May 28th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid Studios provides a swathe of Alpha 1 progress updates and showcase Castle Sieges

Quick Updates:

• • Alpha 1 tests are taking place nearly every wednesday each week.
  • Next Alpha 1 test is on June 2nd, 2021.
  • The new content creator program is live and you can now apply for it.
  • A secondary content creator program is being worked on.
  • Large scale Castle Siege content was shown on stream.
  • Jeffrey Bard has left the studio to pursue his passion in the VR genre.

General Update: We’re doing the alpha 1 tests almost every wednesday, which can be joined with alpha 1 access- We’re still under Visual NDA, but you can still talk about it. Also regarding the new Content Creator Program, it is now live- However since there were so many applicants we will also be making a secondary content creator program which will sort of be like a bootcamp to train creators, more information on this later though!

 

Studio Update: As usual, we are always hiring and have onboarded some great people, including 3 additional producers, some new engineers and a recruiter. The studio move is underway, the server rooms are getting set up next week and hopefully around the middle of June we will be back in the studio. We’ll also be conducting a job fair to onboard new hires, excited to have our monthly potlucks at work. Remember that we’re still in a technical pre-alpha, working on a lot of back end things that you don’t always see visually. Huge props to the testers because they’ve been doing an amazing job at giving us the data and feedback that we need in order to polish and work on the things that we need to work on.

For those unaware, we did have to give a bittersweet farewell to Jeffrey Bard yesterday- I remember we had initially interviewed Jeff for a lead writer position, but he ended up being a jack of all trades and hit the spots where we needed him when we were a small team. Jeff wanted to pursue his passion of Virtual Reality and we’re incredibly grateful to him and wish him the best. I personally shared a lot of passion and stories with Jeff about MMO’s. 

 

Siege Gameplay Footage Notes: All siege footage was recorded in 4k on a widescreen monitor using a GTX 1080. In the future we want to have high octane massive battles without having to worry about your computer blowing up. Currently we’re still working on further optimizing for larger scale content so that we can have fluid 250v250 battles. To do this we’ve been running numerous profiles on the servers in order to essentially play whack-a-mole with bugs and knock issues out one by one.

The current damage numbers are in the wind, we’re not focused on that at the moment- The current focus is establishing the core functionality of the game like “When you push button, the enemy should get hit”. We’re reworking a couple of major systems already to have them better scale for content later. The combat is also heavily being worked on, lots of changes are being made and things are being tested now so that we can build on them later. We’re also working on the rotational movement and rotational animations, right now all attacks are root motion type attacks- We’ll be trying some split body animation next, where your upper body is able to attack while the lower body is able to move. Currently we are in root motion animation because the split body felt floaty 2 years ago. 

A lot of feedback was received on being able to simply hold down the Q key or the Left mouse button in order to attack with your weapon. Traditionally in other MMOs you rarely use your weapon attack. However in AoC, weapon attacks are important, in the planned skill system, you would be able to spec into certain weapon proficiencies so that you could acquire certain flavours to your weapon attack, like being able to proc bleeds on back attacks. Thus weapon attacks play a large role in the skill system for Ashes of Creation. Often other companies reuse things such as launchers and patchers from the past- We as a new studio have built everything from scratch, which allows us to customize tools as we need them. Thankfully we have a team of veteran developers that know exactly what we require.

After August 2021, our engineering team will be working on figuring out the goals for the next testing phase and then have tasks assigned for everyone. Once that’s been locked in, production starts making decisions on what the date for the next milestone will look like. Since Alpha 1 and Alpha 2 are critical testing periods as this is when the majority of large changes and overhauls will be made. 

 

QnA Session

Q: Will we be able to repair siege equipment like ballistas and trebuchets?
A: Yes, you will be able to repair siege equipment.

Q: Will there be diminishing returns on CC?
A: Yes there will be diminishing returns on CC added in later.

Q: How will incurred death penalties, particularly EXP debt, change at max level?
A: There’s a few approaches to the death penalties especially in regard to EXP debt. When you die multiple times, it will take larger chunks of exp debt percentage. As we run through testing and play with numbers, we will change things as this is a process that will be adjusted as necessary.

Q: Will ships have similar permissions and structures as freeholds? Like being able to summon a ship even when the owner is offline?
A: No. Only the owner can summon the ship. You can customize whether your party or raid can utilize weapons/functions etc.

Q: Are there any involuntary item sinks planned for gear? Since over-enchanting and deconstructing are player choices.
A: Yes there are, if you are corrupt and you die you can lose gear. As for a sink, unlike other games where you simply use gold to repair, you will require additional materials which were used to craft the item in order to repair it.

Google Doc Link