Ashes of Creation

Qhue

Qhue

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When playing the game, which admittedly was a very canned scenario specifically built for this show, it was clear that there was intentional interplay between characters that hasn't been seen much recently. There is a point where you encounter a cloud of poisonous gas that needs to be cleansed by the Cleric in the group and other points where the Ranger needs to track or the Mage needs to open a portal in the wall. These were obviously heavily scripted for this canned encounter, but it did communicate their desire to acknowledge the stuff that makes each class unique and brings more of the 'Role' back to the RPG.

People were lined up to try Ashes the entire conference and seemed to be having a genuinely good time with the game. I played twice (once as the cleric and once as the ranger... never could get the spellcaster) and while waiting in line heard many people commenting about how refreshing the demo felt compared to the generic sameness of WoW a few booths over. Control wise I'd say it felt like half-WoW and half-Guild Wars. There are some spammable and 'ultimate' abilities that are bound to keys on the keyboard and I can see how this might eventually result in a console version of the client. The combat felt smooth enough, however, and I appreciated the simple tab-targeting of this game after the recent 'telegraph' schemes of WildStar, Guild Wars and the various Korean MMOs.

Time will tell, however, if they can deliver on their ambitious designs but I remain cautiously optimistic.
 
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zzeris

zzeris

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Qhue said:
When playing the game, which admittedly was a very canned scenario specifically built for this show, it was clear that there was intentional interplay between characters that hasn't been seen much recently. There is a point where you encounter a cloud of poisonous gas that needs to be cleansed by the Cleric in the group and other points where the Ranger needs to track or the Mage needs to open a portal in the wall. These were obviously heavily scripted for this canned encounter, but it did communicate their desire to acknowledge the stuff that makes each class unique and brings more of the 'Role' back to the RPG.

People were lined up to try Ashes the entire conference and seemed to be having a genuinely good time with the game. I played twice (once as the cleric and once as the ranger... never could get the spellcaster) and while waiting in line heard many people commenting about how refreshing the demo felt compared to the generic sameness of WoW a few booths over. Control wise I'd say it felt like half-WoW and half-Guild Wars. There are some spammable and 'ultimate' abilities that are bound to keys on the keyboard and I can see how this might eventually result in a console version of the client. The combat felt smooth enough, however, and I appreciated the simple tab-targeting of this game after the recent 'telegraph' schemes of WildStar, Guild Wars and the various Korean MMOs.

Time will tell, however, if they can deliver on their ambitious designs but I remain cautiously optimistic.
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You mentioned this seemed very Everquesty in the Pantheon thread. That surprises me. Did this feeling come from your first paragraph's reaction or other aspects of the game? This is the most interesting upcoming title so I'm just trying to pick your thoughts a bit.
 
Qhue

Qhue

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The character types, with their specializations, felt more akin to Everquest to me as did the factionless nature of the different races and class combinations. More than anything, however, was a pervasive sense that I was playing EverQuest Next, or what EQNext might have been. The characters and abilities felt very EQ2 ish and the landscape itself evoked strong memories of the environments in both of the EverQuests with a more 'heightened realism' in terms of the overall art style. It lacks the cell shaded 'toon' nature of WoW or WildStar and instead feels like a much more realistic high fantasy setting.

The abilities themselves, while obviously in primitive forms, seemed more situational in their usage as compared to the 'rotation' based combat of WoW. Now this could just be my naivete when it comes to how the abilities string together and it could very well be that the optimal usage is dependent on a simplified and repetitive 'rotation', but at least in the demo I felt like I was making choices both reacting to the situation and setting up next steps rather than following a set prescription.

The nature of the Node system seems in line both with what was planned for EQNext in terms of its evolving world as well as the original design of Rift. The comments about making sure that the world is both dynamic and also USED throughout resonated strongly with me as a nice counterpoint to the 'Themepark' style of WoW. WoW has always been super efficient about cramming locales and quests etc into a very confined space. Some of the original vanilla zones had Disney Imagineering qualities in that they managed to flow and redirect the player through a whole plotline that actually only took up a very small part of the world. This made travel very easy, but also resulted in the areas being disposable. You go there once and then never ever go back. Ashes seems primed to keep people in and around the core game areas by having the node-based 'cities' be the focal point of characters whether they are low or high level in much the same way that Eve operates.

I think, more than anything else, it is the idea of discovery and exploration fueled by a dynamic environment that invoked the strongest feelings of EverQuest for me. I too would very much like to recapture that sense of wonder I had in EQ and EQ2 when going into new lands...it is a sensation I've not had lately in WoW for a number of reasons.

They had everyone at the Ashes panel give them our email addresses and promised access to the Alpha Zero for everyone in attendance as part of their iterative 'playtest it' development cycle. I've been eagerly checking my email since PAX ended hoping to see an email pop up so that I can get another taste of Ashes. I've not had that sensation of eager anticipation in quite a long time and while I am very hesitant to be hurt again... I can't help but feel hopeful.
 
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moonarchia

moonarchia

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Just need to lure Brad in and they will reach critical mass on their black hole of sucking.
 
Daidraco

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Quineloe said:
So there's this rumor that the makers of this game are looking to purchase SOE / Daybreak Games.

UPDATED - Rumor: Daybreak Games in Talks for Possible Acquisition - MMORPG.com

at least it would be a completely new path towards utter failure.
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UPDATE #1 From Intrepid's Steven Sharif:

It has long been my personal policy not to comment on rumors. Even if we were in talks with Daybreak for an acquisition, we would not be able to comment. Additionally, I saw the news of recent layoffs at Daybreak today and would like to extend my condolences to those affected. Daybreak (SOE) has an incredible history of creating some of the most cherished franchises that are near and dear to our hearts, and the people laid off today are some of the most talented developers in the industry. Intrepid Studios wishes them the best in their future ventures and I know they will go on to accomplish great things.



Looks as though that rumor got debunked. At least he made it "seem" that way.
 
Furious

Furious

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How do you make a MMO with Unreal engine? Maybe E Elidroth can explain.

I know you can "brute force" things, but it seams like it was chosen to make the demo look more finished, polished and get the hype up.

I have some sweet zones and animations I made with my free UE4.

Please fund me.
 
Qhue

Qhue

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What else would one use? I suppose Unity based on having seen a few that use it. I am a bit surprised that no one had really opened up a major engine with the various hooks necessary to support various MMO-type functions like gear / inventory / progression etc.
 
Neranja

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Qhue said:
I am a bit surprised that no one had really opened up a major engine with the various hooks necessary to support various MMO-type functions like gear / inventory / progression etc.
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That's not the hard part: Gear/inventory/progression stuff is part of the design decisions for a game. It should vary between games. In fact, there are a lot of RPG frameworks for game engines. E.g. ORK Framework

The hard part is the "massively multiplayer" part, and writing a bulletproof server backend with its network interactions between DB, server farm and client. It has to perform, it has to scale, and it has to be bullet-proof and unexploitable (e.g. duping).

You need real programmers for that, people with experience that understand the pitfalls of large scale distributed systems and at least know what ACID properties are. Not those stupid hipster guys with their "I don't need to learn SQL, that stuff is so 70s and I'll just use an object-relational mapper for that, or an NoSQL database for my really structured datasets!"
 
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arallu

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Live Stream this Monday the 4th of June at 3PM PDT:
 
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E

Elidroth

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Furious said:
How do you make a MMO with Unreal engine? Maybe E Elidroth can explain.
Click to expand...

When we did Vanguard with UE2, we rewrote a HUGE amount of the underlying code.. It basically wasn't much Unreal anymore.. but it showed the problems trying to convert an FPS engine into an MMO engine. UE2 was a great engine when everything could be canned and baked into the game, but when you're trying to dynamically load a lot of different art assets based upon proximity to other players, who also have their own texture loading to do, you run into big trouble. This was the core of the hitching problem with VG.. Trying to load assets on the fly is hard.. It's why photorealistic textures in an MMO are a bad idea too IMO.

I've played around with UE4 some, and it's definitely a lot better all around (duh..), and I know the guys at Epic took a lot of what we learned making VG and worked really hard to make UE3 and 4 more MMO capable. I'm told by people who are still in gamedev that UE4 is actually a very capable MMO engine now..

With the talent at Intrepid, I have no doubts the engine will not be a problem for Ashes of Creation. If I were to get back into GameDev, they'd be who I'd want to work for.. Great creative people in the design side, and of course they're in San Diego, where I live when I'm not in the current desert heatbox shithole I'm living in..

If DBG were to sell the EQ franchise, it would be incredibly stupid.. You don't sell profitable IPs.. EQ/EQ2 are profitable. They may not be making a shit-ton of money, but their net profit is still good money.
 
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Muligan

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Anyone else have much to say about this game? I've been talking around and I hear some say EQ, some say WoW, and others say Guild Wars, much like you've seen on this forum. I never really though that any of them had much in common so could someway give the appropriate correlations with each game? Game seems interesting but comparisons seem to be coming in from all over board. Seems like some talented, passionate guys at the helm but as others have said, time will tell.
 
Kuro

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I'm willing to tell you it is whatever you want it to be as long as you hit up my referral link yo.
 
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Kriptini

Kriptini

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Brikker said:
Who is Sorcerer? Isn't the online gaming industry worth trillions? And MMOs like 20+ billion
Click to expand...

He's the one making the game. He was a guild leader in ArcheAge who bought thunderstruck trees from us for $50 a pop. In the alpha. The dude is notoriously loaded.
 
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Muligan

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Just watching their latest video, I noted a few items for discussion.

1. Name dropped several game, primarily SoE, such as Everquest, Planetside, and DC Online. States they know what it takes to make a game.

2. Social Experience. They seem to be leaning on community and making character an integral part of the game. Curious to how they will accomplish this point.

3. Cater to multiple player types. This is probably my biggest worry. He mentions how they are not going to focus on a specific type of player and another guy begins to list all the different types of MMO players they are attempting to reach. You can't make all of those happy and each of those expect different things from a MMO that cannot necessarily coexist, at least in my mind. To make raiding or hard core guilds feel they are doing something of value and to keep them motivated, you can't make the casual playerbase 100% happy. I'm curious to see how they add value to each type of player without diminishing the reward.

4. Made by a "gamer" so is this guy like Furor? Did he play in a raiding guild and understand that side of MMO's or is a casual guys? Tradeskiller? Home decorator? PvP? Defining a gamer is relative.

5. Alpha is early Q4. Curious who will make it to the pubic first between them and Pantheon? In my mind the next MMO for those who are willing to move on from WoW is Pantheon vs. Ashes of Creation vs. Camelot Unchained vs. Blizzard's next MMO. I'm not sure how small WoW will ever shrink but there's probably a couple of hundred thousand, maybe even half a million worth of players to be gained if someone can get it right. If Blizzard decides to drop a Diablo MMO, it could be game over, I really don't think there's more than 100-200k that can land on Pantheon (that's pretty generous) and Camelot Unchained could fall flat as far as I know so that leaves a lot of people to try Ashes but can they do it? Half a million subs seems insignificant these days but that's a success for someone. Maybe they will go different directions but there's a fairly large idle or nomadic number of MMO players just waiting and it would be awesome to see someone get a large chunk if not all of them.
 
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Kriptini

Kriptini

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Muligan said:
4. Made by a "gamer" so is this guy like Furor? Did he play in a raiding guild and understand that side of MMO's or is a casual guys? Tradeskiller? Home decorator? PvP? Defining a gamer is relative.
Click to expand...

Sorcerer has experience leading absolutely massive guilds but playstyle-wise he is no Furor.
 
zzeris

zzeris

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Muligan said:

Just watching their latest video, I noted a few items for discussion.

1. Name dropped several game, primarily SoE, such as Everquest, Planetside, and DC Online. States they know what it takes to make a game.

2. Social Experience. They seem to be leaning on community and making character an integral part of the game. Curious to how they will accomplish this point.

3. Cater to multiple player types. This is probably my biggest worry. He mentions how they are not going to focus on a specific type of player and another guy begins to list all the different types of MMO players they are attempting to reach. You can't make all of those happy and each of those expect different things from a MMO that cannot necessarily coexist, at least in my mind. To make raiding or hard core guilds feel they are doing something of value and to keep them motivated, you can't make the casual playerbase 100% happy. I'm curious to see how they add value to each type of player without diminishing the reward.

4. Made by a "gamer" so is this guy like Furor? Did he play in a raiding guild and understand that side of MMO's or is a casual guys? Tradeskiller? Home decorator? PvP? Defining a gamer is relative.

5. Alpha is early Q4. Curious who will make it to the pubic first between them and Pantheon? In my mind the next MMO for those who are willing to move on from WoW is Pantheon vs. Ashes of Creation vs. Camelot Unchained vs. Blizzard's next MMO. I'm not sure how small WoW will ever shrink but there's probably a couple of hundred thousand, maybe even half a million worth of players to be gained if someone can get it right. If Blizzard decides to drop a Diablo MMO, it could be game over, I really don't think there's more than 100-200k that can land on Pantheon (that's pretty generous) and Camelot Unchained could fall flat as far as I know so that leaves a lot of people to try Ashes but can they do it? Half a million subs seems insignificant these days but that's a success for someone. Maybe they will go different directions but there's a fairly large idle or nomadic number of MMO players just waiting and it would be awesome to see someone get a large chunk if not all of them.
Click to expand...

Only going to comment on the last discussion point because there's not enough info for me to even guess on the others. They will definitely beat Pantheon to market. They have all the resources they need and Brad doesn't. I don't see Blizzard making another pure MMO at this point. Just too much effort, resources, etc used and the reward is not guaranteed and it would compete with WoW. 500,000 is a lot of people this early in the process. I believe this is the next big thing but it won't ever get to top WoW numbers. Maybe a few million if they are lucky. Global sales will be very important here.
 
Muligan

Muligan

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Interesting to see how this will work with various playstyles.... Curious if you have a guild like Faceless, which i'm assuming all servers will have 2-3 at least, and then the more casual player base? They act as if this is relatively unscripted but is this more like EQ except you unlock Qeynos and Freeport then Nagafen comes out of the woods and presents a raid opportunity?

 
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