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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.
Graphics and immersion
Chicago
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
So I have just recently come across this video of the graphics in alpha 1
https://youtu.be/i3ububKTcD8?si=gcZNbX8Bgx68ZyoR
Ashes has to be one of the most ambitious games of the decade and to be honest I am having an absolute blast playing the alpha, there are so many great aspects of the game that I can't phrase highly enough and for the first time many of us are genuinely excited about an upcoming MMO
However even with all the great systems and planned content it is sad to say that with the current state of the graphics I see a vast majority of the player base losing interest in the game
I know it's an alpha, I know we are not at a polish stage, I know that " core systems " should be implemented first but at what point of development can we start asking these questions? It would be amazing if in an upcoming live stream we could hear some of the plans from the art designers and Steven on what are the plans to fix the world.
The graphics in them selves look decent, but the world it's self feels so terribly miserable, there is almost no feel of fantasy in a fantasy MMO, the scale of almost everything is so out of shape that it's hard to tell if the character models are scaled poorly or it's just the world that we find out self in.
The character creator is absolutely tragic and you build almost no connection to the character that you play.
It worries me alot watching the above video because in alpha 1 the world looked and felt like a world you could get lost in, you didn't want to just rush to end game because you were so intrigued to explore the magical fantasy world, you could get lost for hours looking through caves or giant trees that look like they come from another planet
Then fast forward to alpha 2 and the world feels like you are running your average homeless guy ( character models ) through a boring landscape with a copy and paste simulator of every asset that we have already seen 300 times
The mob variety in the different biomes are just re colours and renamed versions of the same mobs
They are hardly fantasy creatures, just basic creatures we see on earth
I know that this isn't the main goal right now but as it's been stated quite a few times, that different parts of the game are being worked on by different teams, it's a bit disheartening that we have not seen any improvement on this since phase 1 and compared to alpha 1 it looks terrible in my opinion.
It would be great to hear on the next upcoming live streams the goals on this, and even some news on the character creator
https://youtu.be/i3ububKTcD8?si=gcZNbX8Bgx68ZyoRAshes has to be one of the most ambitious games of the decade and to be honest I am having an absolute blast playing the alpha, there are so many great aspects of the game that I can't phrase highly enough and for the first time many of us are genuinely excited about an upcoming MMO
However even with all the great systems and planned content it is sad to say that with the current state of the graphics I see a vast majority of the player base losing interest in the game
I know it's an alpha, I know we are not at a polish stage, I know that " core systems " should be implemented first but at what point of development can we start asking these questions? It would be amazing if in an upcoming live stream we could hear some of the plans from the art designers and Steven on what are the plans to fix the world.
The graphics in them selves look decent, but the world it's self feels so terribly miserable, there is almost no feel of fantasy in a fantasy MMO, the scale of almost everything is so out of shape that it's hard to tell if the character models are scaled poorly or it's just the world that we find out self in.
The character creator is absolutely tragic and you build almost no connection to the character that you play.
It worries me alot watching the above video because in alpha 1 the world looked and felt like a world you could get lost in, you didn't want to just rush to end game because you were so intrigued to explore the magical fantasy world, you could get lost for hours looking through caves or giant trees that look like they come from another planet
Then fast forward to alpha 2 and the world feels like you are running your average homeless guy ( character models ) through a boring landscape with a copy and paste simulator of every asset that we have already seen 300 times
The mob variety in the different biomes are just re colours and renamed versions of the same mobs
They are hardly fantasy creatures, just basic creatures we see on earth
I know that this isn't the main goal right now but as it's been stated quite a few times, that different parts of the game are being worked on by different teams, it's a bit disheartening that we have not seen any improvement on this since phase 1 and compared to alpha 1 it looks terrible in my opinion.
It would be great to hear on the next upcoming live streams the goals on this, and even some news on the character creator
2
Comments
In a game with good PvE and a lot of space (which Ashes is at least aiming to be) this isn't a problem for most people I know, because the mobs act different. They have 'personality' and sometimes, putting a mob you've seen a hundred times in a new environment, lighting situation, etc, with some small changes, really feels quite new because the mob fights differently. This isn't just me abstracting, at least not among my group. It really matters.
In a game with good balanced PvP and less space, this isn't a problem for a different reason. The mobs being repeated is much more about where you put them and how many of them you use (Lineage 2, some parts of Throne and Liberty, Dark Age of Camelot). You don't have to feel like you've seen a specific mob a million times when there are just less of them.
So a hypothetical 'good PvX game' design, I don't feel we should rag on Devs for reusing or recoloring mobs. A Tiger has 'personality' in FF11, for example, based on what it feels like to fight a Tiger. A Smilodon is just a reskinned Tiger in a different situation and barely any difference in even 'what it does' (it's among the 'laziest' uses of this approach, if we don't consider 'this mob is exactly the same as all others in its Family aside from level).
But if they need 'fast-moving otherwise-simple hunter mob with paralyze ability' for an area's ecology or to pose a specific type of threat, making a whole new model to put in the same space is imo doing lots of work for very little benefit.
If you're the type that doesn't 'forgive' even that, it's good that you gave this feedback, I'm just adding the context that those I speak for don't share the opinion on this specific topic of mob appearances/models.
also i commented on how A1 actually had the characters and environment right on other places yet somehow they messed it up so bad in A2
To be fair I have no idea where you get the idea that I want classic, what I am asking for is immersion and the examples I gave are from the alpha 1 of ashes of creation not classic, seems like you just want to be rude .. as always but anyway
No the mobs don't have personality, the re skinned mobs are basically the exact same mechanics where ever you find them, even the knights in carphin have the same mechanics as the level 5 knights at the starting area
And okay if we give them a pass on the mobs, we still have the same re coloured buildings, the same re coloured assets, the same bland biomes that give no sense of adventure
Like I have said a million times I don't think the graphics in them selves look bad, I just think that the world is missing the fantasy world feel
I agree, and I don't think this is a polish issue which is why I want to bring it up on the forums, I played A1 and I played pre A2.. while I will agree the Riverlands looks night and day difference to when we first jumped in last August, they still have not done anything about immersion, it still looks bland
I think that if they can have immersion during alpha 1 but have missed the mark by such a wide margin in alpha 2 it is something that should be looked at and we should stop expecting magic polish will fix it
We have now been in alpha for what 4 years? ( I know they scrapped the entire game after A1) But still..
And they are pumping out biomes at a fast rate that almost just look like a copy and paste of eachother in the way that they feel
Yes, alpha mobs w/o proper AI and proper skillsets are indeed bad. We know.
Yes, unfinished EVERYTHING is in fact unfinished.
I do wonder sometimes, hwo many times a day Steven curses himself for having decided to make the game in an "open" development.
Riot's mmo had to literally reinvent itself several years into production. TL LITERALLY reinvented itself almost a decade into production. But due to those games not being openly developed, people simply accept them for what they've become (well, excluding Riot's mmo cause it doesn't exist). Yet here we are, arguing over unfinished things being unfinished...
To be fair that is not the only definition of classic, maybe a definition but besides the point
I think we don't need to be reminded that it's an alpha at this point, I think at some stage it is a valid conversation topic to ask what the intended design looks like
I don't really see what the issue is when stating that the game felt better in and during alpha 1, I mean this is when many people bought their keys because of this content showcased so why can we not ask the question? I also never said I wanted something from the past, but yes obviously me and many people would like the immersive feel that alpha 1 brought and then to be improved apon during alpha 2
I understand alpha 1 was scrapped and they started over during alpha 2 but that is not an excuse for leaving out core elements of a fantasy MMO, which is the fantasy...
It's fine to say that you liked things in A1 better. But then at least point them out, explain why you prefer them (or at least compare to A2's similar stuff and say that you prefer the older version) and you'll have yourself a good feedback post.
Luki's video showed the things I mentioned above and those are the exact things we don't have right now, probably because they're harder to recreate in UE5 than just some basic-ass trees/palms that we've gotten so far.
The entire underground location HIGHLY depends on very good lighting. Current version of A2 has shit lighting (as confirmed by devs). All other node race variants are not in because we're not in that part of testing yet, considering we still don't have basic systems implemented.
Character creator is super basic because it requires a ton of work to properly match animations to all the potential player creations, which is also not a thing you gotta do when you're still figuring out optimizations and animations (pop-in has been utterly abysmal so far).
Different magical trees that look all kinds of weird would need proper animations and several optimization passes. Like, I'd imagine Intrepid don't want dreidel trees in their game, but we have those still and they like to spin spin spin.
And the most "done" biome so far is the human one. And you know what literally every fantasy media has in it, and it's also the most boring part of said media? HUMANS. So of course Riverlands will look kinda dull when you compare it to Tulnarian environments or even something from Vek or proper Vaelune (which have Djin versions btw, which will probably be even more fantasy-like in nature).
So, as I keep saying in every such thread - yes, we all want the game to move forwards faster. But it's not. If anything, it's moving too fucking fast for the devs themselves, exactly because our collective feedback has been yelling at them about all the things we're missing. So now, instead of proper base-lvl systems, we're getting one fucking biome a month. Except they're barely finished and barely populated.
Days since Steven cursed himself for open development: 0.
Your have a fair point, the things I liked about alpha 1 that we don't have in alpha 2 is the fact that everything felt to scale, when you ran around the world you felt a sense of mystery, danger, curiosity. Where as in alpha 2 we have none of that even in as you mentioned the most finished biome.
The Riverlands may be the "human " biome but that is only relevant because humans settled here, it does not feel like a magical world that we have not set foot in for the past 1000 years and other than a few human buildings it should realistically have nothing to do with humans
I think you are right that they may be moving to fast but let's not forget, there are different teams doing different parts of the project, whoever is designing quests and the leveling experience is almost guaranteed to not be designing the art style and biomes so these don't really go hand in hand and can very well be done in tandem
look at this , while this could still suffer from the same look at the very least it had a nice vibe going and most importantly , the trees (actually big), the characters the atmosphere it all looked to be on scale , it looked right unlike how it is now , if we had that then i would of believed that the biomes would of became a lot better since the base of them is already pretty decent
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxq0JM51UzTV7VdU1zvCP9jrLDHzeAFNpb?si=TbRYlVq6YDUo3MNF
100% agree, many of the showcases look like a completely different game, a good example is this
Skip to 49:30 it actually looks to scale and somewhat of fantasy world, but in reality it's nothing like this
And if you ever bring this up on the forums it's just " it's an alpha bro " comments
Right??? And these previews are years old at this point
But yes, I did mean 'you would like Alpha-1 style better'.
Ah well. Keep doing what you can, Intrepid.
Isn't that clip a preview of Highwayman Hills, a spot that is live in the Alpha right now?
I don't know if that spot looks different or has been removed since I never travel to that part of the map (so technically, I'm asking if that spot in Highwayman Hills has been changed, for example if the trees are smaller).
To me, this says that what we're shown there is just a possible vision of things. A vision that works on a super limited playspace, with barely any people in it and, most likely, no other features implemented. This allows them to boost all the visual effects, the fog, the leaves in the wind - all of that shit.
The current A2 client must survive literal thousands of players, all while being optimized enough to run on some encient hardware (i.e. my gtx1080 and i7-6700K). And to achieve that kind of performance you gotta cut down on the prettiness and on the client load from models, etc.
Also, both of these showcases have uncuttable trees. Hell, I'd even assume that the Cleric showcase has its tree cutting turned off completely, though maybe I missed a white dot somewhere. And in the Artisanship you can go to 48:36 and see that the tree to the left of Steven doesn't give him a "cut" prompt (and it's not even that big of a tree tbh).
And all of this just screams to me that implementing the things both of you are asking for simply requires a later stage of production, where it would not crash the game over and over, cause even the current basic-ass visuals/models still crash servers and people's clients on the regular. And when it comes to trees - blame aaaalll the people that begged on their knees to have "all trees are cuttable" kind of design back in 2021.
I was in the HH today and ran through almost the exact spot from that Cleric showcase. There were just a few trees there, but they suuuuure were cuttable
And this then also relates to the economy and model interaction side of things. If forests are so dense that the ground is dark - you have to account for that amount of trees when you design your crafting material costs and you need to account for fallen tree interactions between each tree. And if you look at a few recent threads you'll see the exact kind of feedback that happens when the econ side of the game increases the requirements by almost x10.
And when the entire game's design is built on "scarcity of resources and pvp for them" - you don't really want to plop insane amounts of resources everywhere. So the current tree situation is most likely a compromise between "you can cut all trees" and "crafting costs are not as high as they probably should be".
Though even then, I remember that in P1 node surroundings had very dense forests of Ash trees. But that's probably because Ash is the most useless damn tree in the game, so of course we can have forests of them
In other words, no, 3d modelers can't just easily plop their cool-looking massive trees into the game willy-nilly. So the answer, still, ultimately distills down to "it's alpha".
RIP to another Giant Pile of Gushing Praise.
Not an expert or even an amateur at biome design. But if I was in charge of "fixing" it, the first thing I'd want a sample of is the riverlands shaded to a somewhat darker, more vivid green. It could only go so dark and vivid before it starts encroaching on the tropics/joondark color palette though.
But yeah that's my input. I found it kinda boring. It's not an issue I overly care about though. It's very pretty as is...just somehow boring to me at the same time.
It's fine, I'll Resurrect it later.
16:14
vs 3:15
Now, mind you, I'm running at 1080 resolution and on minimal settings, and I was also there at night. But the core visual difference is still present.
god , looking at this just makes me extremely sad
Everything is subject to change, they should just ditch this idea that everything needs to be harvestble, I mean they ditched the entire A1 build so they are not married to anything..
The other thing I just watched the jundark jungle preview " the art team worked really hard on this " but I mean it looks dreadful.. it does not look like a jungle, it looks like you slapped a few trees in the desert, places some random mobs with next to no thought on placement positioning and just called it a day, even games made in 2003 did jungle biomes better
what trees , those are weed , aint no trees those are small tree branches
The "work" the team did in Ashes is "making it testable". It's in the game and players can interact with it - job well done.
What I'm trying to make both of you see is that you're giving counter arguments to your own complaints. You give examples of previous showcases (i.e. vertical slices of what the devs are capable of), but then you say that Intrepid aren't capable of that
I doubt that anyone at Intrepid wants the game to look like shit. But they still have to release something for people to test, so we've got what we've got. But we've also seen what they CAN do, so I find it kind of illogical to say that the current state of the game will never become better, when we literally know that it can.
except i didnt say that those showcases were what i wanted , i said they were a lot better than what we had now , they somewhat fixed some of the problems we got rn but overall still keep a lot of them and if that is what we had with bad optimization i would of believed we would only get better yet we got like 10 time worse than that and the game is literally frying people PCs and laptops, at least let my PC explode looking at something nice that i could see becoming great but nah
🤣 I will agree with this my fans both malfunction running ashes
Among my group the only issues with Ashes are for my laptop, yes. Everyone else is fine, even on their weaker Desktops. Is it really data? Probably not, but I'd definitely EXPECT for weaker Desktops to outperform even gaming laptops, at least 'Gaming Laptops bought around the time of Alpha-1.
But this is one of the reasons I am still a Console MMO gamer.