[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

Find more posts tagged with

Staff

Comments

Daggial

With our guild we decided to go to Halcyon and at the moment it's pretty disappointing.
The entire part of the ZOI north, east and southeast of the node is completely empty. No mobs, no resources, nothing at all.

For a day or two we grinded the mobs surrounding the node that are lvl8/11 but now we are out. Every mob in the other areas is very high level. The lowest POI, Ursine Caves, has lvl 15 3 star mobs at the entrance, while every other node has locations for lower level players.
The zone southwest has lots of resources to gather, but they are surrounded by mobs that are lvl 20-ish so its impossible to get them, and if we want to test out gathering and crafting we need to travel a lot and go in other nodes.

I understand this is not a content testing alpha but we would appreciate if the devs populated the ZOI with some grind spots and resource nodes for players of different levels and playstyles.🙏

Vyril

Pocket Dungeons are lacking soul and depth, while also highly abusable.

DeusVult117

Loot: It feels rare and very rewarding when received. That said, it was very noticable that only some mob types in certain areas drop loot, as I would go hours without something and then find an area where I would get 3-4 drops in less than 30 minutes. Unless more mobs are given loot tables, it will be difficult to gauge if the the loot drops are too generous or too rare.

Environment: Beautiful, and aside from a very funny area in Halcyon where you can swim in the air, and a few roads that path through the air, the environment seemed clean.

Combat: Auto Basic attack should be enabled by default. Literally every person I played with asked how to enable it. It should be more accessible in the menus. Combat felt fun and responsive once I enabled the auto basic attack. I only played Fighter, so it might be different for other archetypes.

Questing/Commissions: Most quests and commissions do not feel worth the time invested considering the paltry XP gain. Exploration commissions feel like a waste of time and effort, so I avoid them completely despite my interest in exploration.

Glint: The game doesn't make it clear what glint is for.

Gaul_

Overall I enjoyed testing the game very much, here is my breakdown below:

Character Creator
The CC is very underwhelming, and the character models are not beautiful. I eventually ended up just skipping it with a premade selection since the saving functionality is broken.

Leveling
Right now, there is a big disconnect in terms of knowledge, adventuring, and artisanship between levels 5-10 and going from Lionhold to your first node. There is a lack of efficient crafting and trading options early on as well.

Node
I saw Joeva on Lyneth jump from an encampment at 74% XP to a village node in a 2-minute period. That was very strange, and I hadn't heard anyone from Intrepid mention why that is happening.

Tank
Overall tank abilities feel good, although there are big issues with dodge and block. The threat mechanics are very TBC, which is great. It's not hard to keep aggro but it's not fire-and-forget either.

As a tank, I want the evasion buff from dodge but not the large ground that I cover when I roll over, which both looks comical and makes me jerk the mobs around. This is not good for tanking as it creates a lot of chaos. There should be a secondary option to use dodge to proc evasion without the movement or with much less movement, like a quick sidestep. A sidestep would also look much better than groups of players rolling around on the ground constantly.

I did have some mana issues as a tank if I was grouped and there was no bard...so I would be conserving mana constantly and my damage would suffer greatly. I wanted to try out some of those group defensive skills, but mana was already a major issue, so I didn't take them.

The auto attack weaving as a tank is not very interesting. Occasionally, I would wait for 4 melee swings before resuming abilities. That's about it. The weapon trees should involve much more choice instead of just deciding what I want my finisher to do (if it even procs). Perhaps giving options for the 2nd and 3rd swing to be buffed?

Active block is terribly unfun. In a tab MMO, tanks should be pressing block for a short buff and then moving onto the next skill. Right now, you just sit there like a chump holding down block. Pressing and holding block while being unable to use other skills to generate threat or do damage is beyond boring. You don't even get to swing basic attacks. It would be a little more interesting if some tank skills could be used while blocking, that would add some depth at least. Or, better yet, active block just shouldn't be in the game at all. Ashes is not a souls game with no latency and fancy animations to parry. Ironically, 'active block' makes tanking far less fun and active.

Corruption
Corruption penalties look to be in an ideal state, besides the baiting issues that other players have brought up. I was not hunted by higher level players, and that's how it should be.

Trade
There isn't enough trade capacity to service the player's needs, especially at this point in testing. Trading through global chat is not a reasonable solution.

As far as the future of trade systems in the game, I don't know how player stalls or the auction house will work, but I hope Intrepid realizes that a localized economy game needs massive capacity for a small number of players to create a very large number of market orders. Each player should be able to create at least a thousand market orders because only 0.1% of players are going to spend hours of game time on the market every day. Intrepid needs to let allow design space for a tiny minority of players to service the trade of a majority of players.

This is a big mistake that New World made and is the reason they swapped to a global trading post system so quickly after launch. They had a bunch of different trading posts but there was no capacity for players to fill them with goods. It was as if the designers assumed that every single player would post the maximum number of market orders every single day.

The AoC markets being localized instead of global means that the game will need about 20x more trade (and storage) capacity in the design space than a game like WoW. For example, instead of a healthy game needing about 20 market orders selling copper in a single global auction house, now you need 400 market orders selling copper at 40 different locations all over the world. Multiple that need by the number of items in the game, including different material rarities and the individual sales of gear. And if auction house or player stall market buy orders are also intended, then you can double that number again. Ashes will need massive trade capacity in its design to resolve the needs of the localized economy.

Siendel

Tested Mage class (around level 6.5)

Initial class thoughts: seemed fine up to these levels. Focused build around ice + lightning and liked available synergies. High dps and very squishy when shield isn't up. Mana seemed always topped off when just farming in a group (likely would be different for major fights), and seemed pretty fine to me when solo (which I spent most of my time). Note that I always kept a stack of rations handy to help speed up recovery when needed, but was surprised at the number of equal level mobs could knock down before needed to rest. Seemed like I could solo higher elites like the golem near the crystal without running out (at least if it weren't for all the nearby trash mobs respawning).

Edit: one thing I'd like is an option to toggle the AoE trigger effect from spells. There are times (both grouped and solo) when you don't want to be hitting nearby targets (like sleeping ones), but other times when you want your AoE turned up to 11.

Low level gear: I liked finding crafting recipes that I could turn into better gear. I think I found 2 pieces of the riverlands level gear, but the recipes found plus the ones available from npcs I was easily able to craft myself a full set of T1 gear by level 6.

Gathering: didn't have much time actually in the game this weekend, but was able to get a few levels in most of them. Did not advance to level 10, which also was a reason for not grinding those out yet. That said, gathering seemed worth it just for the glint. I did run into a bug where my herbs would go into my mining bag after the herb bag was full. And when I took those out, for awhile ore wasn't going anywhere (at least not into my inventory), but that fixed itself with time.

Quests/leveling: some seemed mandatory (like the horse and the delivery mission), while almost all the commissions seemed buggy and/or not worth the effort by themselves. A couple times they led me to areas where I just got DCed and thrown back into queue. For the most part, I found just grinding equal level (or one level lower) mobs was most efficient in terms of experience and loot. Doing this solo gave me way reward than either being in a group or raid. Sure we could kill much higher mobs grouped up, but at least at low levels this didn't seem worth it. Obviously at max level it will be critical to group up to get the best drops (and for protection), but at lower levels in the current iteration it doesn't seem optimum ... although it is far more fun to play grouped up than not.

If I had one recommendation for improvement, I'd suggest making the named mobs for kill quests just needing to be damaged by player (or player healing another player that damaged the named mob). Those mobs should not drop special loot and not grant any experience over a normal mob in the area. It is not fun spending an hour trying to get credit for a quest only to be outdone by a dozen solo melee players swarming the spawnpoint completely preventing your ability to get credit (whether solo or grouped).

paratua

I had a lot of fun, but there were two main issues that hit me like a slap in the face early on. Both of them can be very easily fixed too.

The first is widescreen support. This can be solved with a simple INI entry as I noted in my bug thread. This really makes it hard to play on a wide screen, which has become quite common.

Second was the voiceovers. I can look past them as I know they're temporary, but oh my god they're very bad even for AI voices. Use something like Elevenlabs, where you can make a clone of a staff member voice with less than a minute of talking and produced output sounds far, far, far more realistic.

Flashfirez23

I thought the game has a good foundation. I am enjoying the alpha and I am excited for the future of the game. Here is my feedback:

Social Gameplay - Ashes’ alpha is one of the most social mmo I’ve ever played. I hope it maintains this all the way to the release of the game. People group up and talk to each other. You meet people in the world and this makes the game so alive! Also, grouping currently is the best way to progress your character. I think this is important to getting people to play together. Please keep it this way. Solo play needs to be less efficient than group play or else group play will rarely occur organically. I think if people want to play solo they should be able to. However, there should be some challenge to doing so but make it so that it is stull possible and the reward for solo play should be decent but not as effective as grouping with others.

Combat: I love the combat. It already feels better than a lot of other MMOs. The combat is fun and impactful. The skills are also extremely fun to unlock and use! There does need to be a bit more polish but I’d say it’s like 80% there and just needs a few small tweaks to get there all the way. But the team has done an amazing job developing this. Defiantly one of the best features of the alpha.

World: The world is beautiful and large. I feel like I’m going on an adventure when traveling in it. I think it is a good start. However, there needs to be more crafting materials in it. There simply is not enough as is for low level crafting. Basic resources should be common. While late game resources should be rare. Right now everything is uncommon which is not good. The world needs content but I am sure that is the plan and I’ll have to wait and see how the world evolves further into the alpha before I can further comment on this.

Crafting: it needs to be much easier to make low level crafting items. Systems should be easy to pickup and hard to master. Right now it’s tough to pick up and hard to master. This just makes crafting to much of a pain to even get started with! Please make it so a lvl 5 or lvl 10 doesn’t take a long to make. Over time crafting items should take longer and harder to make gradually as you level up. But not at the start!

Questing and Commissions: they simply are not worth doing at the moment. The rewards are not worth the effort. Questing is a bit of challenge due to the scale of the world. There’s a lot of traveling involved for some quests and that can be not very engaging gameplay. The quests are also hit or miss in quality. I don’t think regular mmo questing will work for this game. I would suggest having a drastically fewer quests than other MMOs. But the quests you do have are high quality engaging, well written, memorable, and feel like an actual adventure. This way they actually make the travel feel worth it. There also should be rewards to make the time invested in the quests worth it. As for commissions, i honestly don’t like them as a concept. I don’t think doing menial tasks in games are fun personally. Hopefully commissions are completely optional and avoidable so players who do not like low effort content can enjoy the other aspects of the game.

Dungeons: I feel like the dungeons are kind of small. It would be nice for them to be larger. Also I would like to see more bosses, secrets, treasure chests, and rewards in them. Traps could also be an interesting addition to add more challenges to them.

That’s my feedback so far. I am excited to see future updates for this game. And am enjoying playing the game.

Kalnazzar

Vaknar wrote: »

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

Mount Call Improvement: Responsive Summon Range Suggestion
One enhancement I'd love to see with the mount system is a more immersive approach to the mount call feature, especially when the mount is within close range. Currently, if your mount is nearby, calling it requires two actions—one to despawn it and another to re-summon it to your side.

My suggestion is to allow the mount to path directly to the player if it’s within earshot, creating a realistic experience where the mount actively approaches without needing to be re-summoned. This would streamline the call mechanic and make mounting up feel smoother and more intuitive. For example, if you dismount temporarily, you could call your mount back to you without the immersion break of despawning and respawning.

balkoth

All in all, I think it is looking and running pretty good. Ive been playing/testing MMOs since the beginning. I beta tested UO (and some of you will remember how long ago that was), along with AC, EQ, EQ2, DAoC, and many others. Many of us have been waiting since UO for this. So first let me say thank you.
I will say I'm impressed with the speed at which your team is reacting to and handling issues. Not very often anymore do you see a dev team that's not only paying attention, but actually doing something in real time when issues arise. In my opinion, that just shows the pride/investment (along with obvious talent) the team has in their work. Its refreshing to see.
I like the combat so far, and progression seems decently paced, but admittedly, I didn't get real far last weekend, due to work. So Ill just hit a couple small things real quick.
I do think there needs to be little work with the mounts yet. I know you've heard it needs a way to identify yours from the others. I'm hoping you have plans to be able to name it. I also think it needs to be made clear how to stable it or despawn it or whatever. I saw many horses standing around while people were fighting things. Along with creating lag potential, its also going to be a guaranteed cause of griefing. I would like to see a little more help in general though, in the early game. I don't know if you have plans for more of a tutorial from the start or not. If not, it may be easier at this point to add in something as another tab or section in the journal that has some basic tips, at the very least. Even the more experienced of us are bound to have some questions in a game this complex. One thing in particular id like to see is a basic key for the symbols on the map/minimap. I also don't remember seeing much for tool tips with the mouse-over either. Its a beautifully built world, and I love the complexity of it, but that same quality does inevitably create a level of confusion. Id hate to see the game's success damaged by something so easily avoided.
I also thought the DDoS attack was handled pretty well, all things considered. I was surprised to see one this soon though, as I'm sure you were too probably. Im very interested to see how it goes this weekend now. Being an IT specialist myself, Id be curious to know more about that whole incident.
There's other small points to mention, but I'll wait to see if they're in the plans yet. It is only in alpha still, after all. I'm sure Ill have more to say once I have a bit more time with it. Overall though, I think its going very well. Tell the team they've done a great job so far.

Cinemark

I really am enjoying the combat rotation, very happy with that I have seen so far.

simpetar

Consumables crafting time

This is one thing I have issues with. I gathered a fair amount of herbs and wanted to give Alchemy a try. It takes 40 minutes to craft a stack of 20 Novice Mana Salves from scratch: 20 for grinding the Daffodil Powder + 20 turning them into the Salves. I can cope with a minute when making a permanent piece of gear, but consumables like potions are meant to come and go and are created en masse.

My understanding is it's supposed to get faster at higher skill levels or with better artisan gear, but this leaves incredibly bad first impression. It means 40 minutes of mindlessly staring at the progress bar, or being AFK. This is antithetical to engaging gameplay and discouraging from leveling the artisanship in the first place.

SonicXplosion

Plannindorf told me to put my feedback here, so:
I'm not a fan of the current experience of going from level 9 -> 10. It feels like it creates a bump in progression, and the slow leveling curve on its own is enough to make leveling feel rewarding. I understand it leads to a huge powerspike due to level 10 gear, but if its intended for level 10 to be that kind of power spike, I would expect more than just access to that new gear.

Imnotkio

Additional feedback:

The caravan event system is not good IMO. It announces to everyone that there is a caravan in the area, preventing any chance of doing stealth or hidden route runs. It creates unnecessary bloat in the UI and it feels super gamey and not immersive at all. (There are more problems but those could be fixed without changing the system so I won't bring those up)

I suggest an alternative caravan system: To become a defender, you must approach and interact with the caravan. To become an attacker, you must either hit a defender or the caravan. You can have a radius around that caravan in which if someone leaves this radius for a certain amount of time, they are no longer attackers or defenders. It's simple, it doesn't require a UI middleman, it allows for stealth runs, and it's a seamless way to implement it without feeling "gamey"

Prismatic beam: You should be able to aim the beam up and down with the action camera

gear: I like the design of a higher tier lower level gear being equal to a lower tier higher level gear. It makes it so you can compare in force with a higher-level player just by farming properly and getting a bit lucky. It also makes sense that if you get lucky with a rare drop, you won't be trading it for a gray item a few levels forward and your luck really matters. If you have a legendary level 10 gear, it should stick till you get another very rare drop from higher levels. I still think the jump in power from gear tiers/levels is a bit too high though.

Kalnazzar

The current setup for crafting, particularly that players can begin crafting and then walk away without needing to be present at the station, feels immersion-breaking and detracts from the engagement of crafting in Ashes of Creation. I believe there’s room for significant improvement here, especially in the early stages of the crafting journey.

For instance, starting out, crafting should require players to remain at their crafting stations, encouraging hands-on interaction and an invested process. As players and their nodes progress, this could then evolve with upgrades that allow for more flexibility and efficiency over time.

Here’s how I envision improvements that would make the crafting system both engaging and rewarding as players advance:

Node Crafting Stations: Early on, players could be required to be present at the station, which creates a sense of commitment and immersion. But as a node grows and is upgraded, the mayor could eventually hire NPC helpers or specialists to assist at crafting stations. These NPCs could help reduce crafting times and enable “off-station” crafting, allowing items to continue producing while the player engages in other activities. This setup would reward dedicated players and invested communities by gradually increasing crafting efficiency over time.

Homesteads: Similar improvements could be applied at player homesteads. By advancing their personal property and investing in specialized retainers or crafting assistants, players could achieve a similar “progressive crafting” system. Retainers stationed at homestead crafting tables could help manage production, providing flexibility in an immersive and earned way rather than as an automatic convenience.

Progression Paths for Faster Crafting: In addition to NPC helpers, there should be a range of options available to players for reducing crafting time. Upgrading nodes with specific crafting stations, equipping artisan gear, using powerful artifacts, and accessing guild buffs would all contribute to faster crafting, allowing players to specialize and customize their experience. This would let players feel more invested in their character’s profession and see meaningful results from their dedication and choices.

By requiring players to interact with their crafting stations at the beginning, they experience a rewarding journey that grows into a sophisticated system over time. This approach encourages players to interact closely with the world around them while allowing earned convenience and flexibility in the long term.

Kesarakk

Short Answer:

Overall, I had a positive experience in Phase One. I'm looking forward exploring more what Vera has to offer.

Long Answer:

Combat

- Transition between Tab and Action feels fine.
- Basic Attack and Block taking up two keys that I'm used to for movement feels silly. In the sense that I start swinging my sword or raising my shield when all I meant to do was move left and right. In some ways, I feel like my movement has been hindered by these two buttons.
- In Action, I would love it if the RMB acted as the block button. There's an awkwardness that your LMB becomes your basic attack instead of "Q" but the block is still stuck on "E".
- Not every creature needs a unique fighting style. I think this should ramp up in difficulty as you level, sure, but levels 1-10 (Minus named quest creatures and elites) should be a tradition tank-n-spank.
- Possible I missed it but it needs to be easier when tabbing onto friendly targets to make healing more efficient. I've found myself accidently healing myself instead of a party or raid member because my buttons were sticky (Yeah, yeah. I hear all of you... "git gud" haha)

Artisanship

- There needs to be a unique quest for each Artisan class to help ease the player into it. For the Alpha, what's there now makes sense but in the long term it doesn't nearly cover the base it should with all the different ways for crafters to explore the game.
- Material sizes in the bags feels very off. You can't tell me that a ruby is the same size as a horse or even raw ore haha.
- Early crafting needs to have a level of independence. If I want to make a sword, I shouldn't need to go out of my way to learn Stonemasonry to make a single mold to craft. It should either be something I can already do as a smith or the mold should be reserved for higher tier items or maybe for different aesthetics (i.e. Wanting a Dunir style blade instead of an Empyrean). I believe ESO does this well with their Rune system.
- Finale note: I'd like to see unique quests for each level of advancement in the Artisan classes. Something immersive and engaging like assisting an NPC master smith with crafting or gathering a material in the wild.

Solo Content

- There needs to be a balance between group and solo content. Group content is fun but you can't expect your players to group up every single time they come online or for every quest.
- Early levels (1-15) should be easy enough to do solo. That's plenty of time for a player to get their feet under them and have a basic level of understanding of the game. Especially for those late comers who aren't there at launch and now have no one to group with
- Adding on to the last point: This game isn't designed to be alt-friendly and until majority of players hit max level and established in their nodes/guilds/etc. you're not going to see many lowbie players running around three months in. Imagine how new players would feel coming into the game late only to not play because there's no one at their level to do quests and NO ONE enjoys being carried through content.

Skill Trees

- I like being able to respec on the fly and I hope a version of that stays through to launch.
- Additionally, I would like the ability to de-select a single talent choice and swap it for something else rather than having to reset all my points and do it manually.
- I know the players are going to do this on the wiki but I'd like to have a preview of weapon choices. i.e. Pros and Cons for what you pick like "Great Sword: High Damage, Low Defense" or something like that.

Congratulations to Intrepid Studios for reaching this milestone we've been waiting for years to get to. Now that we are here, I love doing my part in making this a game I can come home to every night and forget about life for a few hours. Keep up your good work! No other studio can hold a candle to you with your passion, communication, or desire to make a game we all want to play.

frogbound

frogbound wrote: »

[...]

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

[...]

- Love
frogbound

Summary of 2nd weekend:

I've been focusing a lot more on gathering this time around with copper and zinc being more readily available. I did some combat stuff, but I mainly wanted to dive into gathering and crafting.
Here are my two cents for this second weekend:

Crafting is still very bare bones it seems. I know the main focus of this test was stability and my overall stability was A LOT better than last weekend. I was still mainly on the NA realms while playing from EU but I did take a little detour to the EU realms to try to see if I can notice the latency difference and I can say, I barely noticed it but I am also not too sure if that was still server side or if it actually was latency (since I have no way to see my latency to the game servers). I had people talk about how the EU servers are more stable than the NA server but I cannot confirm this notion as I did not notice a significant difference that would warrant this opinion.

But going back to gathering.
I am overall happy with what I have accomplished over the weekend. I spent quite some time mining and chopping down trees, I did craft a couple of shields to increase my weaponsmithing skills but I do have a few things I would like to say.

The community seems to be very focused on LEVELING. Purely leveling. The gear I can craft after spending more than 12 hours a day of gathering, is nowhere near the level where it would be useful to other players.
This is either solved by people changing their mindset and focusing less on leveling or getting the craftable items to a comparable level to the drops. I do understand that enemies drop recipes and gear (at least if they are humanoid) and I can turn these recipes into items that are significantly better but that would require me to go out there and grind for the recipes. As of now no one is trading recipes, everyone is keeping them for themselves, etc. Going out there to get them myself, makes me have less materials, makes me lose out on spending time on perfecting my craft but it would give me exp and glint, which then would make me want to be even better at crafting to get gear that I actually can use. Hence it's a devilish circle that somehow needs to be addressed.
If the guild does not play ball and helps their life skillers from top to bottom, there is only pain on the horizon for crafters and gatherers. I think this needs a very big mindset change for many many players.

On the topic of tools: I dislike being unable to unequip my gathering tools. I cannot craft tools for others, only for myself. Not sure if this is a bug but I went back to the Samir's Hope to get a second horse from the "Sweat of your brow" quest and it destroyed my novice pickaxe when I got the crude pickaxe. I reported it as a bug but I overall wish I could craft gathering tools for others. My guildmates did ask if I could do so and I had to hand them materials so they could do it themselves. I think this should change or get fixed, however the status on that is.

Artisan gear:
The different shirts are quite cute but they didn't feel like there were doing anything - besides the bonus EXP ones. The quantity one for mining didn't seem to provide any quantity increase whatsoever. Maybe bugged, maybe too low in stat. Not sure because it was hard to tell what the stat actually does even in the character artisan window. Looking at the stats there is nothing telling you how much 135 mining speed rating actually is. My heroic novice pickaxe didn't feel significantly quicker than the common one but it had almost 3 times the stats.

Which is the final point I wanted to make:

I wish there was a way to get more detailed information on STATS in general. What do they do, what are they used for. How much rating do I need per % increase, etc. It is very unclear and I think advanced tooltips should be introduced for these stats somehow. The last thing I want to do is break my immersion and look the information up OUTSIDE of the game.

That being said, I had a blast once again!

so much love from Germany,

frogbound

PS: I still have a bone to pick with this scythe wielding mfer. I didn't get to it.

Frighter

The current meta of glitching mobs for excessive XP, while efficient, detracts from the immersive experience. Here are some possible solutions.

Lets prioritize exploration, quests, and meaningful interactions.

-Professions-
* Introduce a streamlined professions tab with clear progression paths.
* Offer group profession quests that reward both XP and let you craft valuable items.
* Balance profession XP to match mob grinding, encouraging a more diverse playstyle.

-Enhance Quests and Call Boards-
* Provide quests that offer substantial XP, encouraging exploration of Verra's stunning landscapes.
* Implement a dynamic call board system with time-limited quests, fostering community and competition.

-Reduce mob xp-
* Reduce the excessive XP gained from mob grinding to incentivize other leveling methods.

Leveraging Events for Community and Progression
The current event system is a fantastic way to bring players together and offer unique leveling opportunities.

* Strategic Event Placement: Continue to scatter events across the map to prevent player caravans and encourage exploration.
* Let's have events that are very hard but give you opportunities to improve the nodes in the region or give you a temporary buff.

I want a more immersive and rewarding leveling experience by prioritizing exploration, community, and meaningful gameplay over mindless grinding.

Anyways that's my gripe and suggestions. At the end of the day maybe this game isn't for me. But I do like a lot about it.

Drezao

Had a great time playing this weekend. Much better than last week.
Had the opportunity to join a 40v40 pvp and it was a very smooth, no lagging experience. That really was a very positive surprise.

The game still has a lot of improvement to be worked on but the less obvious change I'd suggest would be to totally remake the interface visuals. The inventory, the character equipment page and the menu (maybe even the skill tree). It all just feels like a game made in 2008.

But overall I'm very glad with the game so far. Congratz to the team

Keypi

Dear Community,
Dear AoC-Team,

Preface:
I learn english by watching O.C. California years ago.
Lags, disconnects, grafics, animations, flora, fauna, style etc.will not evaluate in my first alpha report.
Started playing ultima Online decades ago and playing always supportive classes.
I played twelve hours, watched many streams and rewatched the Bard Archetype Preview.

Questing

I love the Idea of Townboards with little „to-do“ in terms of questing, gathering and crafting.
More quest variety would be nice and maybe a way to split your questbar in gather-Quest and hunting-Quest.

In gerneral i strongly dislike any story-quest just for the reason to have quests.
Or to tell me i am the chosen one, also the other millions of players are chosen too....

Quests for opening a dungeon, get a new skill, get a horse, evolve to the next class or lean some new artisans are fine to me.

Bard gameplay

I like the ability to move while using skills, the sound of the skills are mesmerizing and unique.
I loved the knee-slide, also the future plans with more instuments and sounds are nice.

I slightly dislike the Tomoto-throw-skill, the magical book and the Q-skill at start.
It doesnt fit in the bard theme imo.
I would like to see an real Instrument, fireing strings of melody or notes to damage enemys.

I dislike the amount of healing-skills in the first eight levels, also there could be more varity in the buff effects, so every build is more unique but impactful.

I strongly dislike the Saga-skill Apocalypse (Dragon-AoE-fire spell). It is out of place i think.
I would be nice to see that skill as a Magician (Bard-Mage) or maybe Songcaller (Bard-Summoner) but the basic bard should do another visualisation. maybe Screaming AoE attack or just somethink more neutral or music-related?

Artisan

Everything feels greate, no complain.
Just one request: please add a highlight-button to show your current recipe in the HUD. I keep forgetting und running back and forth.

HUD & HUD-manager

Just love it!

Last but not least:
Sidenote:

The water has flowdirection, my character floated away...
What an insane detail, i was impressed to have this in an alpha.

Thanks for the game, i needed to stop myself to save some time for next weekends.

Greetings
Kpy

magical-hobo

For all the love of ducks, let us edit the map in real time or be able to share with a group/friends/guild..
will make trying to locate someone/something easier..
will make raids much easier to follow plans..
same with transport and pvp and other things... like war.. the real world lets us do it, let us have the freedom and fun plzzzz

Child Item