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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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How Do You Feel About Immersion-Focused Changes That Shift (by complicating) Game Mechanics?
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
An effort to 'get out of my info bubble' a bit. Will try to keep initial short as usual, lmk if it ends up unclear as a result.
When games develop over time they sometimes would need to change/replace a well-known system to add more immersive elements (this also happens for balance but that might need to be discussed separately).
Simple example is a game that only has two types of weather, and a thing in the game that reacts to these binary weather states, changing their weather system so that there are either more types of weather or more gradations of the binary states (let's use rain for simplicity).
If the game starts off as 'when it rains, this thing happens' and then switches to 'we have expanded the weather system so that rain can now be heavy, light, or 'monsoon', and also added sleet which is counted as light rain'...
Obviously if you had something you liked doing in rain and now that thing only happens in Heavy Rain, at MINIMUM your chances of being able to do that thing are probably reduced and that's probably annoying, but...
Do you see it as worth the change if it adds other mechanics (and therefore just grumble) or do you think that games shouldn't make changes like this at all?
(if you prefer droprates, crafting systems, combat, or whatever else as your input to this discussion, plz use that).
When games develop over time they sometimes would need to change/replace a well-known system to add more immersive elements (this also happens for balance but that might need to be discussed separately).
Simple example is a game that only has two types of weather, and a thing in the game that reacts to these binary weather states, changing their weather system so that there are either more types of weather or more gradations of the binary states (let's use rain for simplicity).
If the game starts off as 'when it rains, this thing happens' and then switches to 'we have expanded the weather system so that rain can now be heavy, light, or 'monsoon', and also added sleet which is counted as light rain'...
Obviously if you had something you liked doing in rain and now that thing only happens in Heavy Rain, at MINIMUM your chances of being able to do that thing are probably reduced and that's probably annoying, but...
Do you see it as worth the change if it adds other mechanics (and therefore just grumble) or do you think that games shouldn't make changes like this at all?
(if you prefer droprates, crafting systems, combat, or whatever else as your input to this discussion, plz use that).
Stellar Devotion.
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Im sure you already know my response, but ill put it here anyway for engagement.
Supremely annoying for me, but also worth having that macro complexity for its own unique experience that it offers.
For this example, thats why I would enjoy having areas with a more consistent weather/gameplay experience and a variety of content types within that area to enjoy my preferred way of playing, but also have the option to branch out into other areas as my mood shifts.
So, sometimes I like it, but sometimes I don't, depending on my mood, which is why ideally there should be both as options (not just for me but also for other people who are more purist with their content preferences).
For Intrepid (or whoever wants to talk about it), this is a fundamental question that needs to be answered in pvx game with as many systems, content types, progression paths, and player types as AOC, because the idea of these "macro" vs "micro" experiences will heavily affect your your incentive structure and player retention- and the "idea behind this post" is talked a lot about in this thread:
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/59192/splinter-topic-micro-competition-vs-macro-competition/p1
But this particular example in this post is obviously at a much smaller scale/much more specific audience subset (player-preferences for different micro-experiences within various weather conditions)
This is the risk of playing an "Early Access" game.
You could wait until full release but then you would miss nice transient stages.
Some can be happy for seeing them others sad for being transient.
When I pressed the buy button two years ago, this is what I considered the most, to determine if I will be happy or sad.
I'm actually not talking about Early Access games, though.
Live MMOs (at least in the past, and at least Throne and Liberty, Dune Awakening and FF14 right now) do this to expand the game's systems.
I'd say that if we wanted to limit this to Ashes, then it would be about 'which things they can add later', because for me, if certain things don't come with launch and the team is not willing to do this sort of change, I will 'know' that those things won't be of the highest standard (which is unlikely since Intrepid mostly aims for that and then tells us if they fall short, but not 'we decided not to try', so far).
So, when you considered it the most, what did you decide for your answer?
Regarding AoC, with the info I had about the game and myself, I decided to press the buy button. I wouldn't press it if I would have many concerns. I estimated less than 20% chance to be upset by changes. The rest of 80% can be either satisfaction or detachment. Detachment can cause me to play something else and being happy that I play that other game
So, if, say, a dungeon was getting flooded in the previous version and you didn't have access to it during rain - the flooding itself could shift to the monsoon type. Heavy rain would trigger a "a local defensive force on patrol got caught in the rain and decided to wait it out in the dungeon, completely blocking the entrance with their stuff". Light rain could trigger a "passing caravan got caught in the mud, a wheel broke off and it fell on its side, blocking the path". Sleet could trigger a "group of passive mobs were passing through, one of them slipped and broke its leg. This attracted local aggressive mobs and a huge fight started. The spilled blood attracted corruption and the entrance is now overgrown with it, blocking the path".
And all of those triggers should ideally have some additional interactions associate with them that would be resolved once the weather passes.
If the devs can't achieve that kind of interactability with this, now deeper, system - why the fuck did they even make it deeper? If it was just to artificially delay player's behavior - that's bad design (and yes, I know this is hypocritical coming from me and my preferences for some other parts of the design
For clarity the system is changed for the sake of some other system and therefore has a complicating effect on the first system (you could argue that all forms of rain should trigger the same things as before, or that it should be calculated by incentives and ratios, but for an example of where this doesn't work, we have the current Intrepid situation of needing to change recipes or Static Resource Respawns).
This kinda brings up a question about massive expansions/updates in mmos. Have there been expansions where the introduced changes required a "rework of the entire recipe system"? I'd imagine at least a few games mighta had a "cataclysm so big that the entire world changed", but at that point it's a glorified "X Game 2" rather than an expansion.
But yeah, my base preference would always be "if you go deep - go balls deep", with all the additional systems and interaction that a change to a particular system could bring, but I know that this approach is near-impossible for majority of games because it's simply too costly. And the second best choice is "the core mechanic is the same, but the other system that needed the change should still be able to interact with the change's results".
Though this would bring up the question of "what's core in any given system", but I feel like that's for devs to decide on per-system basis and the incentives/ratios that you mentioned.
Well, that's cleanly burst my info-bubble, at least.
I'm so used to new features and mechanics that get added in expansions having large effects that I don't even think of updates that don't do this as necessarily being expansions, even if they add areas (clearly wrong, but so it goes). But you did say 'entire recipe system' which kinda wasn't what I meant?
The thought of a game where you could introduce, like, 'Animal Husbandry' after release, or 'Naval combat' in an expansion, and that not have these effects doesn't even occur to me (but now that I've read some more L2 patch notes, I get it... y'all had it hard back then, huh?)
So in that type of situation where it is binary so "you can't have both", since the system is interdependent on another, to where that weather variation that I really liked needed to be adusted in some way, like for balance reasons or whatever, to where "I had to choose" whether to have "only heavy rain" or "heavy rain+hurricane" within the weather rotation- then I imagine answering this question comes down to the specifc content which would be affected by the change.
My content preferences prioritized are
1. Combat
2. Jump/traversal puzzles
3. Racing
4. Crafting
5. Solving mysteries
6. RP expression/choices
7. Etc.
For example if heavy rain caused my favorite enemy type to spawn, and im having fun with it. Then Intrepid added a new weather variation like "hurricane" effect into the rotation, reducing my time to enjoy the heavy rain state and experience (since the weather now has more effects in the rotation). In doing so, the hurricane effect, in combination with other intertwined reasons, changed drop rates and other things to where the "heavy rain" effect is no longer able to provide the exact same experience of fighting that enemy type in the same way that I once enjoyed. However the hurricane effect also added additional layers to the combat, like other enemies that have synergies with my favorite enemy type, and rebalanced crafting through how that new weather effect changed material drop rates or whatever, to where combat felt that balancing change, then it would depend.
So since combat is a priority to me, then if the combat experience was negatively affected by this change (no longer being able to fight my favorite enemy type) because of needing to adjust the "heavy rain" state to balance out crafting content, then I would see that addtional "macro-layer" (the additonal weather effect added) as a downgrade.
But even this assumes that the combat micro-experience (fighting fav enemy type in heavy rain) is more important than the combat macro-experience (heavy rain enemy type + hurricane combat factors + the rebalanced crafting benefits to the combat loop) and how those additional layers add or subtract to the overall combat, which is the determining factor in this instance (preferred content type impacted by the weather change). So this macro vs micro combat experience would have to be compared and contrasted, based on more specific preferences to judge this.
It would still be ideal to have a location-specific version of that original system (heavy rain with preferred enemy type/same experience), of which is not interdependent on the other, and thus doesn't require that balancing related trade-off. Then have the more "interdependent" version (heavy rain + hurricane, with heavy rain adjusted to account for the addition) as the "mainly used" version of the weather system. This would allow for the original micro-experience of combat (preferred enemy type in heavy rain) while also facilitating that macro-version of combat (hurricane additional enemy type, crafting rebalance, etc.).
In theory, this would be ideal, in practice definitely leads to scope creep very quickly when applied to all binary problems throughout all the systems, and due to that would likely end up playing out in a way that you described where binary trade-offs are required and you need to balance the experience, in which case I would fall back on how that change affects my content preferences, or the content ratios that the target audience/subset prefers most.
The biggest thing we've gotten was the whole new race and it was definitely OP as hell on release, but that got balanced out with later gear types and had some counters in the older gear types.
I guess the other big part of that particular update was the addition of elemental attributes on gear, which only applied to higher gear tiers, but this was also 2 years into the update that added those items into the game, so I'd imagine majority of players on the official servers had that gear by that time.
When subclasses got added it was simply a "you have another class on your character (up to 3), but you can only be 1 class at a time" situation, so other systems didn't really need to accomodate this all too much.
And in the game of L2's progression pace, simplicity is king. If every damn update introduced world-shifting changes - how in the hell would people keep up with those? From what I've heard from WoW players, that's pretty much what happened to later stages of WoW (and afaik L2 as well, but just even later stages), where trying to progress too far while you don't have the time to play 12+h/d would be almost useless cause the world will move on past your progression in the next expansion.
Also, I might be devaluing some of the bigger changes in L2, simply because to me they never seemed all that big. Yes, they were exciting at the time and completely something new (like, my new main class completely changed when we got the new race), but at pretty much all cores of the game's design - it was still L2, with the same gameplay.
But in later updates we definitely had the massive shift (Goddess of Destruction update) where it was no longer L2. It fully became WoW, where you just leveled up through quests to a certain lvl and then farmed instanced dungeons either solo or in a small group. And that was the kind of cataclysmic event in L2's world, where a shitton of stuff got destroyed and you pretty much moved into a new world, even if it was still kinda called the same name.
And that experience is exactly why I have the binary outlook on your initial question. Either make the changes purely visual for the previous core gameplay loop, while the new system benefits from them in a mechanical way, or make all the alternatives you need for the core gameplay through the system change.
Also, to burst your bubble even more with a few questions, to give more context on my thinking of "what a big change is". By animal husbandry, do you mean "addition of mounts where there previously were none" or "there were basic mounts before, but now you can make them better through certain actions"? Cause if it's the latter then I would not see that as a massive change. Yes, the world will feel smaller and probably some combat situations will change slightly, but to me that is simply progression of the core system, rather than a big change.
And same for Naval Combat. Do you mean "no ships before, but are now" or "ships before, but only character to character fights, while now there's direct ship to ship combat"? Or is it a "yes ships, no fighting into yes fighting"? I'd see the first and last as just a continuation of caravans, while 2nd would barely even register as a change for me.
"Does this apply to bosses and if not why not?"
I think that's why I was 'in the bubble', and couldn't understand this. I could understand people who don't want anything much at all to change so they can just 'relax and grind' or 'feel confident once they learn something'.
But Ashes is offering the thing I'm more used to. "This biome is different if X happens." and "This boss is just different sometimes by default."
You might have some fun fighting a boss and then never encounter the boss in that form again. Certain boss experiences are invalidated just by addition of mechanics to characters sometimes. I always viewed changes to things like weather conditions or other 'immersion' based things to be less disruptive than those.
Should I just assume that people who focus on simplicity and combat see a personal benefit in those changes when it's for their preferred content type after all? (whether or not most of those people would be able to extend that same wish to others is its own argument).
What do you say to people who 'want bosses to be exactly the same every time because it's less fun for them if they change?' (this is a derail but probably fine given what I made the thread for).
And for those who haven't had the experiences to visualize what I mean by 'boss changing', I mean 'might as well be a different encounter because of new abilities or massive changes in the way abilities can be used or their frequency'. If that isn't enough I figure I'd have to write up a whole TheoryRaid but maybe you can visualize it if you take the boss Cornelius in Throne and Liberty, imagine that when it rains too hard the geothermal vent he 'lives' over gets flooded and steam fills his arena and you get 'Mistweave Cornelius' or 'Bloodmist Cornelius' and that mob has like, misty shadowclone summons that absorb blood from players they damage and then if you don't kill them they return to Cornelius and heal him.
Then imagine that every time you happen to be online and Cornelius spawns, it's raining heavily, so you can't fight Original Cornelius for like a month.
If og Cornelius drops item A and Mist Corn drops item B, I'd want item A to be droppable either my another boss that was affected by the same mechanical change (say, a worm boss now called Wet Noodle) or the mobs in the surroundings drop parts of item A at a more frequent rate which, overall, matches the loot table of the og Cornelius.
I won't really care either way, as long as my goals can still be achieved. If my goal is "to get item A", but heavy rain just started I'd prefer to not have to change my goal for the day for that. Fine with changing the approach to the goal, but not the goal itself.
The adaptation part of the design is still there, cause now players would need to adjust their gear/skill/party builds for this new approach, but they don't need to change their plans of "we're making this item for this person today, so that tomorrow we can benefit from it".