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.
Genuine concerns for Ashes of Creation
Daeven
Member
Disclaimer: the following is nothing more than my thoughts, concerns and opinions as someone who has been following Ashes on and off the past couple of years. Would love for someone to shed some more light on my points.
Ashes looked extremely cool and promising to me a couple of years ago. The way they "sold" the game, the features it would have to offer and the idea of a true modern day MMO being developped in UE5 really got my attention. We are lacking severely in the western MMO department, this had to be the one.
A few years further into development, a year into A2 and just as Phase 3 is up I must say that I feel like there has not been a huge amount of progress towards those early promises. The game looks (I don't play it, so correct me if I'm wrong) very, very barebones. And yes, ofcourse it's *still* "only Alpha", but we're years and years into development now and so far they have not shown alot. In my opinion that is, ofcourse. There might be alot more to show for which they simply just haven't yet, who knows.
At this point I'm also a little bit concerned about the longevity of the game. Right now the game seems to cater to only the 0.1% of maxed out hardcore guilds and players with extremely tedious gameplay loops (even at the lower levels). Requiring hours and hours on end to even get simple stuff done. I think it's fair to say that cannot the be case come launch, that playerbase is nowhere near big enough to support a game of this magnitude. I know the game is not intended to be "for everyone", but to cater to such a small amount of (possible) players just seems off to me. I just can't see a world where that would end well given the state of the genre.
So my question is, what do you guys think? Is Ashes realistically on schedule to deliver what they initially promised and do you think that, if they do, there will be enough players supporting the game after launch long term? I seriously doubt it at this point. Hopefully I'm wrong tho!
Ashes looked extremely cool and promising to me a couple of years ago. The way they "sold" the game, the features it would have to offer and the idea of a true modern day MMO being developped in UE5 really got my attention. We are lacking severely in the western MMO department, this had to be the one.
A few years further into development, a year into A2 and just as Phase 3 is up I must say that I feel like there has not been a huge amount of progress towards those early promises. The game looks (I don't play it, so correct me if I'm wrong) very, very barebones. And yes, ofcourse it's *still* "only Alpha", but we're years and years into development now and so far they have not shown alot. In my opinion that is, ofcourse. There might be alot more to show for which they simply just haven't yet, who knows.
At this point I'm also a little bit concerned about the longevity of the game. Right now the game seems to cater to only the 0.1% of maxed out hardcore guilds and players with extremely tedious gameplay loops (even at the lower levels). Requiring hours and hours on end to even get simple stuff done. I think it's fair to say that cannot the be case come launch, that playerbase is nowhere near big enough to support a game of this magnitude. I know the game is not intended to be "for everyone", but to cater to such a small amount of (possible) players just seems off to me. I just can't see a world where that would end well given the state of the genre.
So my question is, what do you guys think? Is Ashes realistically on schedule to deliver what they initially promised and do you think that, if they do, there will be enough players supporting the game after launch long term? I seriously doubt it at this point. Hopefully I'm wrong tho!
3
Comments
If the current design remains - no, there won't be. And I'm one of the very few that had believed Ashes could hold 200-300k subs, but the game has changed for the much much worse since I've thought that.
However as someone who has played hundreds of hours across multiple Alpha phases it is hard to disagree the game feels wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle at this time.
The game world is intended to be even bigger than it is now, but the content present in the game atm is pretty limited (again alpha), only Riverlands has any major POIs, nevermind back story content like quests. Other regions, even if CAN look pretty, are missing major POIs. Size of the world alone is going to make the game world feel rather empty unless they increase the intended server population.
Classes do no offer different builds, through talent point distribution nor do gear choices: weapons, armour and accessories. There is no real different playstyles per archetype, with exception of maybe bard. Large part of"social" roles: processing and crafting are now locked behind a massive grind wall. PvE content is limited to grinding mobs, grinding mobs at POIs and grinding resource nodes. Too many systems boil down for me to: gather 1000s of x resource "to gain 1/4 of an experience bar" to paraphrase Jeffrey Bard.
There are very limited options for player driven content, and quite a few of those require a major time investment before you can engage in those and compete. The ratio of what I would consider "not enjoyable grind" to "fun" is out of whack.
I cannot shake off a feeling that they are intentionally increasing itemisation grind to inflate the time investment required to progress. It will 100% lead to casual players feeling they cannot compete in what is supposed to be a PvX experience. Butter is spread way too thin on this piece of bread
For those reasons alone the project has certain Darkfall vibes to me.
Blown past falling sands…
Let's hope they change that up a bit. I know this game is made to not be like other modern day MMOs where u just close ur eyes, follow the msq, come out max lvl and then gear up a bit in like 60 hours. BUT, there has to be some sort of golden middle ground. The current design will fail in no time, and people won't return after that imo.