Talk:2023-04-07 Community Q&A with Steven Sharif

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Intro

• 00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to a bonus stream in April. We have a really cool show today.

• 00:24

You know, for those of you who've been a part of the community for a while now, you know

• 00:28

that on a yearly basis we kind of interact with different content creators who have been

• 00:33

with the Ashes of Creation community for a while now. And I am joined by three of our

• 00:38

very amazing content creators and they also manage their own communities who are very

• 00:45

excited for Ashes of Creation and they've compiled a really cool list of questions that

• 00:49

I'm excited to answer with them today. I have not previewed these questions so I heard that

• 00:56

some of them might be fun and some of them might be a little spicy. We'll see. But I

• 01:03

would love to go around with each of you and have you guys introduce yourselves and your

• 01:08

channels and your community and just kind of give a little introduction. Why don't we

• 01:12

start with you, Simurg?

• 01:13

Oh yeah, so my name is Simurg and I am the host of the Ashes Pathfinders podcast and

• 01:22

we're on the community site AshesHQ.com. So that's pretty much where you can find us doing

• 01:27

our thing pretty regularly. We're pretty stoked about Ashes.

• 01:29

Yeah, I jump on and I listen to your guys' podcasts every now and then that you have

• 01:34

with some of the guests and also when you do the reviews of the live streams and stuff,

• 01:40

you have a very active community and I love to see the questions and the banter and the

• 01:43

kind of go back and forth and whatnot. We also have with us Mr. Richie S.H. How you

• 01:50

doing, buddy?

• 01:51

I'm doing good. How are you?

• 01:52

Very good. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your channel.

• 01:56

My channel is Richie S.H. over on YouTube. I cover all sorts of Ashes of Creation news.

• 02:02

I cover tweets, Discord chat, all sorts of things to get every bit of information we

• 02:09

possibly can.

• 02:11

Every little piece of morsel possible. And then we also have a regular, our amazing,

• 02:20

our one and only Chibi. How you doing?

• 02:23

I'm doing pretty well. Thank you so much. I hope you're doing well also.

• 02:27

I was getting sick last week during the live stream. Actually, I got sick that Thursday

• 02:35

and I am almost out the other side. This one was a doozy. It was definitely a rough one,

• 02:44

but I'm feeling much better today and I'm excited to be here with you. Tell us a little

• 02:47

bit about your channel and what you do with Ashes.

• 02:53

I am a co-host of The Golden Feather, which is a community-based interview and opinion

• 03:00

podcast where we usually get to know our guests and also get to know the community's opinions

• 03:06

on topics that the community is generally talking about. I have some of my questions

• 03:12

are in that style.

• 03:13

Very cool. Well, I love the opportunity to sit down with members of the community, especially

• 03:20

you guys who have been following Ashes for such a long time. Obviously, there are different

• 03:26

tiers of content creators who follow Ashes on and off, bring updates to their communities.

• 03:32

But you guys have been following for a very long time. You're very core central members

• 03:36

of the community and you represent, I think, a cross section of followers and fans who

• 03:41

have been relatively up to date with what the game is intending to be, the philosophy

• 03:47

of our designs, and been here from the very beginning. It's always good because when we

• 03:54

do live streams or other types of quote-unquote marketing events where I might do interviews

• 04:02

with content creators and whatnot, sometimes those are done within the context of the new

• 04:06

audience. Who might we be speaking to that has never heard of Ashes before? But today,

• 04:13

I think we're going to be a little bit different there. We're going to be speaking to more

• 04:17

of our core audience with the types of questions that you guys want to ask. Those of you who

• 04:23

have been following the project for a long time and have been through the journey with

• 04:27

us of what it's come to be to make this game. That's always exciting for me. I apologize,

• 04:33

I have a cough drop, so I don't cough too much. That might be why I'm sounding a little

• 04:41

bit strange. But with that being said, how have you guys been doing? How'd you guys enjoy

• 04:47

the last update?

• 04:50

I loved it. I thought it was great seeing the story arc starting to come together. It's

• 04:54

pretty cool.

• 04:55

Yeah, it was something that we haven't really shown before. Obviously, we've talked a lot

• 04:59

about since the beginning of time for Ashes back in 2017 about a changing world and whatnot.

• 05:05

But I don't think people really had the opportunity to have seen what systems are associated with

• 05:12

that. They got a little bit of a touch on it with the weathers and seasons. And now

• 05:15

they get to see that both from a story arc perspective, as well as how we intend to facilitate

• 05:21

those story arcs across the world. I thought it was cool. I love seeing the transition

• 05:27

to that zone over into the Blood is Due story arc. I thought it was super cool. And Carfin

• 05:34

is such a giant tower. One of my favorite things that I enjoyed in previous MMOs was

• 05:40

these tall vertical dungeons. In Lineage, they had a really cool one called Krumah Tower

• 05:46

that you got when you were level 40-ish and Tower of Insolence that you got when you were

• 05:51

a little bit endgame. And I really always enjoyed going through those towers and the

• 05:57

different rooms of that dungeon competing and fighting for where I could hunt or where

• 06:03

I might get PK'd or get trained a bunch of mobs on. I don't know if you guys ever had

• 06:08

that experience in your MMO play.

• 06:10

Yeah, definitely watched you have that a lot on the livestreams.

• 06:15

Yeah.

• 06:16

Yeah, it was super cool. Well, let us get to some of your questions. I am super excited

• 06:25

to just... And just for you guys who are tuning in, this is going to be a Q&A primarily. We're

• 06:30

going to just shoot the poop, so to speak, and talk a little bit about Ashes and some

• 06:39

of the questions that the communities have expressed to these guys. So what do you guys

• 06:43

got for me?

• 06:46

My first question, and as I mentioned, this is going to reflect our TGF Tavern podcast

• 06:52

theme. So my first question is a little bit of an icebreaker. What are the most challenging

• 06:58

and most enjoyable things you have found about running the studio? With these in mind, what

• 07:03

is your biggest lesson learned throughout the process?

• 07:06

What have been the most challenging and exciting things I've experienced in running the studio?

• 07:12

Well, that is a big question. For those of you who don't know my history, I started Intrepid

• 07:19

with my husband, John, back in 2016, really. It was when we hired our first employees,

• 07:29

I think it was John Arilano and Keith Kovac. It was December of 2015. And it really came

Most Challenging and Enjoyable Parts of the Journey

• 07:42

from a point of me as a player. I was kind of upset with the state of MMOs, and I've

• 07:52

been a huge MMO fan for a very long time. I played a lot of MMOs. And we had an opportunity

• 07:59

with some of the talent here in San Diego from formerly Sony Online Entertainment and

• 08:05

some great MMO franchises that were built to attract an audience of developers who were

• 08:13

going to be interested in building the next best MMO possible. And I didn't know much

• 08:20

about development at the time. I knew a lot about designs and systems because I had run

• 08:26

my own campaigns in D&D and Pathfinder. And that's what Ashes of Creation is predicated

• 08:31

on with what it's built off of, is off of that campaign and Pathfinder. And so I had

• 08:38

a very kind of understanding design-wise of these systems that I've experienced and were

• 08:43

inspired from in other MMOs that I have played in. And I thought, how cool it would be to

• 08:49

integrate those systems into a comprehensive and cohesive design theory around risk versus

• 08:54

reward and not everybody's a winner and a little bit more of a throwback to more old

• 09:00

school design feel and whatnot. So for me, starting in studio was a firehose of information,

• 09:09

of learning. The first couple of years just sitting very closely with each of my lead

• 09:16

developers and digesting as much as possible from their experiences in previous companies

• 09:23

and previous projects. And that was a very difficult task to learn as much as I did in

• 09:31

such a short period of time and still to continue learning that. What I would say the most fun

• 09:37

aspect of having led an MMO studio now for the last over six years has been to watch

• 09:46

the team grow and change. It's a very different feeling when you're a group of half-done

• 09:53

to a dozen people, growing to a couple dozen people, growing to dozens of people, growing

• 10:00

to 150 plus people. That experience, these different thresholds of studio size while

• 10:11

maintaining the culture of what Intrepid is, which is a place for gamers to build games

• 10:17

that they love, that has been a really rewarding experience to see the connections, to see

• 10:25

the friendships formed, to see the bonds created, to see the camaraderie, the collective desire

• 10:32

and motivation to create something that stands the test of time, that makes your audience

• 10:37

proud, that makes you yourself want to play the game. That is something that is a sight

• 10:43

to behold. The second most exciting thing I think for me has always been the opportunity

• 10:49

to interface and talk to other gamers, people who are excited. I get a taste of this on

• 10:56

a Reddit, I get a taste of this on the forums or through different YouTube channels and

• 11:00

Twitter and Discord. A large portion of my initial environment and how I talked to players

• 11:06

was through Discord. But I think that the pinnacle of that experience was going to PAXs

• 11:13

and having an opportunity to sit down and hear directly from the player what's inspirational

• 11:20

about Ashes, what is the core philosophy that speaks to you as a gamer. Each person is different

• 11:26

what speaks to them, because we're all eclectic and have our own backgrounds and pasts and

• 11:30

experiences that we want to relive and the nostalgia that we want to experience again.

• 11:38

Just kind of finding what that common ground is between us as gamers. That was fun to experience

• 11:46

and see people with just literal excitement and opportunity to kind of chat with them,

• 11:52

play magic with them, play board games and hang out after the events. That was a super

• 11:57

fun thing for me. What has been the most challenging? Obviously the most challenging thing for me

• 12:04

was learning everything I needed to learn in a very short period of time and then continuing

• 12:08

to learn and evolve from there. If I were to give another answer on the challenging

• 12:12

aspect from a development perspective, it's integrating, I feel, this transparent process

• 12:20

with the creative and development side of a project. Typically what people don't see

• 12:28

what it takes to build these types of games. It's ugly, it's hard, it's iterative, it takes

• 12:37

so much imagination to look at what you're seeing in a functional setting and imagine

• 12:43

it in a testable and then eventually polished and shippable setting. That is a logical leap

• 12:51

of creativity that it takes to get from this has no VFX, this has no sound design, this

• 12:56

has no polished animation, this has nothing. I'm not talking about what you guys see because

• 13:00

we take that up to close to a shippable quality. But when you see it in a very bare bones setting,

• 13:13

it can be difficult. It can be challenging to imagine it in its next step of iteration

• 13:19

and work. And then have to make decisions based off of that. It's a challenging thing

• 13:29

to do but very rewarding as well. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer to your question.

• 13:35

All right. My first question is, which zones can we expect to see in Alpha 2 and how many

Zones In Alpha 2

• 13:43

of them are in a comparable state to the Riverlands and how far along in development they are?

• 13:49

That's a big question. We have a lot of zones that are planned for Alpha 2. Not all of them

• 13:55

will be online by the time Alpha 2 launches but they will be continuously integrated and

• 14:04

launched as part of Alpha 2 continuing forward. The big areas obviously are the Riverlands,

• 14:12

the Badlands, the San Squall Desert, the tropics, the forest areas, some of the tabletop mountains

• 14:22

and the tundra and ice areas. And then we want to obviously have the loops around our

• 14:31

naval zones partly represented. I apologize for coughing guys. Or as some called our last

• 14:39

week's preview, the Tower of Coffin. I know that was good. But yeah, so there's a lot

• 14:47

of areas that are planned. When we talk about level of completion, what goes into really

• 14:52

making a particular zone? Obviously, there's the terrain, there's the foliage, there's

• 14:59

setting up small points of interest, medium points of interest, large points of interest.

• 15:04

There's connecting the quest hubs into those points of interest. They're setting up the

• 15:07

nodes within those localities. There's the overland population, the spawner work that

• 15:11

needs to be set up, narrative and storylines and how they connect outside of that particular

• 15:17

zone. There's the resource tables and materials. There's a lot that really goes into that.

• 15:25

As we accomplish setting up each of these zones incrementally, different parts of the

• 15:32

team come and touch the zones at different points in the pipeline. So first, environment

• 15:38

kind of gets in there and they set up the terrain and kind of the block out for all

• 15:42

of the level design across that particular zone in conjunction with the level design

• 15:47

team who's been and Jason and Jeremy kind of work with them on that front. And then

• 15:54

once those kind of areas are set up and the POIs get blocked out, that's when narrative

• 16:00

teams start assigning quest locations, quest markers and setting those up while nodes is

• 16:07

kind of setting up the base node areas as well. So it depends on the zone, where it's

• 16:15

at from a level of completion standpoint and who's kind of touched it. It would be a long

• 16:20

list to kind of run down and go through each of those. But I would say generally when we

• 16:25

talk about in preparation for Alpha 2, we bring the zones that are intended to launch

• 16:30

with somewhere between like a 60 to 70% completion perspective before it's ready for an Alpha

• 16:36

2. And then that's where you would expect players to kind of participate in those zones

• 16:40

during Alpha 2.

• 16:41

Cool. So this one's going to be related to lore. Could you elaborate on how the soul

Souls and Their Connection to Realms, Planes, and Avatars

• 16:48

as a conduit may tie into other realms or planes? Again, assuming those are actually

• 16:54

different things or possibly even the avatars of the gods, which you've previously mentioned.

• 16:58

Oh, I need to be careful on this one. And I don't know how much I've gone into this

• 17:06

in the past and how much is revealing maybe too much right now. But okay. So to understand

• 17:17

what the mortal coil is, what we call the mortal coil, there is some base metaphysical

• 17:26

understanding that's required of kind of the universe of Ashes of Creation or quote unquote

• 17:33

universes, I suppose. And at the crux of each is this concept of the flow of essence, the

• 17:41

river of essence we might call it. And essence is really all that can come to be comes from

• 17:48

in some way, shape or form the essence. And in the original kind of Ashes of Creation

• 17:56

Pathfinder campaign that I had built long ago, I'll just kind of talk a little bit to

• 18:01

that and let you guys discover what may have changed in Ashes of Creation. But in that

• 18:07

sense there was very much this concept of planar locations or different planes that

• 18:13

existed within the universe. Some things existed on the material plane, some things existed

• 18:19

on the ethereal plane, on the celestial plane. There are a number of planes that kind of

• 18:24

exist. And essence flows like a river through each of the planes. And the higher up you

• 18:32

go in these planes, the closer to the source of the essence you really are. And that's

• 18:38

where you can see stronger manifestations of the magical aspects of the essence. Now,

• 18:47

I'm sorry, let me make sure I'm touching on the right point of the question. Can you re-ask

• 18:54

the question just one more time for me?

• 18:55

Sure.

• 18:56

Oh, I see it actually on the screen. Okay, sorry. No, elaborate more of how the soul,

• 19:00

okay, got it. So when the divine races were created by the pantheon of gods, they were

• 19:10

created for a particular purpose. And the purpose they were created for was to observe

• 19:16

how these mortal beings would interface with a substance like the essence. And obviously

• 19:24

one of the great differentiators between mortal divine races and the gods is that aspect of

• 19:31

mortality. And one of the ways that the divine races were created in order to interact with

• 19:36

the essence was through the use of a mortal coil. And that mortal coil was malleable.

• 19:42

Your soul was malleable. It could change to adopt a greater connection with the essence

• 19:52

around one particular school of magic perhaps or one type of magic that you might use essence

• 19:57

for. And the more you experienced that, the more adept you became with utilizing that

• 20:04

magic. And that's because your coil would start to mold itself to best facilitate that

• 20:10

flow of essence, whatever school of magic you were manipulating with it, right? And

• 20:17

so in that sense, when you have the story of the original ancients, the predecessor

• 20:23

race to the divine races, their coil began to warp and change to best facilitate essence

• 20:32

through the use of corruption and corrupt magic because it was in their story, in their

• 20:37

history that they learned the most powerful use or at least what they believed was the

• 20:42

most powerful use of essence was through corrupt magic. And that's what allured them towards

• 20:48

it. So to give you better context about why that conduit is so important is as your base

• 20:56

character, as your core archetype continually learns and manifests things in the world of

• 21:02

era through the use of the essence, it will continue to shape and change its conduit towards

• 21:08

that purpose. Now, how does the soul act as a conduit to the other races, to the other

• 21:17

realms? Remember, that essence is like a river that flows through the plains. And when it

• 21:22

touches mortal coils that use it in a certain way, it has reverberations throughout the

• 21:28

river that is felt across the plains. And that's how important the divine races are

• 21:34

when it comes to the war over their soul, so to speak, is what impact it has across

• 21:40

the universe, so to speak. So hopefully that answers some of your questions. And then I

• 21:44

see since the possible avatars of the gods, which have previously been mentioned. We've

• 21:49

talked a little bit about them. I don't want to give them away too much because they are

• 21:54

core characters within some of the storylines. But obviously, you know, the Phoenix is an

• 21:59

avatar. And so that kind of gives you an example of the types of mythos and mythological creatures

• 22:08

that we lean into to kind of represent the avatars of the gods.

• 22:15

All right. My next question is, will the Alpha 2 map include any portion of the eastern continent?

Will Alpha 2 Include Part of the Eastern Continent?

• 22:24

Hmm, that's eventually it will. Yes. At launch, it might not. It depends. It depends on how

• 22:31

much progress we make towards that end. It is not required for us to begin testing. Let's

• 22:37

just say that. And so if it makes it by the time we want to launch Alpha 2, then we will

• 22:42

include it. Otherwise, it will be released at a later time during the Alpha 2 test.

• 22:48

All right. Did the Underrealm size increase when you expanded the size of the world map,

Underrealm Size

• 22:54

or is it still expected to be about 100 square kilometers?

• 22:58

It didn't increase too much. You know, there is going to be some level of additional scope

• 23:05

that's necessary on the Underrealm. Again, to reiterate the intent of the Underrealm,

• 23:10

in areas where you have overland transit and movement between zones, the Underrealm is

• 23:18

meant to provide an alternate path so that you are not creating these kind of congested

• 23:24

environments where it is just too easy to gank, you know, someone who's moving material

• 23:31

goods like through a caravan in a particular choke point. It's kind of offering alternative

• 23:38

paths that can exist for players to utilize as necessary. And so in that sense, even though

• 23:45

the size of the map grew, those choke points remained relatively similar, right? They're

• 23:50

designed for a particular player count as a conjunction between different zones. And

• 23:56

so the Underrealm, in order to facilitate that alternate path idea, did not have to

• 24:03

increase in size too much.

• 24:08

Cool. So the next question for the Pathfinders is that you've mentioned milestones a lot.

Elaboration of Milestones

• 24:15

Is there any chance you could elaborate on what these different milestones or goalposts

• 24:20

are in order to provide some added transparency without promising dates?

• 24:24

Elaborate on these different milestones or goalposts. Well, when, I mean, there's a lot

• 24:33

that gets done in a particular milestone. To give you kind of understanding from our

• 24:40

internal kind of production schedule perspective, milestones consist of multiple sprints worth

• 24:48

of work, right? And these sprints are kind of small increments of time that a particular

• 24:56

development team might work towards a goal, completing a feature or content pass that's

• 25:04

necessary in a particular area. And so when we set up our milestones and we are kind of

• 25:11

identifying what those particular milestone goals are, they span across the entirety of

• 25:16

development from platform and engineering to design and concept to combat iteration

• 25:24

and counter design through model creation and VFX and our tools adjustments and iteration

• 25:34

and environment buildouts and everything that goes into making a game, everyone is kind

• 25:39

of involved in this concentrated and cooperative effort to achieve a particular milestone.

• 25:47

Now, we talk about these milestones every month that we do a live stream. You see the

• 25:54

fruit of these milestones, whether it be in the assets that get created that we talk about

• 26:00

or a particular feature that we want to show off its development as it's been kind of fleshed

• 26:06

out further. So each month you guys in the community get insight into what was a part

• 26:13

of this particular milestone. And when we talk about upcoming presentations and upcoming

• 26:19

live streams, you're getting insight, I think, into what's part of our internal scope. Now,

• 26:26

obviously we don't share our internal milestones because they're very fluid and subject to

• 26:32

change. We're an agile development team, which means that between sprints, it becomes necessary

• 26:39

for us to make pivots, for us to make priority changes as it exists within our backlog. And

• 26:47

a lot of that is driven by desired testing we need to get done internally or when we

• 26:55

discover undiscovered work or we develop tech debt. Like there are reasons why those milestones

• 27:02

change the excuse me, the scope and or objectives of a particular milestone might change from

• 27:08

sprint to sprint ever so slightly. But the goals are always what we are aiming to achieve

• 27:15

and stay consistent. So we don't share those because it is a very agile, fluid environment

• 27:21

where particular objectives of a milestone might be relatively fluid.

Bodies of Water in the Underrealm

• 27:30

And going back to the under realm, will there be larger bodies of water like oceans, lakes

• 27:37

or rivers in the under realm? And if so, will we be able to use boats or ships to navigate

• 27:41

them? There will absolutely be under realm lakes

• 27:46

and rivers. Those will be locations and very important ones for unique material goods like

• 27:54

certain types of fish that players will be able to go down and fish with. But there will

• 27:59

not be the use of boats and vehicles within the water, water vehicles of the under realm,

• 28:06

at least not for launch.

• 28:08

All right. If everything goes relatively smoothly, how long are you anticipating Alpha 2 to run

Length of Alpha 2 and Avoiding Burnout

• 28:17

for? And if it goes longer than anticipated, how do you continue to keep players and the

• 28:22

viewers interested for that long without feeling the burnout of seeing all the content?

• 28:26

Well, Alpha 2 will not be content complete. That's the first thing. The other thing is,

• 28:34

you know, when talking about kind of burnout, I think that's something that we adapt to

• 28:38

during the testing period. We kind of observe how players are buying on to this particular

• 28:45

testing that's available. If we need to consolidate that testing, if we need to wipe that testing.

• 28:50

We talk about the length of Alpha 2. Alpha 2 is intended to exist up until launch. There's

• 28:54

going to be different testing periods that we will be releasing either new content locations

• 29:01

or zones or systems that we want to have players kind of focus in on. In those situations,

• 29:08

if we're having, you know, participation drought because of the length of Alpha 2, we can set

• 29:15

them up in a more focused setting. We can even incentivize that. We can offer unique

• 29:21

testing to potentially new testers as well. You know, it's important to note that Alpha

• 29:31

2 and our Alphas are not what traditional Alphas have been that many players have experienced,

• 29:38

which are usually completed games that are being ported over or moved over into a new

• 29:45

region for publishing purposes. And they're selling access to Alpha as a higher price

• 29:53

point of exclusion, you know, exclusivity in order to start off that product launch

• 29:59

with a bang in the new territory. That's what traditionally players in Western audiences

• 30:05

are accustomed to are these Eastern ported over MMOs and their quote unquote Alphas,

• 30:11

which are really just stress tests environments for a completed game in a server. Ours are

• 30:16

very much traditional Alphas. And what that means is the game is not complete. The game

• 30:23

is in a very core functionality perspective. Alpha 2 will be a bit more than that obviously

• 30:31

than Alpha 1 was. Those of you who participated in Alpha 1 saw just the basics and core functionality

• 30:36

of the game, you know, seeing nodes get stood up, seeing nodes collect experience and threshold

• 30:41

and having some service buildings you could build and character progression and skills

• 30:44

and abilities and dungeons and, you know, bosses and monsters and some basic crafting

• 30:50

and questing like that was Alpha 1. Now that was a large environment. It was 64 plus square

• 30:55

kilometers I think of space. But Alpha 2 is a much more fleshed out version of what Ashes

• 31:02

of Creation is. And so in that sense, it's still important to keep in mind it is not

• 31:08

a finished product and there's still a lot of stuff to be done. But this is an opportunity

• 31:12

for us again to touch point with the community and say, okay, on these particular systems,

• 31:17

on these particular content passes, on these particular gameplay features and loops like

• 31:24

combat and whatnot, how do you want to see changes? And then we validate what those change

• 31:29

desires are against what our intended list of deliverables already are, ensure that there's

• 31:34

one-to-one parallelism there. And then if there are things that we didn't see, we evaluate

• 31:38

based off of feedback from players, if we should incorporate them or iterate upon the

• 31:43

existing designs. Hopefully that answered your question.

• 31:49

All right. So this one's about the cosmetic store in Freeholds. When are we going to get

When Will We Know About Cosmetics and Freeholds?

• 31:56

answers on the point regarding what the cosmetic skins correlate to on Freeholds as it's been

• 32:03

quite some time now since people have been waiting for an answer on that?

• 32:07

Yeah. So the majority of cosmetic Freehold skins, the vast majority of them are used

• 32:14

for the home. And to give you an example, kind of an idea of how the Freehold is partitioned,

• 32:23

Freehold serves kind of three main purposes. The first and foremost is as a location for

• 32:28

your home. And so because of that, a portion of the Freehold is dedicated to a home building.

• 32:36

And you cannot fill that space with workshops and or processing stations other than to place

• 32:44

a home there. The home offers a lot of things and the reasons why it's a core element of

• 32:49

the Freeholds is because of storage capability, excuse me, storage capability, furniture allotment

• 32:59

and placement. Furniture interacts very closely with processing as well as the crop rotations

• 33:08

that exist around the particular housing building. The other portion of the Freehold is dedicated

• 33:18

to workshops and these processing stations essentially. And processing stations are of

• 33:24

course a necessary component of taking gatherables into usable crafted goods essentially to fulfill

• 33:31

what recipes require in order to make items. And so the majority of cosmetics that are

• 33:40

out there from our pre-order packages are dedicated to that Freehold housing slot. Now

• 33:46

some are used for the workstations and it is the intent that our designs facilitate

• 33:54

multiple applicable cosmetics skins to those workstations as well as to the house. So you'll

• 34:01

see Freeholds that have the house applied cosmetic and some with the workstations applied.

• 34:08

Why is it taking so long for interpretive clarification? So the unique thing about the

• 34:14

Freehold approach and design is that there's a lot of testing that needs to be done around

• 34:20

that. And in Alpha 2 we will have our Freeholds available to test. And while we have the designs

• 34:30

in place for how processing interacts for gathering and how processing feeds the crafting

• 34:38

stations, some of that stuff might change. The allotment of buildings that can be placed

• 34:43

on the Freehold, the way that the buildings get placed on the Freehold, whether or not

• 34:46

we even scrapped the idea of dedicating a portion of the Freehold towards the house.

• 34:51

And because of that, because of the design limbo that's still pending our testing environment

• 34:56

in Alpha 2, we've not wanted to kind of give definitive definition around how those cosmetics

• 35:06

will be applied to the Freehold buildings in the event that that might change based

• 35:10

on iteration. But to give you perspective there, it's mainly going to be focused around

• 35:17

the Freehold house and then also having the ability to apply the skins to some of the

• 35:22

workstations as well. There is going to be a limited allotment of how many workstations

• 35:26

you can have stood up at any given time. There's a limited allotment of licenses that can be

• 35:30

applied to a Freehold in order to make some of those stations reach level two, tier two

• 35:34

and tier three. What those particularly are, we have some designs for them now, but that

• 35:40

most likely will not survive testing and will need to be changed and adapted and iterated

• 35:45

upon based off what the testing results provide. One other thing is that we don't really market

• 35:54

our pre-order packages. We don't market our cosmetics. We don't spend any marketing dollars

• 35:58

towards that end. And I want to reiterate something that I've always said in the past

• 36:04

and will continue to say going forward. It is not necessary to pre-order Ashes of Creation.

• 36:12

We do non-NDA testing periods. This is an opportunity where all of the community gets

• 36:18

to see what some of the testers are experiencing in Alpha 1 and in Alpha 2. And to be perfectly

• 36:24

honest, our testing environments are not catered or made for the enjoyment of players. It is

• 36:29

not a game that you are purchasing when you make a pre-order into Alpha and Beta for Ashes

• 36:34

of Creation. You are actually committing yourself to dedicating a portion of your time in testing

• 36:41

specific loops that might not be fun in order to accurately provide us the team with information

• 36:48

from a player invested perspective. And so in that sense, it is perfectly acceptable

• 36:55

and desired that players who are cautious or questioning whether or not this is the

• 37:00

game for them, some of the designs might speak to them or not, sit back and wait. You have

• 37:04

an opportunity to watch development, to continue to opine and give your thoughts and feelings

• 37:09

on something. And if the monetization structure of selling cosmetics is not your cup of tea,

• 37:14

then by all means, do not participate that. There are plenty of games that are out there

• 37:18

that do things differently. We're very upfront about how we want to operate with regards

• 37:23

to no pay to win, no pay to convenience. Our cosmetics are available if players want to

• 37:30

participate. They like collecting those things, that's fine. And they are part of building

• 37:34

the world. These cosmetics get used as part of NPCs, they get used as part of unique buildings

• 37:39

around different points of interest. They're already in line of production in order to

• 37:44

build the world of Ashes. They're just also available as part of the cosmetic purchases

• 37:50

as well. So hopefully that answers your question.

How Will World Events Affect Freeholds?

• 37:56

I'm gonna actually go ahead and elaborate on the freehold. What happens if you have

• 38:00

a freehold and a world event happens in the area? We know that some events can affect

• 38:05

buildings, can it also affect your freehold?

• 38:08

No. So the way that events work is there's a certain number of world conditions that

• 38:18

can serve as predicates for whether or not an event, the event manager and the event

• 38:23

system which Clayton has done a great amount of work on, on whether or not these predicates

• 38:28

satisfy the requirements in order to initiate an event. And those events have objectives.

• 38:36

Some of those objectives might be centralized at points of interest, some of the objectives

• 38:41

might be centralized at a particular node, some of those events might be predicated on

• 38:47

a particular objective that just randomly spawns out in the world in order to kind of

• 38:51

create player activity and engagement and soft friction between players, right? The

• 38:59

events do not target personal belongings, which means that your freehold is essentially

• 39:05

a personal belonging, right? It is a certificate, a deed in which you own, in which you have

• 39:11

constructed the necessary requirements in order to stand up any particular building on that

• 39:17

freehold. So in that sense, we don't want to create an event that targets you. We want

• 39:23

to create events that target, engage and incentivize your community. And there are a lot of different

• 39:30

communities in the aspect of Ashes of Creation. Remember, we're a non-faction based game,

• 39:35

which means we have to create a lot of micro communities. We have to create a lot of quote

• 39:39

unquote pseudo factions. And the reason we create those pseudo factions and they're opt

• 39:44

in like I choose which node I'm a part of, I choose what social organization I'm a part

• 39:48

of, I choose which religion I'm a part of, I choose which dungeon I choose to go and

• 39:52

you know, to XP at. The reason why we allow that amount of player agency is because we

• 40:01

create complimentary systems that incentivize soft friction between those communities, right?

• 40:07

And events is one of those systems that helps to facilitate the soft friction between communities.

• 40:13

So we don't want to focus them on an individual player. We want to focus them on the micro

• 40:16

communities or the pseudo factions that that player has chosen to be a part of.

• 40:07

Right. How do you go about designing some of the more old school systems such as XP debt, minimal

How Do You Go About Designing Old School Systems In a Modern MMO?

• 40:30

fast travel and open world rating that have really gone away for the most part in modern

• 40:35

MMOs? And how do you design them to be accepted again by a new generation of gamers? And what

• 40:55

made you decide to bring these back for ashes to begin with?

• 40:58

into that question. How do you design some of the more old school systems? Well, when looking

• 41:10

at the reasoning behind why some of those old systems existed, a lot of it was centralized

• 41:16

around the idea of risk versus reward. I mean, let's take a look at the three that you name,

• 41:24

XP debt, minimal fast travel and open world rating. Experience debt is a cost of failure. Experience

• 41:47

debt is the cost I pay for the bad choice. Right. And if you and I think to skip well, let me just

• 42:11

go through the two minimum fast travel. My location matters. And the time it travels

• 42:14

matters too. And each of these minimum fast travel Patriots narrowed down and left me only

• 42:20

with a minimum and a whole load of

• 42:28

greater value for every hospital and every railway station in the world. And you know,

• 42:39

one of the core fundamental philosophies as to how you design some of the more

• 42:44

old-school systems. To answer the second part of the question, we've moved away

• 42:49

from that modern MMOs. Modern MMOs have had a difficult time. Modern MMOs have

• 42:56

had a difficult time because of really three main probably issues. The first and

• 43:04

foremost is that the existing primary franchises of MMOs today, the big ones

• 43:13

out there, the WoWs and the Final Fantasies and the Guild Wars and the PDOs,

• 43:18

they've had a lot of time to create a social gravity well, which means that

• 43:26

MMOs are very social environments. That's what MMOs do best. From a business

• 43:33

perspective, that's why MMOs have long lifetime value for customers because of

• 43:38

the retention ability for that particular MMO to keep a customer

• 43:42

returning. And it's because of these social environments, the guild structures,

• 43:47

the cooperative questing environments, content completion that incentivizes

• 43:52

people to work with one another to create friends, online friendships and

• 43:56

environments. That is not the typical genre. That is not the

• 44:02

FIFA sporting genre. That's not the first person shooter genre as much.

• 44:09

It is not the... You can jump into those session-based games as a

• 44:12

solo player real easy and just kind of dip out when you're done and see your

• 44:16

individual performance. From a MMO perspective, those existing

• 44:22

franchises have a strong social gravity well. And so games when they launched to

• 44:28

compete with those existing franchises, they have wanted to remove friction.

• 44:38

Their approach philosophically to game design theory has been every time a

• 44:44

player experiences friction, that is an opportunity for us to lose the player.

• 44:50

And that can be a scary thought. Not that we place the emphasis or the

• 44:55

reasoning behind why should a player emphasize the reward of success because

• 45:02

the taste of defeat can be bitter. And so that creates an investment for the

• 45:08

player that's more long-term. But some of the perspective of the new modern MMOs

• 45:12

that have launched is we need to make our money back and we need to retain the

• 45:16

user for as long as possible. Let's reduce the friction for that player and

• 45:20

the opportunity for them to disassociate with the game at the taste of failure.

• 45:25

And so that's been a lot of the reasoning behind why modern MMOs go more towards

• 45:30

the realm of everyone's a winner. You get a trophy and you get a trophy.

• 45:34

Doesn't this trophy feel great? Big hoopla and rewards and now the screen is

• 45:39

shaking and shining and you've killed a trash monster. Now the whole world is

• 45:44

jumping up in joy for you. That is how I feel every time I jump into a new MMO.

• 45:50

And to be honest, it sucks ass. Excuse me. It sucks, right? It is a bad experience.

• 45:58

Oh my gosh, should we have said ourselves to... Margaret's going to kill me.

• 46:04

Okay, regardless, it is a trash experience. It does not feel good to be a winner

• 46:09

every time no matter what you do. That sucks. It feels good to lose sometimes.

• 46:18

It is the duality of that experience that makes the feel good moments actually feel

• 46:23

good. So, some more of those. So anyways, that's a little bit of a throwback to why

• 46:33

that sometimes I get a little bit animated. I apologize if there's anybody

• 46:45

who's not accustomed to that language. But regardless, that is one of the reasons

• 46:50

why I think modern MMOs moved away. A couple other reasons, of course, why is

• 46:55

there's a lot of content that those older MMOs had had the opportunity to kind of

• 46:59

release over the cadence of 10 years of like regular drops for new content.

• 47:04

That is another reason. I think it's important that a new generation of MMO

• 47:13

gamers have not had the opportunity to experience it before. Look, there is a

• 47:20

wall of willingness to try a game based on the graphics. I'm just going to say it

• 47:26

out loud. Graphics don't make a game. However, graphics can help attract an

• 47:33

audience. And for younger new players who have not seen, and I think this is a

• 47:40

standard third reason of why older MMOs don't see a lot of new player acquisition

• 47:45

from younger generations jumping in is because their graphics just aren't up to

• 47:51

par with some of the other games that are now being made in genres that it's

• 47:54

much easier and faster to make new games in. Okay? An MMO lifespan to develop a

• 48:00

product is a long time. And not a lot of studios are willing to commit to that

• 48:06

amount of time or that money, but the reward can be oh so sweet for those

• 48:11

studios. And I'm glad we're seeing now in today's age a little bit more of an

• 48:15

embrace for new MMORPG development. Thank goodness we get some new life there.

• 48:20

I think that there is going to be a golden opportunity for us as developers

• 48:27

to define what the new golden cohort of MMO players are. And I'm going to tell

• 48:33

you we have not seen that largest cohort yet. We have seen the golden cohort

• 48:38

continue to age. You know now we're in our mid 30s to near 40s some of us, right?

• 48:45

I think we're the golden cohort of that MMORPG genre. And I think that there is

• 48:51

going to be an opportunity for an entirely new generation over the course

• 48:56

of these next five years or so with some of the new projects that are on the

• 49:00

horizon, Ashes of Creation, for us to come along and say hey you didn't know

• 49:06

what a WoW launch looked like. You didn't know what a Final Fantasy launch looked

• 49:10

like. You didn't know what other these giant you know franchises that their big

• 49:15

launch felt like. And it was a really cool and interesting time to be at the

• 49:19

ground floor opportunity of a new MMORPG. Especially one with next generation

• 49:25

graphics and some intense player agency driven systems. I think that's super cool.

• 49:29

And I think that's going to be something that's going to be a sight to behold.

• 49:33

Apologize for the language.

• 49:36

Margaret we got to set the setting to whatever mature. Yeah I only laughed

• 49:45

because it resonated Steven. But moving on. For this one, wanted to address some

What is the Current Scope for the Combat System?

• 49:51

concerns around combat becoming more action focused or builder spender. You

• 49:56

know maybe less of a hybrid combat system. What's the current scope for the

• 50:00

combat system that and has intrepid deviated away from its original goals

• 50:05

with it? If so how? I wouldn't say that we've deviated. I would say that we've

• 50:13

iterated. I would say that okay so to reiterate what the current scope for our

• 50:22

combat system is. Is a hybrid between tab and action. And what that means is at its

• 50:28

essence what is the difference between tab and action? Action contains a lot of

• 50:35

player driven skill shots right? These are me reacting to the situation I'm

• 50:44

seeing. They're landing an aimed shot or timing and predictive behavior. It's a

• 50:53

lot of fluidity right? And mobility that's associated there. Obviously one of

• 51:00

the staple you know components of action combat is a reticle to differentiate

• 51:06

between the camera modes of course. Some of us have played tab targeted games

• 51:12

that emphasize those elements as well through templated AoEs. Templated

• 51:20

targeted AoEs right? Line attacks you know those those types of abilities

• 51:30

exist in tab target games as well. What we're trying to do with Ashes of

• 51:36

Creation is create a system that blends the two worlds together to a degree. And

• 51:42

offers players the opportunity to spec into more heavily skill oriented

• 51:47

abilities or tab targeted. Have that duality that's represented. So

• 51:55

we've changed a little bit about how we approach that over the course of the

• 51:59

last several years based off of player feedback. You know we did some APOC

• 52:03

testing around like really core action combat. And we did some testing around

• 52:14

Alpha 1. We did some split body iteration. We saw kind of player feedback there

• 52:22

with regards to root motion attacks and whatnot. So you know right now we have a

• 52:28

really talented strike team on the combat side that end on the encounter

• 52:33

side. That are making significant progress I think in moving forward the

• 52:38

combat designs around Ashes of Creation. You've seen a little bit of this in the

• 52:43

tank demonstration. And while it's not quite there yet it is getting closer to

• 52:49

there. And this is probably one of the most subtle driven components of

• 52:57

development is combat. Because it's the most tactile. Because it's the most

• 53:01

interfaced with. Because it is something you're constantly experiencing. And it's

• 53:07

also something that a lot of different people have a lot of different thoughts

• 53:10

on. Because there's a lot of different games out there that do combat

• 53:13

differently. And that's okay. And that's normal. And let's take the best parts of

• 53:17

those and incorporate them into what we want to make Ashes' combat identified

• 53:22

around. The simple truth of the matter is this and what people should walk away

• 53:26

from this question thinking. We will continue to iterate on combat until it

• 53:35

is in a place that collectively we as a community can say this may not be my

• 53:42

particular combat. But this combat is good. That is the driving force and

• 53:48

factor behind the development of combat. And that is how we are going to continue

• 53:52

to iterate upon it. Utilizing of course the player feedback from our community.

• 53:57

But also keeping you guys informed and up to date as we continually iterate on

• 54:02

combat. All right. My next question is on the character creator. When might we

When Will We See an Update for the Character Creator?

• 54:12

expect to see a new iteration of the character creator? Has the team been

• 54:15

concentrating more on polishing the new faces in that we have already seen? Or

• 54:22

integrating more races with a similar degree of polish? The character creator

• 54:27

is currently scheduled in this milestone, milestone five, to get brought up to

• 54:37

speed with the most recent additions of our races. The additional features

• 54:46

that we're talking about with like different hairstyles and decals that can

• 54:51

be used, those might not be worked on this milestone. They might not be

• 54:56

worked on until next milestone. But I would say in anticipation for Alpha 2,

• 55:01

you will expect to see that the character creator is in a usable,

• 55:06

functional, and testable playable format for Alpha 2. It may not have all the

• 55:11

bells and whistles of course that we want to launch with, but it is going to

• 55:15

be a part of the Alpha 2 client that players will get to interface with. All

How Far Are You Willing to Go In Response to Player Feedback On Core Systems?

• 55:22

right. How far are you willing to go in response to player feedback on core

• 55:26

systems? For example, if there's a huge outcry at launch to have more instanced

• 55:30

dungeons and raids, is that something you would address? Are you standing firm on

• 55:34

the more open world aspect of it? Well, let's see here. So to first answer

• 55:45

that question, player feedback is important. However, the identity and the

• 55:51

vision of the game is not up for discussion. And so when we talk about

• 55:58

the core systems, tenets, and philosophies behind what the game that we're

• 56:03

trying to make is, we believe that the game we are trying to make resonates

• 56:09

with a large enough section of the MMORPG player base that it is a

• 56:14

sustainable and profitable venture for us to create that core game. Now, the

• 56:22

ancillary systems that live around the core philosophy of Ashes of Creation, or

• 56:27

the subtleties and what we need to do in order to make a particular system or

• 56:31

feature better, right? That is why we interface with. That is the reason that

• 56:36

we want to collect player feedback. The identity of the game, when you leave

• 56:42

that up to council design, so to speak, right? That's when you start running

• 56:48

into an identity crisis. And I think that if the objective of a particular

• 56:54

team is to answer the call of every player, that ten times out of ten,

• 56:58

they're going to fail. And I do not believe that that is the way that you

• 57:02

go about creating a product. I think that you identify your golden cohort,

• 57:07

you identify your core audience, and you say, hopefully with this sense, I am a

• 57:12

member of that core audience. I know what that core audience desires from a

• 57:16

10,000 foot perspective. I am going to build that, right? And you stick with it.

• 57:22

And the moment you have voices that come from a board or that come from a, you

• 57:27

know, an executive or that come from a monetization guy, and they say, hey, this

• 57:34

is made a lot of money over here. Let's make some money over here, right? That is

• 57:38

when you start running into the problems. That is when you start running into the

• 57:44

identity crisis. And that is not up for discussion, so to speak. But as I said,

• 57:54

the subtleties of implementation, the iterative portions of a particular

• 57:59

feature or system, those are where player feedback matter. And I'm going to tell

• 58:03

you, it's a difficult job parsing through feedback. It is a very difficult one.

• 58:11

Roshan and Vaknar and Margaret and Peter, you know, they do great jobs on the

• 58:20

community side, and not a lot of teams invest money into community teams this

• 58:26

early on and as early as Ashes did. But it's necessary in order to distill the

• 58:33

feedback into actionable items. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult thing.

How Will Branching Storylines Affect Future Expansions?

• 58:44

So with server quests that can only be done once and that begin certain events

• 58:49

in the game, how will this affect future expansions if two servers don't follow

• 58:54

the same major quest paths?

• 58:56

That's a good question. So obviously, you know, when our story arcs have branches,

• 59:07

and it depends kind of on the story arc itself, right? We have these major story

• 59:12

arcs, we have minor story arcs, we have personal story arcs, stuff like that.

• 59:17

They all tie into a metanarrative. And when we are releasing expansions, we

• 59:27

throw back to more gross generalized ideas of a particular story arc. So for

• 59:35

example, if little Timmy dies at the end of one particular story arc, there might

• 59:41

be five or six different ways he could die, depending on which story arc maybe

• 59:47

gets interfaced with or which chapter, how a particular chapter might end. But

• 59:52

when we refer back to little Timmy dying versus living in a future expansion, we

• 59:59

don't need to get granular in how little Timmy died, right, out of the six possible

• 1:00:04

scenarios. We just need to say, poor little Timmy died. Isn't that sad? Right?

• 1:00:09

So in that sense, we keep it as binary, as restricted in the number of ways that

• 1:00:18

it can occur. But in addition, the reality is we're going to be creating new

• 1:00:22

storylines with the future expansions, and we're going to do our best to kind of

• 1:00:27

call back into what a particular story might have been with on a server. But the

• 1:00:32

core aspect of these story arcs is to kind of create that unique aspect of

• 1:00:39

player-driven storylines within a particular expansion or launch, and then

• 1:00:45

do our best to call back to them as we release future expansions and redefine

• 1:00:49

particularly those areas.

The Separation of Artisan and Player Level and its Effect On Gathering

• 1:00:55

My question is in regards to character level and artisan level. We know that

• 1:00:59

currently there are two separate things. That being said, what prevents a player

• 1:01:03

from staying level one and parting up with a level 50 player to then gather

• 1:01:08

level 50 resources in the high zones? That way, anyone who wants to take those

• 1:01:12

resources will have to kill the gatherer who is level one and get a large amount

• 1:01:16

of corruption for killing a level one as a level 50.

• 1:01:20

Well, there's a lot that goes into it. First of all, gathering higher level

• 1:01:26

resources requires significant advancement within a particular

• 1:01:32

profession for that gatherable resource. So if I'm a miner and I want to access

• 1:01:37

the highest possible mineral, I need to be a master miner. And in order to

• 1:01:43

achieve the master miner status, I am gonna be one gaining adventuring level

• 1:01:49

experience through that process because many of those quest lines, many of those

• 1:01:55

achievements are facilitated through quest lines. Some of those quest lines

• 1:01:59

interface with adventuring difficulties that are out in the wild at certain

• 1:02:04

levels. So that's going to predicate me... That's going to be a predicate for

• 1:02:10

me to achieve a certain level in order to complete some of these quest lines

• 1:02:14

and achieve that master status. So you will likely not see the ability of a

• 1:02:19

level one alt character having the access to high level mineral mining or

• 1:02:26

any other type of gatherable out there.

• 1:02:28

That's one thing to prevent it. And then the other thing is...

• 1:02:35

Let's see here again, higher tiers. So that's the primary method really in

• 1:02:40

which we prevent that. Anyone who wants to take these resources who kills a

• 1:02:44

gatherer will get a large amount of corruption. But the truth of the matter

• 1:02:46

is, if you're killing a gatherer, it is gonna be entirely possible that a

• 1:02:52

level 30 or 35 person might achieve the rank of master miner and be out

• 1:02:57

in the level 50 areas mining that gatherable. And to a degree, whoever

• 1:03:05

wants to kill them is gonna suffer the consequences of a larger amount of

• 1:03:08

corruption gained because of the disparity in level between that

• 1:03:11

character's adventuring level and the character who killed them. And that's

• 1:03:14

part of the disincentivization of the corruption system. And that's part of

• 1:03:20

the novelty of player agency within a particular system like the Artisanship

• 1:03:25

one, where maybe my first focus as a player is to level up my master mining

• 1:03:32

profession as quickly as possible. And that exceeds what would naturally have

• 1:03:36

been my character level or adventuring level advancing alongside it. That's, I

• 1:03:41

think, unique. That's, I think, interesting. That is, I think, what players

• 1:03:45

want to have the choice to be able to do if they want to. Oh, and yes, you

• 1:04:00

guys can't hear this, but we just heard a very lovely Margaret talking to us.

• 1:04:03

So we were awkwardly silent there for a second. Margaret was talking to us.

• 1:04:08

It's noon, but I'm fine with continuing this questions if you guys wanna

• 1:04:13

keep going a little bit. Yeah, I'm down. I'm enjoying it. All right. Will there

Perks To Leveling an Alt

• 1:04:21

be any perks to leveling in all once you have a character max level to make the

• 1:04:25

experience more convenient, such as account wide rep mounts leveling gear?

• 1:04:29

Or will each character start from absolute scratch when you start a new

• 1:04:32

one? Each character will start from scratch. However, with that being said,

• 1:04:39

there are certain account based considerations that we're making, such as

• 1:04:46

the ability to share warehouse space between alternate characters on the same

• 1:04:57

account, the ability to utilize housing and furniture that might be in the

• 1:05:03

housing and or workstations that might be on a freehold across characters on

• 1:05:07

a particular account. So in that sense, there is a bit of a leg up for players

• 1:05:13

who have achieved things on their primary character. However, at the same

• 1:05:18

time, there should not be like experience boosters and things that kind of hasten

• 1:05:27

the development of that particular... They could share... We are an open economy

• 1:05:31

system. So if they wanted to give them the best gear set for each particular

• 1:05:35

level grade, players could do that. But that I think is normal. That's what most

• 1:05:41

alt creating characters want to kind of experience. But they'll have to go

• 1:05:45

through and complete all the same quest lines. They'll have to complete the same

• 1:05:47

leveling process. They will have to do what it takes to level up that particular

• 1:05:52

alt.

• 1:05:53

All right. So the next question that we've got is going to be regarding the

Classes and Their Relevancy In Gameplay Loops

• 1:06:08

class composition and design revolving around the Holy Trinity.

• 1:06:15

Okay.

• 1:06:16

Yeah. If that is the case, where does a non-healing support fall into that

• 1:06:23

concept of design and how will players who choose that path remain relevant

• 1:06:28

throughout the gameplay loops?

• 1:06:30

Well, this is a bit of a throwback again design. This is a more old school idea

• 1:06:37

of the Holy Trinity and where non-healing support classes fall into that mix.

• 1:06:41

Generally, you see in my experience, most non-healing support classes fall into

• 1:06:49

between the hybrid of support to tank or support to DPS, right? So they tend to

• 1:06:54

fill a hybrid role. The bard has an opportunity to fill that space. It is a

• 1:07:02

very integral component to maximizing a particular group or archetypes ability

• 1:07:10

to perform through the use of their supportive and buff oriented abilities.

• 1:07:17

As we've talked in the past, many of these are support based on proximity. Some

• 1:07:22

of them are support based on targeted buffs. We're going to be following the

• 1:07:28

format of abilities that adhere to dances, songs, and stories when it relates

• 1:07:33

to the bard and the scope of their particular ability sets. Each of those

• 1:07:38

provide a certain type of benefit to other characters within proximity.

• 1:07:46

The idea here, again, pointing back to a more old school Trinity design, is that

• 1:07:53

no party is complete without the non-healing support class, which is the

• 1:07:59

bard in Ashes of Creation. So that is, I think, a role that a lot of players out

• 1:08:08

there enjoy. And you'll be able to perform as that class in either a DPS or

• 1:08:14

tank oriented and perhaps even depending on your archetype selection, healing

• 1:08:19

oriented as well. Obviously not to the degree that a primary archetype cleric

• 1:08:23

would, but yeah. My next question goes back into the Alpha 2. Do you plan on

Will Testing In Alpha 2 be Compounding or Cyclical?

• 1:08:34

introducing it all in a steadily compounding way, only adding new features

• 1:08:38

or content or in a cyclical manner so certain systems are turned on and off to

• 1:08:45

test while others are iterated upon and alternately cycled out? Probably a little

• 1:08:52

of both. I would say it's going to depend on the particular system. So you'll

• 1:09:02

see drops where we update Alpha 2 and want a lot of focus around one

• 1:09:09

particular system. And in order to make sure that we are seeing that level of

• 1:09:15

interaction, we might disable certain systems or take them down to be

• 1:09:19

iterated upon. The benefit of being in a production environment is that we make

• 1:09:27

releases and that cadence of our release candidate is predicated on an amount of

• 1:09:33

work done within some number of sprints, gets tested internally QA wise, and then

• 1:09:41

gets promoted out to a production environment. Those will tend to be larger

• 1:09:45

drops for Alpha 2. So you may see whole systems come online at some different

• 1:09:52

points throughout the Alpha 2 testing, entirely new different areas, entirely

• 1:09:57

new packages of narrative content and POIs. That is going to adhere to kind of

• 1:10:04

what our development schedule and release cadence will look like. All right.

Will Dialog Choices Have Any Impact On Quests?

• 1:10:13

Will dialogue choices have any impact on the quests in regards to how NPCs

• 1:10:18

respond to you or is the overall outcome of it or sorry, will they have any

• 1:10:23

impact on the quest or regards how they respond to you or the overall outcome of

• 1:10:27

that quest or is it more of just a role playing perspective without any major

• 1:10:30

impact? No, the dialogue choices are intended to provide an impact both with

• 1:10:39

the response of the NPC, it might also serve as predicates for other systems if

• 1:10:46

there are certain paths chosen within the dialogue tree. It might unlock different

• 1:10:56

side arcs and storylines that other players may not experience. The dialogue

• 1:11:05

trees are not meaningless. They're meant to provide gameplay related context.

Will Players Be Able to Wield Blood Magic?

• 1:11:14

So in the last developer live stream, you had mentioned blood magic is an illegal

• 1:11:19

magic which has us curious. So we've seen elemental and arcane forms of magic,

• 1:11:24

but will players be able to wield blood magic? What are the different schools of

• 1:11:28

magic you are considering for the game? Well, so first when we say that blood

• 1:11:36

magic is illegal, right? We're talking about in the context of a normal

• 1:11:42

everyday player who's a citizen of Vera having come from Sanctus, you are

• 1:11:47

adhering to the local laws and guidance from nation governments and or node

• 1:11:56

governments, right? To be a good upstanding citizen of Vera, you adhere to

• 1:12:02

these laws. The ability to wield blood magic might be seen in some storylines,

• 1:12:13

we'll see, that is left to the players to experience and discover. Those types

• 1:12:21

of choices might have ramifications on your character and or ramifications

• 1:12:28

within storylines. There are a lot of different schools of magic. In fact,

• 1:12:36

we haven't released our style guide for VFX and whatnot, but when we talk about

• 1:12:42

how do we create a blood corruption setting? Well, what is the associated

• 1:12:48

colors? What's the shape language of blood magic? This flowing river, you saw

• 1:12:55

some of them in the VFX of the zone and in Carfin, you saw the mist in the

• 1:13:01

deep red saturation. Each of the environments and the magics and what we

• 1:13:09

create has an associated style guide that includes color wheels and palettes

• 1:13:15

across different influences, whether it be transformation, summoning magic,

• 1:13:24

arcane magic, elemental magic, blood corruption, regular corruption, chaos.

• 1:13:33

There's a whole bunch of influences that exist across the player abilities,

• 1:13:38

but also across the environments and the POIs and unique to each of the cultures

• 1:13:44

that require defined style guides associated with them. We have a lot of

• 1:13:51

different schools of magic that we have in the game. Whether players will be

• 1:13:59

able to wield blood magic is up to the different storylines you all explore.

Do You Plan on Introducing All Primary Archetypes Before Adding Any Secondary Archetype Systems?

• 1:14:05

Going back to Alpha 2, do you plan on introducing all of the primary

• 1:14:10

archetypes before adding the secondary archetype systems into the test?

• 1:14:15

Additionally, once the secondary archetype system is added, will you want

• 1:14:19

to test it with only a few classes at a time or release all classes available

• 1:14:24

at the point in development? So we may release some limited scope of the

• 1:14:30

secondary archetype selection in the augmentation system without having all

• 1:14:35

of the base archetypes released in order to test some things. In addition,

• 1:14:40

it's more than likely that we'll be releasing secondary selections one at a

• 1:14:46

time or a few at a time, as opposed to waiting until all are kind of ready

• 1:14:50

to be released for testing so that we can collect appropriate information

• 1:14:57

from play testers in as fast a setting as possible.

Metagaming Node Concerns

• 1:15:06

Do you have any concerns on players eventually discovering a meta server

• 1:15:11

build with nodes due to players heading to specific nodes and regions because

• 1:15:14

they find that content more enjoyable? And if so, how would you go about

• 1:15:18

getting players to shift around the world to break up the meta?

• 1:15:22

Yeah, I'm not too concerned about that, to be honest, because

• 1:15:25

the way that we facilitate the world kind of taking into account player

• 1:15:34

activity to manifest different story arcs and or world states is based off

• 1:15:42

of population, start location, heat mapping of player movement and activity.

• 1:15:48

A lot of that stuff is built in a way that almost ensures very different

• 1:15:57

outcomes from a world state perspective across different servers.

• 1:16:02

Now, if players had a concerted effort in order to elicit similar world

• 1:16:11

building achievements, it might be possible for them to do that.

• 1:16:16

It might be possible for them to do so in very bespoke areas like standing

• 1:16:21

up a node in a particular zone. But that's the first level of interaction

• 1:16:27

when it comes to deciding what content trickles out of these POIs,

• 1:16:33

what supporting structures in the world change the zones.

• 1:16:39

It's not just one level deep. When that node gets manifest,

• 1:16:43

it has a relationship based with other nodes. Some of those relationships

• 1:16:49

get told through the VASL system, some get told through reputation,

• 1:16:52

some get told through particular initiatives that a node might undertake.

• 1:16:59

And not everything that happens in the world is predicated on a node

• 1:17:03

reaching a certain level. That's one predicate system.

• 1:17:07

There's a whole bunch of predicates that are sprinkled throughout different

• 1:17:12

layers of content and that need to be achieved in order to elicit

• 1:17:18

a response from the server or from the server world manager.

• 1:17:22

So, I'm not too concerned with reaching a quote unquote meta across servers.

• 1:17:29

I think it's going to be possible and expected that players in certain areas

• 1:17:34

will yield similar outcomes to things. And that's okay. That's cool.

• 1:17:38

I think it's interesting if players have a concerted effort across server

• 1:17:41

to interact with one another, learn from their actions, mistakes, successes,

• 1:17:46

and effectuate that on the server they're on. That's interesting.

• 1:17:50

But I don't believe we'll see a metaphor. I think that the intricacies are too great

• 1:17:55

when it comes to how predicates are formed in order to elicit world state changes.

True Natives of Verra

• 1:18:02

So, we haven't talked about the Tonar, sorry, Tolnar recently.

• 1:18:06

The Tonar!

• 1:18:07

Who do you consider to be the true natives or traditional people of Vera?

• 1:18:11

Could we be seen as foreigners trying to colonize Vera or would the Tonar view us differently than that?

• 1:18:22

How do I want to say this? So, I think when we talk about the Tonar and we're talking about

• 1:18:31

how will the Tonar perceive their ancestors, the children's children's children of their ancestors

• 1:18:42

returning back to Vera, I think majority of the disposition is going to be

• 1:18:52

these are the descendants of those responsible for the tragedy that befell.

• 1:18:56

Our world. And so that is one way to look at it.

• 1:19:04

And I think that you'll see a disparity between the younger Tonar and the older Tonar

• 1:19:12

and their reception to those who are coming new. I think that's normal. I think that's expected.

• 1:19:22

I think that creates an interesting tension. And I think that is a nice contextualization

• 1:19:30

to some of the stories that might be told and interfacing between the Tonar cultures

• 1:19:34

and those of the returning descendants.

• 1:19:41

How advanced is it going to be? How advanced is going to be the system of hiring and customizing

Hiring and Customizing Labors On Your Freehold

• 1:19:48

laborers on your freehold?

• 1:19:55

Relatively advanced. I think there's a few paths that you can take when it comes to training up

• 1:20:01

those types of NPC aids. What things that they can do. I think there's going to be different tiers

• 1:20:10

and costs associated with higher level assistance on the freehold. But the same is true for

• 1:20:20

mercenaries that nodes can hire or castles can place with regards to sieges and or wars and or

• 1:20:27

events. Like you have a very base functioning level of mercenaries with set of equipment and

• 1:20:34

skill rotations and behavior trees that are possible at a fundamental level. And then as you

• 1:20:40

upgrade the nodes barracks, as you might upgrade, you might achieve certain relics that you gain

• 1:20:50

or enact certain policies that allow you to dial up the stats of those mercenaries. The same thing

• 1:20:56

is true for the NPCs that can exist on freeholds, except those might be more predicated to

• 1:21:03

service buildings that relate to artisanship. And that might be one of the reasons why it's

• 1:21:09

beneficial to own a freehold in one particular node versus another is based off of what amenities

• 1:21:17

are now available to your freehold as a result of that node selection. Hopefully that answers

• 1:21:24

the question. I think we have time. Let's do one more question from each of you.

• 1:21:29

All right. Nice. You spoke in the last stream about how eventually Intrepid would hold off on

Will You Use Unreal Engine 5.2?

• 1:21:37

Unreal Engine updates until post-launch, but didn't state if you're considering to upgrade to 5.2.

• 1:21:44

Is that something you're planning on doing? And if so, what features from it are you planning

• 1:21:48

on utilizing? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're nowhere near close to stopping our continued

• 1:21:55

updates with Epic with Unreal. So 5.2 is on the radar. We might even skip, we might wait to do,

• 1:22:05

you know, based off of the next iteration 5.21 or 5.3. It just kind of depends. We have a technical

• 1:22:12

team that evaluates what's on the horizon with updates from Epic on Unreal, and we kind of make

• 1:22:20

that decision based off of the team's needs for particular features that might be being released

• 1:22:26

in the future. But usually we want to give Epic the opportunity to release the first version of

• 1:22:31

a particular major update and then go with the 0.1 version of that, just from a safekeeping

• 1:22:39

perspective. All right. So are there any mechanics or systems that you wanted to add to the game but

Have Any Mechanics or Systems Been Cut From The Game?

• 1:22:47

haven't because you wanted to ensure that your development schedule stays on track? And if so,

• 1:22:52

what are they? Oh, yeah. What are they? There's a lot. We, you know, generally when we're doing our

• 1:23:01

internal meetings and reviews and a great idea comes up, you know, we throw it in the backlog

• 1:23:07

post-launch. That's kind of our, generally our MO when it comes to great ideas. I mean, because,

• 1:23:16

you know, the reality is as we continue to go through features, we develop those features,

• 1:23:21

we test those features and iterate on those features, a lot of new ideas and opportunities

• 1:23:26

come about for the team to think about, well, wouldn't it be great if this feature actually did

• 1:23:31

this and interacted with another feature over here that did this. And so we're trying to make

• 1:23:36

sure that another feature over here did this. And in some situations, we'll evaluate and determine

• 1:23:42

whether or not, you know, that type of interaction is really necessary to demonstrate what the core

• 1:23:47

loop of a particular system might be trying to demonstrate and we'll make the changes necessary.

• 1:23:53

But in the majority of cases, we try to stay cognizant of, hey, here is our MVP necessary

• 1:24:01

list of core integrated systems in order to achieve the identity of the game that we're

• 1:24:05

in the core gameplay loops that we want players to experience. And we work towards that end from a

• 1:24:11

launch perspective and anything that's added that sounds good, or we want to incorporate,

• 1:24:16

we throw it into the expansion bucket, right? There's an opportunity for us to, you know,

• 1:24:21

we need stuff obviously for us to expand upon and for us to continue development post-launch.

• 1:24:25

So that's generally our MO with regards to new ideas and stuff.

• 1:24:36

Okay. Given that you said that these story arcs are kind of like a module that get placed into

Will There Be an Ashes Of Creation Themed TTRPG?

• 1:24:46

the world, do you plan to sell or release your Ashes of Creation themed TTRPG module for other

• 1:24:51

DMs to use? You know, there's a lot of things I want to do when we launch Ashes. One is, of course,

• 1:25:04

a module that's set in the world of Ashes of Creation. Yes, I would love to release a throwback

• 1:25:10

to the original campaign. It's very different from where Ashes of Creation is today. But I think

• 1:25:19

it's, there's a lot of overlap between gamers who enjoy tabletop RPGs and MMOs and, you know,

• 1:25:30

one of the benefits of telling a story through different venues, mediums and

• 1:25:35

systems is that you reach a broader audience because not all of us like the same things.

• 1:25:42

And I think the story of Ashes is a rich one. And because of that, telling it through

• 1:25:48

multiple mediums is definitely a desire. From a board game perspective, I'm a huge board game

• 1:25:55

nerd. I love playing board games. A lot of us at the office do. I would love to tell the story

• 1:26:01

of Ashes through a board game as well. I would love to tell the story of Ashes through a RTS.

• 1:26:07

I would love to tell it through film and television. There's a lot of ways I think that

• 1:26:12

the story can be told. It doesn't all have to be focused around the return to Vera. There's a lot

• 1:26:18

of different opportunities across the many thousands of years of timeline that Vera's

• 1:26:23

existed that we can tell the story and even other aspects of that. So, yeah. Yeah. To answer your

• 1:26:31

question, the desire is a yes post our flagship product launch, which is the MMO.

• 1:26:40

All right. How exactly does the Constellation system work? You stated that it'll be very

How Exactly Does The Constellation System Work?

• 1:26:46

relevant to the system, such as narrative, empowering abilities and items, and gathering

• 1:26:50

relics. But how do they tie into these systems exactly? So the Constellation system is another

• 1:26:59

predicate system. And when I say it's a predicate system, it means that certain conditions will yield

• 1:27:11

certain Constellations being available to pursue, discover and achieve. And they span the realm of

• 1:27:20

interfacing across adventuring level, artisanship, node, relics, policies. There's a lot of different

• 1:27:30

things that Constellations can touch because at its essence, it is a predicate system.

• 1:27:36

Now, once players have achieved identifying a certain location that yields a Constellation,

• 1:27:45

and they've checked off that box, okay, I have achieved this thing, it can serve its purpose for

• 1:27:51

kicking off a new storyline for that individual, kicking off a new storyline for that individual's

• 1:27:57

micro communities or pseudo factions, if necessary, right? It can serve as a broader kickoff. One

• 1:28:03

person's discovers it, three, four or 500 people get to participate now in it. That's an opportunity.

• 1:28:10

It can yield the location of an achievable world relic that can be brought back home to a particular

• 1:28:17

node. You know, there's, there's a lot of different things that are possible in order to see the

• 1:28:24

Constellation and to actually achieve that, it could be just as simple as looking at your character's

• 1:28:32

viewport into the night sky at a certain location at a certain time. It could be far more in depth,

• 1:28:38

which is killing a certain raid boss for a particular number of times until it drops a

• 1:28:44

particular item that yields a map that sends you to a location that sends as a, like, there's a lot

• 1:28:49

of different layers that can get added on how do we manifest a particular Constellation.

• 1:28:56

The intent here is to provide an immersive system that keeps the player in the world and allows

• 1:29:04

their in-world movement and interactions and immersiveness to yield a result that's unique.

• 1:29:12

And that, I think, is a fun and compelling interaction, especially as it relates to adventuring.

• 1:29:23

I, was that our last question?

• 1:29:27

Oh, we have one more. We have one final question.

• 1:29:30

What do we got?

• 1:29:39

I apologize. I had a technical issue there. So as it stands, final question, what is the biggest

• 1:29:45

obstacle preventing Intrepid Studios from being ready to begin Alpha 2 testing?

Biggest Obstacle to Overcome Before Alpha 2

• 1:29:51

The biggest obstacle.

• 1:29:56

I think right now it's content production.

• 1:29:57

I think our obstacle is the sheer size and complexity of our systems, of course.

• 1:30:06

The necessary time for our teams to complete the content to fill those systems so that the data

• 1:30:14

that we collect from play testing those particular loops is compelling and indicative of accurate

• 1:30:23

player responses and player activity. So there is a certain level to which the Alpha 2 client

• 1:30:31

and world and experience must be brought in order for us to facilitate the accurate collection of

• 1:30:37

data that we can then inform decisions based off of. And that is a moving point. Right now,

• 1:30:47

we have on paper and our production schedule of what that needs to be. But as we approach the end

• 1:30:54

of milestones and or sprints and we do our inspect, review, reflect process, we get to

• 1:31:01

re-articulate where that point lives because each of those is a touch point. So, look, we're

• 1:31:10

building a massive MMO. Massive. To the likes of which I'm not sure have been done in a fantasy

• 1:31:19

setting before at launch. Now, we have brought aboard a phenomenal team, incredibly talented.

• 1:31:31

We are doing it in a way that I think is right with the transparency and the

• 1:31:37

connectivity to the community and the opportunity for people to watch the development of it.

• 1:31:43

And the truth of the matter is that all of us want to play the game. All of us want to play Ashes.

• 1:31:52

Even if it's just Alpha 2. So, you know, our focus is to continue down the path of production

• 1:32:03

and completing what's necessary for us to have a successful Alpha 2 test. And nothing can be said

• 1:32:13

or done to hasten that process in a manner that is not already conducive to how we are approaching

• 1:32:20

production towards Alpha 2 already. So, with that in mind, you know, patience is key. Spending the

• 1:32:30

time necessary is always going to be a good yield on investment. And I think that being a part of the

• 1:32:39

journey is beneficial both to the project and to you guys as players. But ultimately, our focus

• 1:32:46

will remain on the obstacle of producing the necessary content for us to achieve a meaningful

• 1:32:52

test period with Alpha 2. Yay, we did it! Thank you. And content plug. I like the typing.

Outro & Content Creator Plugs

• 1:33:09

Guys, is that Margaret in the back? I like that. That's cool. Guys, I want to thank each of you for

• 1:33:16

joining me today. Obviously, you guys represent a very core audience section of the Ashes of Creation

• 1:33:23

community. People have been following the project for a long time. Hopefully, the questions that you

• 1:33:32

asked today, I think, successfully scratched some of the outstanding itches that the community has

• 1:33:39

with regards to systems design and the project that they're working on. And I think that's

• 1:33:44

pretty important. So, as you're all familiar with, the system design and the project and development

• 1:33:51

as a whole, I always enjoy chatting with fellow MMO lovers and members of our community, of course,

• 1:33:59

about sometimes I can get a little overly passionate. Apologize about that as well. But,

• 1:34:03

you know, I always enjoy having these conversations. But I'd love each of you guys to just kind of give

• 1:34:10

a little bit of a shout out to you guys and your communities. And, yeah.

• 1:34:18

I'm Chibi Bree. I'm from the Golden Feather Tavern. And you can find us anywhere slash TGF Tavern.

• 1:34:25

So, Twitch, YouTube, etc. And you can find me over on YouTube at youtube.com slash RichieSH.

• 1:34:33

And to catch up with myself or any of the Pathfinders, just go to ashesHQ.com or

• 1:34:41

the corresponding YouTube where the Pathfinder podcast is at. Or you can catch me on my own

• 1:34:45

channel on YouTube, not YouTube, but Twitch, which is just some work. So.

• 1:34:51

Awesome. Well, from everybody here that joined me today and all of you out in the audience,

• 1:34:57

thank you very much for coming and being a part of this. We love and appreciate our community at

• 1:35:02

Ashes of Creation and your guys' participation makes this game a better game. So with that being

• 1:35:07

said, we will see you again at the end of this month when we showcase the new Mage update.

• 1:35:15

And until then, I wish you guys the most amazing April and we will chat with you all soon.

• 1:35:20

Bye, everyone. Bye.

• 1:35:23

Bye y'all.

• 00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to a bonus stream in April. We have a really cool show today.

• 00:24

You know, for those of you who've been a part of the community for a while now, you know

• 00:28

that on a yearly basis we kind of interact with different content creators who have been

• 00:33

with the Ashes of Creation community for a while now. And I am joined by three of our

• 00:38

very amazing content creators and they also manage their own communities who are very

• 00:45

excited for Ashes of Creation and they've compiled a really cool list of questions that

• 00:49

I'm excited to answer with them today. I have not previewed these questions so I heard that

• 00:56

some of them might be fun and some of them might be a little spicy. We'll see. But I

• 01:03

would love to go around with each of you and have you guys introduce yourselves and your

• 01:08

channels and your community and just kind of give a little introduction. Why don't we

• 01:12

start with you, Simurg?

• 01:13

Oh yeah, so my name is Simurg and I am the host of the Ashes Pathfinders podcast and

• 01:22

we're on the community site AshesHQ.com. So that's pretty much where you can find us doing

• 01:27

our thing pretty regularly. We're pretty stoked about Ashes.

• 01:29

Yeah, I jump on and I listen to your guys' podcasts every now and then that you have

• 01:34

with some of the guests and also when you do the reviews of the live streams and stuff,

• 01:40

you have a very active community and I love to see the questions and the banter and the

• 01:43

kind of go back and forth and whatnot. We also have with us Mr. Richie S.H. How you

• 01:50

doing, buddy?

• 01:51

I'm doing good. How are you?

• 01:52

Very good. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your channel.

• 01:56

My channel is Richie S.H. over on YouTube. I cover all sorts of Ashes of Creation news.

• 02:02

I cover tweets, Discord chat, all sorts of things to get every bit of information we

• 02:09

possibly can.

• 02:11

Every little piece of morsel possible. And then we also have a regular, our amazing,

• 02:20

our one and only Chibi. How you doing?

• 02:23

I'm doing pretty well. Thank you so much. I hope you're doing well also.

• 02:27

I was getting sick last week during the live stream. Actually, I got sick that Thursday

• 02:35

and I am almost out the other side. This one was a doozy. It was definitely a rough one,

• 02:44

but I'm feeling much better today and I'm excited to be here with you. Tell us a little

• 02:47

bit about your channel and what you do with Ashes.

• 02:53

I am a co-host of The Golden Feather, which is a community-based interview and opinion

• 03:00

podcast where we usually get to know our guests and also get to know the community's opinions

• 03:06

on topics that the community is generally talking about. I have some of my questions

• 03:12

are in that style.

• 03:13

Very cool. Well, I love the opportunity to sit down with members of the community, especially

• 03:20

you guys who have been following Ashes for such a long time. Obviously, there are different

• 03:26

tiers of content creators who follow Ashes on and off, bring updates to their communities.

• 03:32

But you guys have been following for a very long time. You're very core central members

• 03:36

of the community and you represent, I think, a cross section of followers and fans who

• 03:41

have been relatively up to date with what the game is intending to be, the philosophy

• 03:47

of our designs, and been here from the very beginning. It's always good because when we

• 03:54

do live streams or other types of quote-unquote marketing events where I might do interviews

• 04:02

with content creators and whatnot, sometimes those are done within the context of the new

• 04:06

audience. Who might we be speaking to that has never heard of Ashes before? But today,

• 04:13

I think we're going to be a little bit different there. We're going to be speaking to more

• 04:17

of our core audience with the types of questions that you guys want to ask. Those of you who

• 04:23

have been following the project for a long time and have been through the journey with

• 04:27

us of what it's come to be to make this game. That's always exciting for me. I apologize,

• 04:33

I have a cough drop, so I don't cough too much. That might be why I'm sounding a little

• 04:41

bit strange. But with that being said, how have you guys been doing? How'd you guys enjoy

• 04:47

the last update?

• 04:50

I loved it. I thought it was great seeing the story arc starting to come together. It's

• 04:54

pretty cool.

• 04:55

Yeah, it was something that we haven't really shown before. Obviously, we've talked a lot

• 04:59

about since the beginning of time for Ashes back in 2017 about a changing world and whatnot.

• 05:05

But I don't think people really had the opportunity to have seen what systems are associated with

• 05:12

that. They got a little bit of a touch on it with the weathers and seasons. And now

• 05:15

they get to see that both from a story arc perspective, as well as how we intend to facilitate

• 05:21

those story arcs across the world. I thought it was cool. I love seeing the transition

• 05:27

to that zone over into the Blood is Due story arc. I thought it was super cool. And Carfin

• 05:34

is such a giant tower. One of my favorite things that I enjoyed in previous MMOs was

• 05:40

these tall vertical dungeons. In Lineage, they had a really cool one called Krumah Tower

• 05:46

that you got when you were level 40-ish and Tower of Insolence that you got when you were

• 05:51

a little bit endgame. And I really always enjoyed going through those towers and the

• 05:57

different rooms of that dungeon competing and fighting for where I could hunt or where

• 06:03

I might get PK'd or get trained a bunch of mobs on. I don't know if you guys ever had

• 06:08

that experience in your MMO play.

• 06:10

Yeah, definitely watched you have that a lot on the livestreams.

• 06:15

Yeah.

• 06:16

Yeah, it was super cool. Well, let us get to some of your questions. I am super excited

• 06:25

to just... And just for you guys who are tuning in, this is going to be a Q&A primarily. We're

• 06:30

going to just shoot the poop, so to speak, and talk a little bit about Ashes and some

• 06:39

of the questions that the communities have expressed to these guys. So what do you guys

• 06:43

got for me?

• 06:46

My first question, and as I mentioned, this is going to reflect our TGF Tavern podcast

• 06:52

theme. So my first question is a little bit of an icebreaker. What are the most challenging

• 06:58

and most enjoyable things you have found about running the studio? With these in mind, what

• 07:03

is your biggest lesson learned throughout the process?

• 07:06

What have been the most challenging and exciting things I've experienced in running the studio?

• 07:12

Well, that is a big question. For those of you who don't know my history, I started Intrepid

• 07:19

with my husband, John, back in 2016, really. It was when we hired our first employees,

• 07:29

I think it was John Arilano and Keith Kovac. It was December of 2015. And it really came

• 07:42

from a point of me as a player. I was kind of upset with the state of MMOs, and I've

• 07:52

been a huge MMO fan for a very long time. I played a lot of MMOs. And we had an opportunity

• 07:59

with some of the talent here in San Diego from formerly Sony Online Entertainment and

• 08:05

some great MMO franchises that were built to attract an audience of developers who were

• 08:13

going to be interested in building the next best MMO possible. And I didn't know much

• 08:20

about development at the time. I knew a lot about designs and systems because I had run

• 08:26

my own campaigns in D&D and Pathfinder. And that's what Ashes of Creation is predicated

• 08:31

on with what it's built off of, is off of that campaign and Pathfinder. And so I had

• 08:38

a very kind of understanding design-wise of these systems that I've experienced and were

• 08:43

inspired from in other MMOs that I have played in. And I thought, how cool it would be to

• 08:49

integrate those systems into a comprehensive and cohesive design theory around risk versus

• 08:54

reward and not everybody's a winner and a little bit more of a throwback to more old

• 09:00

school design feel and whatnot. So for me, starting in studio was a firehose of information,

• 09:09

of learning. The first couple of years just sitting very closely with each of my lead

• 09:16

developers and digesting as much as possible from their experiences in previous companies

• 09:23

and previous projects. And that was a very difficult task to learn as much as I did in

• 09:31

such a short period of time and still to continue learning that. What I would say the most fun

• 09:37

aspect of having led an MMO studio now for the last over six years has been to watch

• 09:46

the team grow and change. It's a very different feeling when you're a group of half-done

• 09:53

to a dozen people, growing to a couple dozen people, growing to dozens of people, growing

• 10:00

to 150 plus people. That experience, these different thresholds of studio size while

• 10:11

maintaining the culture of what Intrepid is, which is a place for gamers to build games

• 10:17

that they love, that has been a really rewarding experience to see the connections, to see

• 10:25

the friendships formed, to see the bonds created, to see the camaraderie, the collective desire

• 10:32

and motivation to create something that stands the test of time, that makes your audience

• 10:37

proud, that makes you yourself want to play the game. That is something that is a sight

• 10:43

to behold. The second most exciting thing I think for me has always been the opportunity

• 10:49

to interface and talk to other gamers, people who are excited. I get a taste of this on

• 10:56

a Reddit, I get a taste of this on the forums or through different YouTube channels and

• 11:00

Twitter and Discord. A large portion of my initial environment and how I talked to players

• 11:06

was through Discord. But I think that the pinnacle of that experience was going to PAXs

• 11:13

and having an opportunity to sit down and hear directly from the player what's inspirational

• 11:20

about Ashes, what is the core philosophy that speaks to you as a gamer. Each person is different

• 11:26

what speaks to them, because we're all eclectic and have our own backgrounds and pasts and

• 11:30

experiences that we want to relive and the nostalgia that we want to experience again.

• 11:38

Just kind of finding what that common ground is between us as gamers. That was fun to experience

• 11:46

and see people with just literal excitement and opportunity to kind of chat with them,

• 11:52

play magic with them, play board games and hang out after the events. That was a super

• 11:57

fun thing for me. What has been the most challenging? Obviously the most challenging thing for me

• 12:04

was learning everything I needed to learn in a very short period of time and then continuing

• 12:08

to learn and evolve from there. If I were to give another answer on the challenging

• 12:12

aspect from a development perspective, it's integrating, I feel, this transparent process

• 12:20

with the creative and development side of a project. Typically what people don't see

• 12:28

what it takes to build these types of games. It's ugly, it's hard, it's iterative, it takes

• 12:37

so much imagination to look at what you're seeing in a functional setting and imagine

• 12:43

it in a testable and then eventually polished and shippable setting. That is a logical leap

• 12:51

of creativity that it takes to get from this has no VFX, this has no sound design, this

• 12:56

has no polished animation, this has nothing. I'm not talking about what you guys see because

• 13:00

we take that up to close to a shippable quality. But when you see it in a very bare bones setting,

• 13:13

it can be difficult. It can be challenging to imagine it in its next step of iteration

• 13:19

and work. And then have to make decisions based off of that. It's a challenging thing

• 13:29

to do but very rewarding as well. Sorry, that was a long-winded answer to your question.

• 13:35

All right. My first question is, which zones can we expect to see in Alpha 2 and how many

• 13:43

of them are in a comparable state to the Riverlands and how far along in development they are?

• 13:49

That's a big question. We have a lot of zones that are planned for Alpha 2. Not all of them

• 13:55

will be online by the time Alpha 2 launches but they will be continuously integrated and

• 14:04

launched as part of Alpha 2 continuing forward. The big areas obviously are the Riverlands,

• 14:12

the Badlands, the San Squall Desert, the tropics, the forest areas, some of the tabletop mountains

• 14:22

and the tundra and ice areas. And then we want to obviously have the loops around our

• 14:31

naval zones partly represented. I apologize for coughing guys. Or as some called our last

• 14:39

week's preview, the Tower of Coffin. I know that was good. But yeah, so there's a lot

• 14:47

of areas that are planned. When we talk about level of completion, what goes into really

• 14:52

making a particular zone? Obviously, there's the terrain, there's the foliage, there's

• 14:59

setting up small points of interest, medium points of interest, large points of interest.

• 15:04

There's connecting the quest hubs into those points of interest. They're setting up the

• 15:07

nodes within those localities. There's the overland population, the spawner work that

• 15:11

needs to be set up, narrative and storylines and how they connect outside of that particular

• 15:17

zone. There's the resource tables and materials. There's a lot that really goes into that.

• 15:25

As we accomplish setting up each of these zones incrementally, different parts of the

• 15:32

team come and touch the zones at different points in the pipeline. So first, environment

• 15:38

kind of gets in there and they set up the terrain and kind of the block out for all

• 15:42

of the level design across that particular zone in conjunction with the level design

• 15:47

team who's been and Jason and Jeremy kind of work with them on that front. And then

• 15:54

once those kind of areas are set up and the POIs get blocked out, that's when narrative

• 16:00

teams start assigning quest locations, quest markers and setting those up while nodes is

• 16:07

kind of setting up the base node areas as well. So it depends on the zone, where it's

• 16:15

at from a level of completion standpoint and who's kind of touched it. It would be a long

• 16:20

list to kind of run down and go through each of those. But I would say generally when we

• 16:25

talk about in preparation for Alpha 2, we bring the zones that are intended to launch

• 16:30

with somewhere between like a 60 to 70% completion perspective before it's ready for an Alpha

• 16:36

2. And then that's where you would expect players to kind of participate in those zones

• 16:40

during Alpha 2.

• 16:41

Cool. So this one's going to be related to lore. Could you elaborate on how the soul

• 16:48

as a conduit may tie into other realms or planes? Again, assuming those are actually

• 16:54

different things or possibly even the avatars of the gods, which you've previously mentioned.

• 16:58

Oh, I need to be careful on this one. And I don't know how much I've gone into this

• 17:06

in the past and how much is revealing maybe too much right now. But okay. So to understand

• 17:17

what the mortal coil is, what we call the mortal coil, there is some base metaphysical

• 17:26

understanding that's required of kind of the universe of Ashes of Creation or quote unquote

• 17:33

universes, I suppose. And at the crux of each is this concept of the flow of essence, the

• 17:41

river of essence we might call it. And essence is really all that can come to be comes from

• 17:48

in some way, shape or form the essence. And in the original kind of Ashes of Creation

• 17:56

Pathfinder campaign that I had built long ago, I'll just kind of talk a little bit to

• 18:01

that and let you guys discover what may have changed in Ashes of Creation. But in that

• 18:07

sense there was very much this concept of planar locations or different planes that

• 18:13

existed within the universe. Some things existed on the material plane, some things existed

• 18:19

on the ethereal plane, on the celestial plane. There are a number of planes that kind of

• 18:24

exist. And essence flows like a river through each of the planes. And the higher up you

• 18:32

go in these planes, the closer to the source of the essence you really are. And that's

• 18:38

where you can see stronger manifestations of the magical aspects of the essence. Now,

• 18:47

I'm sorry, let me make sure I'm touching on the right point of the question. Can you re-ask

• 18:54

the question just one more time for me?

• 18:55

Sure.

• 18:56

Oh, I see it actually on the screen. Okay, sorry. No, elaborate more of how the soul,

• 19:00

okay, got it. So when the divine races were created by the pantheon of gods, they were

• 19:10

created for a particular purpose. And the purpose they were created for was to observe

• 19:16

how these mortal beings would interface with a substance like the essence. And obviously

• 19:24

one of the great differentiators between mortal divine races and the gods is that aspect of

• 19:31

mortality. And one of the ways that the divine races were created in order to interact with

• 19:36

the essence was through the use of a mortal coil. And that mortal coil was malleable.

• 19:42

Your soul was malleable. It could change to adopt a greater connection with the essence

• 19:52

around one particular school of magic perhaps or one type of magic that you might use essence

• 19:57

for. And the more you experienced that, the more adept you became with utilizing that

• 20:04

magic. And that's because your coil would start to mold itself to best facilitate that

• 20:10

flow of essence, whatever school of magic you were manipulating with it, right? And

• 20:17

so in that sense, when you have the story of the original ancients, the predecessor

• 20:23

race to the divine races, their coil began to warp and change to best facilitate essence

• 20:32

through the use of corruption and corrupt magic because it was in their story, in their

• 20:37

history that they learned the most powerful use or at least what they believed was the

• 20:42

most powerful use of essence was through corrupt magic. And that's what allured them towards

• 20:48

it. So to give you better context about why that conduit is so important is as your base

• 20:56

character, as your core archetype continually learns and manifests things in the world of

• 21:02

era through the use of the essence, it will continue to shape and change its conduit towards

• 21:08

that purpose. Now, how does the soul act as a conduit to the other races, to the other

• 21:17

realms? Remember, that essence is like a river that flows through the plains. And when it

• 21:22

touches mortal coils that use it in a certain way, it has reverberations throughout the

• 21:28

river that is felt across the plains. And that's how important the divine races are

• 21:34

when it comes to the war over their soul, so to speak, is what impact it has across

• 21:40

the universe, so to speak. So hopefully that answers some of your questions. And then I

• 21:44

see since the possible avatars of the gods, which have previously been mentioned. We've

• 21:49

talked a little bit about them. I don't want to give them away too much because they are

• 21:54

core characters within some of the storylines. But obviously, you know, the Phoenix is an

• 21:59

avatar. And so that kind of gives you an example of the types of mythos and mythological creatures

• 22:08

that we lean into to kind of represent the avatars of the gods.

• 22:15

All right. My next question is, will the Alpha 2 map include any portion of the eastern continent?

• 22:24

Hmm, that's eventually it will. Yes. At launch, it might not. It depends. It depends on how

• 22:31

much progress we make towards that end. It is not required for us to begin testing. Let's

• 22:37

just say that. And so if it makes it by the time we want to launch Alpha 2, then we will

• 22:42

include it. Otherwise, it will be released at a later time during the Alpha 2 test.

• 22:48

All right. Did the Underrealm size increase when you expanded the size of the world map,

• 22:54

or is it still expected to be about 100 square kilometers?

• 22:58

It didn't increase too much. You know, there is going to be some level of additional scope

• 23:05

that's necessary on the Underrealm. Again, to reiterate the intent of the Underrealm,

• 23:10

in areas where you have overland transit and movement between zones, the Underrealm is

• 23:18

meant to provide an alternate path so that you are not creating these kind of congested

• 23:24

environments where it is just too easy to gank, you know, someone who's moving material

• 23:31

goods like through a caravan in a particular choke point. It's kind of offering alternative

• 23:38

paths that can exist for players to utilize as necessary. And so in that sense, even though

• 23:45

the size of the map grew, those choke points remained relatively similar, right? They're

• 23:50

designed for a particular player count as a conjunction between different zones. And

• 23:56

so the Underrealm, in order to facilitate that alternate path idea, did not have to

• 24:03

increase in size too much.

• 24:08

Cool. So the next question for the Pathfinders is that you've mentioned milestones a lot.

• 24:15

Is there any chance you could elaborate on what these different milestones or goalposts

• 24:20

are in order to provide some added transparency without promising dates?

• 24:24

Elaborate on these different milestones or goalposts. Well, when, I mean, there's a lot

• 24:33

that gets done in a particular milestone. To give you kind of understanding from our

• 24:40

internal kind of production schedule perspective, milestones consist of multiple sprints worth

• 24:48

of work, right? And these sprints are kind of small increments of time that a particular

• 24:56

development team might work towards a goal, completing a feature or content pass that's

• 25:04

necessary in a particular area. And so when we set up our milestones and we are kind of

• 25:11

identifying what those particular milestone goals are, they span across the entirety of

• 25:16

development from platform and engineering to design and concept to combat iteration

• 25:24

and counter design through model creation and VFX and our tools adjustments and iteration

• 25:34

and environment buildouts and everything that goes into making a game, everyone is kind

• 25:39

of involved in this concentrated and cooperative effort to achieve a particular milestone.

• 25:47

Now, we talk about these milestones every month that we do a live stream. You see the

• 25:54

fruit of these milestones, whether it be in the assets that get created that we talk about

• 26:00

or a particular feature that we want to show off its development as it's been kind of fleshed

• 26:06

out further. So each month you guys in the community get insight into what was a part

• 26:13

of this particular milestone. And when we talk about upcoming presentations and upcoming

• 26:19

live streams, you're getting insight, I think, into what's part of our internal scope. Now,

• 26:26

obviously we don't share our internal milestones because they're very fluid and subject to

• 26:32

change. We're an agile development team, which means that between sprints, it becomes necessary

• 26:39

for us to make pivots, for us to make priority changes as it exists within our backlog. And

• 26:47

a lot of that is driven by desired testing we need to get done internally or when we

• 26:55

discover undiscovered work or we develop tech debt. Like there are reasons why those milestones

• 27:02

change the excuse me, the scope and or objectives of a particular milestone might change from

• 27:08

sprint to sprint ever so slightly. But the goals are always what we are aiming to achieve

• 27:15

and stay consistent. So we don't share those because it is a very agile, fluid environment

• 27:21

where particular objectives of a milestone might be relatively fluid.

• 27:30

And going back to the under realm, will there be larger bodies of water like oceans, lakes

• 27:37

or rivers in the under realm? And if so, will we be able to use boats or ships to navigate

• 27:41

them? There will absolutely be under realm lakes

• 27:46

and rivers. Those will be locations and very important ones for unique material goods like

• 27:54

certain types of fish that players will be able to go down and fish with. But there will

• 27:59

not be the use of boats and vehicles within the water, water vehicles of the under realm,

• 28:06

at least not for launch.

• 28:08

All right. If everything goes relatively smoothly, how long are you anticipating Alpha 2 to run

• 28:17

for? And if it goes longer than anticipated, how do you continue to keep players and the

• 28:22

viewers interested for that long without feeling the burnout of seeing all the content?

• 28:26

Well, Alpha 2 will not be content complete. That's the first thing. The other thing is,

• 28:34

you know, when talking about kind of burnout, I think that's something that we adapt to

• 28:38

during the testing period. We kind of observe how players are buying on to this particular

• 28:45

testing that's available. If we need to consolidate that testing, if we need to wipe that testing.

• 28:50

We talk about the length of Alpha 2. Alpha 2 is intended to exist up until launch. There's

• 28:54

going to be different testing periods that we will be releasing either new content locations

• 29:01

or zones or systems that we want to have players kind of focus in on. In those situations,

• 29:08

if we're having, you know, participation drought because of the length of Alpha 2, we can set

• 29:15

them up in a more focused setting. We can even incentivize that. We can offer unique

• 29:21

testing to potentially new testers as well. You know, it's important to note that Alpha

• 29:31

2 and our Alphas are not what traditional Alphas have been that many players have experienced,

• 29:38

which are usually completed games that are being ported over or moved over into a new

• 29:45

region for publishing purposes. And they're selling access to Alpha as a higher price

• 29:53

point of exclusion, you know, exclusivity in order to start off that product launch

• 29:59

with a bang in the new territory. That's what traditionally players in Western audiences

• 30:05

are accustomed to are these Eastern ported over MMOs and their quote unquote Alphas,

• 30:11

which are really just stress tests environments for a completed game in a server. Ours are

• 30:16

very much traditional Alphas. And what that means is the game is not complete. The game

• 30:23

is in a very core functionality perspective. Alpha 2 will be a bit more than that obviously

• 30:31

than Alpha 1 was. Those of you who participated in Alpha 1 saw just the basics and core functionality

• 30:36

of the game, you know, seeing nodes get stood up, seeing nodes collect experience and threshold

• 30:41

and having some service buildings you could build and character progression and skills

• 30:44

and abilities and dungeons and, you know, bosses and monsters and some basic crafting

• 30:50

and questing like that was Alpha 1. Now that was a large environment. It was 64 plus square

• 30:55

kilometers I think of space. But Alpha 2 is a much more fleshed out version of what Ashes

• 31:02

of Creation is. And so in that sense, it's still important to keep in mind it is not

• 31:08

a finished product and there's still a lot of stuff to be done. But this is an opportunity

• 31:12

for us again to touch point with the community and say, okay, on these particular systems,

• 31:17

on these particular content passes, on these particular gameplay features and loops like

• 31:24

combat and whatnot, how do you want to see changes? And then we validate what those change

• 31:29

desires are against what our intended list of deliverables already are, ensure that there's

• 31:34

one-to-one parallelism there. And then if there are things that we didn't see, we evaluate

• 31:38

based off of feedback from players, if we should incorporate them or iterate upon the

• 31:43

existing designs. Hopefully that answered your question.

• 31:49

All right. So this one's about the cosmetic store in Freeholds. When are we going to get

• 31:56

answers on the point regarding what the cosmetic skins correlate to on Freeholds as it's been

• 32:03

quite some time now since people have been waiting for an answer on that?

• 32:07

Yeah. So the majority of cosmetic Freehold skins, the vast majority of them are used

• 32:14

for the home. And to give you an example, kind of an idea of how the Freehold is partitioned,

• 32:23

Freehold serves kind of three main purposes. The first and foremost is as a location for

• 32:28

your home. And so because of that, a portion of the Freehold is dedicated to a home building.

• 32:36

And you cannot fill that space with workshops and or processing stations other than to place

• 32:44

a home there. The home offers a lot of things and the reasons why it's a core element of

• 32:49

the Freeholds is because of storage capability, excuse me, storage capability, furniture allotment

• 32:59

and placement. Furniture interacts very closely with processing as well as the crop rotations

• 33:08

that exist around the particular housing building. The other portion of the Freehold is dedicated

• 33:18

to workshops and these processing stations essentially. And processing stations are of

• 33:24

course a necessary component of taking gatherables into usable crafted goods essentially to fulfill

• 33:31

what recipes require in order to make items. And so the majority of cosmetics that are

• 33:40

out there from our pre-order packages are dedicated to that Freehold housing slot. Now

• 33:46

some are used for the workstations and it is the intent that our designs facilitate

• 33:54

multiple applicable cosmetics skins to those workstations as well as to the house. So you'll

• 34:01

see Freeholds that have the house applied cosmetic and some with the workstations applied.

• 34:08

Why is it taking so long for interpretive clarification? So the unique thing about the

• 34:14

Freehold approach and design is that there's a lot of testing that needs to be done around

• 34:20

that. And in Alpha 2 we will have our Freeholds available to test. And while we have the designs

• 34:30

in place for how processing interacts for gathering and how processing feeds the crafting

• 34:38

stations, some of that stuff might change. The allotment of buildings that can be placed

• 34:43

on the Freehold, the way that the buildings get placed on the Freehold, whether or not

• 34:46

we even scrapped the idea of dedicating a portion of the Freehold towards the house.

• 34:51

And because of that, because of the design limbo that's still pending our testing environment

• 34:56

in Alpha 2, we've not wanted to kind of give definitive definition around how those cosmetics

• 35:06

will be applied to the Freehold buildings in the event that that might change based

• 35:10

on iteration. But to give you perspective there, it's mainly going to be focused around

• 35:17

the Freehold house and then also having the ability to apply the skins to some of the

• 35:22

workstations as well. There is going to be a limited allotment of how many workstations

• 35:26

you can have stood up at any given time. There's a limited allotment of licenses that can be

• 35:30

applied to a Freehold in order to make some of those stations reach level two, tier two

• 35:34

and tier three. What those particularly are, we have some designs for them now, but that

• 35:40

most likely will not survive testing and will need to be changed and adapted and iterated

• 35:45

upon based off what the testing results provide. One other thing is that we don't really market

• 35:54

our pre-order packages. We don't market our cosmetics. We don't spend any marketing dollars

• 35:58

towards that end. And I want to reiterate something that I've always said in the past

• 36:04

and will continue to say going forward. It is not necessary to pre-order Ashes of Creation.

• 36:12

We do non-NDA testing periods. This is an opportunity where all of the community gets

• 36:18

to see what some of the testers are experiencing in Alpha 1 and in Alpha 2. And to be perfectly

• 36:24

honest, our testing environments are not catered or made for the enjoyment of players. It is

• 36:29

not a game that you are purchasing when you make a pre-order into Alpha and Beta for Ashes

• 36:34

of Creation. You are actually committing yourself to dedicating a portion of your time in testing

• 36:41

specific loops that might not be fun in order to accurately provide us the team with information

• 36:48

from a player invested perspective. And so in that sense, it is perfectly acceptable

• 36:55

and desired that players who are cautious or questioning whether or not this is the

• 37:00

game for them, some of the designs might speak to them or not, sit back and wait. You have

• 37:04

an opportunity to watch development, to continue to opine and give your thoughts and feelings

• 37:09

on something. And if the monetization structure of selling cosmetics is not your cup of tea,

• 37:14

then by all means, do not participate that. There are plenty of games that are out there

• 37:18

that do things differently. We're very upfront about how we want to operate with regards

• 37:23

to no pay to win, no pay to convenience. Our cosmetics are available if players want to

• 37:30

participate. They like collecting those things, that's fine. And they are part of building

• 37:34

the world. These cosmetics get used as part of NPCs, they get used as part of unique buildings

• 37:39

around different points of interest. They're already in line of production in order to

• 37:44

build the world of Ashes. They're just also available as part of the cosmetic purchases

• 37:50

as well. So hopefully that answers your question.

• 37:56

I'm gonna actually go ahead and elaborate on the freehold. What happens if you have

• 38:00

a freehold and a world event happens in the area? We know that some events can affect

• 38:05

buildings, can it also affect your freehold?

• 38:08

No. So the way that events work is there's a certain number of world conditions that

• 38:18

can serve as predicates for whether or not an event, the event manager and the event

• 38:23

system which Clayton has done a great amount of work on, on whether or not these predicates

• 38:28

satisfy the requirements in order to initiate an event. And those events have objectives.

• 38:36

Some of those objectives might be centralized at points of interest, some of the objectives

• 38:41

might be centralized at a particular node, some of those events might be predicated on

• 38:47

a particular objective that just randomly spawns out in the world in order to kind of

• 38:51

create player activity and engagement and soft friction between players, right? The

• 38:59

events do not target personal belongings, which means that your freehold is essentially

• 39:05

a personal belonging, right? It is a certificate, a deed in which you own, in which you have

• 39:11

constructed the necessary requirements in order to stand up any particular building on that

• 39:17

freehold. So in that sense, we don't want to create an event that targets you. We want

• 39:23

to create events that target, engage and incentivize your community. And there are a lot of different

• 39:30

communities in the aspect of Ashes of Creation. Remember, we're a non-faction based game,

• 39:35

which means we have to create a lot of micro communities. We have to create a lot of quote

• 39:39

unquote pseudo factions. And the reason we create those pseudo factions and they're opt

• 39:44

in like I choose which node I'm a part of, I choose what social organization I'm a part

• 39:48

of, I choose which religion I'm a part of, I choose which dungeon I choose to go and

• 39:52

you know, to XP at. The reason why we allow that amount of player agency is because we

• 40:01

create complimentary systems that incentivize soft friction between those communities, right?

• 40:07

And events is one of those systems that helps to facilitate the soft friction between communities.

• 40:13

So we don't want to focus them on an individual player. We want to focus them on the micro

• 40:16

communities or the pseudo factions that that player has chosen to be a part of.

• 40:07

Right. How do you go about designing some of the more old school systems such as XP debt, minimal

• 40:30

fast travel and open world rating that have really gone away for the most part in modern

• 40:35

MMOs? And how do you design them to be accepted again by a new generation of gamers? And what

• 40:55

made you decide to bring these back for ashes to begin with?

• 40:58

into that question. How do you design some of the more old school systems? Well, when looking

• 41:10

at the reasoning behind why some of those old systems existed, a lot of it was centralized

• 41:16

around the idea of risk versus reward. I mean, let's take a look at the three that you name,

• 41:24

XP debt, minimal fast travel and open world rating. Experience debt is a cost of failure. Experience

• 41:47

debt is the cost I pay for the bad choice. Right. And if you and I think to skip well, let me just

• 42:11

go through the two minimum fast travel. My location matters. And the time it travels

• 42:14

matters too. And each of these minimum fast travel Patriots narrowed down and left me only

• 42:20

with a minimum and a whole load of

• 42:28

greater value for every hospital and every railway station in the world. And you know,

• 42:39

one of the core fundamental philosophies as to how you design some of the more

• 42:44

old-school systems. To answer the second part of the question, we've moved away

• 42:49

from that modern MMOs. Modern MMOs have had a difficult time. Modern MMOs have

• 42:56

had a difficult time because of really three main probably issues. The first and

• 43:04

foremost is that the existing primary franchises of MMOs today, the big ones

• 43:13

out there, the WoWs and the Final Fantasies and the Guild Wars and the PDOs,

• 43:18

they've had a lot of time to create a social gravity well, which means that

• 43:26

MMOs are very social environments. That's what MMOs do best. From a business

• 43:33

perspective, that's why MMOs have long lifetime value for customers because of

• 43:38

the retention ability for that particular MMO to keep a customer

• 43:42

returning. And it's because of these social environments, the guild structures,

• 43:47

the cooperative questing environments, content completion that incentivizes

• 43:52

people to work with one another to create friends, online friendships and

• 43:56

environments. That is not the typical genre. That is not the

• 44:02

FIFA sporting genre. That's not the first person shooter genre as much.

• 44:09

It is not the... You can jump into those session-based games as a

• 44:12

solo player real easy and just kind of dip out when you're done and see your

• 44:16

individual performance. From a MMO perspective, those existing

• 44:22

franchises have a strong social gravity well. And so games when they launched to

• 44:28

compete with those existing franchises, they have wanted to remove friction.

• 44:38

Their approach philosophically to game design theory has been every time a

• 44:44

player experiences friction, that is an opportunity for us to lose the player.

• 44:50

And that can be a scary thought. Not that we place the emphasis or the

• 44:55

reasoning behind why should a player emphasize the reward of success because

• 45:02

the taste of defeat can be bitter. And so that creates an investment for the

• 45:08

player that's more long-term. But some of the perspective of the new modern MMOs

• 45:12

that have launched is we need to make our money back and we need to retain the

• 45:16

user for as long as possible. Let's reduce the friction for that player and

• 45:20

the opportunity for them to disassociate with the game at the taste of failure.

• 45:25

And so that's been a lot of the reasoning behind why modern MMOs go more towards

• 45:30

the realm of everyone's a winner. You get a trophy and you get a trophy.

• 45:34

Doesn't this trophy feel great? Big hoopla and rewards and now the screen is

• 45:39

shaking and shining and you've killed a trash monster. Now the whole world is

• 45:44

jumping up in joy for you. That is how I feel every time I jump into a new MMO.

• 45:50

And to be honest, it sucks ass. Excuse me. It sucks, right? It is a bad experience.

• 45:58

Oh my gosh, should we have said ourselves to... Margaret's going to kill me.

• 46:04

Okay, regardless, it is a trash experience. It does not feel good to be a winner

• 46:09

every time no matter what you do. That sucks. It feels good to lose sometimes.

• 46:18

It is the duality of that experience that makes the feel good moments actually feel

• 46:23

good. So, some more of those. So anyways, that's a little bit of a throwback to why

• 46:33

that sometimes I get a little bit animated. I apologize if there's anybody

• 46:45

who's not accustomed to that language. But regardless, that is one of the reasons

• 46:50

why I think modern MMOs moved away. A couple other reasons, of course, why is

• 46:55

there's a lot of content that those older MMOs had had the opportunity to kind of

• 46:59

release over the cadence of 10 years of like regular drops for new content.

• 47:04

That is another reason. I think it's important that a new generation of MMO

• 47:13

gamers have not had the opportunity to experience it before. Look, there is a

• 47:20

wall of willingness to try a game based on the graphics. I'm just going to say it

• 47:26

out loud. Graphics don't make a game. However, graphics can help attract an

• 47:33

audience. And for younger new players who have not seen, and I think this is a

• 47:40

standard third reason of why older MMOs don't see a lot of new player acquisition

• 47:45

from younger generations jumping in is because their graphics just aren't up to

• 47:51

par with some of the other games that are now being made in genres that it's

• 47:54

much easier and faster to make new games in. Okay? An MMO lifespan to develop a

• 48:00

product is a long time. And not a lot of studios are willing to commit to that

• 48:06

amount of time or that money, but the reward can be oh so sweet for those

• 48:11

studios. And I'm glad we're seeing now in today's age a little bit more of an

• 48:15

embrace for new MMORPG development. Thank goodness we get some new life there.

• 48:20

I think that there is going to be a golden opportunity for us as developers

• 48:27

to define what the new golden cohort of MMO players are. And I'm going to tell

• 48:33

you we have not seen that largest cohort yet. We have seen the golden cohort

• 48:38

continue to age. You know now we're in our mid 30s to near 40s some of us, right?

• 48:45

I think we're the golden cohort of that MMORPG genre. And I think that there is

• 48:51

going to be an opportunity for an entirely new generation over the course

• 48:56

of these next five years or so with some of the new projects that are on the

• 49:00

horizon, Ashes of Creation, for us to come along and say hey you didn't know

• 49:06

what a WoW launch looked like. You didn't know what a Final Fantasy launch looked

• 49:10

like. You didn't know what other these giant you know franchises that their big

• 49:15

launch felt like. And it was a really cool and interesting time to be at the

• 49:19

ground floor opportunity of a new MMORPG. Especially one with next generation

• 49:25

graphics and some intense player agency driven systems. I think that's super cool.

• 49:29

And I think that's going to be something that's going to be a sight to behold.

• 49:33

Apologize for the language.

• 49:36

Margaret we got to set the setting to whatever mature. Yeah I only laughed

• 49:45

because it resonated Steven. But moving on. For this one, wanted to address some

• 49:51

concerns around combat becoming more action focused or builder spender. You

• 49:56

know maybe less of a hybrid combat system. What's the current scope for the

• 50:00

combat system that and has intrepid deviated away from its original goals

• 50:05

with it? If so how? I wouldn't say that we've deviated. I would say that we've

• 50:13

iterated. I would say that okay so to reiterate what the current scope for our

• 50:22

combat system is. Is a hybrid between tab and action. And what that means is at its

• 50:28

essence what is the difference between tab and action? Action contains a lot of

• 50:35

player driven skill shots right? These are me reacting to the situation I'm

• 50:44

seeing. They're landing an aimed shot or timing and predictive behavior. It's a

• 50:53

lot of fluidity right? And mobility that's associated there. Obviously one of

• 51:00

the staple you know components of action combat is a reticle to differentiate

• 51:06

between the camera modes of course. Some of us have played tab targeted games

• 51:12

that emphasize those elements as well through templated AoEs. Templated

• 51:20

targeted AoEs right? Line attacks you know those those types of abilities

• 51:30

exist in tab target games as well. What we're trying to do with Ashes of

• 51:36

Creation is create a system that blends the two worlds together to a degree. And

• 51:42

offers players the opportunity to spec into more heavily skill oriented

• 51:47

abilities or tab targeted. Have that duality that's represented. So

• 51:55

we've changed a little bit about how we approach that over the course of the

• 51:59

last several years based off of player feedback. You know we did some APOC

• 52:03

testing around like really core action combat. And we did some testing around

• 52:14

Alpha 1. We did some split body iteration. We saw kind of player feedback there

• 52:22

with regards to root motion attacks and whatnot. So you know right now we have a

• 52:28

really talented strike team on the combat side that end on the encounter

• 52:33

side. That are making significant progress I think in moving forward the

• 52:38

combat designs around Ashes of Creation. You've seen a little bit of this in the

• 52:43

tank demonstration. And while it's not quite there yet it is getting closer to

• 52:49

there. And this is probably one of the most subtle driven components of

• 52:57

development is combat. Because it's the most tactile. Because it's the most

• 53:01

interfaced with. Because it is something you're constantly experiencing. And it's

• 53:07

also something that a lot of different people have a lot of different thoughts

• 53:10

on. Because there's a lot of different games out there that do combat

• 53:13

differently. And that's okay. And that's normal. And let's take the best parts of

• 53:17

those and incorporate them into what we want to make Ashes' combat identified

• 53:22

around. The simple truth of the matter is this and what people should walk away

• 53:26

from this question thinking. We will continue to iterate on combat until it

• 53:35

is in a place that collectively we as a community can say this may not be my

• 53:42

particular combat. But this combat is good. That is the driving force and

• 53:48

factor behind the development of combat. And that is how we are going to continue

• 53:52

to iterate upon it. Utilizing of course the player feedback from our community.

• 53:57

But also keeping you guys informed and up to date as we continually iterate on

• 54:02

combat. All right. My next question is on the character creator. When might we

• 54:12

expect to see a new iteration of the character creator? Has the team been

• 54:15

concentrating more on polishing the new faces in that we have already seen? Or

• 54:22

integrating more races with a similar degree of polish? The character creator

• 54:27

is currently scheduled in this milestone, milestone five, to get brought up to

• 54:37

speed with the most recent additions of our races. The additional features

• 54:46

that we're talking about with like different hairstyles and decals that can

• 54:51

be used, those might not be worked on this milestone. They might not be

• 54:56

worked on until next milestone. But I would say in anticipation for Alpha 2,

• 55:01

you will expect to see that the character creator is in a usable,

• 55:06

functional, and testable playable format for Alpha 2. It may not have all the

• 55:11

bells and whistles of course that we want to launch with, but it is going to

• 55:15

be a part of the Alpha 2 client that players will get to interface with. All

• 55:22

right. How far are you willing to go in response to player feedback on core

• 55:26

systems? For example, if there's a huge outcry at launch to have more instanced

• 55:30

dungeons and raids, is that something you would address? Are you standing firm on

• 55:34

the more open world aspect of it? Well, let's see here. So to first answer

• 55:45

that question, player feedback is important. However, the identity and the

• 55:51

vision of the game is not up for discussion. And so when we talk about

• 55:58

the core systems, tenets, and philosophies behind what the game that we're

• 56:03

trying to make is, we believe that the game we are trying to make resonates

• 56:09

with a large enough section of the MMORPG player base that it is a

• 56:14

sustainable and profitable venture for us to create that core game. Now, the

• 56:22

ancillary systems that live around the core philosophy of Ashes of Creation, or

• 56:27

the subtleties and what we need to do in order to make a particular system or

• 56:31

feature better, right? That is why we interface with. That is the reason that

• 56:36

we want to collect player feedback. The identity of the game, when you leave

• 56:42

that up to council design, so to speak, right? That's when you start running

• 56:48

into an identity crisis. And I think that if the objective of a particular

• 56:54

team is to answer the call of every player, that ten times out of ten,

• 56:58

they're going to fail. And I do not believe that that is the way that you

• 57:02

go about creating a product. I think that you identify your golden cohort,

• 57:07

you identify your core audience, and you say, hopefully with this sense, I am a

• 57:12

member of that core audience. I know what that core audience desires from a

• 57:16

10,000 foot perspective. I am going to build that, right? And you stick with it.

• 57:22

And the moment you have voices that come from a board or that come from a, you

• 57:27

know, an executive or that come from a monetization guy, and they say, hey, this

• 57:34

is made a lot of money over here. Let's make some money over here, right? That is

• 57:38

when you start running into the problems. That is when you start running into the

• 57:44

identity crisis. And that is not up for discussion, so to speak. But as I said,

• 57:54

the subtleties of implementation, the iterative portions of a particular

• 57:59

feature or system, those are where player feedback matter. And I'm going to tell

• 58:03

you, it's a difficult job parsing through feedback. It is a very difficult one.

• 58:11

Roshan and Vaknar and Margaret and Peter, you know, they do great jobs on the

• 58:20

community side, and not a lot of teams invest money into community teams this

• 58:26

early on and as early as Ashes did. But it's necessary in order to distill the

• 58:33

feedback into actionable items. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult thing.

• 58:44

So with server quests that can only be done once and that begin certain events

• 58:49

in the game, how will this affect future expansions if two servers don't follow

• 58:54

the same major quest paths?

• 58:56

That's a good question. So obviously, you know, when our story arcs have branches,

• 59:07

and it depends kind of on the story arc itself, right? We have these major story

• 59:12

arcs, we have minor story arcs, we have personal story arcs, stuff like that.

• 59:17

They all tie into a metanarrative. And when we are releasing expansions, we

• 59:27

throw back to more gross generalized ideas of a particular story arc. So for

• 59:35

example, if little Timmy dies at the end of one particular story arc, there might

• 59:41

be five or six different ways he could die, depending on which story arc maybe

• 59:47

gets interfaced with or which chapter, how a particular chapter might end. But

• 59:52

when we refer back to little Timmy dying versus living in a future expansion, we

• 59:59

don't need to get granular in how little Timmy died, right, out of the six possible

• 1:00:04

scenarios. We just need to say, poor little Timmy died. Isn't that sad? Right?

• 1:00:09

So in that sense, we keep it as binary, as restricted in the number of ways that

• 1:00:18

it can occur. But in addition, the reality is we're going to be creating new

• 1:00:22

storylines with the future expansions, and we're going to do our best to kind of

• 1:00:27

call back into what a particular story might have been with on a server. But the

• 1:00:32

core aspect of these story arcs is to kind of create that unique aspect of

• 1:00:39

player-driven storylines within a particular expansion or launch, and then

• 1:00:45

do our best to call back to them as we release future expansions and redefine

• 1:00:49

particularly those areas.

• 1:00:55

My question is in regards to character level and artisan level. We know that

• 1:00:59

currently there are two separate things. That being said, what prevents a player

• 1:01:03

from staying level one and parting up with a level 50 player to then gather

• 1:01:08

level 50 resources in the high zones? That way, anyone who wants to take those

• 1:01:12

resources will have to kill the gatherer who is level one and get a large amount

• 1:01:16

of corruption for killing a level one as a level 50.

• 1:01:20

Well, there's a lot that goes into it. First of all, gathering higher level

• 1:01:26

resources requires significant advancement within a particular

• 1:01:32

profession for that gatherable resource. So if I'm a miner and I want to access

• 1:01:37

the highest possible mineral, I need to be a master miner. And in order to

• 1:01:43

achieve the master miner status, I am gonna be one gaining adventuring level

• 1:01:49

experience through that process because many of those quest lines, many of those

• 1:01:55

achievements are facilitated through quest lines. Some of those quest lines

• 1:01:59

interface with adventuring difficulties that are out in the wild at certain

• 1:02:04

levels. So that's going to predicate me... That's going to be a predicate for

• 1:02:10

me to achieve a certain level in order to complete some of these quest lines

• 1:02:14

and achieve that master status. So you will likely not see the ability of a

• 1:02:19

level one alt character having the access to high level mineral mining or

• 1:02:26

any other type of gatherable out there.

• 1:02:28

That's one thing to prevent it. And then the other thing is...

• 1:02:35

Let's see here again, higher tiers. So that's the primary method really in

• 1:02:40

which we prevent that. Anyone who wants to take these resources who kills a

• 1:02:44

gatherer will get a large amount of corruption. But the truth of the matter

• 1:02:46

is, if you're killing a gatherer, it is gonna be entirely possible that a

• 1:02:52

level 30 or 35 person might achieve the rank of master miner and be out

• 1:02:57

in the level 50 areas mining that gatherable. And to a degree, whoever

• 1:03:05

wants to kill them is gonna suffer the consequences of a larger amount of

• 1:03:08

corruption gained because of the disparity in level between that

• 1:03:11

character's adventuring level and the character who killed them. And that's

• 1:03:14

part of the disincentivization of the corruption system. And that's part of

• 1:03:20

the novelty of player agency within a particular system like the Artisanship

• 1:03:25

one, where maybe my first focus as a player is to level up my master mining

• 1:03:32

profession as quickly as possible. And that exceeds what would naturally have

• 1:03:36

been my character level or adventuring level advancing alongside it. That's, I

• 1:03:41

think, unique. That's, I think, interesting. That is, I think, what players

• 1:03:45

want to have the choice to be able to do if they want to. Oh, and yes, you

• 1:04:00

guys can't hear this, but we just heard a very lovely Margaret talking to us.

• 1:04:03

So we were awkwardly silent there for a second. Margaret was talking to us.

• 1:04:08

It's noon, but I'm fine with continuing this questions if you guys wanna

• 1:04:13

keep going a little bit. Yeah, I'm down. I'm enjoying it. All right. Will there

• 1:04:21

be any perks to leveling in all once you have a character max level to make the

• 1:04:25

experience more convenient, such as account wide rep mounts leveling gear?

• 1:04:29

Or will each character start from absolute scratch when you start a new

• 1:04:32

one? Each character will start from scratch. However, with that being said,

• 1:04:39

there are certain account based considerations that we're making, such as

• 1:04:46

the ability to share warehouse space between alternate characters on the same

• 1:04:57

account, the ability to utilize housing and furniture that might be in the

• 1:05:03

housing and or workstations that might be on a freehold across characters on

• 1:05:07

a particular account. So in that sense, there is a bit of a leg up for players

• 1:05:13

who have achieved things on their primary character. However, at the same

• 1:05:18

time, there should not be like experience boosters and things that kind of hasten

• 1:05:27

the development of that particular... They could share... We are an open economy

• 1:05:31

system. So if they wanted to give them the best gear set for each particular

• 1:05:35

level grade, players could do that. But that I think is normal. That's what most

• 1:05:41

alt creating characters want to kind of experience. But they'll have to go

• 1:05:45

through and complete all the same quest lines. They'll have to complete the same

• 1:05:47

leveling process. They will have to do what it takes to level up that particular

• 1:05:52

alt.

• 1:05:53

All right. So the next question that we've got is going to be regarding the

• 1:06:08

class composition and design revolving around the Holy Trinity.

• 1:06:15

Okay.

• 1:06:16

Yeah. If that is the case, where does a non-healing support fall into that

• 1:06:23

concept of design and how will players who choose that path remain relevant

• 1:06:28

throughout the gameplay loops?

• 1:06:30

Well, this is a bit of a throwback again design. This is a more old school idea

• 1:06:37

of the Holy Trinity and where non-healing support classes fall into that mix.

• 1:06:41

Generally, you see in my experience, most non-healing support classes fall into

• 1:06:49

between the hybrid of support to tank or support to DPS, right? So they tend to

• 1:06:54

fill a hybrid role. The bard has an opportunity to fill that space. It is a

• 1:07:02

very integral component to maximizing a particular group or archetypes ability

• 1:07:10

to perform through the use of their supportive and buff oriented abilities.

• 1:07:17

As we've talked in the past, many of these are support based on proximity. Some

• 1:07:22

of them are support based on targeted buffs. We're going to be following the

• 1:07:28

format of abilities that adhere to dances, songs, and stories when it relates

• 1:07:33

to the bard and the scope of their particular ability sets. Each of those

• 1:07:38

provide a certain type of benefit to other characters within proximity.

• 1:07:46

The idea here, again, pointing back to a more old school Trinity design, is that

• 1:07:53

no party is complete without the non-healing support class, which is the

• 1:07:59

bard in Ashes of Creation. So that is, I think, a role that a lot of players out

• 1:08:08

there enjoy. And you'll be able to perform as that class in either a DPS or

• 1:08:14

tank oriented and perhaps even depending on your archetype selection, healing

• 1:08:19

oriented as well. Obviously not to the degree that a primary archetype cleric

• 1:08:23

would, but yeah. My next question goes back into the Alpha 2. Do you plan on

• 1:08:34

introducing it all in a steadily compounding way, only adding new features

• 1:08:38

or content or in a cyclical manner so certain systems are turned on and off to

• 1:08:45

test while others are iterated upon and alternately cycled out? Probably a little

• 1:08:52

of both. I would say it's going to depend on the particular system. So you'll

• 1:09:02

see drops where we update Alpha 2 and want a lot of focus around one

• 1:09:09

particular system. And in order to make sure that we are seeing that level of

• 1:09:15

interaction, we might disable certain systems or take them down to be

• 1:09:19

iterated upon. The benefit of being in a production environment is that we make

• 1:09:27

releases and that cadence of our release candidate is predicated on an amount of

• 1:09:33

work done within some number of sprints, gets tested internally QA wise, and then

• 1:09:41

gets promoted out to a production environment. Those will tend to be larger

• 1:09:45

drops for Alpha 2. So you may see whole systems come online at some different

• 1:09:52

points throughout the Alpha 2 testing, entirely new different areas, entirely

• 1:09:57

new packages of narrative content and POIs. That is going to adhere to kind of

• 1:10:04

what our development schedule and release cadence will look like. All right.

• 1:10:13

Will dialogue choices have any impact on the quests in regards to how NPCs

• 1:10:18

respond to you or is the overall outcome of it or sorry, will they have any

• 1:10:23

impact on the quest or regards how they respond to you or the overall outcome of

• 1:10:27

that quest or is it more of just a role playing perspective without any major

• 1:10:30

impact? No, the dialogue choices are intended to provide an impact both with

• 1:10:39

the response of the NPC, it might also serve as predicates for other systems if

• 1:10:46

there are certain paths chosen within the dialogue tree. It might unlock different

• 1:10:56

side arcs and storylines that other players may not experience. The dialogue

• 1:11:05

trees are not meaningless. They're meant to provide gameplay related context.

• 1:11:14

So in the last developer live stream, you had mentioned blood magic is an illegal

• 1:11:19

magic which has us curious. So we've seen elemental and arcane forms of magic,

• 1:11:24

but will players be able to wield blood magic? What are the different schools of

• 1:11:28

magic you are considering for the game? Well, so first when we say that blood

• 1:11:36

magic is illegal, right? We're talking about in the context of a normal

• 1:11:42

everyday player who's a citizen of Vera having come from Sanctus, you are

• 1:11:47

adhering to the local laws and guidance from nation governments and or node

• 1:11:56

governments, right? To be a good upstanding citizen of Vera, you adhere to

• 1:12:02

these laws. The ability to wield blood magic might be seen in some storylines,

• 1:12:13

we'll see, that is left to the players to experience and discover. Those types

• 1:12:21

of choices might have ramifications on your character and or ramifications

• 1:12:28

within storylines. There are a lot of different schools of magic. In fact,

• 1:12:36

we haven't released our style guide for VFX and whatnot, but when we talk about

• 1:12:42

how do we create a blood corruption setting? Well, what is the associated

• 1:12:48

colors? What's the shape language of blood magic? This flowing river, you saw

• 1:12:55

some of them in the VFX of the zone and in Carfin, you saw the mist in the

• 1:13:01

deep red saturation. Each of the environments and the magics and what we

• 1:13:09

create has an associated style guide that includes color wheels and palettes

• 1:13:15

across different influences, whether it be transformation, summoning magic,

• 1:13:24

arcane magic, elemental magic, blood corruption, regular corruption, chaos.

• 1:13:33

There's a whole bunch of influences that exist across the player abilities,

• 1:13:38

but also across the environments and the POIs and unique to each of the cultures

• 1:13:44

that require defined style guides associated with them. We have a lot of

• 1:13:51

different schools of magic that we have in the game. Whether players will be

• 1:13:59

able to wield blood magic is up to the different storylines you all explore.

• 1:14:05

Going back to Alpha 2, do you plan on introducing all of the primary

• 1:14:10

archetypes before adding the secondary archetype systems into the test?

• 1:14:15

Additionally, once the secondary archetype system is added, will you want

• 1:14:19

to test it with only a few classes at a time or release all classes available

• 1:14:24

at the point in development? So we may release some limited scope of the

• 1:14:30

secondary archetype selection in the augmentation system without having all

• 1:14:35

of the base archetypes released in order to test some things. In addition,

• 1:14:40

it's more than likely that we'll be releasing secondary selections one at a

• 1:14:46

time or a few at a time, as opposed to waiting until all are kind of ready

• 1:14:50

to be released for testing so that we can collect appropriate information

• 1:14:57

from play testers in as fast a setting as possible.

• 1:15:06

Do you have any concerns on players eventually discovering a meta server

• 1:15:11

build with nodes due to players heading to specific nodes and regions because

• 1:15:14

they find that content more enjoyable? And if so, how would you go about

• 1:15:18

getting players to shift around the world to break up the meta?

• 1:15:22

Yeah, I'm not too concerned about that, to be honest, because

• 1:15:25

the way that we facilitate the world kind of taking into account player

• 1:15:34

activity to manifest different story arcs and or world states is based off

• 1:15:42

of population, start location, heat mapping of player movement and activity.

• 1:15:48

A lot of that stuff is built in a way that almost ensures very different

• 1:15:57

outcomes from a world state perspective across different servers.

• 1:16:02

Now, if players had a concerted effort in order to elicit similar world

• 1:16:11

building achievements, it might be possible for them to do that.

• 1:16:16

It might be possible for them to do so in very bespoke areas like standing

• 1:16:21

up a node in a particular zone. But that's the first level of interaction

• 1:16:27

when it comes to deciding what content trickles out of these POIs,

• 1:16:33

what supporting structures in the world change the zones.

• 1:16:39

It's not just one level deep. When that node gets manifest,

• 1:16:43

it has a relationship based with other nodes. Some of those relationships

• 1:16:49

get told through the VASL system, some get told through reputation,

• 1:16:52

some get told through particular initiatives that a node might undertake.

• 1:16:59

And not everything that happens in the world is predicated on a node

• 1:17:03

reaching a certain level. That's one predicate system.

• 1:17:07

There's a whole bunch of predicates that are sprinkled throughout different

• 1:17:12

layers of content and that need to be achieved in order to elicit

• 1:17:18

a response from the server or from the server world manager.

• 1:17:22

So, I'm not too concerned with reaching a quote unquote meta across servers.

• 1:17:29

I think it's going to be possible and expected that players in certain areas

• 1:17:34

will yield similar outcomes to things. And that's okay. That's cool.

• 1:17:38

I think it's interesting if players have a concerted effort across server

• 1:17:41

to interact with one another, learn from their actions, mistakes, successes,

• 1:17:46

and effectuate that on the server they're on. That's interesting.

• 1:17:50

But I don't believe we'll see a metaphor. I think that the intricacies are too great

• 1:17:55

when it comes to how predicates are formed in order to elicit world state changes.

• 1:18:02

So, we haven't talked about the Tonar, sorry, Tolnar recently.

• 1:18:06

The Tonar!

• 1:18:07

Who do you consider to be the true natives or traditional people of Vera?

• 1:18:11

Could we be seen as foreigners trying to colonize Vera or would the Tonar view us differently than that?

• 1:18:22

How do I want to say this? So, I think when we talk about the Tonar and we're talking about

• 1:18:31

how will the Tonar perceive their ancestors, the children's children's children of their ancestors

• 1:18:42

returning back to Vera, I think majority of the disposition is going to be

• 1:18:52

these are the descendants of those responsible for the tragedy that befell.

• 1:18:56

Our world. And so that is one way to look at it.

• 1:19:04

And I think that you'll see a disparity between the younger Tonar and the older Tonar

• 1:19:12

and their reception to those who are coming new. I think that's normal. I think that's expected.

• 1:19:22

I think that creates an interesting tension. And I think that is a nice contextualization

• 1:19:30

to some of the stories that might be told and interfacing between the Tonar cultures

• 1:19:34

and those of the returning descendants.

• 1:19:41

How advanced is it going to be? How advanced is going to be the system of hiring and customizing

• 1:19:48

laborers on your freehold?

• 1:19:55

Relatively advanced. I think there's a few paths that you can take when it comes to training up

• 1:20:01

those types of NPC aids. What things that they can do. I think there's going to be different tiers

• 1:20:10

and costs associated with higher level assistance on the freehold. But the same is true for

• 1:20:20

mercenaries that nodes can hire or castles can place with regards to sieges and or wars and or

• 1:20:27

events. Like you have a very base functioning level of mercenaries with set of equipment and

• 1:20:34

skill rotations and behavior trees that are possible at a fundamental level. And then as you

• 1:20:40

upgrade the nodes barracks, as you might upgrade, you might achieve certain relics that you gain

• 1:20:50

or enact certain policies that allow you to dial up the stats of those mercenaries. The same thing

• 1:20:56

is true for the NPCs that can exist on freeholds, except those might be more predicated to

• 1:21:03

service buildings that relate to artisanship. And that might be one of the reasons why it's

• 1:21:09

beneficial to own a freehold in one particular node versus another is based off of what amenities

• 1:21:17

are now available to your freehold as a result of that node selection. Hopefully that answers

• 1:21:24

the question. I think we have time. Let's do one more question from each of you.

• 1:21:29

All right. Nice. You spoke in the last stream about how eventually Intrepid would hold off on

• 1:21:37

Unreal Engine updates until post-launch, but didn't state if you're considering to upgrade to 5.2.

• 1:21:44

Is that something you're planning on doing? And if so, what features from it are you planning

• 1:21:48

on utilizing? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're nowhere near close to stopping our continued

• 1:21:55

updates with Epic with Unreal. So 5.2 is on the radar. We might even skip, we might wait to do,

• 1:22:05

you know, based off of the next iteration 5.21 or 5.3. It just kind of depends. We have a technical

• 1:22:12

team that evaluates what's on the horizon with updates from Epic on Unreal, and we kind of make

• 1:22:20

that decision based off of the team's needs for particular features that might be being released

• 1:22:26

in the future. But usually we want to give Epic the opportunity to release the first version of

• 1:22:31

a particular major update and then go with the 0.1 version of that, just from a safekeeping

• 1:22:39

perspective. All right. So are there any mechanics or systems that you wanted to add to the game but

• 1:22:47

haven't because you wanted to ensure that your development schedule stays on track? And if so,

• 1:22:52

what are they? Oh, yeah. What are they? There's a lot. We, you know, generally when we're doing our

• 1:23:01

internal meetings and reviews and a great idea comes up, you know, we throw it in the backlog

• 1:23:07

post-launch. That's kind of our, generally our MO when it comes to great ideas. I mean, because,

• 1:23:16

you know, the reality is as we continue to go through features, we develop those features,

• 1:23:21

we test those features and iterate on those features, a lot of new ideas and opportunities

• 1:23:26

come about for the team to think about, well, wouldn't it be great if this feature actually did

• 1:23:31

this and interacted with another feature over here that did this. And so we're trying to make

• 1:23:36

sure that another feature over here did this. And in some situations, we'll evaluate and determine

• 1:23:42

whether or not, you know, that type of interaction is really necessary to demonstrate what the core

• 1:23:47

loop of a particular system might be trying to demonstrate and we'll make the changes necessary.

• 1:23:53

But in the majority of cases, we try to stay cognizant of, hey, here is our MVP necessary

• 1:24:01

list of core integrated systems in order to achieve the identity of the game that we're

• 1:24:05

in the core gameplay loops that we want players to experience. And we work towards that end from a

• 1:24:11

launch perspective and anything that's added that sounds good, or we want to incorporate,

• 1:24:16

we throw it into the expansion bucket, right? There's an opportunity for us to, you know,

• 1:24:21

we need stuff obviously for us to expand upon and for us to continue development post-launch.

• 1:24:25

So that's generally our MO with regards to new ideas and stuff.

• 1:24:36

Okay. Given that you said that these story arcs are kind of like a module that get placed into

• 1:24:46

the world, do you plan to sell or release your Ashes of Creation themed TTRPG module for other

• 1:24:51

DMs to use? You know, there's a lot of things I want to do when we launch Ashes. One is, of course,

• 1:25:04

a module that's set in the world of Ashes of Creation. Yes, I would love to release a throwback

• 1:25:10

to the original campaign. It's very different from where Ashes of Creation is today. But I think

• 1:25:19

it's, there's a lot of overlap between gamers who enjoy tabletop RPGs and MMOs and, you know,

• 1:25:30

one of the benefits of telling a story through different venues, mediums and

• 1:25:35

systems is that you reach a broader audience because not all of us like the same things.

• 1:25:42

And I think the story of Ashes is a rich one. And because of that, telling it through

• 1:25:48

multiple mediums is definitely a desire. From a board game perspective, I'm a huge board game

• 1:25:55

nerd. I love playing board games. A lot of us at the office do. I would love to tell the story

• 1:26:01

of Ashes through a board game as well. I would love to tell the story of Ashes through a RTS.

• 1:26:07

I would love to tell it through film and television. There's a lot of ways I think that

• 1:26:12

the story can be told. It doesn't all have to be focused around the return to Vera. There's a lot

• 1:26:18

of different opportunities across the many thousands of years of timeline that Vera's

• 1:26:23

existed that we can tell the story and even other aspects of that. So, yeah. Yeah. To answer your

• 1:26:31

question, the desire is a yes post our flagship product launch, which is the MMO.

• 1:26:40

All right. How exactly does the Constellation system work? You stated that it'll be very

• 1:26:46

relevant to the system, such as narrative, empowering abilities and items, and gathering

• 1:26:50

relics. But how do they tie into these systems exactly? So the Constellation system is another

• 1:26:59

predicate system. And when I say it's a predicate system, it means that certain conditions will yield

• 1:27:11

certain Constellations being available to pursue, discover and achieve. And they span the realm of

• 1:27:20

interfacing across adventuring level, artisanship, node, relics, policies. There's a lot of different

• 1:27:30

things that Constellations can touch because at its essence, it is a predicate system.

• 1:27:36

Now, once players have achieved identifying a certain location that yields a Constellation,

• 1:27:45

and they've checked off that box, okay, I have achieved this thing, it can serve its purpose for

• 1:27:51

kicking off a new storyline for that individual, kicking off a new storyline for that individual's

• 1:27:57

micro communities or pseudo factions, if necessary, right? It can serve as a broader kickoff. One

• 1:28:03

person's discovers it, three, four or 500 people get to participate now in it. That's an opportunity.

• 1:28:10

It can yield the location of an achievable world relic that can be brought back home to a particular

• 1:28:17

node. You know, there's, there's a lot of different things that are possible in order to see the

• 1:28:24

Constellation and to actually achieve that, it could be just as simple as looking at your character's

• 1:28:32

viewport into the night sky at a certain location at a certain time. It could be far more in depth,

• 1:28:38

which is killing a certain raid boss for a particular number of times until it drops a

• 1:28:44

particular item that yields a map that sends you to a location that sends as a, like, there's a lot

• 1:28:49

of different layers that can get added on how do we manifest a particular Constellation.

• 1:28:56

The intent here is to provide an immersive system that keeps the player in the world and allows

• 1:29:04

their in-world movement and interactions and immersiveness to yield a result that's unique.

• 1:29:12

And that, I think, is a fun and compelling interaction, especially as it relates to adventuring.

• 1:29:23

I, was that our last question?

• 1:29:27

Oh, we have one more. We have one final question.

• 1:29:30

What do we got?

• 1:29:39

I apologize. I had a technical issue there. So as it stands, final question, what is the biggest

• 1:29:45

obstacle preventing Intrepid Studios from being ready to begin Alpha 2 testing?

• 1:29:51

The biggest obstacle.

• 1:29:56

I think right now it's content production.

• 1:29:57

I think our obstacle is the sheer size and complexity of our systems, of course.

• 1:30:06

The necessary time for our teams to complete the content to fill those systems so that the data

• 1:30:14

that we collect from play testing those particular loops is compelling and indicative of accurate

• 1:30:23

player responses and player activity. So there is a certain level to which the Alpha 2 client

• 1:30:31

and world and experience must be brought in order for us to facilitate the accurate collection of

• 1:30:37

data that we can then inform decisions based off of. And that is a moving point. Right now,

• 1:30:47

we have on paper and our production schedule of what that needs to be. But as we approach the end

• 1:30:54

of milestones and or sprints and we do our inspect, review, reflect process, we get to

• 1:31:01

re-articulate where that point lives because each of those is a touch point. So, look, we're

• 1:31:10

building a massive MMO. Massive. To the likes of which I'm not sure have been done in a fantasy

• 1:31:19

setting before at launch. Now, we have brought aboard a phenomenal team, incredibly talented.

• 1:31:31

We are doing it in a way that I think is right with the transparency and the

• 1:31:37

connectivity to the community and the opportunity for people to watch the development of it.

• 1:31:43

And the truth of the matter is that all of us want to play the game. All of us want to play Ashes.

• 1:31:52

Even if it's just Alpha 2. So, you know, our focus is to continue down the path of production

• 1:32:03

and completing what's necessary for us to have a successful Alpha 2 test. And nothing can be said

• 1:32:13

or done to hasten that process in a manner that is not already conducive to how we are approaching

• 1:32:20

production towards Alpha 2 already. So, with that in mind, you know, patience is key. Spending the

• 1:32:30

time necessary is always going to be a good yield on investment. And I think that being a part of the

• 1:32:39

journey is beneficial both to the project and to you guys as players. But ultimately, our focus

• 1:32:46

will remain on the obstacle of producing the necessary content for us to achieve a meaningful

• 1:32:52

test period with Alpha 2. Yay, we did it! Thank you. And content plug. I like the typing.

• 1:33:09

Guys, is that Margaret in the back? I like that. That's cool. Guys, I want to thank each of you for

• 1:33:16

joining me today. Obviously, you guys represent a very core audience section of the Ashes of Creation

• 1:33:23

community. People have been following the project for a long time. Hopefully, the questions that you

• 1:33:32

asked today, I think, successfully scratched some of the outstanding itches that the community has

• 1:33:39

with regards to systems design and the project that they're working on. And I think that's

• 1:33:44

pretty important. So, as you're all familiar with, the system design and the project and development

• 1:33:51

as a whole, I always enjoy chatting with fellow MMO lovers and members of our community, of course,

• 1:33:59

about sometimes I can get a little overly passionate. Apologize about that as well. But,

• 1:34:03

you know, I always enjoy having these conversations. But I'd love each of you guys to just kind of give

• 1:34:10

a little bit of a shout out to you guys and your communities. And, yeah.

• 1:34:18

I'm Chibi Bree. I'm from the Golden Feather Tavern. And you can find us anywhere slash TGF Tavern.

• 1:34:25

So, Twitch, YouTube, etc. And you can find me over on YouTube at youtube.com slash RichieSH.

• 1:34:33

And to catch up with myself or any of the Pathfinders, just go to ashesHQ.com or

• 1:34:41

the corresponding YouTube where the Pathfinder podcast is at. Or you can catch me on my own

• 1:34:45

channel on YouTube, not YouTube, but Twitch, which is just some work. So.

• 1:34:51

Awesome. Well, from everybody here that joined me today and all of you out in the audience,

• 1:34:57

thank you very much for coming and being a part of this. We love and appreciate our community at

• 1:35:02

Ashes of Creation and your guys' participation makes this game a better game. So with that being

• 1:35:07

said, we will see you again at the end of this month when we showcase the new Mage update.

• 1:35:15

And until then, I wish you guys the most amazing April and we will chat with you all soon.

• 1:35:20

Bye, everyone. Bye.

• 1:35:23

Bye y'all.