Ashes of Creation

Today on Ashes discord Steven announced that he would be doing an AMA on reddit this Saturday, starting at noon PST.

Just listened to this:


Sounds great but quite a lot of red flags, guy saying he has total confidence in 250 vs 250 pvp and a lot of detailed/specific claims. I think either this will be super cool / groundbreaking, or just another disappointment that launches with tons of bugs / few promised features etc. Hoping to be pleasantly surprised but expecting star citizen.

edit: Like, I'm imagining there are devs on this game that are listening to this interview and thinking very hard about death.

edit #2: In his defense, he does say no NDA on alpha, no buy to play box (just pay a sub), take a look before you play. So he does have some confidence at least.

I wonder if the game will have siege vehicles? I liked lobbing cannon balls more than trying to tab/assist target a fucking Zerg army

Cybsled said:

Performance is a bigger issue. I recall EQ1 zerg raids where I basically had to stare at the floor for an hour because otherwise I would be unable to move.

Uncapped raids in uninstanced content is basically begging for a slide show. And shit performance in a PVP game is an even bigger issue than in PVE.

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Sheet, I remember doing Nag on a dial up. Staring at the ground, sending Jabober in and learning we won 5 minutes after we did was normal. By the time I was Zerging down stuff in Velious while abusing my schools T1, performance lag was an upgrade. lol.

That being said, if the mob is open world, then a raid size limit to determine loot won't matter--you can always just bring more for support. So then they have to add mechanics to the fight that make it a mess to fix that issue...and then those mechanics can be exploited to grief, so...that issue needs mechanics. And eventually the world feels very gamey and nonsensical. I mean, you're right--performance is a huge issue. But trying to control is also one.

Not sure how I'd deal with that if I wanted to keep shit open world completely but raid limits I don't think would do much to tackle the performance problem. Even with them you're going to get guilds leap frogging each other, and piling in raid groups as support ect, unless they work out a rotation.

tarb said:

Is that really a bad thing to take ideas from other games if they are done well? Blizzard has been stealing ideas for 15 years.

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I like what Sorcerer said in his interview with Asmon, and it's really true. Basically he said MMO gamers are like beaten dogs, almost every MMO has come out and handed us a shiny new bone then beaten us with it. He said don't pre order, just wait and see. There's gonna be no NDA for alpha or beta, so let's wait and see. Literally nothing for us to lose if it sucks, and it might turn out to be awesome. They don't need to reinvent the wheel on everything, I would love a game like Archeage that isn't P2W shit with trash devs who ruin their game. If it doesn't live up to expectations, then no point in being a negative bitch because why waste the energy on that. Optimism doesn't cost anything and negativity just makes you feel like shit.

TJT said:

After the past 12 years of flying mounts for all that is WOW. I am quite ready for a game that is more of a "place" than it is a "game." If you want something that minimizes all travel time to nothing, or busywork as you call it, there is a game out there that caters to you already.

I never played Archeage or Lineage 2. Which this game seems to draw very heavily from. I am quite ready for an MMO that I can just enjoy. As it seems their design philosophy is not that the game begins at max level and that everyone can contribute something to the nodes they're citizens of.

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I don't mean I'm asking for this change myself, it's just what's going to happen. A lot of mmos are starting out with fairly inconvenient systems which are getting streamlined over the course of the games lifetime. If flying mounts are available anyways to everyone, then they're not really rare in the first palce. They're just cumbersome to use because you have to hit the gas station and get a refill every other day.
Imagine everyone getting a Thunderfury but 9 out of 10 guys had to put in 5 gold every hour to swing their sword again. That would never make it past the first expansion because everybody is tired of it.

It’s always the same song and dance

Chorus: stop making transport easy, it makes the world small!

1 year later

Chorus: I’m fucking sick of having to run for 15 minutes to get anywhere, add fast travel!!!!

Cybsled said:

It’s always the same song and dance

Chorus: stop making transport easy, it makes the world small!

1 year later

Chorus: I’m fucking sick of having to run for 15 minutes to get anywhere, add fast travel!!!!

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If this was a theme park game like WoW then yeah absolutely, but with sandbox pvp games its a different story. in EVE for example you might spend your entire time playing the game in just a small part of the map, moving occasionally. You could be a mission runner, an industrialist, a trader, a solo pvper, a small gang pvper, part of a huge alliance holding territory, living in wormholes, running incursions, exploring, running plexes. There were so many ways to play the game and they could be done in different areas. This ends up creating communities around the map basically, where areas have a different feel depending on who is living in that area currently. Having travel time also makes strategy and tactics actually matter in PvP engagements. Scouting and intel come into play rather than just calling in the zerg. And the fast travel networks that will be available when you reach Metropolis node status (max level node I think?) gives the locals there an incentive for dedicating time in that region and gives them an edge for PvP in their territory (assuming the benefits are only available to citizens of that node).

Sure, but it’s fucking boring. I remember Shadowbane and hitting auto run for 10 minutes because where you wanted to go was miles away. Or making your 500th boring pack run in AA because speed was capped and it took 40 minutes one way to deliver your shit.

When your game starts to feel like a job, then that is when you start to lose folks.

yes on siege vehicles, no on cannonballs. There will be no gunpowder. Think trebouchets.

Meh trebs aren’t as interesting

I'm still convinced this is some manner of giant scam, but I'm starting to think it's a giant scam that might actually release an end product, which makes it better than many others.

I can also respect the idea of getting rich, then making your own MMO so that you can give yourself GM powers and fuck over people you hate.

Mist said:

Why is everyone I used to play MMOs with spamming me about this game all of a sudden in the past week?

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Because New World got pushed to infinity.

Only thing I remember from Sorc was he Pay2winned for his guild to be "the best" in Arche Age buying shit to get thunderstruck logs more often from the shop or RMTing or some shit. Perhaps not a great person to be leading development.

It was Sorcerer in AA. He was the GM of The White Order on Kyrios, same server PRX was on.

lol, I just recalled one of the PK guilds trying to get his guild's name banned, trying to claim it was was a white supremacist organization.

Sorceror was paying $ for items in beta of AA. Dude was a p2w champion. Granted will that carry over? Who knows. I will try every game I think is interesting at least once before making a decision, no reason for this I would change that aspect, even with who is bank rolling it.

Will see how it is when I can play it. Not exactly a lot of options on the MMO market. And as much I would kill for something new or even a non fantasy based MMO, I still try most things that come out.