Talk:2018-09-27 Livestream
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[Music]
Steven: We're on. Hey guys!
Jeffrey: Hi everybody!
Steven: Welcome to our stream. We're sorry we're a little late. Just a little just a little tiny bit late. Actually I should probably
Jeffrey: We did pretty good though.
Steven: Did we?
Jeffrey: Considering.
Steven: I should probably post on Discord that we're actually live now. How many- what are we at? We got - we're good? Okay. Louder, just a little louder. No?
Jeffrey: Any of us?
Steven: They want the mics louder. Okay guys we're getting that fixed right now.
Jeffrey: Is me? Am I too loud?
Steven: Is it Jeff? Jeff.
Jeffrey: Or is it Steven too loud?
Steven: I'm never too loud. Am I? Maybe.
Jeffrey: I can yell.
Steven: Hello friends out in the Twitch lands. Okay.
Jeffrey: We should not be watching chat. It was a terrible idea.
Steven: Don't look at chat. Just know it's there's, but now we're good. Okay guys so by the way we do have a treat for you guys today.
Jeffrey: It's a different kind of livestream.
Steven: A little bit different. We're actually gonna be showing some alpha-1 arena gameplay.
Jeffrey: Yeah the whole time yeah.
Steven: Most of the whole time. We- you know it's interesting because we just started the stress tests on the seventh I believe it was? Was it the first stress test? And it is now what the twenty seventh?
Jeffrey: Twenty days later.
Steven: Oh my gosh nearly three weeks into the stress testing. So we've had three official stress tests. A couple of them over the weekends and then one was one day early on. As you guys know we are launching first with the Battle Royale mode that we've been testing and we'll be implementing our castle siege mode shortly after that; which will include some of the classes that people can spec into; and then after that we'll be doing our horde mode. Yes so what- is that- oh we're connecting to a game session. Right we should- let's switch it over- oh can you actually see it now okay?
Jeffrey: I don't know.
Steven: We can see it. No we can't? Oh let's move over into the game. Can you put us into the game? We're in the corner now. Yay. We're in the corner. Okay so you're seeing here a little bit of a lobby for the arena; and okay you guys should be able to see it. Yes you can. Good. Alex is playing for us actually. Alex is over here.
Alex: Hello.
Jeffrey: Hi Alex.
Steven: Hey Alex. How you doing buddy? So let's talk a little bit about this arena alpha.
Jeffrey: Yeah. So as you can see here this is kind of like the staging area where we kind of get ready to jump into combat. That portal there is what everybody goes through to try and get off the world of Verra.
Steven: Oh yeah we could talk a little bit about lore I guess. So we did put this alpha arena in some lore context, right. So as some of you were perhaps theory crafting: This actually does take place near, excuse me, during the exodus of Verra, right; and
Jeffrey: You're playing your great-great-great ancestors.
Steven: Great-great-great great-great-great.
Jeffrey: great-great.
Steven: An indiscriminate number of greats.
Jeffrey: Indiscriminate.
Steven: Yes and you are actually a part of some of the lat- though don't- this starting area- this lobby area where you're seeing players load into- this is unfinished- but this is actually- this will be one of the capital cities that you are about to enter through one of the great divine gateways. You're trying to flee and you are a part, in this particular game mode, you are a part of the some unlucky few who didn't quite make it out; and they unfortunately after entering the great divine gateway fell back to the planet.
Jeffrey: Some thing happened to cause a rift to open up into the world.
Steven: Right.
Jeffrey: And drop anybody who got in there too late [inaudible]
Steven: Left behind. Do we have game sound working as well on this? Game sound is good? Okay cool. Hopefully it's not too loud. Game sound seems okay. Game sounds might be a bit loud. We could probably turn those values down slightly. Alright so the match has begun. What you're seeing is a standard kind of fall through; and Alex can jump on out aboard his Griffon that is untextured. Do not judge the not textured Gryphon. This is very much alpha gameplay. It does look pretty good can we see some flaps Alex a little animation? There we go. Oh perfect. Beautiful. Look at that. That's nice. Okay now we're diving. So when textures get on this Griffon you will see that in the coming weeks, textures will be applied to the Griffon.
Steven: So now you're coming through the clouds and you can kind of see the world. And the great thing about this alpha arena is that players get an introduction into the art, the world, the aesthetic of Ashes of Creation.
Jeffrey: It's what we're going for with the kind of different environments are you going to see there. This map is two by two?
Steven: I think it's two and a half by two and a half yeah. Two and a half kilometers by two and a half kilometers. That's the size of the map that this current arena is in; and the intended player count for this is to be at 100 but we may go higher with that, because obviously you know our- the purpose of this test is to test our systems; and a part of those systems are getting players onto a battlefield with each other and hundreds of players.
Jeffrey: We want to push that as high as we possibly can as we make progress in our back-end and continue to optimize things and find some some nifty solutions to the problem of a zillion players well probably push that up during our tests as high as we can get.
Steven: Yes absolutely that's a whole purpose of having- like right now we have invited all 10,000 alpha-1 backers into the stress test, so I know some of them didn't get to participate this last weekend, however we will have a stress test beginning Friday evening and going throughout Saturday and Sunday where you will have advanced instructions that should go out tonight, alpha one backers, for you to get in and stress test our servers. We have our server setup. We have matches will be set to 50 right now because a part of this alpha is discovering certain issues that we want to make sure we can optimize; and we when we did our 100 player matches a couple of weeks ago we discovered some issues that we wanted to fix before we went back into the 100 players.
Jeffrey: We know we know what to solve on that problem so it's just a matter of time until we can [cross talk] so yeah that it also allows us to spin up more servers and kind of test the bat functionality sure that our scaling ability to dynamically start matches works the way we want it to.
Steven: I see in chat a couple people saying, you know, why did we go with Battle Royale as the first testable arena mode? Right and the answer for that is honestly you know as we're testing and getting people into matches and on our servers and and testing the replication among players in a battlefield and making sure that that tech is present and capable for hundreds of players on the battlefield we wanted to have a game mode that still was fun for players to test in. An environment that was fun to test in.
Jeffrey: And if you take a look at like our content- where we're at right now in terms of content- we're not there yet right. We're not there to to really give you a full MMO, so we tried to figure out a way that we can get a lot of players into a place at the same time, have it be fun, have it be quick and have us still get the same kind of data that we would get if you get if we were running the MMO; and so this is just a really good solution for us.
Steven: And it was the fastest solution right. I mean from a game-mode perspective there's really not much to about a Royale, you know [cross-talk] and that's really pretty much it. So you know it was really- it really just made sense for us to get this world in the hands of the players and us actually collecting data that we need to collect right in the process of building the game. Now that being said however, you know obviously Battle Royales are pretty popular right now among a large portion of the gaming communities. So that doesn't hurt as well. This can this can be something that will get more eyes on the project but Ashes of Creation is an MMORPG and this arena is just a testing grounds for us to actually collect data and refine.
Jeffrey: And it's also really good for us as a company too in terms of like getting people used to putting stuff in front of people. It's having a game that is live like this is a much different thing than just hanging back and not not putting stuff out in front of people. It changes the way that you approach problems. It changes the way that you kind of- you get more serious: You put on your big-boy pants; and that right there is really good for us as a studio you know kind of to establish and cement our identity you know a game designers so
Steven: Absolutely yeah I agree and the other thing is- important is- you know you have you have these- I mean I'll say the speed that we've been building and developing is rapid and fast but when we jumped into the stress test phase it somehow got even faster.
Jeffrey: Yeah well because it's all of a sudden it's you have really specific problems to work on. You can't really you know- you want to fix them as soon as you possibly can because you have people depending on you who are out there absolutely waiting for this; so it really kind of changes your perspective on things and it makes it real.
Steven: Yeah and the other thing about you know this in preparing us for phase 2; and phase 2 for those of you who don't know phase 2 of alpha one is the persistent MMO world that will be roughly 120 square kilometers, progression up to level 20. You're going to have 8 base archetypes available to play. You're going to see a more integrated aspect of our combat system which was always from the beginning intended to be a blend of action and tab. Now with our alpha 0, as many of you guys saw back in December, you know we had progression up to level 10. We had a 16 square kilometer zone. We had our node system working, collecting experience, advancing collecting cultural experience specifically, connecting into the quest lines and changing the spawn tables of the areas and locking dungeons. You know that was all present in our alpha 0. What we saw from the community was a desire for us to iterate on our combat system; and that was never-
Jeffrey: That was the weakest part
Steven: Right and that was never really our focus from the get-go right with alpha zero. We knew how to setup tab-based combat systems right. that's pretty traditional. What was going to be really the feat was to blend action and tab together in a comfortable and good feeling combat system.
Jeffrey: And balanced way.
Steven: Yes absolutely because those are very different tempos, action and tab, completely different. So what alpha 1 in this arena phase does is it allows us to have one hundred percent focus on action systems and then as we swatch those systems play out and continue to develop them we can begin to implement and iterate those systems in with the tab system right
Jeffrey: And it's really great because it gives you a totally different perspective when you're looking at something like that. You know action is real fast. Like I can't describe to you how fast it is. You know I grew up in a kind of tab Q based system and you really approach abilities and weapons and all the stuff in a very different way once you have action sort of opened up for you; and it allows us to really start categorizing kind of the idea behind abilities and what they should be doing and what they should be doing in each context. So already we've made a lot of progress down that road here internally just from having the stuff exposed to us.
Steven: Yes and we really actually I mean you know I played about 30 some-odd matches last Sunday and you know I'm very happy with the place that this game is from a smoothness standpoint you know with participating in combat so as we tested the siege stuff before we went to PAX as well seeing you know a hundred players in that kind of area right was a smooth experience; and I've played alot of MMOS and I will tell you that we have- a lot of them- and I will tell you almost without fail any siege experience that I have gone to in every other MMO I have experienced major performance issues; and it didn't matter the engine right. From proprietary engines to previous Unreal engines you know I experienced those problems. What I will say, which is promising, is that this early in our development when we were testing those seas mechanics that some of you may have seen the video we showed some of the gameplay from that back on September 1st I think we released a video at PAX, those that performance was smooth.
Jeffrey: No it felt really good even you know- like from my perspective as a very critical person like it felt good. I was I'm always amazed at how much progress were able to make on that so- and these are really hard problems to solve right. Like when Steven says like I've been in all these these sieges and they've always been you know difficult to run because they are so laggy and choppy. I mean it's not because people don't know what they're doing, it's that they're really hard problems to solve. So I mean it's cool that we have made so much progress even in just this short amount of time.
Steven: Right yeah and I think it's great you know as we've talked about this before but you know an open development where you have such transparency with the community that you're building a game for this early on you know it can be a little scary to get something in the hands of players like this.
Jeffrey: Terrifying.
Steven: You know before we came on this stream you know even some of the devs were just like are we gonna show this? And it's hard to show- I mean obviously when you're when you're an artist- and developers are an artist- letting your designer, a coder, or an artist- really you're all artists in the sense that this is a project you work on you dedicate vast majority of time in your life on right now; and to show it to the people you're building it for.
Jeffrey: Let it loose in the wild.
Steven: Like we're showing now. I mean this is a work in progress. This is truly an alpha; and you know sometimes people they don't know that, that's what we talked about. It's the downside of transparency is you know people don't understand those those points. Don't die Alex. Alex don't die. You can do it. Kill him. You gotta good. You can do it. Oh my gosh this is so scary. I'm so scared. GM cheats! GM cheats! Go do it. Activate the cheat codes. Oh my god! Oh good job!
Jeffrey: Well done sir.
Steven: Alex you survived. Quick find a corner and heal yourself!
Steven: Okay, so yeah going back to there- but that is the downside of transparency as you're showing a work in progress and some people don't understand that. But that's okay because part of this whole process is being able to interact with the community, being able to hear feedback and let them give us as much data as possible.
Jeffrey: I mean you can't fix something if you don't know if it's broken and the only way to really tell if it's broken is to give it the players because they'll break it.
Steven: Yes absolutely. So that's fun. Alex are you fighting another person? Oh my gosh we put Alex on the spot having to perform for this stream. Oh he turned into a plant! What are you? Are you a plant? He has no idea. I hope he's not actually watching the stream and is stream sniping you. This is actually riveting.
Jeffrey: And as you can see like we talked about the environments before this is the part of the underrealm for this map; and we've kind of taken the ideas of various different environments and kind of shrunk them down so they don't all have their own identity here this is two by two- two and a half by two and a half map. So you know it takes a little while to run across but you'll see a lot of different environments: Some familiar, some difference; and yeah our environment guys continue to knock it out of the water.
Steven: Oh yeah the great thing about the process and being as transparent as we have been: You get to go back onto our YouTube channel and look at the old art that was there and just watching that art train keep on moving and stopping for nobody.
Jeffrey: I mean every time I think like oh man it looks so good you know a month or two goes by and it's like oh my god I can't believe we had stuff look like that.
Steven: Yes. What is he doing? They want to know what you're doing right now. Alex is repairing his armor. So in this mode- in this arena mode- you pick up pieces of armor and those armor pieces have skills and abilities associated with them. but additionally they also grant a capacity of shield damage mitigation points and if you lose those shields... you can recharge the magic in that armor to reconstitute those mitigation points- those shields; and that's what Alex was doing.
Steven: Yeah why don't you talk a little bit about perhaps Jeff- you know the number of skills we've associated in here with weapons and armors and a little bit about you know this game mode itself?
Jeffrey: So yeah I guess not everybody knows exactly how everything's structured, so we have 14 weapons in the game. Each weapon has its own ability associated with it. Each weapon has three different tiers, so it gets better as it goes up in tier and then the ability also gets better as you go up in tier. So like we have a book and the book's main attack is a meteor. So you throw a fireball wherever it lands a giant meteor comes down and wrecks people under an AoE. Now its ability is chaos meteor, so it will still summon down a meteor but this meteor that explodes and it does random effects to different people who are in that area, so they can do all sorts of nasty stuff. You can see that Alex just went invisible invisibility is a armor ability. We've got two different types of armor: Upper body and lower body. Each of those have abilities that are associated kind of with the idea of of its spots. So like legs are like evasion abilities. You'll get super jump which is what we call Catfall. You can get frigid tracks which will leave ice behind you is run away, so lots of things to get out of combat are attached to your legs; and then your upper body is kind of more like preventing damage to yourself. So upper body has invisibility, it has the ability to summon a wall, it's got immunity to corruption; so yeah there's all sorts of different stuff going on. We tried to keep abilities pretty interesting and kind of keep it away from like straight damage, so a lot of stuff changes the way a battle happens. So we've got the darkness bow, which will create this area of darkness; it'll make everybody who's inside it unable to see what's going on around them, so doesn't do any damage but it really can disrupt a fight.
Steven: I saw someone actually asked a question with regards to the BR mode. Did making the BR mode take away anytime from the MMORPG?
Jeffrey: Not really. I mean it's such a simple mode and you know it's a matter of a map, characters, abilities: All these things we already have and are still working on, so really the only thing it took out of our would be just a rule set and the storm yeah. So the corruption storm.
Steven: It was pretty a seamless mode to implement. The reason why we chose Battle Royale as a game mode was because it took the least amount of time from the game modes perspective.
Jeffrey: We had a big discussion on in terms of like what we should actually do going forward in terms of this; and this is kind of the best most efficient way forward in order to get what we needed to do. Because putting out any kind of alpha or beta does require a lot of polish; and we wanted to get something out quicker rather than later because again like the more time that passes-
Steven: Yeah and and we had kind of spoken with you know with regards to the the battleground types: We want objective-based battlegrounds and part of the discussion early on as we were you know creating phase one of alpha 1 for a combat test perspective was: Should we go full-blown into just making those objective based battlegrounds from the get-go; and the time associated with that was just far greater than what we wanted to do. And we didn't- we wanted to be able to start collecting data as soon as possible which is why we tiered this stage of release for Rattle Royale being the easiest and fastest to implement, moving into then the Castle Siege system being implemented and the Horde system being implemented later on down the road.
Jeffey: It all requires very little on the content side so it frees up designers to kind of do what they need to do. Again it's about getting something in front of you guys as soon as we possibly can. It's something that's useful right. All the stuff that we're doing here are useful to us in getting this MMO done. So really it really didn't take too much time at all away from what we're doing. I mean all this stuff is all stuff we'd be doing anyway.
Steven: Alex! Alex you can do it! Oh my gosh. Alex how do you keep winning? How many people are left, I can't see it? How many people? Three! Three people!
Jeffrey: You might see win here.
Steven: Oh Alex can you do it? Can you do the first streamed victory for the Ashes of Creation Alpha one arena? No pressure. No pressure. You can do it. I believe in you. Let's just watch for a second and see... Oh my gosh. Oh no. Oh no. Oh my gosh! Alex! How did you do that with six kills? Well done. That's a good job. Very nice. Very cool. That's good job. What were we talking about? Sorry. Okay.
Jeffrey: We were talking about the different phases of this mode.
Steven: Oh yes the different phases. Oh! One thing that we announced to our alpha one backers that I know they love clarity on is that we'll also be including progression and experience tracking for participation and testing that will entitle them to some unique cosmetics as well that reflect on the lore of this setting, which is before the fall. So you'll be able to acquire some armors that reflect some of the ancient cultures of Verra that you will earn and hold for live launch. Yeah which is pretty exciting.
Jeffrey: Would be kind of like your ancestors kept these curios for you.
Steven: Oh we want him to play more. Alex. I think he thought he was just playing one game. Tell him he's playing more. He can't just walk away and win once and undefeated. Yeah so this is a little Lobby. Okay very cool. I can't believe he won on the first time.
Jeffrey: I can. He's owned me so many times. He's a little bit too big for his britches.
Steven: He has done well. What are some questions that we have? I know that we had a- sorry Alex you have to- you get to play so many more times. Okay it's a vicious cycle. Let me open up our forums because I know there was a thread that had- oh what is this? Boogs in chat wants a shout out. I don't know who that is. Hello Boogs. How you doing buddy? Okay where is that thread at? Is it in the announcements and headlines? Maybe okay here we go: Official livestream 27th. So let's answer some questions while we are queued up for another match.
Steven: Let's see. Will- okay so- question from Master Sindbad: Will we be able to give monthly sub time away as gifts from money earned through the AOC referral link? This is important for many of our content creators who would like to be able to give away this away to our followers, subscribers and friends.
Steven: At the moment Sinbad, no that is not possible; and I'm not sure we would necessarily make that possible as well. Really the the purpose of the referral system was to and I know we've said this in the past but it was to take what's often done with content creators from a marketing standpoint with games over the past decades since influencers have really become a thing on YouTube and twitch and different social media platforms, was to take what's done usually behind closed doors and democratize it out to all the players; because an MMORPG community is so sticky it's probably the most interconnected of all the gaming genres out there; and you already are doing you know as players the work of talking to your friends, your guild mates and telling them about Ashes of Creation; and you know we felt that it was important to reward that activity with potentially playing for free; and you know we are sub based game and that is one of the methods that players can play for free is if they share the game with their friends. So that was that one.
Steven: Next question from Liette: Given that taverns are confirmed feature is things such as cooking going to be in the game? Can I become a brewer and open a brewery? Will alcohol have negative effects? So yes you can open different businesses. Taverns are one of them. You can offer food and ale through the tavern and that food and ale will grant certain benefits buffs you'll even be able to connect perhaps the NPC that you may have potentially in taverns to offer certain quests that are local if a tavern gets built within that area
Jeffrey: In terms of Brewer being its own class I'm not quite sure if we'll have enough drinks to support that. It's something we'll explore obviously but I'm not quite sure that we can come up with that many unique effects for to justify that being a thing but if you were to be a cook anyone to specialize in that you can do it.
Steven: Yeah the cook will have drinks but you're right the brewery won't be its own profession.
Steven: Okay question from Z: Will the camera angle be able to be changed and the camera zoomed out more, or will be stuck with a character on the left and the zoomed in right? No so Z what you're seeing camera wise in this arena is solely intended for the current action combat. Right that's a camera that's tied a third-person view over the shoulder for the reticle purposes to be able to grant specific zoom options and aim-down-sights with the weapons that are present.
Jeffrey: To make those weapons effective.
Steven: Exactly. The idea behind our hybrid system is going to obviously be customizable from a traditional higher up third-person view that is seen in MMORPGs; and then to have that customizable so that more action-oriented players might be able to come in closer to the character and have more feasibility there.
Steven: Question from Gigabear: I must know: Are we getting growth and shrinking potions from Alchemy? So part of the questions that we are trying to answer with these types of tests in an action arena is the question of how tab will relate to action when it comes to hit boxes on a character; and it's entirely possible that that answer may include the adjustment of such hit boxes throughout alchemical means perhaps, during runtime, or you know if a person wants to customize our character smaller or larger what that impacts from a stat perspective so that it blends well into the tab system. But for us to have that answer now really puts the cart ahead of the horse because our horse is the alpha testing period that we're finding these answers out. That's the whole purpose for us creating this action only arena testing phase: A whole new phase that we can really- a whole new world- a whole new phase that we can that we can actually get some clarity on these specific questions.
Jeffrey: And it's also like we totally think that those kinds of things are a lot of fun. We'll be putting stuff along those lines in as much as we possibly can as long as it doesn't negatively affect the gameplay. Because stuff like that is just crazy fun.
Steven: And here's- and you know just to clarify so you guys have a very good context understanding- I know we've said this before, but the holy grail is to find that blend of action and tab that accommodates the play style of the player to a degree. So you know you have traditionally in these MMORPGs, you have some of them leaning towards more action some of them leaning more towards tab and some of them trying to create these hybrids right; and the question the next question that kind of put me off on this was a question for Shaze that said: You recently confirmed headshot hitboxes currently exist in the game. As an MMORPG player I cannot help but be concerned that this steers the game towards a shooter. So the desire is to allow the players to customize their playstyle more predominantly towards action or tab right.
Jeffrey: So if you take a look at like kind of what a head shot represents: A head shot is basically a critical hit; and players who are relying on tab skills will have that critical hit chance baked into their character. They will have that fixed chance every time they use an ability or use a spell or swing a weapon; and then somebody who is kind of preferring you know action based, in order to get that crit, they're not gonna be relying necessarily on their stats they're gonna be relying on whether they get a headshot or not, or are able to hit that critical spot on that character. So that's kind of the direction that we're going in that way. Again, it's gonna be hybridized so there's gonna be a little bit of both happening in both places. but yeah that's the direction we're going.
Steven: Okay Decimus asks: How will the Battle Royale game-mode seen in alpha-1 be integrated to the full version of the game? We're not sure that we will have the Battle Royale integrated into the full version of the game. You have to understand the Battle Royale mode is intended as a testing atmosphere. This is what is allowing us to collect hands-on data from testers with regards to action combat. It allows us to test our server balance. It allows us to test our back-end systems. It allows us to test the the framerate with the environment when players are loading it. It allows us to test our level streaming. It allows us to test mount. It allows us to to iterate on art and cosmetic appearances. It allows us to implement our character creation screen. It allows us to test our castles. I mean there's there's so many things that get tested, sorry to go on, but to get tested in this mode it doesn't have to be integrated into the MMORPG.
Jeffrey: It's weird because that's it's you got a thing of it in terms of this isn't- this is the MMO, but it's not the MMO right. It's the MMO: We've cut a couple sections off of it and we're just focused on this part right now right; and then as we go into alpha phase 2 that will grow and kind of like start to encompass more things. It's more of a starting point right rather than an end point or a means in and of itself. It's a thing that is contained that allows us to test a bunch of stuff in a really focused manner, so think of it that way, less like it's its own thing.
Steven: Yes okay next question from Malgus: Hello intrepid I would like to first congratulate you on hitting the milestone of reaching a1. Thank you. It is really lovely combat. Thank You Malgus we appreciate that. My question is in regards to node leadership for economic nodes. So far we know it is a bidding war, so can you explain how would you stop a guild from banding together to send all our cash to certain individuals to take the leadership, so it can be a bit more fair to smaller gaming communities, or if the system is going to work a little bit differently? So that's a good question. Obviously part of how an economic node works is through the accumulation of resources, the trading of those goods and/or resources; and those resources can include gold money currency. Part of one of the ideas on how that might work is that your transactions through let's say that economic node's auction house may yield account bound currency as well as whatever currency you take; and the account bound currency might be used as the currency with which you can bid in the economic node or use for other types of systems. So for example, let's say there were certificates required in order to craft certain types of goods at that economic node that utilized this account bound currency. Your choices through that month would be to accumulate the account pound currency and either benefit from it by using it at those different types of transactions with merchants that benefit you, or saving and accumulating them to bid for the position at the economic node. The idea here is yes to kind of try to stop guilds from potentially banding together, or let's say someone who might subvert our security and RMT gold from you know sellers or whatever and claim control over. We have ideas in the works for that regard but that's going to be implemented during testing. We will see whether or not some worse systems work. Exactly what works and doesn't work. That is something that is on our mind however in making sure. Here's the other thing I- funny thing- I sit in discord and sometimes I read you know the conversations that people are having so okay all the time and you know I see things like you know how are they going to make this system work when we're just going to circumvent it by doing this or find the loophole by doing this or whatever that you know whatever the deal is people always try to break a system right; which is good.
Jeffrey: Systems are there to be broken.
Steven: Exactly. They're there to be broken. The cool thing about you know hiring everyone at Intrepid is one of the questions during an interview is always what's your favorite MMO right: What MMO do you play? And I will say among our talented devs here MMO passion is at the forefront of being a part of Intrepid Studios, which means that we have been there, we have done that. We are all players. We have tried to break systems. We have tried to find loopholes. We know that they will be found but we are going to be addressing them actively as they're found. We're going to be testing it a lot before they're released; and our design is thought of with the philosophy of how could I break this.
Jeffrey: Right and then it's also like to kind of counter that a little bit we also kind of don't mind if some of our systems get broken because that's where kind of really interesting stories happen. I think we can probably tell a bunch of them you know throughout. So we don't really approach it as like wanting to proscribe gameplay too specifically we're like you don't have any room to make choices as a player. We want those choices no matter. We want them to have like really interesting knock-on effects. So it's not always going to be just about like trying to prevent people from finding these loopholes, we might go hey there's this loop hole here, well let's see what happens when player take advantage of it right. Like so there's a little bit of that too in our process so don't worry if you're a little bit worried about you know us locking it down too hard.
Steven: Yes, agreed. Okay question so from Autumn Leaf: This has been on my mind for some time but are we going to get waist-length hair in character creation? Also how much will spells be able to interact with the environment? Finally will we have any regions that have a more permanent weather like for example a winter region that stays cold almost all the time with little impact from seasons? Those are the three questions.
Jeffrey: Waste length hair is a little bit tough especially once we have physics with hair. It gets difficult. There's a reason why you don't see it too often and that's the reason. Obviously we're always trying to push boundaries, so I can't say that we're not going to do it, but we can't say that it is not a super easy problem to solve especially when it comes to you know hair clipping through horses and hair clipping through your cloak and air clipping through all sorts of weird stuff. So it's not a hard no that's something we'll probably certainly explore but I don't know that we could promise it.
Steven: Yes what was the other question?
Jeffrey: There was a question about permanent seasons. So I forgot what I was going to say.
Steven: Oh permanent seasons: There will be regions of the map obviously that are more inclined towards a less temperate climate, let's say.
Jeffrey: We have north and south. You know, tropical regions, so yes you will see seasons be local to wherever you're at.
Steven: Yes. Okay, next question.
Jeffrey: And also magical seasons.
Steven: Magical seasons as well.
Jeffrey: Seasons where okay I'm in a tropical zone and suddenly it's snowing here and it's never snowed here before. What's going on?
Steven: Someone asked are we planning cinematic events in-game?
Jeffrey: Yes.
Steven: Yes. Yes yes yes. Okay Tact 0210 asks: With dungeons not being instanced, will it scale to how many players enter if more than eight go in at a time? Will there be positional- okay so that's first question is the dungeons will not scale based on player count inside. These are open-world dungeons so they'll be populated to facilitate multiple groups that are present within the dungeon and these are the non instance ones. There will still be instanced dungeons. Some instanced dungeons will be present and those will be created for you know whether it's a solo questline or a group questline.
Jeffrey: They're open and contested.
Steven: Correct yes.
Jeffrey: So half the problem won't just be solving the dungeon it will be solving other players too.
Steven: Right that is absolutely correct. Will there be positional scaling for doing damage ie about doing more damage if you're closer because of losing less kinetic energy or hitting a monster from behind doing damage and having less chance and being parried or resisted?
Jeffrey: Those are all things were playing with. The the drop off on damage based on distance is probably not going to be something we do. But we're reading notes. I didn't understand the last one.
Steven: Yes that is fine. Okay so next question: I know you said that you don't have plans to make flying a permanent feature, but do you have plans or thoughts on a legendary item that summons a flying mount that you can only use for a certain amount of time? So we do have we do have flying mounts that are granted to castle owners and mayors of metropolis and are legendary drops from legendary world bosses that are timed. Those eggs. So those are a thing.
Jeffrey: Yeah there's a reason why we're trying to stay away from flying just because it trivializes so much of the content; and again this is a sort of there's an economic underpinning to kind of everything we're doing with this game and sort of the drivers of gameplay, so we- flying- unless the game is designed around flying and kind of has space up there, it doesn't it ends up taking away from what's happening on the ground. We have all these artists spending all this time trying to create a beautiful world and once you introduce the idea of flying and that players all have flying mounts all of a sudden you lose out on all that. It's one of the reasons why in some games that we will not name where they've opened Pandora's box and they keep trying to put Pandora back into the box and it doesn't work.
Steven: Pandora doesn't want to go back there.
Jeffrey: We think we can have a very fun game without that being a focus and so that's where we're going with that's why we've made that decision/
Steven: Okay, let's see. We have another question from Mad Goat: What are the current plans for leveling characters? Will it be some questing, some grinding, grinding and questing, or something new? How are you planning to make leveling something new and interesting and not just a rush to max level where the game really starts?
Jeffrey: Oh I hate that.
Steven: Yep.
Jeffrey: So yeah the idea is that the journey shouldn't matter; and the journey should matter for everyone not just you know not just an individual right. So part of the way that we do it is through nodes. Nodes take a lot of work to level up; and to a certain extent some things are gonna be gated behind that. Also we are kind of event-driven and sort of task driven in terms of what you want to be doing. We want to make sure the people who are you know focused on crafting for instance aren't losing out because they're not out in the world grinding right; and we want people who really enjoy grinding to be able to do that too, but we don't want that to be the most efficient way to level up. So we're kind of spreading our experience around and making sure that we're rewarding people constantly for the things that they would be doing anyways. Not because you know there is one specific best path forward, because everybody's gonna be waiting for these nodes to level up. Because there's all these things to do in the world outside of that to progress, you know it's- we're not just making that adventure level the thing to focus on. So that's kind of how we're going with that.
Steven: Okay T-Elf asks: Will people who defeat you be able to loot your mule? Yes if they kill you they can loot a portion of the resources on your mule.
Jeffrey: Yeah and that includes like even if you're just running across the world on yourself without a mule right. The resources that you have on your character do have a chance to drop.
Steven: Correct, a portion yes will drop Vouneck: Question number one: Do you guys have an idea of where you are going to be locating the servers since that is definitely a very important thing for action combat games and tight hit boxes where headshots are a thing and being ping dependent? We'll have a multitude of servers located throughout to the various regions of the world; and those servers will be good connection points for- and will be driven by- I mean there's two types of servers I'm sorry: For the alpha-1 arena those will be driven by the party leader right; and wherever whatever region they have selected if they invite friends to their squad or whatever, they'll be able to play on that region. With regards to live launch when the server's go live, you'll be selecting a server to play on; and that will be your character's home; and that server you'll be aware of where that server is located usually by either a ping or a region that's notated on next to the server.
Jeffrey: Yeah we've done a lot of work on this. We've already scouted out. We've already got our plans, so we're pretty much ready to go on that.
Steven: And the great thing about alpha-1 is that a vast majority of that server architecture is in place on the backend, which is cool; and why we are very happy about that testing going forward. So let me check out some questions before we hop off on discord. Where are we? Do we have a do we have a discord channel for questions? I thought we did. Maybe we don't maybe the questions are just being asked in #ashes-discussion. I thought I saw questions: Here we go this is oh in #questions okay. That makes sense. There's a questions channel.
Jeffrey: Will there be long duration CC? Generally we're going to stay away from taking complete control away from characters, so CC will usually be interrupts and things along those natures. I don't think outside sort of like something like a snare or something that doesn't fully lock down your character that stuff will generally be fairly short and duration and likely have some kind of diminishing returns.
Steven: Like a mob boss asks: Will we be able to have multiple summons at once or will there be only one summon limited at a time? There will be some classes with the summon combination that allow you to have multiple summons.
Steven: Beyond asks: Will parkour movement be a thing in the game as climbing on walls and trees? It's a good question.
Jeffrey: So long long long time ago I was very excited about this idea, but there are problems with making everything climbable. It can create a lot of weird situations especially in a multiplayer game; and I'm not just talking about like you know like a tiggers falling from trees but like you know people being able to get to places that you never intended them to go. So I don't know yet. We're still kind of exploring like what we can do with that and how we can make it. Our animators are doing a really fantastic job though and they're giving us more and more tools that we can implement more and more cool things, so there'll probably be an element of parkour to it but exactly how much I don't know yet.
Steven: Okay next question is: So when we try to item dupe under their noses, Steven knows is Intrepid going to properly the hackers and exploiters or a slap on the wrist? So I will say this: When it comes to finding exploits and/or dupe related you know game breaking problems, if you come to Intrepid and tell us about them, not a problem. In fact you'll likely be rewarded. Almost certainly. But if you go on and attempt to exploit it then yes you'll be banned.
Steven: Okay question- Go ahead.
Jeffrey: Was just gonna say we're probably doing escalating you know series of punishments.
Steven: Straight ban [laughter].
Jeffrey: If you're injecting billions of dollars of dupe coin we're gonna probably gonna do a straight ban. If it's just a couple of items we're not gonna bring out the hammer just for that.
Steven: Little hammer.
Jeffrey: Little baby.
Steven: Small hammer can do a lot of damage.
Steven: Okay. Rossler asks: This game will have activities afk and will depend on them like BDO? I'm assuming he means like AFK leveling up something by hitting on whatever, or running your horse in a circle in ArcheAge.
Jeffrey: Oh no no no.
Steven: No.
Jeffrey: Again like we want this game to be played. If there are things that you can do to not play the game and still progress we've done something wrong.
Steven: Benji asks: Do the city leaders design the city layout? To a degree yes. Yes there are going to be a certain layout parameters that are dictated by the mayor in which what buildings go there.
Jeffrey: Some parts are determined by the area it's in. Some parts are determined by the type it is. Some parts are determined by the race it is; and then the rest of it is determined by the mayor.
Steven: Alkarim asks: While action combat is fun and can be entertaining have you guys looked at more strategic combat styles so it's not all twitch based action? Yes that is the tab side of the-
Jeffrey: We talk about the tab side like we like we have a strategic and tactical version of the game basically: There's the strategic is the tab targeter and the tactical is the action combat; and we kind of feel like both of them can work really well together; and so for people who who like a slower pace and who want to really be thoughtful about what they're doing that's probably where you want to spec your points.
Steven: Okay question from Sindill: When might we see some ship assets in-game? Oops I think I lost that question where'd it go? Oh there it is. Ship assets in-game, even if they are just static environments that we can fight in? So ship assets will probably be released around the time that alpha 2 or leading in to Alpha-2.
Jeffrey: We'll probably see preliminary pieces of that. I don't know that too much of ship combat is gonna make it in by phase 2.
Steven: Not phase 2, alpha 2 [cross-talk]. Alpha 2. Okay put it in the schedule!
Steven: Okay. Question from Cambiguous: Have you enjoyed the gifs? Cambiguous us I have enjoyed your gifs. I find them quite funny. Okay. Question from- let's do this one. We can do two more questions, so why don't you pick one and I'll pick one.
Jeffrey: I'm gonna pick one from the chat on Twitch: The Vek are astrologers. Does this make them better at naval navigation or maritime effects? Or a race design for a coastal sailing? So the Vek very likely- so we've talked about how races will contribute to the abilities that a character has. Navigation on the open seas might be something along those lines.
Steven: Yes very good okay I will choose the last one from Discord. Okay the last question- let's see if I can find a big one. Last question: Okay let's do this one. From dice: What are some examples of guild abilities that you could get instead of in increasing player cap? So talk a little bit about the guild systems and how they level and what types of abilities can become available. So first of all most of those abilities are going to be passive abilities that increase certain stats and/or values of your character's ability to perform in likely combat. So what happens is as you're leveling up the guild and you're getting these points to either allocate towards expanding the guilds member count or allocate towards adding certain passive abilities that your guild members can gain by being guild members. You're also going to see as you're leveling up the guild through different type of quest-based, participation-based, node-based, organization-based systems and ways that those quests hook into the world, you're also going to see perhaps some augment abilities at the upper tiers of the guild levels become unlocked for certain members that have a classification of officer or knight, will have access to those different types of augment abilities that might get unlocked should you go down the non expansive member lane; and the idea there is to offer these benefits to smaller groups. You know not everything has to be about the the quote-unquote Zerg or the mega guilds having a- and it makes sense having a fine-tuned honed-in a specific-
Jeffrey: Thing that your guild is good at.
Steven: Yes.
Jeffrey: And Stephen said likely combat but it's not always going to be combat. You could have an economic focus guild. You could have a trade oriented guild; and there's all sorts of things that you can kind of put together and kind of give your guild its own identity.
Steven: Yeah and another thing we were talking about I remember early on with regards to guilds is not just that but also having a reputation score; and being able to allocate points to increase that reputation perhaps with a specific node that you may have your guild hall in; and that reputation will interact with the way that NPCs interact with you. It might interact with the way that quests are given in that particular node or merchant services that are present.
Jeffrey: Merchant services or religious areas.
Steven: Right absolutely; and that can also be a focus that guilds will be able to allocate points towards that as opposed to the expansive or necessarily the skill-based stuff.
Jeffrey: All right guys.
Steven: That was a good question. Well hey we will be continuing the stress test I believe until around October 5th around there. Seeing how these bug fixes and different iterations go; and then around that time is when we will release the NDA for players to actually stream their gameplay sessions and you guys to kind of watch regularly these gameplay sessions.
Jeffrey: And watch our progress.
Steven: And watch our progress, absolutely. We're very excited here at the studios obviously to have something in the hands of the players that reflects Ashes of creation, the environment that it is in, the world that you will be playing in eventually and we feel it's obviously an important process to keep you guys informed and plugged into the development of this project. It is such a massive project. It really is.
Jeffrey: But we're getting there.
Steven: We are getting there, absolutely; and we love being able to come to you and show you that progress. So guys from the bottom of our hearts everybody here at Intrepid Studios appreciates your guys' dedication and commitment to watching this project proceed and the feedback that you give us. It means the world to us and we will see you next time. Take care everybody have an awesome weekend.
Jeffrey: Bye everybody.
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