice thing where enemies wouldn't just loiter around and spawn out of thin air but actually had idle animations and activities like players.

Thugs could be mugging someone or a group of cultist might have been performing a ritual - and when they spawned they usually ran in from a building or something. It felt like the NPCs had some other reason to exist than just standing around waiting to be killed. Not to mention the game utilized full 3d space (albeit it did so poorly with water).

Have a wolf pack? Have some sitting around, some lying around, some howling, some stalking after rabbits and other ambient prey. Static spawns of mobs standing around mindlessly just waiting to be slaughtered is 90s MMO design.

I'm somewhat used to impractical buildings with no doors or actual living spaces being a MMO stable, and I guess it's a question of how to best use limited resources, but the current buildings feel like they aren't spaces anyone would like to live in. I was hoping more Skyrim and less WoW. Even if the cupboards and such are just background scenery.

Like the primary selling point for me was the touted immersiveness and how the world is dynamic and alive. It's neither of those things atm or maybe I just have very different idea about what immersive and alive mean.

I'm a bit hesitant to write this because it feels like all this is more of a polish thing than actual alpha mechanic but I'm just putting it here in hopes it's not forgotten.

Harolf

To the whole team of Intrepid Studios.

My friends and I have been waiting for this weekend for years. We had a lot of fun over the last 3 days and can hardly wait for the coming weekends.
We were well aware of the fact that the state of the game is a very early version when we bought the keys to A2.
Our expectations of the game were not very high. However, the current state of the game was significantly better than we thought.
You are working very hard and energetically on the game and you give us the feeling that this is happening with a focus on our feedback.

I have been part of alpha and beta phases for many games. No other development team has responded to our wishes, concerns and experiences as well as this one.

A big compliment and thank you for that.

Keep it up!

Taneroth

Hi Dev Team,

After participating in the recent Ashes of Creation Alpha tests, I wanted to share some feedback on areas that could enhance the game’s overall experience. These observations focus on server stability, gameplay mechanics, and balancing issues that I believe could benefit from some adjustments. I appreciate your hard work and dedication to making this game the best it can be, and I hope this feedback is helpful as development progresses.

Server Stability in Starting Zones:
The server stability in the starting zones needs significant improvement. Players who log out in these areas are often faced with longer queue times upon re-entering than those who have already left. This issue creates an unnecessary bottleneck and should be addressed.

Friendly-Aggressive Mobs:
Some aggressive mobs appear friendly, preventing players from attacking them despite being attacked. This issue sometimes affects only certain group members but can also impact all players in a group. Consistency in mob behavior is crucial to ensure a smoother gameplay experience.

Quest Tab Organization:
The quest tab could benefit from categorization by quest types, such as different commission board types, grouped by the Node where the quest was obtained, and quests from open-world NPCs. Currently, finding specific quests is difficult, especially those ready for turn-in, as they are not clearly marked.

Quest Tracking Persistence:
After relaunching the game, the system should remember which quests were selected for tracking on the map, so players don’t have to reselect them each time they log back in.

Quest Limit Increase:
The maximum number of active quests should increase from 30 to at least 50 or even 100. For players exploring the open world, the limit restricts the ability to accept new quests from encountered NPCs, which detracts from the sense of freedom and exploration.

Quest Marker Tracking:
The number of trackable quest markers on the map should either be increased or made unlimited to enhance gameplay and improve navigational ease.

Quest Turn-in Bug:
There is a bug in some quests where if a player initiates a turn-in dialogue with an NPC but closes the window before confirming, they are then unable to interact with the NPC again to complete the quest. This needs a fix to ensure players can finish their quests smoothly at any moment.

Character Creation Bugs:
Certain character customization options picked durning character creation (e.g., nose and teeth for the Vek race) are not consistently applied in the game. Additionally, saved character templates are not loading correctly, with some settings misrepresented in-game.

Cleric and Bard Balancing:
The Cleric and Bard classes require rebalancing. Due to their healing abilities, these classes, particularly the Cleric, are far more resilient than others, especially Cleric during solo AoE leveling. Adjustments to prevent them from becoming overpowered would benefit overall class balance.

Loot Drop Frequency:
Equipment (armor, weapons, and jewelry) drops from mobs too frequently. Reducing this drop rate significantly (by at least 10 times) would encourage players to engage more with the crafting system, which is now completely unprofitable. Recipe drop rates, however, should remain the same to maintain crafting accessibility.

Quest Rewards vs. Grinding Rewards:
Quest rewards should be balanced to align with the rewards earned through grinding. In my opinion, a better approach would be to reduce the amount of experience gained from grinding, thus extending gameplay and the time needed to reach max level, rather than increasing the experience reward for completing quests. This would help ensure a fair progression pace regardless of the player’s chosen playstyle.

Event Reward Nerfing:
Event rewards should be nerfed to prevent players from farming excessive experience and currency by participating in frequent events. A balance is needed to ensure that event participation is rewarding yet does not overshadow other experience-gaining activities. It shouldn’t be the case that even low-level players can participate in these types of events and gain such large rewards with little to no effort.

Thanks again for all your efforts and for giving us a chance to be part of the testing process. I look forward to seeing Ashes of Creation continue to evolve and improve.

Best,
Taneroth

LaSnOcHeS

Quick disclaimer - I did only play Mage, so have limited view on the other classes, did not do much group activities, did quite a bit of farming as I would like to explore more the crafting system, due to irl stuff and the DDoS I did only play for like 20-25 hours. I will also add markers here like [Bug] and similar to state if I consider something a bug or suggestion or something like this and if it was a bug if I reported it in-game.

I will start with a bit of an overall view of the game. For an alpha it is way better than expected given it is in 'early' stages of development. And yeah, people will say its been in development for 6+ years, but given they had to change the engine and redo a lot of the things, plus creating a solid base for a project of this size, it definitely takes a long long time.
Now for the actual game, the world is pretty great, the combat feels pretty good and most spells are nice (as I played a mage) but also abilities I saw from other classes near me looked cool, the gathering and crafting seems interesting but needs more testing/playing with it as it is a slow one to explore, the cities evolving bit by bit is great although it is hard to measure the impact of it this early (except the increased storage space you get, which was great for someone farming bunch of mats), the sound and music is great as well. The not so good part at the moment are more or less known - server stability, lag and de-sync, graphical issues, the quest system needing some polish, the game not remembering your realm on login and you having to swap it felt annoying after a while, the character creation needs a lot more customizations and polish, UI bugs, terrain bugs, NPC bugs and more that I will discuss later in this.

Lets get into a bit more detail, feedback and suggestions.
Animations/Graphics:
Overall the game looks pretty good, most things have ok animations and things are mostly telegraphed in a ok way. There is definitely a bit room for improvements. And for the people complaining the graphics look old and not up to date, we get that you must complain about something, else you won't feel good about yourselves, but the graphics are pretty good, it is just different style from the more cartoon-ish style of games like WoW and FF. (Also if you wanted some way more modern or amazing look of the game, consider this - to do something like this, it would have taken them at least 2-3 times more time to get the game to where it is today, as well as the space you would need to store those 'amazing' graphics could even be 100 times more then currently given the size of the game world and do not forget the PC requirement you would need for this).
Some things I found/saw:

[Bug] [Reported] Some death animations are strange/buggy - like I had some 'Slate Wolf' corpses (when they are killed) jump in the air, then turn to the side and then fall down, which is kinda funny
[Bug] [Reported] Your mount glitching and its animation stopping can also be funny depending on the position it glitched in - like I had it glitch during jumping, so it ended up like its gliding through the air. It seems to be due to terrain or if you are attacked by mobs, which are things that should not matter for the mount animation.
[Bug] [Reported] What about when you cut a tree and it starts spinning around like crazy - yup that is funny. Seems to be related to what other 'solid' things are around.
Stuttering animation - for now keeping this as part of the server stability and lag. Main example is the caravan events, the few I saw had an annoying stuttering movement.
[Bug] [Reported] Your character hair glitching - have you seen graphic distortions around your character head? If so, it is your character hair - yup it seems to bug out sometimes and fly in some direction causing those distortions. Zooming in and out seems to fix this. Seems to happen on more crowded place and due to things that move your char more than usual - like mount/dismount.
[Bug] [Reported] Have your camera bugged and you got a mouth pov? Yup that thing was funny too and again something that can be fixed with mount/dismount. This seems to be cause by terrain issue and in particular small things on the ground that are not technically solid, as your char goes through them, so when you pass over those terrain places (say a small rock) the system thinks you are inside a small space so, it changes the camera position to fix the space, which ends up glitching the camera to be inside your character.

PvE/PvP/Classes/Skills:
Fighting/Combat feels great, it is definitely in a pretty good spot. Skills feel impactful, cooldowns seem appropriate (As a mage at least) given you are supposed you use your weapon(s) as well and not be mindlessly spamming 1 skill like in other games. From what I saw in some streams and from players I played with for a quest or things like caravan escorts or events, they seem to be in a similar state, with different option to pick and each class has some uniqueness to it. Choices matter and depending on what active and passive skills you pick, you can build different things depending on your playstyle. The little PvP i had during a caravan escort also felt ok but it was 3 of us vs one enemy, so maybe in a bigger scale it will be more informative.
Some things I found/saw:

[Bug] [Reported] Combat is not always responsive at the start, like sometimes you hit a target you see you did X amount of damage but the target does not take any damage. If you didn't hit then why show a damage number? If you did, why did the enemy not take a single point of damage?
[Bug] [Reported] Rarely, some spells will disappear after it is cast and before it reached the enemy. Had a few situation where a fireball would disappear mid flight and do not do damage or engage with the enemy. Also depending where you cast something from the spells can fly through the terrain to hit the target. Sometimes even if there is nothing between you and the enemy a projectiles trajectory can pass though the terrain you are standing on while trying to reach the target.
[Bug] [Reported] [Mage] Accelerative Blink - doesn't always give you the instant cast

NPCs (mobs/enemies):
The agro is all over the place - sometimes you can pass by some mob and not pull it, other times you are on the other side of the map and you things from nowhere. If a mob quits attacking someone and you are on its path or nearby, it often switches to you. If there are mobs near each other, they don't always pull each other (as a group) and other you pull all of them and then even some more from the side. Some enemies moving sporadically and some cosplaying 'The Flash', some teleporting around. Enemies being faster they your character when on a mount feels bad. Also a lot of enemies you can attack but not damage them and a lot of enemies you can't even attack that are like stuck.
Some things I found/saw:

[Bug] [Reported] A lot of friendly enemies that you can't attack but they can attack you. Those are only attack-able if you attack enemy you can attack with multi target skill (like chain lightning as mage).
[Bug] [Reported] Enemies you targeted but not killed can sometimes have their nameplates visible from quite far away, even if where they were is not rendered clearly on your screen.

Professions:
Initial overview is that they are kind-a ok, and seems you can make some interesting things but it just takes too long to get to a position where I could have a better view over them.
Leveling any single one of them feels super slow, but if you consider that on launch people who spend time on leveling their profession can have an advantage over those that do not, even if they take way more time to get to max level. Also this system seems to be able to create big margins between players abilities to craft things, which initially will be interesting (until later point where everyone maxes everything).
The progression is not that clear - it is a bit confusing (like how to exactly get certification/next stage like apprentice/journeyman).
There were almost no starting things to gather except wood around the starting zone - you do need to go quite a bit out, in order to get things you can gather. In addition, the starting zones had a lot of mines or herbs that require you to be pretty high level in the given profession as to be able to get them, which is a feels bad moment.
Gathering is also kind-a slow, It can definitely make people quit that part of the game. This combined with the slow leveling of the professions make the whole experience pretty time consuming and when you add up that you need currency (gold/silver) to process those material (which you do not want to sell cuz you need them to level the professions ) and you got none from just farming, makes the whole experience a bit painful. So at the moment it seems to be in a state where you can farm for 1-2h then go kill stuff to get gold for 1-2h to be able to process your material as to level the processing professions.
For the hunting part - the progression feels even slower mainly cuz there are less things to gather and also the progression circle has 3 stages each taking like 5+ seconds whereas other gathering professions have more stage to their gathering progression circle. Also not being able to skin enemies you kill feels strange - hopefully the whole system will change cuz that is pretty bad atm.
Some things I found/saw:

Finding a pet/mount after you 'skinned' an npc, yup that feel so unintuitive... like a gamble - do i get meat or pet/mount
Hunting targets respawn way faster than herbalism or mining nodes.
Gathering is not interrupted if you are attacked by something, meaning you can keep mining for example, while a spider is biting your A.
Going around towns to use their storage spaces is a great way to keep a lot of material until you can use them to level your professions, but it does take time going from place to place
In most games gems kinda have similar levels, while here you can only mine ruby initially and later on you can do the other gem like materials, also ruby seemed kinda hard to find, so there seems to be weighting on what materials are better to keep.
[Bug] [Reported] Having 100% progression on a level of a profession doesn't switch to the next level - you need to go over the 100%. For example: I was cutting trees and reached 100% on level 5 and stayed there until I cut one more tree to get me to 2% of level 6, so the 100% on level 5 didn't equal 0% on level 6, which feels strange and unintuitive.
[QoL] [Suggestion] Bags for professions - they are called 'mining/herb/etc..' bags but you can put everything in them, like hunting and getting a carcass that is 2x2 automatically goes in my mining bag that has 4 2x2 slots. Also as they can contain anything its best to get the mining and/or hunting bags as they are 4x2x2 spaces while the herbalism one is the smallest and most useless one. This makes different bags inconsistent with each other given space they provide. Maybe align the bag spaces so you can actually have a choice, else remove all of them and just have 1 type.

Quest:
Descriptions for quests seem vague, not definite enough to point you to the right direction. Not all quests have quest markers on the map. Sometimes markers are at the wrong place (on one quest it was even 20min away by horse from the actual turn in). Some quests tell you to kill a given type of enemy at given locations show on the map by the quest marker, but there are no enemies of that type in that zone. Quest items do not go to the quest item inventory tab. The commission board giving you the exact same quest without limit feels boring. Some quests are also bugged.
Some things I found/saw:

[Bug] [Reported] 'The Sweat of Your Brow' pickaxe crafting wasn't show on map for me and was harder to find - saw there were fixes for the quest marker for other parts of the quest chain.
[Bug] [Reported] 'The Boneyard Brigade' quest mob for Scout Eloris does not respawn while the corpse of the mob is still there (probably if some1 doesn't loot it, the corpse does not disappear. It also stayed at the same position for over 10h until the servers were restarted)
[Bug] [Reported] 'Boxed in' shows and area where to kill undead but there are no undead there except one hidden one and you need to kill 10 of them
[Bug] [Reported] 'Defending a Caravan' quest is bugged - the 'join' part works but when delivered the quest was not completed and we got nothing from it. Also one of the completion points of the quest is blank. (did a few caravan escorts and non worked for the quest)

Mount:
The mount speed just feels way too slow. Even the sprint is faster then it (30% m vs 40% s) but the sprint is limited to your stamina. The mount speed definitely needs some increase. Also having mobs be faster than you on your mount feels pretty bad. The need to call it twice is also pretty bad - what happens is when you leave it somewhere, your mount stays there, so your first call dismisses it (removes it) and your second call summons it at your location - definitely not good interaction. Also you mount can be killed wherever you left you and you end up finding out later when you try to summon it - this feels kinda unintuitive and also there were no notifications your horse died or was attacked. Sometimes your mount also gets one-shot from enemies,

Other:

No teleporting between gates and slow movement does not feel that great, especially, if you are someone that does not have the whole day to play you can spend more than half the time you can play just walking from point A to point B which can defiantly make you quit the game after a while.
[Bug] [Reported] The non-stop reloading login screen is not a good experience. It seems to happen because the initial load positioned you inside something (usually the statue or whatever it is called that you attune to) then it seems to gitch because of it and if not mistaken your character moves a bit on each reload. Got out of it by spamming movement and jumping, so it got my char unstuck from a wall I was loaded into, but it seems if you char ends up outside the map there is no saving it.
[QoL] [Suggestion] The bottom right menu (like equipment/artisan/skills) should have the keybinds for them as part of the name.
No drowning ? definitely feels strange to be immortal under water, also no mobs in the water, just near it.
The caravan escorts felt super slow, especially with not many people trying to attack/defend it, it felt boring. Hopefully with more people it will be more fun. The quest for it was bugged. There were no rewards for the participants. At least I could gather material along the way, so it ended more like a gathering session than an escort mission. [Bug] The caravan events UI pop up you get when they are near you can also bug stay there no matter the result of the event. Had 2 of them stay on my screen even after logging out and in again. Also the UI can prompt you to pick whether to attack or defend a caravan multiple times. Also, if you have more than 1 pop up each the 1st one you chose counts for all of them, meaning if you pick you want to attack, you are kept as 'attacker' for all even if you pick defend on another one. And if one of those initial picks bugs and stays on your UI, you can't change the decision for future caravan events.
[Bug] A lot of things have the interact option but you can't actually interact with them or just nothing happens at that point of time.
[Bug] Some reward chests from completed events also can't be interacted with.

There are probably a lot of other things I am forgetting for sure.

Overall, the game has potential to be great, some of the basic systems are in good condition and just need a bit of polish, the music and sound are pretty good, combat is good, party activities seem fine, so outside the bugs, which are expected the game as a whole is good enough to keep players engaged and interested for a long time especially with the planned phases and content that will be provided in them.

northie

I'm also going to touch a bit of "ambient usefulness" because one of the things that really intrigued me is was the "Our Immersive World Environments" article.

This is no longer alpha feedback per say but more like... hopes and dreams?

Quote: "In Ashes of Creation, the development of Nodes causes the world around you to change. But what if the world changes independent of those Nodes? We talk a lot in the office about the environment needing its own character. How can we give it character outside of just stellar art direction?

We give it life, and we give it meaning. Not just with a few visual effects, but with actual mechanics that reflect that life. <snip>"

Like I want to see spawned enemies be part of ambient life as I mentioned above and for critters to do their own stuff. For example you could introduce harvestable and huntable animals that are also ambient critters and hunted in turn by predators.

Ima build three hypothetical simple spawners. A prey spawner and two wolf spawners since I've a beef with the alpha test wolves. They are easy to plug in and have a minor dynamic element that is tied to the spawn itself, so they can appear basically anywhere.

These are for illustrative purposes only to demonstrate something I'd like to see!

Prey Spawner: Woodland animals
A node cell based spawner that spawns prey and ambient animals within the node's zone of influence. The animals and others are mostly sedentary in that they stay close to where they are spawned rather than patrolling.

Spawner Type: Resource Spawner
Spawn acitivity: Depends on node development stage. High for wilderness. None for Metropolis.
Resource: Rabbit prey spawn (can be hunted)
Resource: Deer prey spawn (can be hunted)
Resource: Butterflies/Moths (can be harvested, day/night)
Resource: Animal carcass (can be harvested)
Resource: Animal droppings (spawned around, can be harvested)

Note: This is separate spawner from plant spawners (plants and wood) because it directly influences the mob spawns that are carnivorous. Herbivore mobs naturally depend on plant spawns. I'd consider this a base level spawner in that the "woodland animals" spawner is a base level resource spawner.

I'd imagine the three resource spawner types to be: mineral, plant, and prey (animal). These offer three solid bases to build mob spawns on based on a simple food web thinking... though I'm not sure what eats/depends on minerals. Maybe elementals?

Wolf Pack Spawn 1: Nesting wolves
A stationary group of wolves hanging in one spot playing ambient animations such as sleeping, sitting, growling at each other, howling and patrolling.

Activity: Some of the wolves patrol within close proximity of the spawn location and attack any player or ambient prey animals that get close.
Alertness: Low for nesters. High for patrollers. Either don't chase far from the spawn.
Auditory clue: You can hear their howls from distance before you can see them.
Reinforcements: When attacked a patrol wolf calls to other pack wolves once it's close to death/if not killed within certain time limit.
Resource: Wolf skin, meat and bones harvested from corpses, droppings around the spawn site
Spawners: Spawned randomly on "nesting sites". 3-10 individuals per spawn based on player proximity.
Dynamic element: If local prey animal spawner runs out of spawns, trigger "ravening wolves event" where the nest starts spawning aggressive roaming wolves.

Wolf Pack Spawn 2: Hunting wolves
A pack of patrolling wolves that chase after players and prey. These wolves are not stationary but patrol the ZoI.

Activity: Patrol within ZoI. Chase after ambient prey and any approaching players as a group.
Alertness: High. Long chase distance.
Auditory clue: You can hear their howls from distance before you can see them.
Reinforcements: None but pulling one pulls the whole group.
Resource: Wolf skin, meat and bones harvested from corpses
Spawners: Spawned randomly based on prey availability and zone development level. 2-5 individuals per spawn based on player proximity.
Dynamic element: Once prey within area is exhausted the wolves start heading to nearest nesting site, adding to the number of ravenous wolves.

These are relatively simple spawns that don't include a lot of dynamic elements but that still give live to environment. They naturally require ambient animations and some mob AI but the game already has spawners, and resources, and triggers for the dynamic elements. They can be also reused for other similar beast groups.

I mean I'd be surprised if this is not what they are eventually aiming for considering all the talk about immersiveness... Hell I wish the game provided testers tools to build spawns like this. The devs can then put them in to appropriate locations. Yes, I know, kinda unrealistic expectation.

Edit: Forgot to say that it would also be nice from immersion point of view that if/when a spawn spawns they don't appear out of thin air. Like the hunting wolves could walk out from a nearby bush (that is, the spawner appears as a bush) and the nesting wolves could spawn with a "cave" or a burrow from which they appear to walk out, so basically the spawner would have its own visible object. I mean you already have movement animations for beasts so it's not like this is adding extra in that regard.

frogbound

I want to start out by saying I spent almost all weekend testing. I joined a node, leveled to 10 to become a citizen. Did commissions, worked on professions, killed "a few" mobs, joined events, defended a caravan and explored beyond the limits of the north eastern parts.

All of this has overall been a pleasant experience so far.

As a German playing on the NA realms, I noticed my latency (at least I hope it is latency that is shown on the minimap below the fps counter) was never above 20ms.
That is something I haven't experienced in any other game. The "lag" I encountered was never with my own spells and more animation wise on opponents and everytime I saw these things, my fellow NA players saw them too. So big ups for that! I am amazed by how smooth this was.

Another thing I really liked was the fighter combat. So far it felt snappy, I didn't get locked into place while fighting and the same goes for the mage I tried. Even though it is slower, being able to move while casting is so much fun and feels good. Abilities and spells feel impactful. The sound design was on point, although some abilities were a little bit too loud.

Exploration was fun, dangerous and sometimes surprising. There are obviously a lot of visual issues with some waterfalls, rockfaces, mobs being stuck in walls or underground but overall it was a pleasant experience. I haven't even managed to see all of the map, with Joeva being one of the completely ignored areas of the map for me.
I felt at times as if there are too few resources and mobs around, especially in Halcyon. That area seemed super lackluster compared to other nodes. There are barely any resources around, barely any mobs and it was completely devoid of any sort of events. Speaking of missing something: Where is all the copper? I wanted to try to level up some weaponsmithing but the complete lack of Copper around anywhere killed my excitement for that real quick. I think I managed to get my hands on roughly 50 copper in total which when looking at the Greatsword recipe alone would've been 3 crafts.

Another thing I didn't really like - but maybe more so because I don't understand it and I couldn't find an explanation in the game - was the use for Glint. Most of the people I talked to vendored it for silver but there is an option to turn it into crates. However people told me to not get those crates as they are not worth it. But I haven't found any information on what to do with these crates. Do I HAVE to transport the to other nodes via caravan before opening or can I just open them right there in the node? That was a bit confusing to me.

When going for quests it was sometimes confusing to figure out where to go, although I don't personally mind the scavenger hunting - I do in fact love things like that - other players I talked to really had an issue with it, so maybe at least for Lionhold a bit more handholding might be needed and more explanation as to what to do after finishing it.
The players left to their own devices and if they haven't kept up with the development of the game over the years had no idea what nodes are and what to do next. They probably need more hints on what to do next to progress. Too much freedom is scary for people not used to it and could turn into an insurmountable wall.

Traveling the world on the basic mount has been not fun. I often felt sprinting was more effective. The mount animations got stuck often and even though it has a speed boost on roads, it didn't feel that way.

The world feels dangerous, especially when you are alone and lose focus. Some mobs follow you forever unless you attack them at least once, which is kinda counterintuitive and made for a few very not so enjoyable experiences. Some enemies like Ravens and Wolves being quicker than the horse or your sprint is also very unforgiving, especially when you didn't see them due to them sometimes not rendering properly until they actually move at you.

I do enjoy the short staring contest before enemies come after you though. That can sometimes be very intense. Love it.

Leveling being slow was a fun experience, I wish nodes would level slower though. After all nodes hit the village stage I felt forced to go out and grind mobs to become a citizen. I wanted to focus on my professions and level on the side but with everyone trying to get to level 10 and the guild pushing to hopefully take over a node I felt peer pressured into it which didn't feel good.

Experience gains from quests are also very low, which makes them very unattractive. Every quest reward being glint also contributed to that. For convenience sake I just picked up commissions for things I was doing anyways. I also felt like some commissions were extremely confusing. I picked up one to kill "goblinoids" but the only area that had them was Lionhold and they were way too low level to warrant riding around the map for an hour just to get that done.

I do love however that some quests are not marked and have to be discovered by talking to folk around the areas and POIs. I want more of that, also more discoverable quests. The undeads above Lionhold had a lot of interactable things lying around, which is still a mystery to me but I would've hoped something would pop up while interacting with it. Even if it is just a hint to find a person who might now more, or report to a guard to get further directions, etc.

I absolutely love the Minotaur enemies, they have really cool abilities and are fun to fight.
Magic Armors are nasty. I hope summoners will be able to summon these things. They were cool as heck and also scary scary scary.

I also have a bone to pick with the scythe wielding mfer ontop of the church of the seven. I will be back for you, just you wait!

- Love
frogbound

Faimith

Hello! I spent around 10 hours in Phase 1 of the Alpha 2 over the weekend, plus a few additional hours in the pre-alpha last Thursday. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of my experience, including specific improvement suggestions for each aspect.

Point 1: Server Performance and Stability
I was surprised that the servers managed player loads reasonably well. After initial login difficulties, I could create a character and log in. However, in the starting area of Lionhold, rubberbanding was frequent, and other players appeared stationary when they were moving. The minimap didn’t display accurate player locations, and NPCs either didn’t appear or showed up with delays. Mob “aggro” was inconsistent, with incomplete animations, making combat a bit of a guessing game as mob health bars sometimes displayed incorrect values. Queue issues were resolved by developers towards the end. Once in-game, there were few disconnects, but I did experience 3-4 full system crashes, likely GPU-related, which required restarting my PC.

Improvement Suggestions:

Optimize server performance to improve real-time accuracy in high-density areas.
Address rubberbanding and position-sync issues to better support group and solo play.
Investigate causes of full-system crashes; adding low-performance mode might help.

Point 2: World Design and Aesthetic Depth
The game world is vast, especially the Riverlands, which generally looked great, but some elements appeared overly “clean.” Ruins should look old and weathered. The day-night cycle felt abrupt, and smoother transitions with dawn/dusk effects would improve immersion. Nights felt too bright, and the sky was missing the stars shown in previews. Seasons didn’t appear to be in place, as it remained autumn throughout. Mounts felt slow, particularly the starting horse, and I was faster on foot as a Bard with speed buffs. It would be great to have quicker mounts and a small speed boost on roads.

Improvement Suggestions:

Apply more rugged textures to ruins to match the intended setting.
Create smoother day-to-night transitions with dawn/dusk lighting effects.
Adjust nighttime lighting to enhance atmospheric contrast.

Point 3: NPC Interactions and Visual Consistency
NPC interactions worked well, though adding start/end animations could add realism. The AI voiceovers were fine but have room for improvement. Some NPCs with bright hair or unusual costumes broke immersion as they didn’t fit the setting. Variations in NPC visuals felt minimal, and some models repeated across nodes. However, enemy variety was good, with different types, elites, and minibosses. Server lag seemed to affect mob behavior, making some abilities unpredictable.

Improvement Suggestions:

Add context-consistent NPC attire and variations per region.
Improve mob animation syncing and behaviors for strategic play.
Increase NPC diversity in appearance to reduce repetition.

Point 4: Quest Design and Exploration
The quest system felt unclear. The journal lacks sorting options (e.g., by location or type), which were shown in previous showcases. Precise quest markers detract from exploration; a more approximate indication of quest locations would encourage players to engage more deeply with the world. Currently, quests offer little EXP relative to mob farming, which is counterintuitive to the game's goal of reducing grind. It would be rewarding to earn class-appropriate starter gear in main/side quests, teaching players about key stats.

Improvement Suggestions:

Add journal sorting options and filters to improve organization.
Make quest markers approximate for exploration-based gameplay.
Scale quest rewards (EXP, gear) with difficulty or duration.

Point 5: Character Editor and Customization Options
The character editor is basic. The red swelling effect when switching races was distracting, and customization options were minimal. Sculpting partially worked, but blending was absent. Saved presets occasionally failed to load correctly (e.g., a female preset loading as a male with a beard). Many color options and customization features were missing compared to what was previewed.

Improvement Suggestions:

Make transition animations smoother for a better customization experience.
Expand the range of hairstyles, colors, and facial features.
Fix preset saving/loading to prevent incorrect appearances.

Point 6: Crafting and Gathering Mechanics
Crafting feels like a placeholder, offering only basic functionality. I tried hunting, which connects with the Animal Husbandry system, but it lacked depth. Integrating “essence” into hunting could enrich the experience (e.g., summoning an essence bow to target animals, adding a timing mechanic for loot quality). Currently, hunting doesn’t feel very immersive.

Improvement Suggestions:

Add unique animations or mini-games, such as essence-infused hunting mechanics.
Create more depth in crafting steps, particularly in resource gathering.

Point 7: Class Skills and Combat Mechanics
I mainly played as a Tank and Bard. Class skills felt fun and allowed experimentation, especially with no-cost skill resets. However, weapon skills seemed confusing and repetitive for my guild. The Tank’s block mechanic felt lackluster; it would be useful if blocking could fully negate damage sometimes. Balanced groups are essential for gameplay enjoyment, but I haven’t tested PvP balance extensively yet.

Improvement Suggestions:

Add variety to weapon skills to reduce repetitiveness.
Improve blocking mechanics to make Tank roles more effective.
Emphasize class-specific roles in groups to foster cooperative play.

Point 8: Leveling and Grind Reduction
Developer Steven mentioned that reaching level 25 would take about 100 hours, with the goal of avoiding grind-heavy design. Currently, AoC is very grind-centric, as quests offer little EXP, and mob farming remains the primary leveling method. If Steven’s 100-hour goal is maintained, it would benefit from more varied activities. Longer, meaningful quests with scaled rewards could encourage players to pursue quests over grinding.

Improvement Suggestions:

Scale quest EXP and rewards to reflect difficulty and time investment.
Include narrative-driven quests to diversify the leveling process.

Point 9: Guild Interface and Node Citizenship
The guild menu is barebones, only allowing creation and invitations. Additional roles and permissions (e.g., guild leader/officer roles) would improve organization. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test node citizenship as I experimented with multiple classes, but social structure options are currently limited.

Improvement Suggestions:

Expand guild functionalities with leader roles, officers, and permissions.
Add basic citizen information from NPCs to enhance the node experience.

Point 10: PvP and Corruption System
We had one PvP encounter as a group, which was generally positive, though the system feels unclear. During events, accidental AoE damage often tagged other players, triggering corruption. I couldn’t find an option to prevent this. I plan to test the corruption system more thoroughly.

Improvement Suggestions:

Provide an option to disable AoE damage tagging for friendly players.
Add clearer corruption penalty details for PvP interactions.

Point 11: Caravan Events and Trade
The caravan system functions in a basic sense, but we encountered role-assignment issues in events, and the trade system between players has a long cooldown, which felt unnecessary.

Improvement Suggestions:

Make role assignment more consistent for caravan events.
Reduce player-to-player trade cooldown for better resource sharing.

Point 12: Public Events and Dynamic Encounters
Events are currently too visible, with timers on the minimap, leading to overcrowded areas that end quickly. It would be more immersive if events only appeared as players approached, with natural cues (e.g., smoke, bird flocks) to draw attention. Event rewards felt minimal relative to effort.

Improvement Suggestions:

Use natural visual cues (e.g., smoke) rather than markers to indicate events.
Scale rewards based on event difficulty and contribution.

Point 13: Node Development and Layout
Nodes change with levels, which is engaging, but the minimap becomes cluttered with overlapping icons for NPCs and facilities. Node designs were also repetitive, with identical layouts and assets across different nodes.

Improvement Suggestions:

Improve node mapping clarity with distinct icons and layout separation.
Add more diverse designs and layouts to each node to create unique experiences.

Point 14: HUD/UI Customization
I was happy with the HUD customization options, though the grid setting was buggy. I’d like additional options, like color schemes for HUD elements. Some customization, like the enemy HUD adjustments, requires interaction with an enemy, which was unintuitive.

Improvement Suggestions:

Allow for more HUD color and style customization.
Improve grid settings for smoother element alignment.

I plan to update this post with additional insights as I continue testing. For now, I hope this gives an overview of my experiences and suggestions.

Miguel_D

Like me, many of us will likely want to provide feedback for the Alpha 2. That's why I created this dedicated forum thread. This way, we can gather all the feedback in one location. That being said, this is just early feedback. I could miss out or be wrong on some topics etc.

Also: viewing the feedback from Lucky Ghost might be a good thing for the devs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjacKHgdLJA

My feedback:
**Graphics & Art Style:**
- The art style feels overly generic and lacks the unique visual identity needed to define the Ashes of Creation world. A distinct style is critical for immersion; iconic games like *WoW* and *FF14* made a lasting impression with visually stunning, memorable environments that created a magical experience.
- On 4K epic settings, the visuals didn’t feel UE5-worthy, appearing somewhat dated, it reminds me of Unreal 3 or 4 engine games.
- Running at about 90 FPS on an RTX 4090 with DLSS enabled, the framerate feels mismatched to the visuals.
- The font is small and difficult to read, which could be a more personal preference, but it impacts readability.

**Performance:**
- While rubber banding and server issues are expected in Phase 1, they significantly impact gameplay.
- Although aiming for a 250 vs. 250 PvP experience or even 500 vs 500 sounds cool and epic, a more manageable cap, such as 100 vs 100, would be much better for a smoother gameplay experience, rock-solid server stability, improved graphics and FPS.

**Questing and Map Design:**
- Map design needs improvement to be more user-friendly and intuitive, indicating quest locations, NPCs, shops, and quest turn-in points.
- Quest markers above NPCs’ heads to distinguish quest types would make navigation easier, such as:
-Gold exclamation points for main quests, blue for side quests, green for crafting/gathering quests, and red for dungeons.
- Integrating these markers on the mini and main maps would enhance clarity.
- The lack of unique quests leads to an early feeling of grindiness.
- While repeatable quests are a good content fallback, they lose appeal quickly when repeated.

**Crafting & Gathering:**
- Crafting is extremely slow and tedious; taking 15 seconds to process a single low-level item feels inefficient. Having or creating my own shop and being proud of what I’ve crafted is one of the things I really look forward to, but this system and way of working won’t be it.
- Adding a batch creation option would improve this experience.
- Gathering is difficult without guidance on where specific nodes are located; having these nodes appear on the mini-map and including visual cues would aid navigation. Distance indicators that improve with gathering skill would be beneficial.

**Leveling, Loot, Rewards, and “Cool Stuff”:**
- The current loot and rewards feel unremarkable, failing to add excitement or motivation.
- Leveling relies on a slow, old-school grind. Though nostalgic for some, modern MMOs typically avoid this approach. Creating a more engaging leveling system would enhance the overall experience. And for that to happen, you need one thing. Content, content and content. Good content offcourse. Anyone can throw in a "kill 10 wolves" quest just for the sake of it, but let’s be honest, those aren’t exactly thrilling anymore, are they?

**Solo Experience:**
- The game strongly favors group play, leaving solo players at a disadvantage. Although group-based play is a nice concept, in practice, it can be frustrating and tedious when players struggle to find groups. And this WILL happen to AoC, starting zones will be an empty graveyard and creating an alt character will be pure torture. A balanced experience for both solo and group players would make the game more accessible and enjoyable, especially for those with limited free time.
I know this game is designed with a PvP focus, and I'm excited about that. However, the majority of players on my server spent their time on PvE activities! 😊 This makes it clear that observing player behavior and preferences is crucial. Designing a world and questing system that harmonizes with these natural player choices would add a lot of depth. By aligning the game world with actual player tendencies, the game could offer a more engaging experience that respects both PvP focus and popular PvE interest.

**Scope of the Game:**
The world feels overly expansive, potentially diluting content quality. I’d suggest halving the total world size for launch and reserving the other continent for a future expansion. This approach would speed up development and ensure richer detail and content within a more focused area. Even if they launched just a single continent, the world would still be twice as large as New World.

Muse221B

Haven’t played enough to agree/disagree with what you wrote, but batch processing exists.
You can process 1/5/10/25 at a time

CoffeeBrake

Hi friends – first time writing one of these posts – so I apologize if terms are misused or whatever. I am not a coder, game developer, or anything. I used to do Healthcare IT before going back to school full time for my MBA. Now, I’m working full time as a project manager in an entirely different industry. My time is a little limited, but happy to roll my sleeves up and pitch in.

Environment
Old school MMO feel. The world, while a work in progress, feels dangerous. Wrong turns can get you in sticky situations – and it’s thrilling. Literally not knowing what lies over every hilltop or valley gives that sensation of thrilling urgency and a sense of purpose. I dipped a toe into the Sandsquall Desert – saw some starred mid-20s mobs and instantly nope’d the heck out of there. That said, the biomes have “good bones”!
The mob designs are creative, unique and memorable – while conveying the sense of scale to the world. I was pleasantly surprised by the movement kit of the Otters in the Riverlands, and the Beetles in the desert rightly conveyed the unforgiving desert climate.

All of that said, before I get hit with the “It’s alpha”, the world will need some more density between POI/ZOIs to feel more alive; otherwise, it risks losing the novelty in the “wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” sense.
I did not obtain a usable flying mount, so this has all been observed from foot / ground mount.

Combat
I played Bard for the duration of the public alpha 2, and played Mage during the pre/early alpha. While playing tank classes as an alt in WoW since Legion, and playing Holy/Disc Priest / Resto Druid from Vanilla through TWW as my mains, I wanted to change it up. Mage visuals are phenomenal for a start – but I felt that some spells (fireball!) were lacking some “oomph” feeling. I know that through the various builds, some archetypes had bugs with spell attacks properly recording their hits on mobs – but even after some of the fixes, I feel that the trade-offs need to be a bit stronger. If there’s going to be a mana spend for a hard cast, the damage should feel a bit more impactful.

Bard, however, felt amazing. I admittedly found myself enjoying it far more than I expected – and will likely main it – into Beta/Release. The song system is unique in combat – and had the right toolkit mix of hybridization for damage/healing/support.

Combat, overall, felt great. I very much enjoyed the dynamism that it afforded. However, I do feel that tab targeting needs some work – specifically in the area of target prioritization. If I’m looking at a pack of mobs straight ahead at 12oclock, why if I tab target, does it switch my target to something off screen or not in the cone of focus? I think if this gets resolved, it’ll be a huge, huge win.

Guild War vibes. Love it. To borrow from Pirate Software, Pressing buttons is surprisingly addicting and fun.

I do enjoy the XP Debt. I hope it does have diminishing returns in the PvP aspect. I’d be afraid of griefers intentionally keeping people down. If this has been addressed somewhere, please let me know!

Nodes/Crafting/Gathering
I did not experience node contributions enough to warrant feedback on the settlements – so I will pass on this. Visually, would love to see some diversity between Joeva, Miraleth and Winstead in terms of architecture – but again, something that will likely be fleshed out in future builds as this is definitely a technical alpha’s alpha.

Crafting – great start. Reminds me a bit of FFXI and New World. I think with more polish / some streamlining on how what materials interact with the recipes (and fleshing out some of the reagents) will go a long way. Perhaps its user error, but I did not find out until right before the DDoS attacks that merchants sold reagents like Honey or Seeds.

Gathering – this needs the most love. I would love to see dynamic spawning of beginner nodes based off the server meshing. Copper, Zinc and Granite were simply hard to find. I did see some bug reports / casual mentions in the discord that the nodes spawned under the environment meshing. If true, looking forward to this being resolved in a future build.

Alternatively, I believe I read that node resources were on a 30min timer to respawn. If this is the case, I’d like to see some scalability in this based on location, if possible. If Lionhold’s ZOI has X-hundred people, it reduces the cooldown to 15mins or something.

Misc.
Casually, it was great to see the world filled with player characters. I know from a theme park/carousel MMO like WoW, sharding is deployed to manage resource loads – server end – and in game – but, I like that Ashes has avoided that!
LOTS of fun, lots of potential. Happy to contribute.

GANKLORD

first off all , excuse my english, its not my native language and i had no english in school. i learned english by playing wow..
(my experience 15 years wow, few years Rift)
i write this more for developers than for other players.
i will not talk about server issues launcher issues lags etc because that was expected and its almost a norm when launching a game. i want to focus on game itself. i will write it as a list of points because of my english skills, so its more readable.

i start with things i didnt like:

-game needs to be more noob friendly at early levels (1-5) (maybe even 1-10).
you will get in TOO MUCH things before u even step out of lionhold to kill some mobs (not counting goblins on way down to lionhold). for example i think its pointless to make quest about to become citizen when u even cant become citizen on your lvl..

-quest items "glow" is realy ugly, badly visible. i think you can change it just to outline the item. it will look better and more "readable". for example ive been collecting some tree splinters from ground and i had realy hard time with that on cinematic seting (i played maxed at 4K) because that q item "glow" was blending with all those ground clutter things , intense lightning etc.

-talent trees, very boring, (at low level) very ugly, all windows in game basicaly looks old, bad, boring. i realy ndont like window artstyle because i dont think there is no art and not even style.. its just boring generic windos and it doesnt make game look good. (atleast give us a seting where we can change window top colour from that weird green to whatever, like some colour options)

-i think basic economy rules (like seling glint etc) need to be explained ingame at start i a very simple way (make it quest) and not on some website like wiky. people went in and didnt understand how to make money for first gear etc.

-i think its realy bad to make early levels content almost not soloable .. keep the challenge where it belongs

-i realy dont like the fact that weapons are just stat sticks...

-quest guide marks are sometimes very unintuitive

- horses can stay mid air when dissmounting and if you mount it again it can kill you with fall damage even if horse is only 4 feet in the air.

-whole mob spawning system need alot work. its broken, sometimes you wait 5 minutes for mob, sometimes you cant even keep up with spawn rate.

-im very confused how mob taging and loot rules works.. for example. dude was killing mob ( not in party) and i shot his mob cca at 30% hp.. and i looted the mob and he dont...

WHAT I LIKED:
thats easy. i like whole saturday experience. game ran actualy smooth, not 100% but it was 10000% better than friday. so i was able to go and do some quests without being disturbed by server lags etc. and there was a moment where i was telling myself that " this feels like a completed game experience" ofcourse its not but it felt like that because at saturday i cant even recall any major problems. so if im about to judge aoc experience by that saturday , i realy liked the game, it was chill gaming session, i did quests, droped some items , bought some gear and felt boost in my power . it was realy nice. so i think if you guys fix things that need to be fixed and game will run smooth, then i can tell, this is it, this meets my expectations for next mmo to live in.

Lord_Pico

So I only got to play about 30ish hours. Would have been much more, but unfortunately the times I was available to play was when the game was acting up.
I just want to share the opinion of someone that fits probably a large demographic of this game: 30+ age, full time job, will goblin mode as many free hours as I can spare into a game I like.
I will break this up by core systems, environment, and core gameplay loop. Lastly I will just compile a quick list of bugs I found to keep it all in one space. I’ve played just about every MMO worth mentioning so I feel I got a decent idea of what’s good and what is just considered bad by the majority of the mmo community. Regardless this is all my opinion so take that as you will.
——————————————————————
Combat
I played fighter/tank/ranger and can say it overall feels fun and fluid. There were minor bugs that can easily be ironed out and didn’t take away too much from the feel. One thing that did take away from it a lot was switching from action combat to tab target to bring up your mouse to either level a skill or mess with something in your inventory. If someone invited me to a party or I was in the middle of leveling a skill or organizing my loot and a monster attacked it felt very clunky to switch back to action combat real quick to fight back. One solution to this may be a key that quickly brings up your mouse to do what you need rather than switching your entire combat mode. I won’t delve into this much more until the secondary classes are added and get the full feel.

Crafting/Storage
The crafting takes way too long and I don’t feel it adds any substance to the system other than being a nuisance. It takes like 30-45 minutes to convert enough raw resources into something useable for a sword for example. But now it takes 2 seconds to make said sword it just doesn’t make sense. If this is set in place to slow down progression of nodes a much better way would be to make the resources respawn a little slower or something along those lines of first come first serve to it. Also the whole path of exile approach to materials taking up 3 or 4 slots in a line just doesn’t do much. It’s unfortunate because I know time has been spent to make that a thing but in other games like wow, final fantasy, archage everything is just one size and a little bigger to see the sprite of the item. This was a wheel that didn’t need to be reinvented. The separate resource tab and bags are a nice concept but currently any bag can hold any material so there’s like no reason to not just take a mining bag that has 16 square slots versus the herb bag for example that only has 8 square slots worth of inventory. My suggestion would be a weight system versus the space system and resource bags to only hold the resource they are intended for or have a weight reduction for that specific resource. This would make caravans much more necessary for moving things around or open up a need for beasts of burden when farming or crafting. Leather bags that attach to your mount for more carry weight. Or an ox type mount you can bring around with you around the node to hold your materials as you refine them. The possibilities are very numerous with a weight storage system versus the space one that games like Diablo and path of exile use. This would also give pvp gankers something to think about when going around killing farmers who don’t want to partake in pvp, do they really want to pick up all those logs and ores they’ve been farming and get weighted down or should they just grab a couple things and keep hunting. Also please more copper!

Farming
Mining: Some rocks need more distinguishing factors to tell them apart. I spent so much time having to go all the way up to them to figure out what it really was. Could just be the graphics on my end but that was a little annoying. One suggestion I have that would add a little flair to farming would be to add some blue or purple sprites saying “this resource node will be guaranteed rare quality” maybe just some little butterflies or flakes that happen randomly that lets someone know hey farm this first. Could even open up some pvp among farmers fighting for that good tree spawn or that epic rarity copper rock. This just gives that mini “hell yea” moments while farming that make that trip all worth it. A good way would be like when a tree is cut when it comes back there’s a 10% chance it respawns green, 5% chance for blue, 1% for purple .01% for rare. These values could be tweaked to how rare developers want these mats to be. Also mayors could pick a temporary node buff at a certain time that increases the chances of these rarer materials to spawn.

Environment/Questing
The environment was great I did some exploring of unfinished areas and really liked the jungle biome despite it being empty that is definitely someplace I’d like to set up a player owned house in the future. A lot of this game lacks its own personality. Which can be good and bad. World of Warcraft is very lore rich and has memorable cities like Orgrimmar for example but at the same time that isn’t keeping it alive. Meanwhile a game like Archage I can’t name a single town or city from that game but I still really enjoyed the time I spent playing it. I want to say the better focus for longevity is the core gameplay versus creating a lore rich world. I didn’t read 90% of the quests I just took them looked for a yellow circle and got a vague idea of what I needed. If it gave good exp I’d do it if it didn’t I’d delete it. If you wants quests to really mean something they need to have meaningful rewards like runescape. You unlock things for your account that help you forever like formulas for certain gear, access to certain areas or spells. That makes quests worth paying attention to and doing. If it’s just for a bit of dull glint and some exp then I might as well have gone to kill like 10 mobs. These quests take tons resources and hours to make, fix bugs for, add items for. All to be an unmemorable skip dialogue and give me my exp thing. I’d say don’t waste your resources and time making these take this item from point A to point B or collect these 5 items and bring them back and make something worth doing that has real game changing rewards or unlockables. Could be something like a mining quest that gives you a 1% boost to chance of finding rarer resources or a Smithing quest that unlocks the ability to make a sword others can’t make unless they do the quest as well. This is definitely one of those wheels that needs to be reinvented or copied off runescape.

Gameplay Loop
I still haven’t figured out what the gameplay loop is this could easily be blamed on the many systems still missing. So far it’s join group, kill mobs for xp, level up, find stronger mobs. During downtime it’s farm mats, turn mats into better gear and consumables to kill mobs faster. Repeat. Obviously dungeons are coming, player owned housing could be a huge time sink if done properly like using the materials you farm to build out your house rather than some prebuilt house just spawning in front of your face. Building walls, buildings, decorations around a node city could be something artisans could sink time into rather than deposit mats> watch building spawn out of think air. There’s still too much missing for me to fully go into this so I will leave it up for editing in the future as the game progresses.
Side note
PLEASE stop letting any random person just have free access to your mats when you accidentally die. It’s very toxic inducing watching someone you were just farming mobs with yoink your glint and materials you’ve been collecting. Makes you come back to your body and say woooooow. It’s understandable for pvp you got rekt get better. But while farming mobs? The durability and xp loss plus walking back is already plenty punishment.
——————————————————————
Major Bugs:
-Storage stops working after a while of playing don’t know how to replicate as of now.
-Many mobs can get stuck and killed by ranged players with no risk to them giving them easy xp
-Sometimes while moving items from one resource bag to another or into storage the item just disappears.
-Many mesh holes to fall into. The mountains need a lot of work.
Minor Bugs:
-Fighter charge ability never closes the gap just goes forward a small amount and does the damage.
-Fighter whirlwind ability gets stopped early by any auto attack or shielding should just click the ability again if you want to stop it early.
-Ranger spread shot when it’s held to condense it goes through mesh and doesn’t hit target if there’s any kind of elevation difference between you and target.
——————————————————————
Current feelings about game: If it was left open to play as is right now it would be my daily game until it gets boring from lack of content whenever that time may be.
***I will continue to edit and add to this as opinions change and more bugs are found any comments or discussions or disagreements let me know***

amvin

holy buddy thank you for your thoughts

KloWh

Hi,

I'm playing Tank and I'm currently at level 8. For this alpha 2 return, I'll try to be concise while providing feedback on my experience for the first week-end.

User Interface:

The general font used is too small and not very readable, making it uncomfortable to use for extended periods. Increasing the size and adopting a sans-serif font would greatly improve text readability and make me more inclined to read and engage with the game.

The current interface feels outdated, cluttered, and difficult to navigate, especially when dealing with crafting systems. I'd like to see a more modern and immersive design that better supports gameplay.

One specific example is the tank class resource representation; it took me 48 hours to figure out that my "Courage" was centered around the icon of my class, but without any clear numerical data or visual cues, it's hard to understand how to manage it effectively.

Skills with multiple stacks (e.g., the knee strike) are poorly explained and lack emphasis. I found it confusing to keep track of my stacks, which detracts from the overall experience.

Nameplates are also not very clear or easy to read, making it harder to stay aware of my surroundings and opponents. The same applies to the skills tree; its complexity makes it difficult to navigate and understand.

The class progression is solid, but I'd love to see more innovative and dynamic ways to manage armory upgrades. Simply adding modifiers feels like a missed opportunity for something more engaging.

Overall, the user interface is the most work-intensive part of the game for me. Improving readability, reducing clutter, and enhancing gameplay experiences will greatly enhance the overall enjoyment of Ashes of Creation.

Graphics / Art :

While Ashes of Creation has a nice visual aesthetic, it lacks a bit of polish and personality. The assets are of good quality, but they're also quite generic. I'm hoping that the team will soon develop an unique artistic direction and graphical style by emphasizing ambiance, lighting, or lore.

The crafting stations are difficult to distinguish from one another and are clumped together in one area. It would be great to have some sort of overlay with tooltips to indicate at a distance what each station offers.

The terrain connections and city footprints feel a bit too obvious. Adding more subtle visual cues could help enhance the immersion.

One aspect that's missing is adequate lighting sources for nighttime, which would make the evening hours much more immersive. Adding torches or other lighting elements could greatly improve the atmosphere.

The automatic sword shield attack animation can get a bit repetitive and feels like it's stuck in a loop. Some variation would be welcome to keep things fresh.

From a technical standpoint, there's currently no noticeable optimization for graphics, which is a shame since the Async technology from Unreal Engine 5 has already shown impressive performance gains - up to 40% increased frame rate and quality! I think this should be implemented as a base feature soon, as it makes a significant difference."
Lemonking did a great job of offering very nice custom settings : https://gist.github.com/Lemon-King/b352d69889e4665f4a8d4ed257ad3954 that improve visuals AND performance quite substantially.

Sound Design / Music :

While the game has a solid foundation for sound design, I'd love to see more music tracks added to create a more dynamic and engaging atmosphere. The current soundtrack is starting to feel repetitive.

Adding more auditory cues, such as distinct sound effects for quest completion and resource gathering, would greatly enhance the player's experience.

I also think it would be great to have more prominent event announcements for nearby events or activities. This could include things like "Monster Sightings" or "Quest Updates".

User Experience / Progression:

One thing that's been frustrating me is that I can't resources on horseback without having to dismount and check. It would be much more convenient if there was a visual indicator showing the resources available even when I am on my mount.

The journal validation process for commissioned quests feels a bit unclear, with too much emphasis on the quest details rather than the completion status. Adding some clear indicators or animations to show when a quest is complete and if you can complete it in the journal or in person would make it easier for players to track their progress.

Experience and Challenge:

I think one of the biggest draws for me has been the presence of elite monsters in the wild. The experience of encountering these creatures and trying to take them down has been incredibly engaging. However, I do think that some of the other systems could benefit from more variation and challenge at lower levels. Perhaps having a few "tiered" difficulty options or adding more NPCs with unique behaviors would help to make the game feel more substantial.

Artisan System :

I have to admit that the early stages of the crafting system can feel quite overwhelming, especially for new players. The node distribution for resources like Copper and Zinc feels a bit off-balance, making it difficult to progress without investing too much time or effort.

One thing I think would really help is having better tutorial guides or more explicit guidance throughout the early levels. Having some clear instructions on how to set up your crafting station, choose materials, and so forth would be incredibly helpful in getting players up to speed quickly.

Leveling Indicator:

Lastly, I think it would be great if there was an indicator showing the level of difficulty for upcoming events or challenges relative to our current level. This could help us plan our activities and prepare more effectively for what's ahead.

Overall, I'm excited about the potential of Ashes of Creation, but I do think that some tweaks in these areas could really help to enhance the overall experience.

Positive Points:

The map is truly impressive for a single region, showing that the team has done an excellent job with exploration and content creation. However, some areas of the map can feel too large or empty. I'm looking forward to seeing how this will be improved as the game evolves.

The game's difficulty is relatively well-dosed for a group experience. The challenges are challenging enough to be interesting, but not so difficult that they become frustrating. This seems like a great base for creating an active and enthusiastic community of players.

The netcode is very smooth, which is a key point for online play. Stable connections and reasonable latency are essential for seamless interaction with other players.

Characters are fun to control, meaning the gameplay is fluid and responsive. This adds a lot of pleasure to the game and allows me to focus on strategy rather than the gameplay mechanics themselves.

Elite enemies have interesting patterns that require thought and coordination to defeat. This reinforces the idea that these creatures are genuinely threatening and not just mere monsters to clear out.

The skybox is lovely, adding an element of beauty to the game. The landscapes are well-detailed, and visual effects are generous. This contributes to creating an immersive and engaging atmosphere that will help me dive deeper into the game's world

OKamilTan

as a co-authjor of this review, i totally agree, some things are to redo, but cant wait for the next session

LivesUnderBridge

After playing the first weekend, I wanted to offer my thoughts.

Archetype balance: I tried Mage first, and I thought that the damage on its initial ability (the one with the arcane bolts) seemed a little too light. I get that this is supposed to be a group game, but the friend I started with who was playing tank, and indeed the ranger I switched to later, seemed a little more powerful out of the gate. It doesn't need a lot more, but getting dialed a little higher might balance the move a little better. That said, Ranger felt good. Combat and sustainment needed attention, as it should, but it felt capable.

Artisan skills: So much crafting needs copper, even beyond the skills you would expect. After playing all three days, I wasn't able to find a single copper node on Vyra server. Maybe it was further afield, but I saw lots of iron. Increasing copper spawns so it can be found at a rate similar to other low level materials would help artisans get more into that system. Based on what I was seeing in Global chat, I wasn't alone in this.

Early "Sweat of Your Brow" quest: The structure and text of the quest seemed to imply that you could deliver to both outposts, and if you tried that, we ran into an issue where you were then unable to complete the quest. Perhaps add the option to get more snowdrop and deliver to the other place, or make the end state a little clearer? Either way, the NPC you do most of the quest for sounds like a drunken bumpkin idiot. I keep hearing that he is an AI generated placeholder, but I say he is perfect. Do not change him. I would miss him.

Song13

I wanted to provide a single place for people to share and compare their experiences in Alpha 2 for AoC. This is meant to be all inclusive and create a collection, and in hopes, for the Dev team to read and consider going forward. It is my wish for peoples’ voices to be heard out and help shape the game from this point forward now that we have a chance to get our hands on the game and are able to experience/test things ourselves. I am a person that really needs to play with things myself before I can have good feedback or opinions, so I view it as a good time/space to finally start giving my thoughts.

I’ll provide a format for people to fill out if they wish and I will update it as I read a lot of these posts as needed when I can. Feel free to use this if you wish, add to it, or use something different if you wish. I do wish for people to leave out things that are a natural part of the Alpha; ex. buggy, laggy, balancing, ect. These are obvious problems that don’t help to be reiterated many times at this point in development. I’m sure the AoC dev team are aware of a great number of these already. Also, the in-game bug report tool is there for a reason, let’s steer this away from the general bugs of alpha 2. Feel free to fill out any or all as you see fit, I put stars next to ones that could be the most useful imo.
****Please feel free to answer any number of these sections here!****
Or feel free to just respond to what I or others have said!

Primary class played thus far in A2*
Experience with that class*
(Since you have the most experience with it, I would prefer more in-depth answers here instead of on classes you haven’t gotten to play much yet)
Combat (targeting/pacing/feel)*
The AoC team*
The world/terrain/map/open world dungeons/PoI’s*
Professions (gathering/processing)*
Leveling (speed/effectiveness/feel)
NPCs (friendly and enemy)*
Nodes*
Quests*
PVP*
Sound effects/music
Visuals/graphics
Animations
World difficulty/group play*
UI
Camera
Inventory and player storage
Raids/raid bosses
Gear
Drops
Other changes?
Hopes for the future of the game*
Other MMOs you’ve played extensively (gives insight into some people’s views) and about how long you’ve been following AoC development

Song13

First of all, hey all! My name is Song or Songoftrees, I usually played a druid healer in WoW. I hope to make this thread an interesting place for ideas for the game and create a good discussion area for AoC development!

Primary class played thus far in A2*

I have mostly played as Cleric thus far in A2, I played with my buddy most the weekend who played as a fighter. Unfortunately, I had many crash/connection issues this weekend, but I was able to make it to lvl 12.

Experience with that class*
(Since you have the most experience with it, I would prefer more in-depth answers here instead of on classes you haven’t gotten to play much yet)

Cleric feels like a decent start to a healer. The dev team has put a lot of exciting thoughts into how healers heal and function. I love the variety for healing preferences, be it hot focus, raw heals (hard casts), or longevity and even preventative healing like shields. There’s a good place for many of the different types of healing styles for players. In this game there is also a great opportunity to flesh out a new type of healer which (I haven’t seen much before) is the actual melee class healer. One who’s really thicc and is up in the thick of things providing the ‘extra’ heals to melee who always seem to get hit a little harder than the rest of the raid. (Please expand on this aspect, it’s very good gameplay). I view the future of healers filling several roles when it comes to a raid atmosphere. Some who provide the big chunky heals to the tanks and such; those who have blanket heals for the rest of the raid, and diverse healers who can do a bit of flex healing and keep their mana higher for the majority of the fight as to be a safety net for the other healers, along with ones trying to mitigate heavy incoming damage with shields and such. The aoe shielding ability from the bard seems like something the cleric should have instead.

The variety that the cleric has in terms of heals feels fun to play with. In general, there’s an answer to most things. Though I tend to feel like 1 healer shouldn’t be doing everything, especially in raids, roles can tend to overlap with other healers. This can easily lead to wasted heals since it’s almost impossible to coordinate on that degree with your other heals in real time reaction.

Though, the damage of the cleric seems a bit lacking. It feels hard to kill things unless I fully respect to the more damage focus side, but I dislike doing that because I personally just find other players to fill that role while I pocket heal. I mean I’m playing a healer for a reason. This does bring up an issue of requiring people to play with, so if clerics find themselves far behind the curve of people leveling they may run into performance issues when killing things alone. This has always been a hard one to balance because if a healer is doing as much damage as a dps then why even have dps? Pvp would devolve into just a mass of healers fighting each other. I’m still unsure to this day of how to make a healer viable in pvp or pve alone and keeping it balanced for the rest of the game.

As a cleric the healing felt meaningful and while I could heal people that get hit with those heavy hits from mobs, I couldn’t sustainably keep that type of healing up due to mana cost. This means it requires players to really just not be braindead and sit there in the ‘fire’ and keep just dpsing or something. Agency for other roles feels good and it gets punished (either through death or massive mana costs for the healers) to correct the issue.

Mostly my friend and I played together, and group farmed. I would group things up and he would cleave them all down. It worked pretty well tbh. Though, healing ripped threat a lot of the time which makes sense since he wasn’t a tank class. (Also please change tank class name haha, how about guardian?) solo potential feels bad, but group play feels like a healer should be, (required).

Combat (targeting/pacing/feel)*

Combat felt actually quite good already! The world felt dangerous, which I very much love! I enjoy the fact that most enemy NPCs had a sort of ‘heavy’ attack that can be dodged or blocked (it’s a little too predictable right now but that could easily change later on)

I do worry about the game becoming a zerg this zerg that type of game. I think the best way to not let this take over is the exp split. Making it ideal to be in a group of 8 or so instead of 30 when it comes to exp gains is a decent way to balance this imo. Maybe even splits of exp until like a grp size of 8 and anything after that falling off harshly?

I know Steven doesn’t want to hear this part. But when it comes to the action targeting vs the tab targeting; there will only be one imo that is superior and used by everyone. If one ever becomes less viable than the other one, then that one will become the only one used. I think it is a mechanic that needs to just be combined somehow, or one being deleted. It doesn’t work very well imo. And the targeting reticle doesn’t seem very viable right now, at least for a healer or caster type. Aiming melee attacks seem to make the best use of it right now? Either way, I sort of see the ‘action’ targeting method as a complete waste sadly.

The out of combat mana regen seemed kind of meh, but given that this could be due to cooking being a thing, I could see leniency. I would just like to not be eating mountains of rations and sitting all the time to regain mana for minutes between every 3-4 pulls or so. Now yes, this is an important aspect of the game. If you regen mana too quickly outside of combat, then it could lead to things like kiting away and breaking combat in pvp just to sit and regen it all back real quick behind a tree, allowing you to jump right back into the fight after. That would be a problem, especially on large-scale pvp.

The AoC team*

I was impressed by the AoC team this weekend. It felt great having real time feedback and updates on the discord. They were fairly effective when it came to being a team and working to overcome problems.
Obviously, the DDoS attack challenged them quite a bit. But I’m sure they will come up with something to help in the future. But this weekend gave me faith in the team

Keep up the good work everyone at Intrepid!
It almost feels weird having live service again in games. I really prefer it. It may be more costly but honestly Steven, it makes a world of difference! I would be willing to pay a little more a month just to have all the great features that older games used to have.

I hope the team keeps building a game that they want to play! This is the only way a game can be good again imo. Obviously, Steven never wants to do this but, keep it NO PAY TO WIN/CONVIENCE! I will quit the second that cancer invades this game, it is an atrocious plague to overtake the gaming community and cutthroat executives that invade an entertainment environment with that crap can eat shit! Making money in this industry should be about how enjoyable your product actually is instead of addicting someone to your cheap game and using divisive/manipulative measures to milk them like livestock.

The world/terrain/map/open world dungeons/PoI’s*

The world felt amazing! There were lots of PoIs to go and see and the terrain actually felt lifelike in that a mountain actually felt big and difficult to traverse over. I like that the world makes you feel small. As a world should feel! The world felt generally full (obviously there were missing mobs in areas) but those are just alpha issues. They will be fixed. I like how there was all sorts of important places around the map to visit and that it wasn’t all just linear progression level wise. I like the dynamic of mobs being all sorts of different levels leaving places to level in a lot more of an open concept.

The world dungeons made me very hesitant at first. But the respawns were fast enough to not force too much friction between the like 5 groups that are there. And they are generally large enough to accommodate multiple groups. The only thing that really made it difficult was when your team needed to regroup rez and or eat rations. There may need to be some sort of ‘safer’ areas in these locations that allow for this instead of being stuffed to the hilt with mobs that respawn very quickly. I hope your team can keep this in mind going forward when designing these areas. Or even in cases like the tower of carph, maybe a clear floor for people to even log out at and come back to in maybe even a day and it be safe enough to do so? Or a rez attune spot on these floors too?

I’m sure the map will become better, but it needs a little marker for party members when fully zoomed out. Keep making tweaks, good job with it so far! The mini map slider seemed a little off too.

Professions (gathering/processing)*

Tbh I think this is very early in the development for a lot of these. I think they need a lot of work in general right now.

Iron and copper look too similar

I love the ideas behind all the professions and how so many feed into others and how you’ll be allowing multiple focuses for each player. 2 grandmaster level ones makes you really think on which ones you want to focus later though! This system definitely pushes players into guilds/groups and markets!

The only major change I think you need to consider at this point in the alpha is that mobs shouldn’t just drop glint, think about them dropping materials for professions too. Such as meat for cooking or provide a skin to cut off after defeating mobs or fur?

I like the idea of the different levels of tools to make your job of gathering easier. I also like the fact that it is a slow process. It makes you selective with your time instead of mastering everything on a bunch of alts quickly. This forces more community play, as long as professions are kept as important as Steven plans for them to be.

This will be a very important aspect of the game and I urge Steven to really get working on this sooner rather than later because this could really make or hurt the game if not done well.

Auction houses for nodes will also be very important for this. Or ways to sell goods without having to always do it in person.

Gathering in the game so far has been leisurely and pleasant so far. I haven’t gotten the chance to try fishing yet. Again the only thing I would change is the hunting side of it. Make actual killing mobs part of hunting/cooking/tanning?

I would also kind of like to see a different way to get animals for the husbandry system too? Maybe small variance in mobs like hp or attack power? This way we can hunt and ‘tame’ enemy mobs in game based on those stats? I sort of attribute this to the system Ark has where all dinosaurs have a set of stats with them. Maybe if you could implement this into the game to some really dumbed down version, it could be a very engaging profession where you are going and hunting out the best mobs out in the wilderness? Like maybe +-1-3 of each of those stats on all mobs making them have more hp or hit harder? Then a proficient hunter could read a stat sheet of mobs later on as they level up with a scan of some sort? The current way of petting these weird spawns out in the wilderness feels really weird to me.

Leveling (speed/effectiveness/feel)

I like the length of leveling, I like it to be slower as long as the world and content leveling up is rich and engaging! If it’s the same sort of grind and boring af to level new alts I will just want to get it done as fast as possible no matter how boring it might be. Don’t just leave all the pvx content for end game! If you make leveling enjoyable, like grinding for gear, making new gear, fighting lower level bosses/raids, PoIs that are fun and have good questlines. Randomness is important too. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of work for your design team to make quests not repetitive horse crap, or the same world events all copy pastas of each other and just sprinkled throughout the areas. Make them unique whenever possible!

This one’s sort of hard to argue at this point in development because ultimately it can easily be adjusted through sliders later on in fine tuning. So, I’m not going to hit on this part too hard. Just simply that the process will need a lot of set up to be exciting later on down the line. Just as world building needs tools to make it easier to set up the world later, this is similar.

NPCs (friendly and enemy)*

The AI voice acting needs work. Whatever, alpha problem. I’m not worried about that part.
But I do think the AI voice acting could be quite enriching to the experience in the game and I tended to prefer it when I heard the NPCs actually talking to me.

NPC behavior was a little erratic but again alpha problem. I like how the enemy NPCs have heavy hits but they need to be a little more random or unexpected, though keep at least some of them telegraphed. I love how the heavy hits sort of add a darksouls sort of vide to the game with the dodge mechanic. Now I’m happy with it as it is, it makes you feel more involved in the combat!

Nodes*

Another costly aspect when creating so many towns and versions of towns! I’m glad to see the work here for creating the different buildings and stuff. Just please don’t make it copy pasta to all the other nodes out there, god that kills the game for me. Unique towns are what enriches the game to the next level! Just think of Stormwind or the Undercity in WoW. Entering those towns were very flavorful to the experience of the game and the races that live there! They leave an impression!

Right now, they are a little too similar, but again alpha problem, hopefully.

I love the idea of how they level up and stuff and have their own economy and citizenry.

There’s a lot left to be seen here obviously, I would like if the entire area kind of leveled up with the node though, like roads and stuff. Can’t remember if you planned this already or not.

Quests*

The rewards are pretty bad as it stands now, exp and money are pointless amounts (can easily be changed). The stories you try to paint with them do a little bit of service towards the game. But honestly the team need to step this section up imo.

This will take a lot of set up as well. But the quests now feel very generic! Go kill, go loot, bring this to …. Unique quests like you keep teasing in some of the trailers. Ones that make a big change or difference to the areas are exciting story telling. Like you start killing goblins and when enough people do this quest it changes the zone. All of a sudden, the goblin king raises up and starts to invade due to his kins men being slaughtered. Then more of the mobs start to respawn in areas as goblins and maybe give them unique ai like they slowly move towards the towns in the area making it feel like it’s under attack, instead of them just sitting there in the world.

Dynamic quests would be amazing but honestly, I don’t know how you would set these up personally. They would almost need cycles for each type of quest. I’m also uncertain if you already plan for these as nodes level up? You teased one where a tree in the distance exploded with dark energy, like that is interesting! Make more quests that do things like that one. Then it’d be ok if they are a little more basic methods of telling the story of the game. Maybe make a main story quest line of some kind for the game? Make that a way to introduce new races or enemies or such?

But quests right now seem like they are all of the monotonous variety. I will take a longer look at these in the future, but I think this area needs a lot of love because they can be the story telling of the game. This is a big aspect of making the game more interesting.

PVP*

Seems fine. The only bit I personally got to experience was when the servers were going to be wiped before Friday. This was mostly people not caring about the consequences because they were getting wiped anyways. So it’s hard to judge here for me. The little I played around with on Thursday seemed to be in a decent spot.
The only main part of this is that mount killing was rather annoying by pvpers during this time. But a lot of these issues can be tuned later on so I’m kind of just leaving this as an alpha problem for now.

Sound effects/music

Absolutely fucking epic! Keep up the great work!! Steven the team is rocking this part! Sounds…. Hit hard I love them! They are what helps make the experience more exciting and even real. I love epic combat sounds and voice lines from monsters and the towns around the game. Big thuds of a mace make it amazing for me!
Small change right now would be make the greatsword sound a little more like a slash instead of a thud? More versions of combat music maybe? That can get a little monotonous.

Keep up the great work here. You’ve set the bar high so far, keep it there.

And I know a lot of people aren’t all that into the noise level of a tree being chopped down. Personally, I liked the sound myself. I could hear the people out in the fields surrounding Lionshold at work. It actually sounded like a logging camp out in the distance. More sound effects around the town like that could help a lot with making it feel more real and exciting. I can point to one distinct sound I think most people from WoW know, and that’s the tink tink tink of the stonemasons in Stormwind. I won’t be forgetting that sound for a long time.

Visuals/graphics

I have no problems here for the most part. I like the looks of the game quite a bit! I only wish for the epicness of spells to stay where they are or go even higher. Spell visuals of Warhammer 3 total war are quite epic in scale and exciting when you cast them for the most part. I love my favorite spells being visually flashy and exciting. A massive fireball should look, feel and sound like a comet hitting the enemy! I think there should be some almost game crashing levels of spells if you can make it work lol! Monstrous scale spells are why I love the magic side of the genre so much.

Some things are hard to put a visual on, but if your team thinks on them a little more I think they can make quite a few more of the abilities more interesting. An example from my gameplay is bless weapon. How about we make it turn that greatsword into a glowing or flaming looking weapon? And when I take the bonus one where it allows me to have some mana regen, maybe put a little mana sprite that circles around my head or something? This could be in the process of being made so I won’t harp on it much more.
Generally, looking great, can still be better. Keep it up!

Animations

These seem to be rather what I expected. I love the fact you animated the trees when chopped down. Stuff like that needs to be everywhere you can stuff it into this game. Great job with it thus far.

World difficulty/group play*

I like the difficulty here in the world. If you pull more than 2 mobs that are a little above you in levels it could be challenging to kill them. I like that it makes you think about traversing the world instead of the brain dead MMOs like BDO where you just click on the map, and it auto runs you over there. This difficulty on the mobs makes you want to group up more and work together instead of just taking advantage of everyone else for your own gain. The world also makes you very thoughtful about traveling to other places.

Group play is rewarded and makes people want to work together more in the future, so they aren’t just all using each other and shitting them out the other end when they are done with them. This game is starting to really set up the better side of group play, better than most other games. Keep up the work.

UI

Obviously heavily under construction. One note is that I LOVE the ability to move everything wherever I want.

I like being able to remap all the buttons as well.

Camera

I actually really like where the cameras sit on characters. And I find myself zooming in to look up under trees or such and I like when a game makes you want to do something other than keep it at max zoom because it allows you to appreciate the game even more as a byproduct.

Inventory and player storage

Seems fine. The herbalism bags seem pointless unless you make the stack faaar larger for those ones specifically. I assume there’s a lot of work here to be done so I won’t harp on it very much. I like the idea of storage being node specific. Small note is there needs to be a little more storage space.

Raids/raid bosses

From what I’ve seen on your showcases, there needs to be a lot more involved in the raid bosses.

Though it’s hard to speak to this when I haven’t been able to do them myself. You have a large kit here to work with, having the players with sprint/dodge/block. Use all this in your raid fights. Large fire breaths from a dragon that coat a large amount of the raid is kind of boring mechanic wise for boss fights. I just wish for a little more in your raid boss fights for now. The big ogre with the tree, that one was a little more interesting where you have to kill the tree weapon. But where were the dodges in the fight? Not much seemed like you need to dodge out of it in this fight and thus wasn’t terribly engaging beyond the norm imo?

Gear

Looks great so far for basic gear. My main thought here was I really want to see some freaking EPIC looking gear for characters, probably more so in the late game. I want to see a crystal great sword that’s bigger than the size of my character like Guts or darksouls. Something that makes me look at it and want to put thousands of hours into a profession to get it. Or maybe even a staff of pure light or living wood. Or glowy shoulder pads, or boots that leave an ice trail? Or hell even a giant dragon scale for a shield? I just generally want better looking gear at later points in this game which I haven’t seen a ton of art for yet.

Drops

These seem rare enough to be exciting when they do drop. But again, as I said above, I would prefer drops from mobs be more for professions like cooking/hunting/tanning when applicable. I think mobs should drop a few more interesting things. And maybe if a higher-level hunter kills something they get more meat when they kill mobs? Not much more on this as it’s still early dev.

Other changes?

I would kind of like to see the mage lightning ball shoot out electric bolts at additional target and do direct damage from the orb hitting things. (the orb is too slow for pvp I think to be useful). I look forward to seeing the fire and earth spells for the mage when they are done.

Hopes for the future of the game*

Naval combat in this game is something I deeply look forward to! I wish for this to really make you feel like you are out at sea. I want big waves, wind and storms if possible. Ideally something sort of like Black Flag. It makes you feel like you are out in the ocean and when in combat it takes a lot of maneuvering and teamwork to get your guns on point and do damage. I think this is one of the most exciting aspects that could easily fall flat on its face for this game. I would love for the ocean to feel expansive and vast. I hope the team manages to really make this a very exciting feature because it could be a massive pull for your game for players!

I wish for raid boss fights to be a little more exciting and interesting and the world’s cities to be more interesting than copy pastes of other cities. Keep all the future biomes feeling big and filled to the brim with stuff, dungeons and places. I really hope the games PVP doesn’t turn into just zerg everything with AoEs and stuff, that’s not engaging gameplay imo. I feel like the economy of this game will be very engaging and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

I really hope to see the teams’ efforts for making all the subclasses. I hope they can turn each of the different healers into something unique and spectacular. I also wish for them to make sure each of the different iterations of healer have their own identity or even role in the game come end game. I would prefer to see the different subclasses make you heal differently such as a shaman or something focusing on hot heals and high priests being the big chunky tank healers. This would provide a great variety for boss fights in the pve realm and allow for a larger and more exciting variety of boss fights. It could also work well in large scale pvp.

Other MMOs you’ve played extensively (gives insight into some people’s views) and about how long you’ve been following AoC development

I’ve played Wow for the most part since original vanilla. I dabbled in FF, Ark and BDO. And I’ve been following AoC since 2020. I almost always play healers.

sauww

Feedbacks and ideas

Hi,
First of all thank you for that first access to the game, for some it was amazing, for other pretty chaotic but overall, we're all happy to finally come to the point where stuff gets real

I thought that it'd be great to create a post where i can recap and update my ideas for the game mechanics or interfaces.
Take what you're interested in and forget about the rest, here's just few notes about my thought while playing. There will probably be some already said stuff, but I'll be updating this post every week with new things.
Also as a second list, I'll join you a list of bug and weird behaviors I've encountered.

My experience has been pretty short, cause I'm one of those who had the Unreal Engine crash. I spend one or two days between stress testing and alpha 2 trying to find a way out of this. Finally managed, I'll explain in the end of the post what i did.

Of course everything here is related to improvement and bugs which is pretty negative but I must say i had a really great time and even if this is "only" an alpha 2, the game is great and I can't wait for what's next

Suggestions

Arrows on the minimap pointing towards group members when they are to far would be great
Imo, having all the groups options when clicking on a group members (and I mean ON HIM not on the group nameplate) is kinda useless, if we need to have groups options, let them be on the group nameplate
I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature so I'm going to put this here. When a member of the group disconnect, it makes him instantly leave the group. This is kinda problematic sometimes to find your in-game meetings after a death + disconnection. Also when fighting rare or elites or whatever mobs that will drop a rare item, it's frustrating for the one who got disconnected to not have his chance on the loot even if he log back instantly. Of course if he leave for more than a certain time, the drop choice "need" or "greed" should forget about him. This is especially important since we are experiencing some regular crashes and disconnections.
The possibility to search a keyword directly on a skill tree? This is not essential but a good QOL improvement i think.
While in a group, we've been doing a question where you need to loot something on a particular mob. The thing is, we realized the mobs is dropping his quest item only once per kill, for one person. Which led us to just stay there and farm the respawn while other people were also trying to steal the mob. I don't know if it is by choice but having the loot dropping for every group members would be great ^^
Be able to remove a buff with a right click
Even if it doesn't give any information having a visual hover feedback on mobs/NPC and all would be nice.

Bugs

Quests items are not in the quest item tabs. AND also if you delete a quest item while still in the quest, the quest objective don't get unchecked. It stay checked but you can't finish the quest. Also I couldn't make sure of that but I'm not sure the mob will actually drop it again after that? The only solution would be to restart the quest. Maybe put a warning when deleting quests items saying the quest is still going? Or uncheck the objective simply?
While walking, not auto walk but pressing W, if you click on any windows, the character stop walking.
Chat censoring looks a bit off, I noticed many occurrences of words that shouldn't be censored (example : "fireball" -> "fir####l") while "shits" still is okay? ^^
When writing in chat, many essential key binds are still active in the game while it shouldn't be. For instance, Ver. Num., Shift or Ctrl. It's kinda dangerous sometimes ahah
My character is a Vek and I swear my hairs are trying to kill me. There is sooooo many interactions where those hairs are crazy but when you zoom in, they stop being crazy. I tried to link a video but doesn't work.
Buffing someone make him stand, even if he's using a ration : on my ranger, if I put thorn on somebody eating, he's gonna stand and loose his ration.

UE Crash, my experience

As one of the lucky ones, I got those crashes.

I tried many stuff but with the queue time between each try, it took me 2 days to finally make a config working.
So I did many things and it's hard to say if it is one specific or all of it who made the difference. I can try to apply each of my solutions one by one to find the good one maybe but that'll be long with queue.
So to make my game work, I had to :

Disable CPU boost in BIOS
Do this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsoMl-e2-Tg
Do that : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VwaWNRFXKU
Also I was still crashing after a bit of playing but without UE error, just a freeze. So i had to limit FPS, which pretty much saved me in the end I finally managed to play for a whole evening (night) without a personal crash.

I've got a shit ton of logs on all my crashes but I'm not really comfortable in sending it here tbh. If you need it let me know, I assume your team has enough of those :P
I will roll back all those changes so I'll try playing without next week, and let you know if it works

Here you go, I'll be back next monday eventually to give my new feedbacks

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