Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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 Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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.
⛰ September 2025 Development Update Livestream Discussion Thread ⚒
Glorious community,
Our latest Development Update Livestream has come and gone, and this month saw exciting glimpses into the future and deep dives into what the team is working on now.
We chatted about the upcoming Summoner archetype, Sport Fishing, and the Harbingers, their systems, and their influence on the world. We also spent time reviewing your ongoing feedback for Phase III testing, including the latest on Settlements, Artisanship, Gear Progression, and more. 🔨
What stood out most to you? What has you eager to jump in? Let’s chat below! 👇
https://youtu.be/6LIq8nCRynY
Our latest Development Update Livestream has come and gone, and this month saw exciting glimpses into the future and deep dives into what the team is working on now.
We chatted about the upcoming Summoner archetype, Sport Fishing, and the Harbingers, their systems, and their influence on the world. We also spent time reviewing your ongoing feedback for Phase III testing, including the latest on Settlements, Artisanship, Gear Progression, and more. 🔨
What stood out most to you? What has you eager to jump in? Let’s chat below! 👇
https://youtu.be/6LIq8nCRynY 
0
Comments
Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!
I do hope that Ancients aren't the only antagonists of the game though or at least if they are, they should each have theme and representative. Maybe even have one of the Others as something they worship....
These ones are obviously blood themed, but I would love to see some based on decay, debauchery and so on. Like Chaos Gods from Warhammer.
Summoner looked really L2-like, which is great.
Harbinger system sounded interesting, though I'm 95% sure it'll just be overrun with "pvpers" who couldn't give fewer shits about the pve or corruption's impact on the world, cause they only care about murdering other people for free in the lawless zones. And by the sounds of it, the corruption zones will be pretty much permanent, if players don't manage to do the required cleansing.
Even if the rewards from the final bosses are valuable enough - I do not believe that the "pvpers" will have enough self-control to let others finish the event properly.
(Mutters to self) "Worth an Alpha key I think....."
The stranger's eyes lifted to the blood red cloud on the horizon.
'We have to move. It's not safe here.'
Could also have a place people could look to see if they have a question already answered since looking through a vod for answers is not the easiest.
This post therefore is about:
The Summoner Teaser
It looked okay. The basic 'you can summon an entity and that entity is there'. For a teaser, it was a neutral-positive indicator that there is good implementation for 'player activates ability and non-player Entity performs that ability'.
No interest in the other aspects of the Summoner, as we are unused to it being a 'DoT' choice. Hopeful that Augments will help with this, somewhat disappointed that this might mean that DoT is a general Summoner Augment category for /SMN, but as long as the other Augment Schools are great, it should be good.
No direct negatives from what was shown, just plenty of personal stylistic ones, not worth the time to go into for this part of the content. Speculating about things that one personally dislikes based on a teaser with minimal communicated 'intent'? Nah.
Sounds like the story arcs/Narrative Design are progressing as planned. Kind of excited for it if everything is working correctly eventually, and almost interested in helping to test it. The idea of physical locations 'appearing' due to the Arc, even if they are small, sounds good, and within parameters for what Ashes promised to be.
Nonplussed about the actual Narrative concept at the moment, feels too disconnected from our previous imagined ideal of Ashes, but it isn't surprising, per se. The 'problem' is that the Ancients were already 'enough' on the Cosmic scale, they had that inscrutable mysterious-ish charm of entities that just exist and do stuff and sure they're evil but you don't really know 'why', and that makes the stakes more personal in a roundabout way. Like, you could 'philosophically' occasionally find an Ancient that you don't feel the need to be automatically hostile toward without yourself being functionally anarchic/insane. Hopefully The Void won't push things too far in the 'Cosmic Balance Is The Story Now' direction, but it is probably a fitting direction for Ashes now that it is becoming more of a WoW-like.
A personal preference against this type of story isn't meaningful when there are other games that have story beats that suit better, it may just feel a bit silly to 'end up ignoring these events' sometimes, due to their scale.
Mostly disappointment, and that's even as a group who would have liked a better ArcheAge. It's an issue of the mismatch between the flows of Ashes and the flows of a much less 'consequence' and 'dynamism' based MMORPG.
Hearing that Sport Fishing is going to be another 'Money Printer For The Strong' doesn't help matters obviously, but can see why finding other, more nuanced uses for large special catches might be hard and would probably still just result in money. Ashes is a game where people want to be able to progress by 'just doing their thing', seemingly, so 'catching amazing fish and then selling them for Currency' is unlikely to be 'dethroned' as the main purpose.
We'd like to see at least one or two other uses more connected to the world state though, even if it's 'silly' things like being able to make temporary Relics out of long-forgotten ancient fish that you manage to catch. A Relicanth, if you will.
The rest of the news around Fishing that this Sport Fishing data brought was just all bad news for us, as players who rate Econ highly in terms of interest in a game. A slightly related exposition on that will be added to the Econ Rant thread, but it's not connected directly enough to justify putting it here. The summary version is that if this turns into too much of a 'you progressed and therefore you are just overall better', then it's a double blow to Casual players, especially with the Food system as it is as of this post.
So, overall, pretty neutral-negative about this update, but that's probably directly on the money for our enjoyment type, and nothing stood out as incohesive, just disappointing.
The Harbinger event - I love events, but in watching the plans laid out, I found myself becoming frustrated as someone who focuses more on pve/crafting than on pvp. Risk vs reward? For who? The pve/crafting part of the community has all of the risk in this scenario. Pvp'ers can just walk in and destroy and steal to their heart's content without risking the hours of work needed to do the building and crafting part of this event.
I am absolutely ok with pvp being a core part of this game, but pvp has to carry a LOT more risk to even come close to the risk crafters take in losing hours upon hours of game time. Very few people are going to engage with this system if they have to watch some trolls easily come in an wreck hours of work.
So my feedback here - 1 - you need to provide some damn good rewards for your pve and crafting folk if you want them to engage with this. 2 - It cannot be an easy thing for people intent on destruction to topple the work of people who are building, or people just won't build.