Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Great Concept, But a Terrible First Impression
pvpgate
Member, Alpha Two
I’ve been a huge fan of MMORPGs for about 20 years. I remember the golden age of the genre, and I clearly see the stagnation it's been in for the past decade. That’s exactly why I’ve been following this project for a long time. I genuinely want to see a modern MMORPG that still carries the spirit of the old-school games — with open-world PvP, free trade, and tons of exciting features.
And so, after years of watching YouTube videos about the game, I finally decided to join the alpha test… and my first impression honestly shocked me — in a bad way.
Let me describe what shaped my first impression — literally within the first five minutes of gameplay. I understand this is an alpha, and I can see that a lot of work has been done in other areas. But a new potential player joining the game will see this first — not the grand vision that reveals itself later.
1. The movement feels really bad. The character instantly snaps to face the camera with no turning animation at all… I get that this was a thing in WoW and other older MMOs, but in 2025 it just looks awful. If I were to compare, the hybrid target/action mode in Throne and Liberty was implemented much better — at the very least, it doesn’t make your eyes bleed.
2. The walking animations are really poor, and the animation blending is terrible. When changing direction quickly, the character snaps and jitters as their body angle shifts instantly — it all looks extremely rough. This could be easily fixed by properly setting up the blendspaces in Unreal Engine.
3. Additive animation. When the character is holding a weapon, it looks like an additive pose is being applied to the arms on top of the base animation. But it feels like it’s being applied very roughly — maybe to just a single bone (probably the clavicle). As a result, when this is blended with the running animation, the arm movement looks extremely unnatural.
4. The same issue applies to blending attack animations with walking or running. It looks like a simple Layer Blend Per Bone is being used based on a fixed bone like the spine or pelvis. This often results in very unnatural movement — the character bends or twists awkwardly when attacking while moving.
5. The combat system feels really clunky. When casting a spell, you can turn your back to the target near the end of the cast, and the character will still play the casting animation forward — but the spell will fly backwards toward the target. Melee attacks are also very awkward — they just deal damage in an area around the character. You can be standing sideways or even almost with your back to the enemy, and still hit them, even though the sword swing animation goes in a completely different direction.
6. The camera behaves strangely during jumps, and especially when climbing over obstacles. It feels like the character capsule teleports onto the obstacle, while the character model stays below and plays the climbing animation — during which player movement seems temporarily "frozen".
7. Enemy AI in the starting area. I get that you were aiming for the feel of an outpost under attack by goblins, but in practice, the enemies just run around chaotically. Honestly, it would’ve looked better if they were simply standing around in improvised “camps” on the field.
Sorry for my English — it’s not my native language, and I used a translator in some parts.
I really hope to see a revival of the genre in your project, and I’m looking forward to improvements not only in the depth of the mechanics but also in these kinds of “small details”.
And so, after years of watching YouTube videos about the game, I finally decided to join the alpha test… and my first impression honestly shocked me — in a bad way.
Let me describe what shaped my first impression — literally within the first five minutes of gameplay. I understand this is an alpha, and I can see that a lot of work has been done in other areas. But a new potential player joining the game will see this first — not the grand vision that reveals itself later.
1. The movement feels really bad. The character instantly snaps to face the camera with no turning animation at all… I get that this was a thing in WoW and other older MMOs, but in 2025 it just looks awful. If I were to compare, the hybrid target/action mode in Throne and Liberty was implemented much better — at the very least, it doesn’t make your eyes bleed.
2. The walking animations are really poor, and the animation blending is terrible. When changing direction quickly, the character snaps and jitters as their body angle shifts instantly — it all looks extremely rough. This could be easily fixed by properly setting up the blendspaces in Unreal Engine.
3. Additive animation. When the character is holding a weapon, it looks like an additive pose is being applied to the arms on top of the base animation. But it feels like it’s being applied very roughly — maybe to just a single bone (probably the clavicle). As a result, when this is blended with the running animation, the arm movement looks extremely unnatural.
4. The same issue applies to blending attack animations with walking or running. It looks like a simple Layer Blend Per Bone is being used based on a fixed bone like the spine or pelvis. This often results in very unnatural movement — the character bends or twists awkwardly when attacking while moving.
5. The combat system feels really clunky. When casting a spell, you can turn your back to the target near the end of the cast, and the character will still play the casting animation forward — but the spell will fly backwards toward the target. Melee attacks are also very awkward — they just deal damage in an area around the character. You can be standing sideways or even almost with your back to the enemy, and still hit them, even though the sword swing animation goes in a completely different direction.
6. The camera behaves strangely during jumps, and especially when climbing over obstacles. It feels like the character capsule teleports onto the obstacle, while the character model stays below and plays the climbing animation — during which player movement seems temporarily "frozen".
7. Enemy AI in the starting area. I get that you were aiming for the feel of an outpost under attack by goblins, but in practice, the enemies just run around chaotically. Honestly, it would’ve looked better if they were simply standing around in improvised “camps” on the field.
Sorry for my English — it’s not my native language, and I used a translator in some parts.
I really hope to see a revival of the genre in your project, and I’m looking forward to improvements not only in the depth of the mechanics but also in these kinds of “small details”.
1
Comments
No they won't.
A new tester will see this, but testers should expect things like this. The game is perhaps two years away from having players.
It is worth pointing out - you may have been playing MMO's for 20 years (as is the case for many of us here), but you have never been able to log in to an MMO as early in its development as Ashes currently is - unless you have been involved in developing an MMO.
I understand that many things will change by release, but even now, everyone who bought access to the alpha is, first of all, a potential future player — and secondly, someone who will talk about the game to their friends, stream the gameplay in Discord, and so on. In other words, they’re either a potential promoter or someone who might end up discouraging others from trying the game.
I believe that when developing any game, it makes sense to polish the core mechanics first — and only after that, start working on things like "caravan heists"
But getting proper base-lvl mechanics and features working is waaaay more important, because THAT is what people play.
If you can't separate a proper alpha from the release presentation, then treat Ashes as you would the release version of No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077. Both games were utter shit on release, but fixed themselves in a few years. Ashes is in the worst state it'll ever be. And its main playerbase will be built on release (or right before it), rather than during an alpha test with no promotion, no ads, no huge twitch streamers (well, one, who, I bet, repeats over and over and over that this is a true test) and no proper presentation of the game to players.
The fraction of a fraction of people, who think that the current version of the game is the stopping point of development and will keep that as their entire opinion on the game, is nothing compared to what the game can (and hopefully will) garner closer to release.
If you go and tell your friends "yeaaah, this totally not an alpha test looks totally like not a full release game" - that's on you, not on Intrepid.
I couldn't agree more with you. I'm even starting to doubt whether the character motion designer of this game is really qualify to create the character motion animations for this game.
I agree that many things you said will change in the future. However, the core content of an MMO, that is, a smooth and silky combat experience, is something that will never change. This is also the purpose of them inviting us to participate in the testing: to identify the flaws and assist them in improving the game, instead of taking it for granted that all the flaws are acceptable just because it's in the internal testing stage and not actively reporting the bugs you've found.
The so-called internal testing means that we, from the perspective of players, discover the problems that the game development team can't detect, so as to help them make improvements.
I believe that a smooth and silky combat experience is the core of the core of an MMO, and significant efforts should be devoted to perfecting it first. It's like the skeletal structure of our human body. Once we have it in place, filling in other game content will make the testing process much easier. A smooth combat experience is also the first thing that new players can feel when they start playing the game.
These experiences will provide players with a great initial experience, which will encourage them to actively test the more in-depth game content, rather than coming in, feeling that the combat experience is terrible, and then leaving the game.
please remember smooth and silky combat experience is the everything in MMO Game !!!
But you did not talk about mechanics in your Initial post, but animations. And polishing existing animations at a stage when your focus is to design new animations for archetypes, races, monsters, weapons, etc. which are under active development and need to be released for testing wouldn't make much sense.
Polishing starts when the foundation has been layed, and animations are either way not of any mechanical significance at this stage of development. I would starting to get concerned if I got the impression that Intrepid is pleased with the current state of the character animations - or even character design, which looks horrible (the faces!) - but I don't have that impression, because we're still so early in development, despite the game being under active development for quite some time.
As someone who started the game few days ago with a similar experience in MMOs as you, this is the first thing I noticed.
To me personally, the first thing that makes or breaks any game for me is movement and combat. The first being the most important factor for a first impression.
Ashes right now feels extremely clunky at best and needs alot of work to make it smooth. This should be one the main things they work on before releasing phase 3.
I can forgive any bad thing in almost any game, but not bad movement and combat (the latter can have exceptions in certain games that focuses on storytelling instead)
I will still play the game a little bit but will only invest more time when phase 3 start and I hope this helps into prioritizing it very soon.
I truly see the love and passion that the devs have put into the game and I hope their efforts are paid off in the end and we have an amazing game.
But when it comes to movement, turning, leaning, etc., that’s a core mechanic that won’t need to scale later on.
The same goes for how player actions are handled and how animations interact with each other. Character rotation, orientation relative to the enemy during attacks — all of that is part of the game’s fundamental foundation. That’s exactly the kind of thing that should be getting polished even at this stage.
They need to make a game first and then smooth it out as much as possible. We've already seen race models reworked and even the current ones aren't final. What exactly would happen if they "polish" animations for the current models, but then decide that these models don't fit the rest of the game they've built? They'd need to make new models with new animations.
Here's the history of updates of combat animations up until 2022 (when the current version was only starting out really)
And the current animations will change further as well. But not now or anywhere soon, because that is not the focus of these tests. Like I already said, anyone who will judge the future final product by the current state of the game will have only themselves to blame for doing so.
You should.
This is an alpha test. The idea of it is to assist in getting the game ready to go live. Ready for when people come to the game to play it.
A test is supposed to have broken and unfinished things. There would be nothing to test if that wasn't the case.
Based on what you are saying, your issues with the game can be summed up in total as being your misconception as to what an alpha test is.
That is probably because you have no idea about game development.
The way movement feels is literally a last minute adjustment. It could be made between the beta servers going down and the head start servers going live.
While it is a last minute thing, it can't (or shouldnt) be made until literally every aspect of all character models has been created, polished and finalized. It is literally the last thing to be done in regards to characters.
An alpha test is less about how movement feels, and more about "does your character actually move around the game world?".
This is why your expectations are so out of whack.