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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
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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.
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Btw, thank you for engaging with the original post and/or this splinter. Was a fun and interesting thought experiement, for me at least.
Wow, that sounds basically identical to what I was trying to explain. Sounds like you have more experience with this than me so I think you were able to put it in better layman's terms.
Your idea of the "core memories" is basically the story "premises" that I was saying should be built into the systems themselves, such as the classes/races/node types and their values/backstories/traits and how that frames the player choices, story perspectives, and story progression to create those "narrative spines" I was referring to, as players role-play in different ways.
I like how you explained these premises as building blocks of the story, and pointed out how that framing can interact with any facet of the game, such as grouping, crafting, etc., because these are all opportunities and outlets for choices and role-play where layered narrative access could develop and react to these existing premises and player choices to create unique and dynamic story experiences.
To summarize, my vision is that there would be these story premises built into a variety of the systems (class/race traits, node type belief systems, artisan class traits, religion philosophies, zone lore, etc.) and that each system integrates and layers narrative progression that capitalizes on these story premises through how the narrative frames, progresses, reacts to, and recontextualizes, the player's own personal role-play choices, gameplay performance, expression of value systems, perceptions, and personal moral development over time as they interface and progress through these various gameplay systems and their respective story premises. I think this would create the most emergent, engaging, immersive, and memorable role-play and story experiences.
Like I said (at least my specific version) would be a monumental task to implement at scale. For example: if you are a tank which might have a story premise of "protecting the weak", and a racial story premise of "values independence and individual strength", then if you choose defy the former and abide by the latter, by not protecting your dps during a group based pve event in order to solo the elite mob, the story would need to have a pre-made "narrative spine" that is triggered to start a story path based on that decision. It would branch off and progress down a story path with story beats, like quests, events, etc. that were triggered by the predicate of you making that role-play choice, which captilize on the idea of you being a "bad" tank because you abandoned your dps in their time of need, but are a proud tulnar who is fiercly independent. The story might progress to show you why it is important to be a reliable protector, and put you in situations where it is tough to rely on your own individual strength. This opens up an opportunity to grow as a player and change your philosophy and mindset, you realize "hmm maybe I won't let my dps mate down next time". The game tracked your decision and behaviors, and this might conflict with ideals of the divine node you are apart of, which says that your honor is based on your consistent moral compass, so if you change your values as a player, then you aren't adhering to the divine order governing that node. *Branching story path with new quests/events/etc.* Enough people experience this arc, and now the neighboring military node has an ideological beef with how the divine node leadership is "indoctrinating" the citizens to be "weak minded" affecting their recuitment levels. *Branching story arc* (at any point throughout this arc you can choose to align or defy either side for moral expression to play the "good" or "bad" guy from your own perspective). Then, the story beat involves recontextualization of everything you thought you understood up to that point. The divine node leadership was being manipulated by the other neighboring economic node leadership to provoke an inter-node war for money making purposes, so who you might have chose to view as the "good" guys, may have actually been the "bad" guys from the beginning (depending on your personal values at the time.) *branching story arc that capitalizes on your role-play choices and perceptions up to that point*, etc. etc. to where all the different story premises of the different systems (race, class, node type, zone lore, etc.) are integrated into the narrative progression, reframed, and inter-dependent on each other, with the physical space and soundscape also reflecting these story developments.
All that was one pre-made "narrative spine" reflecting that very specific sequence of actions.
That initial choice you made to role-play in that specific way as a tank in your party launched a butterfly effect within the narrative systems.
One might begin to see how this kind of trickle down storytelling and layered narrative complexity might become a very daunting design task. But hey "engaging and immersive story".
That was originally why I thought Ashes was going to be a great rp game. I no longer think that is the case and they have done a lot to alienate that part of the supporter base, but hey 'it's still a work in progress' I guess.
That being said I do like really strong narratives. There is a reason FFXI remains my favorite MMO. The stories there are about really well defined characters and they explore the narrative and morale themes that made the worldbuild what it is fairly well without getting in your face or making you feel like you did something 'ultra super special'. You just 'happened to be the right adventurer at the right time'. My personal experience of the games story is way different than any one else I got to know in game and that is largely since I started quite late, but also because I'm a Windurstian and I really wanted Summoner to be my main job. In order to get that class unlocked I had to do some fairly high level things at low level because it was sort of intended as an 'expansion' class for people who already played the game to the level cap at the time. So I actually did have to rely on other people and the whole experience of gaining my summons afterwards really painted my initial journey.
Ultimately though I think the real reason why the narratives that the game gives you are really important and deserve to be written well is that they kind of allow the player base to come up with their own consensus. When you have a pre-written character with a pre-written journey you kind of are 'telling the players what behaviors are acceptable'. When you have npc's and the player is whatever they want to be within the world build you gave them, you are SHOWING them what behaviors are POSSIBLE but the player base consensus kind of 'decides what behaviors are acceptable'. That's the type of cooperative story telling and community building that I expect from mmos and it is something I felt Chatgpt didn't really dig in to but thought you might appreciate me pointing it out.
To bring this back to the topic of the thread here though, ultimately 'design hell' is people kind of twisting narratives on their head and distorting the meaning of the message of the author or vice versa and the author distorting the player experience to an exacting predetermined thing rather than adding to their own inner narrative.
If you need a good example of a really 'loose' way of going about world building as a game dev that maximizes player freedom I highly recommend looking into Elite Dangerous a bit more. It's not the best story telling and the core 'world' story line kinda sucks sometimes, but they serve as a good case study of how an average games story can be great depending on how much effort the players themselves put in.
This means that 'dangerous cool areas' that are 'nearly never explored' in lore can't exist 'in reality'. Elite can do this because Elite has a Galactic-tier exploration requirement, but for most other forms of interaction, our 'immortal locust' status does not help.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/powerplay-2-balance-murder-rewards-far-too-low-committing-crimes-task.629066/
I'm not here to argue about the above or that players should or shouldn't murder NPCs for personal/factional gain, my only point there is that you can't actually stop this no matter how many times you kill the player. Previously I've talked about that from the perspective of competition but it's not even required, for it to be an issue.
A single player game's protagonist failing something normally can just be reloaded from save/reset until they win or if the game allows for a true fail condition, they choose to accept the failure for whatever reason and move on. Randomness can help (i.e. the thing spawns once, if you reload there's no guarantee it will again) but people are... determined.
All that is great for the player but not for the narrative designer because if they lock the state too early, then in the case of most biome related gameplay, the first group to bullrush the content enforces their narratives and the followers/less invested have almost no impact.
tl;dr if a situation like this happens in Elite and 'the murderers get there first' and 'get ahead' in the 'murder vs protection' score, then there can be a problem where 'nothing changes that from there'.
EDIT: And another encapsulation of why it's harder to believe things will work in Ashes as described...
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/trailblazers-update-3-4.638963/
(it's 'short' and doesn't require a massive amount of game familiarity to understand the core problems, though the deeper game design issues might be less visible)
A 'problem' that seems to have a simple answer yet we never get that one implemented either (rather than decay, simply raise undermining multipliers, it's not perfect, but 'never let the perfect be the enemy of the good', etc)
Thats good to know, I figured those games were RP heavy but I didnt realize they went THAT deep with the RP stuff, relative to what we were discussing. Sounds really cool.
Very interesting, this is probably the point at which my lack of experience/knowledge in the nuances of this topic might shine through. Design philosophy wise, I can give my opinion/reaction on this though.
This basically sounds like the balancing act of zergs vs smaller groups of players having a say in the story arcs, since like you pointed out, a fail-state is required to progress the story down certain paths, meaning said fail-state can be triggered before certain players have a chance to even try to have an impact, thus forcing a specific story path prematurely.
I think Ashes response to this is basically "ahh, working as intended".
My "solution" to this would be based on my take on pvx, and macro/micro competitions. Meaning, I think whether this is a "problem" or not, stems from what the intent behind that particular story arc is and who it is "for".
Let the large scale story arcs reward cooperation and player numbers (not neccessarily skill-less zerging, I think you know what I mean.)
Have smaller scale story arcs and personal story arcs cater to those smaller groups and individual players to allow them to have some of "their own" content and experience an impact on the narrative at a smaller scale (like the example I gave to JustVine last post about your role-play choices as a tank during a group fight triggering a narrative effect/quest/event.) If you want to take it further, have those outcomes act as predicates that dictate what story arcs become accessible at a larger scale (butterfly effect), to where the "zergs" might have more pull to dictate that large scale arc's immediate outcome, but what lead up to that point and the story as a whole had already been pushed in a specific direction based on the totality of predicates and decisions made at a smaller scale, to give those players more of a say in the story outcome. When individual actions and split second decisions made at a player level can have this kind of systemic impact, I dont see how a "zerg" could exploit that "nearly as easily.", or at least it might shift the "problems" to other areas that might have a more straightforward solution.
On the otherhand, I could be completely wrong about this.
In Elite this happens when a group of players in a region that is normally low traffic, suddenly finds that their sector has become part of a targeted PowerPlay 'attack'. And this is mostly also treated as 'working as intended'.
The difference is that in a more 'realistic' situation, putting the entire sector on high alert because of a pirate incursion would lead to a concept of 'successfully repelling the pirates', whereas most games don't allow that because 'the pirates are players too and have to be allowed to have fun within the same ruleset'.
Without going into every other aspect of the piles of 'issues' Ashes has with balancing its design goals, I'd moreso point out that for most people trying to 'experience a story', it's not the incursion or pirate attack that is the issue, it's the endlessness of it. Ashes has promised not to let this happen for Nodes (as of now) but it kinda didn't work during P1 because various forms of Wars ran into this problem.
Node Wars basically locked 'noncombat citizens' out of the capacity to do anything within their own Nodes. Acceptable, to a point (this is moreso a matter of lacking housing and escape routes/useful places to escape to). But any situation where the actions of players are, in aggregate, affecting a biome, is much more likely to fall into that 'uncomfortable' space where it is controlled by the most invested players (zerg or not).
This is how it plays out in Elite, with the main 'saving grace' being that most people don't care because Sci-fi/Space sim players expect this rather than the alternative (and, ofc, the fact that there are 11,000+ star systems to fight over even in the <0.01% of the galaxy that all that happens in).
Maybe my reaction falls under the "non-generally" category, but my take on that is:
Wouldn't defending against a pirate incursion be the equivalent of something like a siege affecting some large scale story arc (The "high alert" sector's army vs the pirate incursion)?
At that point the pirates are "still having fun" even if they are "successfully repelled" because they are operating on the same ruleset as other large "zerg" groups who have an "equal chance" (depending on how many players each side brings) at swaying that arc's outcome.
At which point this goes into my point about "shifting the problem" to more about territory control and zone intent, than actual direct narrative "pull".
That example would be the "reward cooperation and player numbers" large scale arc and zone area (something like a lawless territory or battleground with pvp flagging to allow for large scale battles)
For the "we actually don't want large pirates zerg incursions to have fun" story arcs, these are for the smaller groups and individual players. Place these in corruption enabled areas (to discourage unbalanced zerg rushes) within lower traffic areas that have less risk/reward in the content (not worth it to zerg the content), thus to an extent preserving that content/those narrative systems for enagement at a smaller scale, and confining that smaller scale narrative interactivity to a specific area.
Regarding the "it went from a low traffic area to a war zone when the zone went on high alert" This is basically "the area shifted from a corruption enabled area to a lawless territory" (or the content became worth it to go corrupt, opt in pvp flagging at a large scale from both sides...same thing). This shift in zone identity/intent isn't really an inherent problem I don't think, its more about the content type/intent and player experience that matters I would think. This would only be an issue if the world scale was too small to where zergs don't really have to consider how they distribute their time/attention which makes it "more worth it" to zerg that content intended for smaller audiences. As long as there is that choice/sacrifice needing to be made in order to dominate that content (thus taking away narrative impact from those players) then I don't think this is an issue.
So, I think that "reality" you describe is more contextual to Elite, or an issue that can arise when trying to "unify the design", that can be avoided if making deliberate considerations, from my perspective at least.
Edit: I started typing my thoughts before finishing reading your post and forgot to finish reading lol, so initially I didnt fully digest this part-
so I will think on that.
Oh okay, basically because it can be tough to relocate as a solo player/small group once a war begins, then at that point all the content that is accessible by all parties becomes tied to that specific area/node to where everyone is forced into the same ruleset/content design, so then the devs are forced to balance the experience of both the large groups with the smaller groups within that specific area.
My reaction to that is a little more nuanced. Basically this is the example of the "low value area shifted to a high value one" from my last response, where the content becomes worth it to be contested by large groups, where beforehand the content was being enjoyed by the solo players/smaller groups (having free reign to content/story paths before it became locked and influencable by large groups), so it is a scenario where that specific area/content "was for solo players/small groups" but "now is for large groups" and experienced a shift in design intent.
My reaction to this, to use an analogy, is basically this is similar to my view on corruption as a deterrent, in that "most of the time" pve content could exist within a corruption enabled area and be intended for the pve type of players. Similarly in your example, the node was being enjoyed "most of the time" by those smaller groups, until it shifted to become a warzone for a large group. In which case yeah it is going to be uncomfortable for those player types until "the war is over" or they are able to relocate to a lower traffic/less contested area to start rebuilding and enjoying that content instead. As you pointed out, there is an "endlessness" to this cycle, but I think its a matter of player elasticity and keeping player types "happy enough" to where they might be temporarily annoyed/uncomfortable until they can relocate but that it isn't enough to "ruin" the overall experience (similar to corruption needing to be tuned in a way that maintians pve content "to a tolerable a degree"). So basically this shoudn't be happening constantly, even if it happens endlessly.
But I would also hope that the incentives and scale of the world is balanced in a way that this wouldn't need to happen too often to begin with, to where only a select few nodes are experiencing these wars at any given time, allowing for the majority of other nodes some respite and refuge for players who don't want anything to do with that. (Which might be what you were referring to by Elite's saving grace being the world size relative to its contested areas)
Does that make sense?
At that point we're talking about theoreticals for a different game, basically.
In Elite, if a large group of players comes to your system, you don't know that they are Pirates until they start killing people. Once they do start killing people, simply because the game allows them to always kill people, they never have to stop until they run out of money (eventually they would stop because Elite has a 'better corruption system than Ashes', but even then, that's only because they stop being entirely determined to do it, there have been times where people just did not stop).
Similarly, because PvP games almost never balance things such that PvP players actually have to face non-PvP challenges (they lose the players too fast if they do), it's less likely that any ingame 'PvE' military force would stop them and often if such a force existed it would be incredibly immersion breaking OR a thing people spawn on purpose for challenge of some kind (again, warping the narrative).
But, again, this is a matter of 'you visualizing a different type of game', whereas the Splinter exists because I know my group would want to tell you 'that type of design is incompatible with Ashes' and then explain/complain about why.
As far as I can tell, you would never design a game with the same core principles as Ashes of Creation, because you don't 'believe in them' either.
I believe that Ashes intends for this to be able to happen endlessly, as part of the design, and also constantly, and that makes most Narrative Biome-related Gameplay unsuitable for the game.
"Spending two weeks building up your Node so you can craft something that would then only available in your Node and then being constantly killed at Storage/Crafting station before you can craft it, losing the materials required to do so." -> Working As Intended.
Biome Narratives with the amount of complexity from the original post are that, but 5x worse.
This one I think. I remember watching it and having a lot of the remarks about how often this type of thing was going to result in player deaths and the flaws in the design Azherae has been explaining being apparent to me.
Oh okay, my point was moreseo about how this could theoretically exist and coexist within a certain type of pvx and biome design, but I understand what you are saying about the design direction you believe Ashes is taking, and the design context that might cause compatibility issues with biome narrative integration and subsequently "zerg" balancing on narrative "pull", as Ashes might currently exist.
And you believe that the Alpha 2 data you collected reflects the long term direction/intent as opposed to being a symptom of testing (I guess based on the "irreversability" of some of the design choices, however you want to define that)? And that they will stick with this direction, and that it is unlikely it will be tuned for a different outcome, possibly even similar to what I described? Or something similar to the "solution" ED uses?
If you are right and that ends up being the direction, then Intrepid's take on "pvx" would have the slider much closer to the pvp and "pve+pvp integration" end of the pvx spectrum, alienating even the more "pvp tolerant" pve players, and subseqently also favoring large player groups. (Large guilds would dominate even smaller scale biome narratives and pve content paths through pvp control).
Understood. Basically, even if the incentives are such that large player groups are discouraged from constantly starting wars, because it is possible, it will still happen from time to time, thus causing issues for smaller player groups and their intentions to seek out content meant for them/sway biome narrative outcomes to their liking.
In an ideal world (like if I were making a game, and assuming a certain overarching design context), I would hope these would be edge cases rather than the norm though, similar to ED, and that the world and incentive design would mitigate this to an "acceptable" level, even if you have "spikes" of these experiences happening from time to time over the long-term.
To use an analogy, an ideal corruption system and incentive design should not only reduce non-concensual pvp to a "tolerable" level for certain pve player subsets, but even when pvp players choose to ignore it and continually harass/kill, that should be an edge case scenario that has failsafes (damage dampening, player bans, etc.). So you may have "spikes" of non-consenual pvp that settle down over the long term.
Similarly an ideal biome design, narrative design and incentive design, would generally allow for smaller player groups to relocate, or experience narrarive sway through content at a small scale, and be inconvenienced to a "tolerable degree" when those areas become high value for large player groups, potentially temporarily locking those smaller players groups out of content, and said large player groups intrusively affecting immediate narrative outcomes for that area- but on top of all that, if large player groups continuously take over these new "low value" areas, regardless of incentives, then there should be some kind of failsafe to manage the occurence of these "spikes" (Like you mentioned "running out of money" in ED as an example of this), to where it can happen but isnt as much of a long-term issue and of which the target audience would deem "acceptable".
Regarding the "large scale military force" as a method of doing this, I think that goes back to the target audience again, and my particular take on pvx. If the game wants to include some content that is combined pvp+pve integration, this would be a prime use of that type of content (large scale narrative "pull" requires winning a pvp siege, fighting off a pve army, etc., and that narrative path was influenced by smaller player groups in other areas...pvx, and if large groups do this to "low value" nodes too often there is a more forceful deterrent). Even if the guilds could "farm" this pve challenge and force that pve narrarive path, it would be within a narrative context created by those smaller scale player interactions.
Wheras the pure pvp players who would have an issue with this "intrusive pve content" should be provided with some other content outlet (I dunno, instanced practice sieges or something), which would also help serve as an additional incentive in its own right, to help manage the "large player groups constantly dominating low value nodes and biome narratives"
Just explaining how this could theoretically exist in the world of Ashes, if they so choose.
As for me personally, I wouldn't want to ascribe any direct meaning to the data from Alpha-2 Phase 1 (or 2) in terms of Intrepid's design direction, I still believe they can pivot whichever way they want, they're just subject to stricter constraints than the games that are built around 'protected/instanced PvE+encouraged PvP'.
And, for Intrepid, my group afaik has no preference which way you take it, as long as it isn't an inconsistent overly-hopeful muddle (but admittedly if y'all commit to more 'segregation' between PvP and PvE you'll have to beat Throne and Liberty on Economy alone, for us). Though I guess there's also the outlier chance that you can win on RP/PvP-RP potential...
Ah okay, well then thank you for your insight Azherae and to your group for wanting to make your side clear to me.
Im sure this convo will be high quality data for Intrepid if they take the time to parse through it.
Feel free to keep me updated on any shifts in direction on this front, I do not have alpha access.
Also, feel free to engage any time you and your group wants to, it always seems to make for some interesting discussion.