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.
Comments
I think you very slightly missed my point maybe?
AA had the same 'problems' because it is somewhat 'required' to have them, to achieve something else. Sure it's not like 'Oh, no, this absolutely cannot be done better no matter how much time or money you have' but being reasonable (and accepting that whole New World All Trees thing), that's the design space we're in.
The Riverlands has a pretty good amount of rivers. I believe this because I can swim most of the distance between certain nodes if I want to, and that's starting from Joeva of all places. At the end of the day, the team/Steven decided to make the world large, either for Economy through resources, Economy through Caravans, or both. If you make it smaller, that suffers.
So yeah, sometimes different parts of the Riverlands will look like the Midwestern US (which is absolutely an exaggeration because its nowhere near that monotonous or flat, not even near Winstead).
Honestly, what worries me is the lack of energy in the forums. It seems like a lot of people aren’t here anymore.
This becomes even more prominent when people have a much more direct access to "what the game is". Previously that was just the monthly showcases, so there'd be hype around them, because Intrepid could be showing something big (which were very often just vertical slices of "the future"). But now we have daily streams and countless hours of vods to go through, and the showcases are most just "here's what we're fixing, here's what we're delaying, here's what you've already seen on literally all the other streams BUT NOW WITH DEVS!!".
Not much hype can be generated by that kind presentation.
both , i mean here this is footage of AA alpha in a jungle biome and its light years better than whatever we will have so not even memeing at this point
we here cuz we been led to believe we are getting something else with all the talk and showcases for a decade which turned out to be lies
and you missed my point too , cuz despite AA having similar problems they did manage to make a lot of their biomes right which means it wasnt a problem in the first place just the design and execution of them that was.
no one asking them to make the biome unique every 10 meters but at the very least they could of made the nodes zones of influence unique and have actual good fantasy and magical POIs that makes you want to explore them, like even having the node area have different trees would of made it better , imagine if one node area had the majority of it be braidwood while another had ash wood..etc hell this would lead to either cooperation or PVP for mats that actually feels natural instead of all the forced stuff we have right now
I think my concern is they are no longer getting the feedback they need. Main example: you’re the only one who has commented on the latest very important discussion thread.
I didn't play AA, so I dunno what was their situation with gatherables. Could you cut down trees out in the open? If yes, then how many of those trees were in the jungle?
Cause, while I do agree that AA's jungle looks quite nice, I still see it as a "our every tree is cuttable" issue.
Btw, here's another of Steven's inspirations, which pretty much combines the jundark and tropics aesthetic.
One part of the island is full jungle with the dark canopy (lighting is bad cause this is a location from 2006), a massive tropical field with mobs that have huge aggro ranges and a beachside for the npcs.
As I've said in the past, I see all those showcases as vertical slices of what the devs can do. But implementing that slice into the live client, at best fidelity while also the best optimization, is real damn hard.
I'm not denying that they might still not deliver on those promises (god fucking knows I've complained enough about other design choices), but imo it's too early to say either way. They seem to be working on just pumping out the biomes themselves. I'd imagine that their next step will be integration of proper node-related systems into those biomes (this includes dungeons, mobs, POIs, visuals), after which then can start working on proper optimization and visuals.
So I personally don't expect to see a properly good-looking location AT LEAST within this year. It'll maaaybe come around in summer of 26.
To me this just seems like classic Intrepid's bad internal communication (i.e. bad communication between the team and Steven). Steven was too busy to go through Margaret's plan for the livestream discussion, so he created some feedback requests on the fly, which then threw a wrench into mod's plans for forum topics (which are most likely dictated by Margaret's team or even just herself).
And then on top of all that, we obviously have all the people who MIGHT'VE responded testing the Alpha, cause it's hype and all that. That topic was made 20 minutes before the servers went live, so of course no one would've cared about giving a good response to it when you gotta go grind some mobs
I hope you’re right my guy. I really do. When I have some time away from work I’m going to sit down and try to articulate my thoughts on the new player experience.
I think I gave needs to introduce players organically but intentionally to all core aspects of a game. For example, nodes are hugely important, I think that needs to be added into the new player experience in a way.
Another example would be the economy. Not just crafting, processing, and gathering but the economy as a whole. I think having a tutorial market stall where players have a quest to make and then sell armor or weapons on said stall would go a long way. That way we could even get rid of early level venders selling copper armor and replace them with an intro to the economy.
Very few people outside of Korea saw Archeage in its actual beta stage.
The beta most players saw was the beta for localization.
And yes, Steven's ill considered notion of making all trees able to be chopped is a barrier to good woodland and jungle areas. Archeage absolutely did not have this, it went with specific nodes for gatherables in specific, pre defined locations - as every MMORPG should.
Edit; as to your last comment in the above quote, that is why I check in every week or ten days or so now, rather than every two or three days.
didnt see any huge trees unless you mean that somewhat big tree from the pics considering all of their trees seems to be midget size i wouldnt consider that "huge" at all.
also i dunno what the hell is wrong with ashes scale , every other mmo and game the scale of things seem normal and good in ashes everything seems too small, even the little amount of things that are big feel small.
from 2006 yet , its already dark before they got into the jungle , once they got in there it got darker and whatever light there is just a small amount that slipped between the trees then you have the greenish fog along with the big vegetation, vines,actual giant trees and actual big monster like dinosaurs ,tree creatures and fantasy looking mobs instead of tiny ass elephants and crocodiles...etc and well they actually got a decent jungle. its not so damn hard ffs
imo there is no point of adding those biomes if at base they gonna look as terrible as they are , when even the riverland after so long still suffers the same problems i doubt anything will change really.
i am 99% sure ashes will end up with the most bland , boring and uninteresting mmorpg world ever if they dont fix this terrible weird design they are going with
...i really miss AA now its stupid OSTs are annoying my brain now ugh
Ah, that's my bad, I assumed that you were expecting those things based on what they've said/promised in the past, but it's also true that they've backtracked or made weird decisions about previous promises, so your reaction is probably better.
If I try to imagine my reaction to seeing what they're showing now with no prior stuff, I'd still give it a pass for most places. Maybe I'd understand better if I went and looked around wherever you normally hang out in the Riverlands?
I know that Halcyon does sometimes give me the vibe of 'yeah this is all basically the same', for example.
As for comparatively to other games, yes, that's smaller. But imo that's just a subjective preference. To me it doesn't make sense when you have insanely huge things in a world full of tiny beings. I simply don't care too much about visual design, so I ultimately don't care, which is why both L2 and Ashes are fine to me.
I mean, if you don't believe they can do a good job, then I really dunno if there's a reason to keep following the game.
Yes, you can keep giving feedback, but if you either think that they're not listening to it or simply can't do it - there's no point in thinking that the game can ever become good.
not sure if i am gonna word what i think in a right way but
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yea the characters are tiny , the whole scale of the world and characters is messed up, so that 3x times big tree which i doubt is 3 times as big looks like a normal tree maybe slightly bigger in literally every other game to exist.
there is a difference between them giving feedback and giving feedback that they never acknowledge , the only things they do acknowledge is by sweaty ptr testers , content creators and the rare occasions where both of them agree on something being bad like the TTK.
meanwhile everything else they seem to not care about so when feedback or even questions (which suffered from the case above) are not answered or acknowledged and the only changes they been making for the past year or so is straight up bad or make no sense the thought of them being able to make the game good becomes a very hard idea to acknowledge
Another thing I would add, there is absolutely no diversity between races, they all look the exact same, if you have a human, emp and Vaelune stand next to eachother it's basically impossible to tell them apart, the dwarves just look like shrunken humans, the vek I think at least has the posture animation but this goes away whilst in combat
I would really love to know what parts of the game are being designed as place holder and what is intended
The copy and paste of assets is quite immersion breaking too, the church of the seven in the Riverlands ( basically the first POI ) you go too is a 1-1 exact copy of the church you zone to through the portal into vera, I dont think it's even re coloured
Basically a year into alpha 2 there should be at least some things that are not place holder, given even if in an unpolished state
life is a placeholder ..at this point the game will launch as a placeholder , if we are so far in yet everything is a place holder , no system is what it supposed to be instead of being there without being a placeholder and just have it be improved upon then nothing will ever be completed
Agree
And if absolute majority of things doesn't change before release - Intrepid will have failed to a fairly great extent, because, yes, a lot of stuff right now is in a bad place. So releasing bad things would be bad.