November 2nd Livestream Transcription

– The second 24 Hour Pathfinder Campaign.

October 31st Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios hosts their Halloween stream and shares what they’ve learned from Apocalypse and the winners of the Halloween Event.

Quick Updates:

• Extra Life 24-hour Pathfinder/DnD Livestream on November 2nd (10AM PDT)
• Siege mode has been coming along quite well, will be showing a bit today.
• There’s a couple of new hires that will be updated on the intrepid site soon.
• The creative director’s letter is still waiting on a few things to be confirmed.

Castle Sieges Update:
The destruction mechanics for siege are being finalized. Balance is being worked on, layouts for the siege maps are being finalized. Finalizing strategic objectives and how it interacts with players to determine the flow of battle. We found that couple of the warrior and mage abilities didnt work too well, so we’re changing them up to adjust them and make them more fun. 

 

Extra Life 24-hour Charity Stream:
The Pathfinder DnD campaign will be set 50 years after returning to the world of Verra after the Apocalypse. The various races have come in and established cities and sibling cities under their node area of influence. The players will be part of the frontguard militia and are part of different factions depending on where there allegiance lies like the mage order, the ranger order – these various organizations are facing the various threats to protect the nodes, it’s going to be a sandbox campaign and it will be up to the participants to decide which threats they go after. As their choices will have consequences. Also if you want to get Margaret killed in the campaign you can buy that with a donation. Some of the players will know each other beforehand, others will have heard of one another before. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being most ruthless, we’re going to be at a 12. There will be intermissions with board games and donation milestones where you can influence the pathfinder campaign directly. 

 

Lore Tidbit: The Verdant Keeper are a sect of people that keep track of all the things that are necessary to have successful crops and various other things that are necessary for a society to keep growing. During the transition from Sanctus to Verra (The start of the game where players are returning to reclaim the world), these people had to re-learn how to grow things without magic. So they spend their time learning about the world in a scientific way, they keep track of all the seasons, changing times and the years/decades;/centuries that go by to create a map for themselves and the civilizations that they support to help with growing crops and keeping people healthy and happy.

Programming Team Updates: Kevin McPherson (Lead Programmer) is brought on stream to provide a review of the Apocalypse testing. Our team has been incredibly busy with the early access for apocalypse going live. As its our testing ground for the MMO, we’ve been figuring out a lot of optimization and back end things thanks to the testing. When I worked at other companies it was an established platform, with existing account services and code that allows users to log in and play the game. In our case it didnt exist as we were a new studio so all of that has to be built from the ground up. We’ve also got to build our own patcher from scratch. Testing big scale problems, such as issues on the server back end and more, from all these methods large scale testing was essential to figuring these things out right now so we wont have these issues later. We want the Alpha 1 and further testing phases to be relatively fun, unlike when eastern games are ported over and labelled as alphas when they’re actually a finished product being ported over. In the past couple of weeks we overhauled our melee combat through player feedback. Thank you to all the players that have been helping us collect data. Gathering data through logging and tracking statistics is key. We’ve done a lot of automation refinement, we’ve been running hundreds of thousands of bots on our internal servers to stress test things. Gap closing through the acrobatic leaps were a lot of work to implement, we’ve also been working on the friend and party system bugs. 

Leaderboards will be coming online as they are currently in testing. The leaderboards are important to track who is the top crop farmer, the top fisherman and more in the MMORPG. The UI is also being worked on heavily as its a key feature of the MMO. We’re primarily prepping for the move to Unreal 4.231 to support the new Niagara Particle system that our environment and effects artists are using. We also have the new destruction system that is in a beta state as it provides a lot of things to us for future castle siege stuff. Supporting the environment team with tools for node building, destruction and more is critical for getting things done. The siege weapons are being worked on to make them driveable as vehicles, mini-guns on the sides of the siege vehicles so you can defend them. Also the deployables/consumables so you can drop down a med pack or deploy siege weapons and traps, which will scale to dropping homes and more later in the MMO. This piece of technology is probably the most complicated thing to build when it comes to the MMO, we’ve done this before on other MMO’s, but now with newer technology available there’s new approaches. Kevin McPherson worked on Planetside 2 which still holds the record for 2000+ players in a single server instance. However we’d really love to go higher than that, we want multiple server instances to function parallel to each other.

Unreal Engine has a good networking layer that is quite robust and supports a lot of entities, but for an MMO we’re talking about hundreds upon hundreds of players and NPC’s in one locale. So in order to support that we need a more distributed system, where we have different server processes running different groups of entities and they communicate to each other and then upscale/downscale based on activity so if nobody is in a zone, we dont need a lot of power there, but if its 12 noon on a Saturday in a city with trade/business or if there’s a siege going on we need a lot of horsepower to support that.

 

Environment Team Updates: Michael Bacon (Lead Environment Artist) is brought on stream. We worked on the new snow map for apocalypse and have been working heavily on the castle siege maps, besides that we’ve been working on the various tools and templates required to use with the building tool to start building the dwarven architecture. The destruction mechanics have been tweaked so that once destroyed they dont break certain structures such as bridges completely but instead turn them into obstacle courses so it becomes harder to cross in order to reach objectives.

 

Character Team Updates: Keith Kovach (Senior Character Artist) is brought on stream. I’ve been working on the armors for the different races currently. Half of the character team has been working on the mounts and the various backer rewards as they use similar skeletons/rigging as others. This allows us to make more creatures using the shared models/animations. As we’ve characterized the master skeletons/rigging for the creatures, we’re able to speed up the process in creating all of these. Jincy has been working on the Daystrider mount. I’m currently working on the Elder Dragon. 

Community Team Updates: Lt. Toast (Community Manager) is brought on stream to share the Halloween event winners, community highlight clips from Apocalypse and to go through the QnA Session.

 

QnA Session

Q: Are there plans to make blocking more responsive in apocalypse to make it more skill based and if so how will it translate into the hybrid combat for the MMORPG?
A: The blocking system currently has a networking issue when you block, we played around in making it work and its difficult with different lag situations. We have to make it universally responsive. We’re not making a fighting game so the networking is different. We do want it to be strategic so we’ll keep working on it.

Q: What RPG elements can a player choose at character creation? Like bird sign etc.
A: There is a limited amount of stuff that you can choose, we’re still figuring out what that’s going to be and what gameplay implications might be for that stuff. We have to be careful of what we put in, we want you to start fresh and figure out things along the way. We do want something indicative of your life before Verra.

Q: What sort of equipment will be available for mounts?
A: You will have standardized saddle/barding and barding will be split into 3 different types. There will be craftable and quest barding.

Q: Will player owned shops only be available in economic nodes?
A: No. Economic will have more available for the mayor to choose to build. Every city will have economic activity, but the economic node will have global activity. Besides the playerstores where you open up a shop on your character, there are rentable stores/marketplaces from the economic node.

Q: Will it be possible to stow multiple weapons on your back?
A: You cannot have 2 different weapons on your back. You will be able to stow weapons and we will have some stacking rules, we need to make sure the silhouette still looks good.

Q: As we know costumes are not genderlocked, will a wedding dress still appear on a male character or will it transform into a tuxedo?
A: A wedding dress would transform into a tuxedo.

Q: Will we be able to control the camera to take screenshots in the MMORPG?
A: We’re not entirely sure about that as there are some gameplay implications to that. You wont be able to do that in real time, but we will have a recording tool where you can go back in recording and freefly the camera. So in real time – no. Recording tool – yes.

Q: If there are legendary weapons and armors that players can obtain, how much of the rare equipment that intrepid makes be seen in the first year of the MMO and will it be rotated?
A: That will depend on what the players do. We want the players to discover that. We’re making things that we want to be attainable, but we want to ensure the effort put in to acquire them is monumental. Depending on the node development, some things might not be available.

Q: What lessons has AoC learned from the Archeage Unchained launch in terms of server stability?
A: As players we have all experienced launches and most of the time they are not smooth and pretty tough. That’s because of the sheer struggle to launch an MMORPG. Part of it is understanding on the player’s side and understanding that the development process for the scale of games and what goes into making them in-house. You dont know what you dont know. We try to take every bit of information that we can from personal experiences to other studios and launching early access for Apocalypse. We try to take as much from them and learn from them. We got a lot of flak for doing Apocalypse, but in reality it helped us discover unknowns that we will now include in our preparation for our flagship project for the MMO.

Q: What information are you currently gathering from the BR mode for apocalypse and how does it help the MMO?
A: We are gathering an incredible amount of information ranging from the combat side to the match side of thing, each individual attack is tracked, what weapons have high accuracy, how many people are dying over time and use the data to figure out the health of the game. But all of that is just the player side. There’s also so much more on the server side, networking side and account services side to identify the bottlenecks and to break things down on a piece by piece basis. We now know how to move forward for these things on the MMORPG. 

The biggest solution from last December was to rework the architecture. That was a foundational system and as you build stuff on top of them, Apocalypse allowed us to test those foundations before we built on top of them, which saved us a lot of time and resources. An MMORPG’s latency requirement is a lot different from an action based game. In our objective to create a hybrid combat system, we need to raise the bar to exist in an action combat system. Because if the bare minimum is the action combat, everything needs to exist at the same pace.

Q: Will large ships be able to be modded to offer amenities like guild halls and services or will they be purely for transportation?
A: They wont be pure transformation/combat. There will be particular functions, utilities and ancillary functions. Probably wont be a floating guild hall though as we want it to be fixed.

Q: Does the biome of a node also affect the aesthetics of it? Will Elvens swamp be the same as Elven beach node?
A: No they will not look the same. The environment is a variable in the equation of a node’s appearance. They do influence a lot of things.

Q: Do dyes expire?
A: No, dyes do not expire (the item does not go away after some time). If you apply the dye it will stay until a new dye is applied.

Q: Will there be class or race specific mounts in game?
A: Yes there will be specific mounts, but we will not lock them. They will definitely be associated with races and more though. For example a human mount might be a horse at the human starting zone. The renkai or orc might be a turtle. But anybody can achieve those.

Google Doc Link

October 12th Twitch QnA

 

Keynotes

• Castle siege extremely likely this year – Coming shortly.
• Just hired a new UX designer, who has 16 years exp from Blizzard, he starts Monday.
• Currently layering is still not planned, want the world to feel inhabited, want contested areas and scarce resources to have an impact.
• But on the other hand, servers can experience interesting things from a population standpoint, like crazy queue times.
• Also too many servers results in bad server health needing server merges.
• So its possible that one of the solutions we’re thinking of is periods when layering is active.
• Then way we depopulate the layers as the population stabilizes post-launch.
• This prevents dead servers and keeps friends together etc. Its something we’re THINKING about, just thinking for now. But we do want to solve the queue issues.
• One of the thoughts we were thinking about a primary layer with world bosses only, so that they dont get duplicated, we dont know, its still just thoughts, we have to think about it more.

 

Additional Notes

• Regarding name changes – Names are tied to server reputation. If someone makes a reputation for themselves, they should not be able to get rid of it with ease.
• Nodes 3 video around Alpha 2 or just after Alpha 1 – Want it to be representative of the state that its in. Since we’re nearing Alpha 1, want it to look awesome.
• Horde mode is designed around testing node sieges, events, AI, monsters skills and abilities, boss mechanics, additional stat testing on characters and the skills that they have, set bonuses, armor and item abilities.
• Steven’s favourite Biome is Winter/Snow.
• 3x Nighthunter Gryphons were given out on stream.
• 3x Armor of the Golden sun were given out on stream.

 

Battle Royale Updates

• With the new map, experience should we twice as fast as games are shorter.
• We should be getting leaderboards – probably – by the end of next week.
• Leaderboards will NOT be retro-active they will be a fresh board when added.
• About 5 people were banned yesterday (Friday) for teaming, so please continue reporting teamers, extra sad because they had cosmetics.

September 27th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares details on MMORPG progress and special promotions for Apocalypse.

Quick Updates:

• Apocalypse is now available for 24×7 play on both Intrepid website and Steam.
• The creative director’s letter will most likely come out the first week of October.
• We’re going to be setting up October contests to win Peripherals.
• We’re working on Leaderboards for Apocalypse.
• If you are participating in Apocalypse, you can earn the Emberstorm Dragon this weekend.

The beautiful thing about large processes is when it all comes together. Even though we’ve got many industry veterans, its one thing to have personal experience but its another to work with a brand new team in a brand new studio. Funny story regarding the Tidebreaker Mount, when it was originally modelled it was the size of a shoe. Steven actually suggested they should keep it at that size and give players hundreds to make it a dog sled, but then they decided to scale it up and make it bigger.

Engineering Team Updates: Alex Khudoliy (Programmer) is brought on stream. Used to work as a software developer before, this launch is smoother than the previous launches I’ve been a part of. We’ve been incredibly busy this past month to rework the combat system, lots of work into multi-hits per swing, 360 swings, variable damage per combo, variable stamina, variable structure damage. We got bots set up to stress test the servers which helps a lot with the QA testing side of things. 

All of this testing for apocalypse serves the building of the Alphas/Betas of the MMORPG. All of these hiccups and fixes go into ensuring that these issues can be avoided in the MMORPG. We know the BR is not reflective of what the MMORPG is, however many of the backend stuff does translate into it. You’ll see how from the August 20th test to the EA launch now how much the combat has changed. Alex’s team was key in building the new variables for the melee combat with multiple checks which are instrumental to building the hybrid combat system for the MMORPG. It’s one of the reasons why even though you may not enjoy the BR, you get to experience the changes throughout development to build the MMORPG. Mark has been working on scaling things horizontally so the servers can handle larger group population, no crashing/lagging, every server stands up. We solved some issues where we had rubberbanding, we’ve got most of it down and now there’s just a small number of matches experiencing it. We’ve updated our block mechanics, it consumes stamina like before, but if you reach 0 stamina while blocking you get stumbled/staggered. We’ve also improved our gap closing. If you have no enemies in front of you, you are able to perform acrobatic leaps to move around.

So for the MMORPG, this helps detect when players are in front of you to trigger variable animations for different classes that we have planned. We’ve also worked on our HLOD’s, lets say you’re coming down on your gryphon in apocalypse, what you see are low poly objects that look good from afar, but if you get close they look like playdough. But you never see this as when you come closer it swaps out for the higher textures. Many games use this system but we’re tweaking it for the MMORPG and play with these values to make the experience better on your graphic cards, all of this stuff is getting refined in Apocalypse. We’re also working on the destruction mechanics, so when you destroy a wall and walk away, it should not be there and should be removed from the HLOD, etc. The patcher is currently being torn apart and rebuilt – Its very important for us to have a good patcher for the MMORPG.

Design Team Updates: Terrence Yee (Senior Game Designer) is brought on Stream. We’ve had a lot of changes to combat based on the August 20th playtest. Mostly to the animation and the combat system. (Brian is exposed as Harambe) Recently we’ve been working on getting ready for Early Access. We also have been working on the new skillsets for Castle Siege, many of them will carry into the MMORPG. It’s important to distinguish what we can take into the MMO, we need to figure out which skills can make it into the hybrid system to ensure it can be with Tab target as well, match the tempo etc. Many of you would have seen Hybrid systems in other games that are really one or the other. So when we sat down and decided to make a next generation hybrid system, we had some doubts on whether or not it would be possible. So one challenge has been ‘Can action combat – True action combat, exist besides Tab-Target’. 

We have to monitor TTK and heatmaps, to see how fast people are dying, where people are dying, popular zones where players drop and more. One of the more important design decisions that we came to was that the TTK (Time to Kill) has increased. You’re seeing players at the final circle be much more near the end. Match sizes are being varied currently as we’re working on the servers but when we scale it up to 100 players we’re interested in seeing how the final circles play out. The important aspect of time is that strategy becomes more important. If fights end in 3 seconds, the data is lesser, so higher TTK means more data for the MMORPG’s hybrid combat. 

Funny story – Immediately after the August 20th test, I pulled in the Design team for a meeting and said we need to make these changes in 2 weeks and everyone’s faces were filled with horror. But they came together and made a very wide change to our action combat systems in apocalypse. What you see in the BR is a small taste of what you’ll see in the Alphas/betas for the MMORPG. Even if you dont want to test the combat in apocalypse, you can still see the environment stuff. 

Animation Team Updates: Brad Constantine (Senior Animator) is brought on Stream with a Sword. Quick shoutout to the character team. So regarding mounts we break them down into various skeleton types for the animations so that they can be applied to different creatures. Most of our work comes down to the Design team giving us various times for different weapons and then it’s our job to come up with beautiful animations for those times. You would have seen some quarriors and little critters running around in apocalypse. For those of you that are unaware you can domesticate quarriors in the MMORPG on your freehold, the quarriors stick their tongues into the ground and eat and turn their feed into gemstones on their body. They dont have a digestive tract. So you need to harvest the gemstones from their body.

Here’s some examples of the Pridestalker which is a variant of the Dawnbreaker. You’ll be able to customize your mounts using the husbandry system and tweak these. Even now, all Braver of Worlds backers can log into Apocalypse and try out the Dawnbreaker mount. We cannot stress enough how important apocalypse is for testing out the animations and stuff because the BR forces the players into a tight space against each other.

Everyone that achieves level 7 by September 30th will receive an Emberstorm Dragon. We have another announcement saved for after this weekend. We want to make sure you understand the amount of help that Apocalypse provides our combat testing and backend testing for the MMORPG and we want you to come in and participate on that. We also want to reward you for helping us test and this dragon is part of one of those rewards. Action combat is hard, which is why a lot of games dont do it. It’s why we’re committed to make it work. We’ve done tab target for 20 years, we know how to do it, but to combine it with Action takes a lot of work. We appreciate all the love and support, shoutout to Fooshy and other PI members for sending all the love and support. 

QnA Session

Q: Are there any plans to add innovative features to the tab target for the MMORPG
A: Not all tab targetting will be the same, the controls will be based on what the ability does. We dont every class/ability to play the same.

Q: Will the new acrobatic leap/lunge be in the MMORPG or the Siege mode?
A: Not in its existing format, no. It will be present for example in the class skill trees, its different for the BR so we wanted to give players the ability to move around.

Q: Do you have any events planned for October?
A: Yes, stay tuned.

Q: Do you have plans for low level raids (lvl 10/20)?
A: Yes.

Q: What variety of mage skills can we expect besides elemental ones?
A: There’s radiance/darkness, standard elemental stuff and some stuff in Alpha/Beta that is driven based on lore of energy types.

Q: Are there any chances we’ll have ship/naval combat in apocalypse?
A: We’ve brought it up as its the perfect place to test that stuff, so we’ll see. The whole purpose of apocalypse is to syphon and silo out individual systems into their own game modes for testing and data collection. Naval combat in a system of itself can stand alone as a game mode particularly. There’s a chance it could be in apoc yes, same for horde/action combat testing. All of them are systems that can be plucked from the MMORPG and focus test them. When you test a game you have different types of testing – Prototyping which is very bare bones. Then you have QA that tells them what’s broken/not working. Then you have Polish where broader QA sees it, and then the live audience sees it. With an MMORPG there’s a lot of things working together that are dependant on various other systems. So what Apocalypse is – It does this whole process from prototyping to live audience to figure things out. This way we dont need to test it for the MMORPG, we can test it in an isolated mode and then drop it into the MMORPG as a polished system.

Q: Will Metros form military alliances and declare a world war of sorts?
A: Yes. You can set a war/alliance peace status with various other nodes.

Q: Will ships have wind mechanics and manual controls like sails or cars on waters?
A: We dont want riders on ships to sit and do nothing, we want to have mechanics on the ships besides the captain so interacting with sails/weapons/utility items/defensive mechanics and more. Will we be simulating actual sailing with wind and stuff? Probabaly not.

Q: Can we weild shield + spear?
A: Yes we will have 1 handed spears.

Q: Should we choose to forego the ranged weapon slot, can we spec further into our melee weapons?
A: No those ranged weapon slots will be particular to the ranged weapons.

Q: How may a patron diety be particular to a player or appearance/augments?
A: Religion itself will dictate the augment ability that is provided based on the temple you are part of and the system within that determines what augments can be unlocked within that tree. So followers of that religion will have stuff that can be worn or applied to armors and stuff so Yes.

Q: Will the game support 21:9 aspect ratio for monitors?
A: We’ll get back to you.

Q: Will many or any of AoC’s quests have pop culture references in AoC?
A: Not really. We want to keep most stuff immersive. Would we put stuff in for nods and winks, yes, but flavour and context.

Q: Can we have sub groups within our guilds?
A: Yes, you can name contingents within groups and assign leaders with special chat priviliges. As a guild leader myself it was a dying wish to have that function. We’re guild focused so.

Q: You’ve wanted to limit RNG, so how will you limit this?
A: We view RNG as a lever that can be reduced based on time committed. The higher quality input you have to the process, the more you can mitigate the RNG aspect of it. There’s a sense of RNG that will occur regardless but your skill level and stuff will matter. So regarding animal husbandry, if you have a component that is one half of a process, that pedigree is a value in our backend, the higher that number the more impactful it will be against the RNG process. We want to ensure quantity is not only manually induced but also RNG induced to make it more special.

Q: What kind of out of combat skills can we expect from the different classes?
A: Uhh, a lot. We’ve shown stuff at PAX etc for quests and certain markers and things housed in different classes. There will be out of combat skills for explorers/tanks and different playstyles. It goes back to our foundation of straying away from fixed paths – exploration, playing the market, adventuring classes and more, we want to make sure there is representation for each.

Q: How many stat attributes can we expect to see? Enough to make a spreadsheet?
A: We have a base set of 6, then waterfall stats that derive off of that. We want it to be crunchy enough to be interesting. Min-maxing is part of the fun. We dont want a sheet to be necessary, but if you want to really get into it, cool. 

Q: With so many complex systems in the MMO, are there plans for a tutorial?
A: Yes. We will have an onboarding experience for the players. Besides the UI tooltips, we’ll have the first 5-6 levels taking you through and touch every system that you will later experience in-depth. 

Q: Will there be advantages to using a one hander without a shield?
A: That will be something you build towards, there will be passives and stuff that will promote certain fighting styles.

Q: On a scale of Archeage to BDO how bustling with NPC’s do you plan to have towns be?
A: There will be a good amount of NPC’s that will scale with each stage of the node. The idea is that you’re repopulating this world. Will there be an NPC at every corner? No. 

Q: Can we expect constant fixes/updates for apocalypse and siege?
A: Yes, yes, yes. Squads and duos will be up soon.

Q: Will you be able to show off your rare boss kills as freehold trophies?
A: Yes.

Q: Will different weapons of the same types in the MMO have different attack speeds?
A: Yes.

Q: Will there be a class combo that is pure buffing/debuffing?
A: Depends on how you spec it. Depends on the archetype as well, some will be more capable at that than others. All about your build.

Q: The elves in the underrealm of vera, what do they call themselves?
A: We will reveal more of that specific lore as we move forward on those minor races.

Q: How are you addressing the issues with EU launch in terms of My.com?
A: We are in constant communication with My.Games. The Game center client is up for play and the Steam EU executable is up as well to login and play. 

Q: What happens if I am in the middle of a quest that is in relation to a stage of a node and the node changes?
A: The quest will go dormant, depends. For example main storyline will have alternate paths. Upgrades on nodes will not have any issues, it’s only destruction that will require alternate paths.

Q: Are the class kits for castle siege going to be the same for Horde mode?
A: No those class kits will be different.

Google Doc Link

August 29th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares development feedback on the recent apocalypse test of the MMORPG.

Quick Updates:

• • Account services update that happened this month. Check the site for info.
  • We put out a lore article on the noble steed.
  • Collected some great data with the 20th Apocalypse test.
  • We’re working on getting the next test up soonTM.
  • Preparing for the move to the new studio on Nov 22nd.
  • The new studio can hold upto 180 people.

 

Engineering Team Updates: Aaron Bartholomew (Senior Platform Engineer) is brought on Stream. Aside from the CS tools and support, the platform engineers are laying the groundwork for the fancy stuff that’s planned for the account services. The goal of providing an account services section is to give players 1 spot to interact with everything relating to their account. We’re also working on being able to share player characters and other data through the website and these things require laying the groundwork for early on. Besides the account services stuff we’ve been scaling the game infrastructure. The big goal of the apoc test is to ensure infrastructure for the mmo is ready. So long term for the mmo we want the infrastructure to be in a spot where its stable for everything. During the 20th test we were able to get a live production look behind the curtain of “how does this hold up”. Initially we saw some issues and were able to implement a fix about an hour into the test and now we’re able to take these changes and ensure that the scalability is ready to go from the get go for the next test. After that initial fix, we saw some issues with client freezing and disconnects which we’ve got the fix ready for the next test. It was good to see how fast we were able to respond to issues and pump out fixes.

We learned that we have a lot more to do on the level scaling due to the heavy profiling on the backend. The performance increases we saw due to the optimizations were huge. The client freeze/crash was due to the socket connection timeout, we’ve been able to fix that with Unreal Engine. We definitely have a lot of work to do on the horizontal scaling of our servers. So the more bandwidth we have to funnel players through our matches is where we saw core issues, but we’ll be rolling out some changes before the next test. One of the big changes you would have noticed in the recent test that loading into the staging area was incredibly quick, this is due to the new method we’re working on with spooling to spin up the area beforehand to prepare it for the players coming in. This directly contributes to the MMO and ensuring that load times for instances and dungeons etc. are much more streamlined.

Our new account services handled the last test really well, we were able to identify issues before players even came across them and patch them in quickly. So we had like a single fail error throughout the whole test whereas back in December there were loads of website 503 error issues. Usually players assume account services are easy to set up, but we’ve got to ensure the various pieces that go into it work as intended. Most of our efforts went into ensuring the middle and back end worked properly. 

 

Environment Team Updates: Michael bacon (Lead Environment Artist) is brought on stream. This whole month was a lot of optimization and fixes. We’ve also been working on other things that we cant talk about like the castle siege. We had a playtest lask week which was a lot of fun, Krojak killed me on the bridge, then I got killed many times by Cambiguous. Players did discover both the sandal shrine and the sandal hidden in the staging area. We did put some little animals on the map, the quarrior and the little creepy crawlies. 

There are traps available to the defenders primarily while attackers have siege weaponry. Devon has been working on a new terrain for the castle siege. The animation side is working on changing the way how the lunge attack works. So moving forward if there’s no player in front of you, you’ll do a better more parkour-like lunge to get more ‘jumpy-movey-ness’. Stream is invaded by random baby spider.

 

Gameplay Design Team Updates: Brian Ferguson (Gameplay Designer) is brought on Stream to share updates. Right now we’re working on combat, itemization and destruction – all the fun stuff. We’ve been looking at the balance to ensure fights go better. We got to see how the balance all looks when players duke it out. Seeing the melee interaction with ranged players, seeing how it feels, the projectile speed/drop, all of those things carry forward into the MMORPG. So we get to take different approaches towards the hybrid combat, and the opportunity to go through the whole process with apoc before we put it into the mmorpg is going to be the second iteration and the more polished version. We saw some places where loot didnt feel as good, so we buffed those places up, also been adding some easter egg chests. We’re tracking which weapons and abilities have the highest usage and accuracies and then using that to add them to class skills for the MMORPG to see where they fall and work on the augment skills that we plan to incorporate and test them out in Apoc. 

We’ve been improving our destruction system, moving to a new one that looks and sounds much better. Players will get the first chance to see the destruction mechanics in castle sieges and node sieges. Previously in mmos you have sections of structure that have a health pool that when it changes it swaps out meshes or a decal/layer over the material for false destruction. Whereas our destruction is real and has legitimate pieces that fall off. Performance wise it has also been going well when the node changes and the walls fall. We’ve been optimizing the assets, range differences, LOD’s and making a beautiful environment with a large number of players that also performs well. We’ve also been working on new summon and interaction sounds, we’ve tweaked the movement and added a freelook camera for the mounts. 

Lieutenant Toast is brought properly on stream for the first time. I serve as the handhold between the community and Steven. Each time there’s a playtest or FAQ, I help set up the questions, including those for the livestreams. Before Toast, Steven was the one who had to handle all the community side of things, after toast being brought on it has reduced Steven’s load. 

 

QnA Session

Q: Will the hardest raids be persistent across all realms?
A: Each realm will be specific to the region. So as a company we’ll give a shoutout to those that manage to clear the raid first and maybe even include them in the lore.

Q: Can per say one side poison the other side’s water source to gain an advantage?
A: With regards to the MMOPRG, there will be certain missions that people that are odds against one another, like one of those narratives could be to hamper things, but no you cant free will go around poisoning water. Perhaps you can poison the mana reservoir as a quest objective maybe, no promises.

Q: Do we have any news on the remaining 4 classes? (Summoner/rogue/fighter/bard)
A: You can expect to have blogs on those classes in the future, we plan on releasing info on that once it’s ready. We plan to make it incredibly presentable through a blog.

Q: Do you currently have some kind of plan to adjust the forward movement on the lunge attack?
A: We did come away with some changes we plan to try out. Its the difference between exciting and fast, but also rooted and relatively realistic. It’s been the primary topic for the past few design meetings. This is the primary purpose of apocalypse, to collect data and feedback to prepare for the hybrid interactions and movement for the MMORPG.

Q: Are there plans to have similar apocalypse tests with squads? And will you be using steam?
A: Yep, its a big part of apocalypse. We did say there would be squads last week, but we were really focused on the horizontal scaling we needed to address and the server crashing/client disconnects. We do have squads ready to test. Yes we will be using steam for apocalypse.

Q: Will there be positions of power within religions such as apostle/pope to influence religion?
A: 100%, there will be titles that you can achieve within the religion system. With those benefits will come certain powers, unique access, unique quests, certain items and more. Regarding the extra player agency stuff will probably come later in an expansion. You may see cult leaders come in during the future divine node article about counterplay.

Q: Did enough people participate in the recent test to hammer the servers?
A: Yes. We actually gathered more data than we can parse through. 

Q: How do you feel the testing on the 20th went and will it help the MMORPG?
A: It went fantastic, a lot of things went well. The things we were looking for that we werent sure about and we got answers to those things. It went exactly as we wanted it to go and it gave us things we want to work on and all of it goes into Alpha 1.

Q: How do you feel about content so hard that only a small % of people can complete it?
A: Yes. We like it and we want to see it in game. When that content comes in, when its incredibly hard to do, eventually new chapters take place and levels get higher and what once was the hardest content, gets trickled down and becomes more accessible. One of the components of a game being very interesting is the drive or chase to achieve something that is difficult to achieve. When you make the experience bland and achievable by everyone, it doesnt mean as much. We want it to feel like you’ve accomplished things. We also want to create content that the majority of our players can experience. So what was once the limited audience becomes the broader audience. We want to make sure we have content for all the different types of players as all of the different players together make a big community.

Q: Will I be able to minimize my selected tab target abilities to focus on action combat?
A: Yes, that’s the goal. Its why apocalypse became so important to test action combat. We need to collect the data from all the action based skills to make sure its fun and engaging and not cumbersome.

Q: How much of action combat will require manual aiming in the MMORPG?
A: What you see in apocalypse will be near the final output of what you see.

Q: Do you plan to add any improvements to fighting enemies?
A: Yep, there’s lots of feedback and we want to work on many things. People were asking why BETA was applied to apocalypse. We consider BETA as something accessible to all. While ALPHA is a restrictive test. So we used BETA term for apocalypse even though the project is in a pre alpha state.

Q: Will the mmo feature any hover cast (mouse over) compatibility?
A: So the action side of things will involve reticle based, while certain AOE’s you’ll be able to select an option to auto cast an AOE at your mouse pointer location instead of having to click twice.

Q: Will the estimated TTK be longer in castle siege than the BR mode?
A: Yes, each class will have its own health pool, some classes will have a much higher TTK. In castle siege each class will come with pre-defined HP/armor value stats. 

Q: Will we be able to find hidden locations/view points on the map?
A: Yes. There will be other things too. We’ve thought about cartographers guild to bring information to the library. Steven is an exploration player too, he just prefers to conquer what he explores. 

Q: How will you handle armor for the special skins like fire/frost/demonic/angelic?
A: What will happen is those skins will have a base race mesh that they are similar to. So ice/fire skins will represent a character model of a human, so the armor donned on the model will represent a human mesh, while the renkai would be renkai/orc in size. We’re not too sure, but probably one of the older meshes.

Q: Will there be an auto-walk/auto-run?
A: Yes. Not such as click on shoe icon to track quest, but Numlock to auto-run.

Q: Can necromancers revive allies when healers are being poopy?
A: They cannot revive but they can utilize corpses around you to summon something based off of that.

Q: Will we be able to move while dancing?
A: No. Dancing will be a root animation.

Q: We know taverns on a freehold unlock buffs for players, will there be an option to make it a store?
A: The tavern is already kinda like a store that players/their family can list goods on it. 

Q: A while ago citizen tickets were mentioned as a one off, is that still planned for?
A: Citizenship tickets were to get citizenship without owning land. Its too early to tell right now. We’ll give you an update on that when we have it. That’s the first time steven has been stumped by a question.

Q: For the bladecaller class
A: Weapons or Weapon creatures. The fighter doesnt get the summoner skills, so like forward strike attacks with the summoner augment will summon a cage of swords, also the blade golem.

Q: What are your current thoughts on resource management in combat, combat regeneration plans etc?
A: Your action economy is based upon what balance we determine we would like you to have. Do we want you to be able to kill a player with your entire stamina bar? Yes. So when utilizing your mana bar in the mmorpg, do we want you to kill it with what % of your mana bar, and that’s the type of perspective we’re going with for it. We dont want you to sit down after every fight.

Q: Will there be a class that uses fists or gauntlets to brawl it out?
A: Our weapon system isnt tied to classes. You can use any weapon on any class. We do want gauntlets, it depends on the resources we have to make that happen. If we have time to do that, we will.

Q: I like the 3rd person action camera in apocalypse, will it be in the mmo too?
A: It will be in the action combat stance for the mmo.

Q: How will you respond to exploits, new things that happen in systems that you dont plan for?
A: It depends on the imbalance we’re talking about. Like the node system unless something goes catastrophically wrong, it’ll be fine. The goal is to let the emerging gameplay live and breathe and not constrain it. We would get involved for like exploits or duping or if the node system melted down. But for example if people come up with new builds, thats on a case by case basis. 

Q: Will the MMO hybrid combat be skill based or gear based in terms of who will win a fight?
A: The goal is to emphasize skill over gear. But gear will be a VERY important role in your ability to perform. But ultimately the player with the higher skill level is going to have the edge in combat so to speak. Like level 1 will never take on a lvl 60. But relatively within 5-10 levels, we want that to be where the skill takes place. There’s 3 components when it comes to balance when it comes to 1 on 1’s which we arent balancing for. We are balancing for group vs group. We look at level progression, gear progression and class choice. Those 3 things play together the largest role to determine your efficacy in battle. Skill is the weight that tips the scale in people’s favour. So a high skill player below 5-10 levels would be able to tip the balance due to skill. But below those 5-10 levels, it will be extremely difficult to balance things out. Some classes will be better than others, your raid composition will play an important role. 

Q: Will it be possible to revert/reset our artisan points?
A: We havent discussed how we want to do it.

Google Doc Link

August 15th Livestream Transcription

– Steven appears as a guest on the DCN 100th podcast (Congratulations!) for an in-depth interview on Ashes of Creation’s development.

Q: Since Intrepid has partnered with Steam, what kind of benefit do you recieve and will we see the MMORPG potentially on steam down the road?
A: We never planned to be on steam with any iteration of the MMORPG, but as you know, A1 evolved into apocalypse and its 3 modes. But as we approached our backend getting done, it made sense to hammer the servers as hard as possible, but we didnt want to devote marketing to apocalypse. So steam provides a great demographic of players and it makes sense to funnel as many players as possible to get the most amount of data, kick off matches regularly and introduce players to what ashes of creation is as an IP. This led us to change our mind with steam in regards to apocalypse. But as for the MMORPG, currently we still have no plan to do so. Platforms like Steam have a revenue split. When the MMORPG approaches its betas, we plan to ramp up marketing and are confident that we can satisfy that marketing requirement without having to utilize something like steam. 

Q: Are you concerned about negative reviews on Steam for Apocalypse?
A: The MMORPG community as a whole has gone through twists and turns, so their reception is understandable. As one of those jaded people myself, I see negative comments and tend to use them as fuel. So any type of trash talk or doubt I use it as fuel.

Q: What details can you go into about the architecture changes that made you step back and redo them?
A: There were a large amount of changes to be made, ways that which Unreal does things out of the box and things we did that didnt work that well. So we want to use features of Unreal that we can, stacked with the features with our third party partners and much more to ensure the quality of the end product.

Q: Can you tell us from your internal testing what kind of increase are you seeing?
A: Regarding the test on the 20th, we have the matches designed for a 100 players. Originally server framerate was operating at 12-20fps at 100 players. This isnt good from a performance standpoint, rubberbandy and high latency. Right now with the internal and outsourced testing, we’ve had 100 players with server framerate at a steady 60fps which is its cap. This is an extreme backend change. Additionally this isnt about pushing 100 players, we have castle siege coming up and we use internal tools such as bots to test things, the bots use attacks and jump around and stuff. Last test we had over 350 bots and over 30fps, once we begin optimizing this using the data that comes in, we can take this data and start trimming the fat. So players that are only relevant to you based on direction etc. all of those things become logic that increase performance from the network and player standpoint.

Q: Are you looking at capping the fps at 60 for the MMO?
A: Im talking about the server framerate, not the client render framerate. Client framerate is dealt via the GPU with buildings/textures etc. We want the servers to transmit at a higher rate, what’s the position of players, did you score a hit, all these things need to be processed by the server. So we’re optimizing the backend. Our last benchmark was 80fps at EPIC settings with a GTX 960. Apocalypse lets us optimize all these graphical details, optimize the streaming distance, our HLOD and LOD systems, all of these things go into providing a better experience for players.

Q: Since you’re using AWS, have you used bots from outside your geographic region?
A: Yes we use bots but the way we spin up bots is we take virtual machines on the AWS and can create 50-100 bots with C5 or C4 group machines, we spin up thousands of those and throw them into our matchmaking process and balancing etc. This gives us results that allow us to tune things. 

Q: What can you tell us about the server tickrate?
A: So there’s multiple tickrates. Im no engineer, but some tickrates have a very high priority and run every frame like movement. Movement is one of the heaviest tickrates that takes priority. Right now in apoc its 350 meters and weapons go to 275 meters. So movement is the highest cost when it comes to that. Tickrates vary really, depends on what we’re talking about. (We use just found out the longbow has a tickrate of 275meters)

Q: What % done is the apocalypse BR excluding bugs?
A: There’s different departments, from a design perspective its about 98% complete, from environment background its 98% complete, from a character perspective 95% complete and from an engineering perspective 90% complete. Things are going to need to change post live operations as we’ll see data trickle in and we’ll adjust our code to learn from it and move forward. So yeah the BR is relatively complete.

Q: With the BR around the corner, what excites you about the changes to the BR?
A: I am not really a BR player, however when it came to gathering data the fastest way, we went with the BR and when we QA the BR, players seem to have a lot of fun with the fantasy aspect of spells and effects. For me its the ability to see the world and what is coming, to see the immersive nature and various cultures, understanding some of the lore, these are exciting to me as I like to be story driven as a player. So that’s what excites me most as a player, but as a developer the performance and metrics we gain are great to see as we can see the progression of a product via feedback, data collection and refinement. The cool thing is as we step forward we get to take everything we learned and move it there as well. So you get a better experience in Betas due to the learning experiences in Apocalypse.

Q: From an automated bot perspective, is that something you vendored out or developed yourself?
A: We have tool engineers, they run varying degrees of tests from load balancing to simulating player packets, network traffic, website features, all of those things are tests that we get to permeate. Our tools engineers after December 2018 (when we didnt have those tools in place), we were so excited to get live data from the community that we were a bit hasty back in december. When we moved forward as a Studio, we were able to course correct and this contributes to better serve the MMORPG development. 

Q: You guys have this dev discussion series on the forums, has any of the player responses affected development in any way? If so, how?
A: No we’re not getting rid of elves. With regards to the dev diaries, we take all feedback into consideration. Where the feedback tends to shine is where post-discussion, Lt.Toast circulates that around the team and they have a look at the stuff and some of it comes into the round table discussions. So insight is gathered from the player input.

Q: So regarding mayors running cities, can mayors dedicate tasks to players or does the mayor have to run it solo.
A: So the mayor doesnt have the ability to delegate roles. But there are roles that become available that are achieved via title and rank progression. So achieving high priest of the temple or head merchant and achieving this gives them certain duties. So these titles come with roles in sieges that give you buffs and additional skills. So world events where nodes advance or grand temples being built, when they trigger events such as a dragon attack or zombie invasion, these title players become more heroic and may gain additional damage mitigation or additional damage or battle cries to motivate the citizens around them. Those are some of the ways we approach additional roles for players that arent necessarily the mayor. In the game we want to have a separation of state and guild. We dont want guilds to control nodes, guilds can fight for castles, guild halls, guild wars. The node system is focused around the inter-guild community. We want players to be adversaries or friends through not just the guild system.

Q: Are the sub jobs also differently selected like node leaders or some other way?
A: There are many quests that revolve around advancements or performance which dictates the leader.

Q: If the mayor is elected and you have other groups that have leadership in different tasks, do they have checks and balances that work against the mayor or does tha mayor have defacto balance?
A: There are some give or take roles that exist within the node system. This simulates what is the politics of the mayor, the mayor has to build relations with these title players to progress certain systems. So if there’s non-agreement between players present, it might stifle growth. So when different parties control different branches, you can halt progress which might be a good thing. A stop gap that requires compromise. That’s the type of functionality we want to duplicate in game. 

Q: Are there any tools to help me fight a mutiny within my own guild? Or these different positions within the cities, are there a set number of them? Are they locked by node type?
A: The title positions in a node are tied to 2 things, the development level of a node – which dictates the possibility to build certain buildings which when built bring certain titles into play. So this is where ultimate power lies with the mayor as they choose which buildings go up. So a guild could come to a mayor and say they will help build a temple and the mayor might agree and ask for their support in return so that whoever is given the title as a result of the temple being built, that they work with me (the mayor).

Q: Early on you mentioned the ability to track and record data as a foundation of the game, are there plans to share that with the players like in the library or character tab? To see what things the player is done so we can decide whether to recruit them or not.
A: We do have some grand plans that may not be live at launch but will come online post-launch, such as a character profile system that they can turn on to boast or let others see, linked into the website and linked into the mobile companion in the future. There’s a desire to do so, yes, but it takes a backseat to the more fundamental aspects of launch. Regarding the mobile app – We’ve discussed the ability for players to manage their property/processing/node activities/guild features via the mobile companion app. It’s not a “Dont you have phones” its more of a “Hey this is a great tool for when you cant be at your computer.”

Q: Will the website profile you’re considering, will it show gear as well?
A: We have to be careful about showing gear and some of that stuff because those things can partition communities. That’s not to say the partition cannot happen, so guild leaders can absolutely ask people to send a screenshot, but what we want to encourage as a whole is for people to play together for mutual benefit and progression. There’s lots of types of people you wouldnt meet if it wasnt for an MMORPG, so we dont want to make the divide greater between players. Kinda the reason I made an MMORPG, to stick to my ideals. If it works great, but if it doesnt we’ll take the feedback and re-assess. 

Q: Can you give us a leak for the 100th episode?
A: Maybe I can give it to you over Discord, one moment. So you could show the concept first and then the final product. 

 

Community QnA

Q: As Steven is coming from a different background in the gaming industry – What’s a time when Jeff/Margaret had to stop Steven’s idea?
A: Very early on – I catch on pretty quickly – the stupidest thing I had thought of was the hotmic that happened at one of the PAX events. That was Bacon’s fault though, it was totally his fault! Lets just say there was another company talking some not so good things about me and I was like “man this company is talking some mad stuff about me” and bacon was like “uhhhh, we’re live” and I was like “WHAT”.

Q: Since this is your first time developing an MMORPG, what has been the biggest lesson so far?
A: If I could do it all over from start to finish, I would have a serious contemplation of whether I would have revealed it early on or whether I would reveal it closer to the beta. My biggest contemplation has been whether that had been the right decision. I wanted to take everyone with me on this journey. Being a developer, its a harsh reality of what software development is in general. Its not the fault of the players, how can they be expected to know etc. It can be a bit demotivating and public relations. And when something changes or needs to change, you dont have to be a complete open book. So there’s an understanding that things can change in that regard, so that’s one thing looking back I’d have thought about.

Regarding negative comments, I have a thick skin. But not everyone on my team has a thick skin. People take pride in their work, so it can be demotivating to watch a video where someone who has 0 clue about things is being negative about it. But I will say that I love the Ashes community, taking part in this living breathing project. 

Q: Will the livestreams ever go back to talking while running around in the MMO world?
A: When the MMO world is ready to be run around in a way where the people looking at it for the first time will understand what they’re looking it, absolutely. We just need to be careful about it.

Q: What are the working conditions like at Intrepid? We’ve seen a lot about developers not doing so well.
A: There’s definitely truth behind the game industry having a systemic problem with. We’ve had times where we have had to crunch in the past like unexpected delays or unexpected opportunities. So we’ve had those in the past but one of the fundamental processes is having a production team that works on this to ensure from a expectation and production standpoint, it works right. We try to move forward avoiding things such as the crunch, if we do encounter it, we try to make it pleasant like working from home or providing dinners for the team and things to cushion those periods of times when they come up. So the culture at the studio is a great one for them to express what excites them. We’re a very collaborative studio with a desire to push creativity. Like when a milestone or feature is coming up, we deal with it with responsible scheduling to ease things out. 

Q: Steven has spoken about objective based guild wars besides castle sieges
A: So objective based guild wars revolve around what types of actions that one of the guilds has participated in, so there’s default objectives and objectives relating to what a guild has had. So lets say a guild has recently obtained a guild hall on a freehold, it might be near that freehold, or it might be around the guild hall that might need a channeling time, if the guild has recently done a raid, there might be objectives to achieve one of the quest items that the guild has achieved and steal it from them or a guild member might have a bounty on him with special buffs to hunt them down and the player can call for help etc. We havent worked on it yet, we’ve worked on the castle siege stuff, but there’s a lot of ideas/variety of ways we can make it work. 

Q: So lets assume they’re bringing back Archeage Classic with subscription
A: I used to speak to the AA producers and used to tell them “if you did a sub based no p2w server, I guarantee you it would make more money over the long run than the flash p2w fresh start server tactics” I was also talking to one of the investors and told them that they could give me the rights and we could see which performed better, the sub one or the P2W one. Archeage had a lot of great potential, I dont like faction based games. I like to decide friends/enemies on my own. I did like the risk that AA had with pack creation etc. but didnt like that there was no real feeling of loss and summoning ships out onto the ocean etc. But there was a lot more I enjoyed. If the new AA does it the right way, it’ll be a great thing to see, especially if the industry slowly moves back to the sub monetization model. It’d be cool if there was a resurgence of what makes mmo such a unique game, there’s a reason mmos are expensive to make, its because they retain players long term which is better for the sub model. 

Giveaway Winner: Varkun56

Google Doc Link

August 14th Discord QnA

– Steven addresses concerns over Apocalypse being launched on Steam.

Q: How will accounts work with Intrepid and My.com accounts for EU users?
A: With the MMORPG, if you have a My.games account and you want to play on an Intrepid server, you will be able to migrate your mygames account to Intrepid with its belongings. The migration will be an easy process. 

Q: Why arent you considering putting the MMORPG on Steam?
A: Steam as a platform does take a % of revenue, exposure they provide to their users, CDN costs, and so Steam takes a 30% cut. So from a business standpoint, we dont feel its necessary. Self publishing in NA is our projected course in our regard. Everything said in development comes with an asterisk of ‘things can change’. I want developers to feel free and speak as much as they can about their plans just in case things change in the future. If things changes like Apoc on steam, its really a matter of how things change. With apoc it definitely serves a purpose/services and being able to throw as many users as possible and not having ramped up marketing for apoc, we can use steam to make up for the users. Also provides a healthy population for matchmaking type games.

Q: Will Apoc continue to be on steam?
A: For what apoc is, as a matchmaking game, it fits well on steam – Its a free to play cosmetic only shop with matchmaking based instanced gameplay. Having the exposure of number of users that steam can allow is nice. So Yes, it will continue on steam up until the launch of the MMO and perhaps even after. Our marketing will ramp up significantly as we get closer to launch so we wont have to worry about putting the MMORPG on steam.

Steven:  Who is going to play Archeage classic btw? I think it’d be cool if they did it as a sub game with no pay to win. I feel it’d be nice to see the industry move away from the microtransaction model and to the sub based or healthier models.

Q: What will happen to you NA stuff when you migrate to EU and vice versa?
A: It will move over with you to EU. The only thing that wont move over to a different publisher would be if there were region specific marketplace purchases or event rewards/cosmetics, like holiday specific stuff, those things might not move over. If you’re talking about moving over post-launch like transferring characters from NA to EU – that will not happen. But purchases and items pre-launch can be moved over. This does not include in-game achievements or owned items, but purchases like skins etc. 

Q: Will migrating mean both NA/EU accounts will have lifetime sub?
A: No. You will only have it on one region. In the future when these types of services become available there will be a full document explaining things that will be made available.

Q: You’ve said Intrepid/KS pack holders would get Apocalypse paths always for free, is that still the case?
A: All alpha 1 holders get a lifetime battle pass for Apocalypse. Might have to double check that, but it should be accurate. Also, anyone that has purchased a beta or alpha access gets the first compendium season for free. (Confirmed, A1 testers get lifetime compendium(“battlepass”) to Apoc)

Q: Regarding account transfers, could we not do it like Blizzard where we just log in to different servers with one account?
A: What I’d do is, I’d defer the account migration questions to down the road when these services are needed, because we’ll be putting out a proper document then. These are my thoughts and they might change later.

Q: Are you going to Gamescom this year?
A: Very likely not. However I might be. But I will say we have a fun video planned for that date. But for now, no plans for Gamescom.

Q: Will we have EU servers?
A: Yes. 

Q: But you said we’d have EU servers last time too.
A: Yes, we had some issues last time, but we’ve been testing on EU now so it should be good. We’ve also set up Singapore servers for OCE region in the immediate future. We will explore additional server sites for the future

Steven has to run due to a phone call

Google Doc Link

July 26th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares numerous updates from different parts of their development team and development progress of the MMORPG.

Kickstarter pet vote winners:

 

Engineering Team Updates: Alex Khudoly (Programmer) is brought on Stream to talk about updates on game design. We’ve been working on the server polling and wrapping up a lot of things. Currently the networking for the mmo is being worked on with lots of bug squashing, optimization, performance increases etc. We’ve also been running benchmarks as well with different specs to test out the different FX and meshes. The goal is to be able to run the game from literal potatoes to super computers. So for the past few months we’ve been working on control points, there’s a lot of things going on with them so we have to make them modular to ensure no work is wasted. This way we can use it for different game modes within the MMORPG. There’s a lot of different hooks that have to be created, like what happens when a player runs into the control point, things to happen by the FX team, sound team etc. So different things have to be coded in for the control points, i.e. when players cap a certain point, different buffs have to be triggered for the attacking/defending teams. There’s also different types of control points, some are control the point whereas others require channelling. With our objective system, each objective provides strategic bonuses instead of basic win conditions. This way they are real objectives that influence the team so you will have to plan which points to strategically cap to benefit your raid. 

The next thing we’ve been working on is spawning/respawning, a lot of it goes into the MMORPG, but in the castle siege, there’s different types of spawns where you can choose to respawn immediately or a pooled respawn where you can wait and everyone spawns at the same time. The pooling is beneficial as it prevents players from dying one by one. Additionally we have to work on the different respawn points and giving players the choice of where they want to respawn. We’ll be showing the capture point stuff later down the line. We’ve also been working on the various siege weapons/mechanics. So what we did was develop a base siege blueprint which is the trebuchet. There’s two types of trebuchets, one which is stationary and one which can be moved around. After these we moved onto Ballistas which were first person, where you spawn a projectile and have a firing rate, reload rate and more. There’s also different firing modes we were testing, single shot, rapid fire similar to a machine gun, or a supercharged shot with a long reload time.

Bonus funny story: Alex’s game handle is Slurpy – Steven and Alex first met in Archeage 7 years ago while Alex was working for Amazon. Alex’s Archeage guild was a mercenary guild that eventually merged into Steven’s guild. And then when we decided to make Intrepid, Alex said “I code, I fly” and joined the team. 

 

Design Team Updates: J.R. Vosovic (Senior Game Designer) is brought on Stream to share updates regarding the design side of things. He has over 20 years of experience in the industry. Currently the design team has been working on tuning primarily such weapon balance, experience, loot, UI, etc. We’ve began working on the new UI iterations for the MMORPG as well. We’ve also been working on the new first pass of the apocalypse lobby, additional UI animations, loading screens and more. We’ve been using UMG from Unreal Engine but have also started using Humming bird from Coherent labs. The UI in AoC will not be taking up a lot of screen space, it will be minimalist but communicative. We’ve also run a UI test where everyone was spamming the UI to test things. 

 

Environment Team Updates: Devin Lafontaine (Senior Artist) is brought on stream, with over 22 years of environment artist experience. We’ve been working on optimizations, ripping apart older iterations that we did poorly or rushed through in the past and reworking those. We’ve also been working on the new starting area, updating the graphics. While this is the Apocalypse map, it will be a ruined elven capital city where one of the divine gateways was. Regarding the elven architecture, its a bit of a challenge to incorporate the trees into the architecture, ensuring the trees dont look out of place.

 

Character Team Updates: Keith Kovach (Senior Character Artist) is brought on stream, he was the first employee of Intrepid Studios. We’re pretty much only doing MMORPG stuff, we’re making a lot of progress and focusing on the different races, finalizing them. We’ve also been working on the way armor appears on the races, the different racial traits, how the armor appears on fat characters vs thin characters. You can pick between the super symmetrical knight or eastern influence robe outfit. We did want to show some things, but they were not approved on time. These arent concept art, these are production concepts to help the modellers create them.

We’ve also been working on dragons, yes, 4-legged dragons. You can also grant little wyrmlings to the guild officers if you are the castle owner as the guild leader. Jincy has also been working on the dragon saddles. Ancient/Adult dragons will be raid bosses.

 

QnA Session

Q: We’ve been told there will be seamless transitions between areas, how will that work?
A: To give you a limited answer on it, when it comes to networking in MMOs, you have zones that work with others. Our server architecture is more about load balancing during large battles and connections between these zones. We dont want to affect the handshake between these zones. We have our own custom backend and partners that we’re working with. Part of the testing of apocalypse is how many we can handle in a zone to max them out. 

Q: Will we experience different tidal patterns in the oceans?
A: We wont be modelling those. You will see time of day/seasonal, but wont be doing dynamic tides. The ocean will not be static, we do have things that will change depending on the type of content.

Q: Will the map be global, if I walk west will I end up where I was? Or will there be invisible walls?
A: We will test that, we have plans to do test both and see which works out because it changes how we layout the map. Additionally because we’re continental, we dont have to worry about mountain ranges as we have oceans. Its more about how it affects the economics of the game than engineering.

Q: Other than taxes, will the only way nodes get resources from players be by their own prerogative? Or will there be something else that forces that? People, by nature, are hoarders, so I can’t see a willingness to give up hard-earned resources for a tiny bar to advance another fraction.
A: Caravans also supply certain resources. The majority of it will be related to resources. Its about players working together to benefit the node. A good mayor works with the players to benefit the node. Money is the engine of how you incentivize the node.

Q: Will we be able to place mayor campaign banners on our caravans?
A: Previously we had spoken about not allowing custom images. However we are now leaning towards allowing custom images. There will be an approval process. We are a subscription game, if you want to jeopardize your account to do so, we’ll deal with that. 

Q: Will dynamic destruction affect ships?
A: We cant answer that yet, but depending on the solution we find to destruction, the answer would be yes or no. Traditionally we could if we used decal models, but it breaks immersion. Cannot answer this yet for ships.

Q: Will there be sneak mechanics usable for all classes or just limited to rogues?
A: There will be counter mechanics for sure, but regarding secondary classes, augments affect the main class. Stealth is a primary of the rogue. So should you go secondary rogue, you may get the stealth modifier on abilities/augments.

Q: Will there be a form of progression for each primary/secondary classes?
A: Yes.

Q: You’ve mentioned highest skilled players in each artisan class wont be masters of all, will it specialization like armor smithing or steel armor smithing?
A: The professions exist within each path. As you master a path, you master the profession itself.

Q: Will we get some form of the character creator in apocalypse?
A: Its meant for Alpha 1, but there is a chance it might come in apocalypse. You could see it before or after depending on progress as its a seperate thing.

Q: Will there be a typed chat system for apocalypse in the current test?
A: Only VOIP in the upcoming test.

Q: Will there be a PTR or test server post launch for testing content? How do you prevent players from feeling like they’ve already done things?
A: We have a unique solution for that regarding content, we have the ability to include placeholder story/text on testing servers. At release ofcourse you will have the main story as it is a big part of the game.

Q: If my favourite ship is lost in PvP is it gone forever?
A: You can repair your ships, but its a longer processes.

Q: What is the planned ratio of race:class specific quests?
A: You may not be on the same quest but you can still do things together to complete quests, unless its a solo instance thing. You will always be able to play with other players for most of the stuff. As long as its not a solo instance. We generally want everyone to be able to do everything. So mostly 90% can be done by everyone. That 10% will be split amongst race/title/guild/mayor specific.

Q: Are we going to see a difference in VFX of a single spell when it levels up?
A: Part of our skill progression will be to add additional FX to your skills. Part of it is so when you see certain skills in battle, you know what loadout they are running. 

Q: Can you share an update on the Xsolla payment provider?
A: Yes it is still planned. However many of the new account services we provided in December were closely tied to many other systems. The modularity of this system needed some work but it got the backseat over some other important matters. The platform team has been working on it and we’ve also been working with database teams and AWS. So progress report is that it is coming up soon and we’ll keep you updated. 

Q: What kinds of exotic weapons can we expect in game? (Glaives/whips/scythes)
A: There will be exotic weapons, the question is how many will function outside the main weapon system. So a katana falls into sword, glaives fall into halberd, whips are complicated. You will see them in the categories that already exist, but more exotic is still an open question.

Q: Regarding voting, can I support my mayor friend with money? Can a mayor with good policies win over a mayor with bad policies
A: The intent in economic nodes is an olligarchy where the player purchases the mayorship. There will be a mechanism to help your friends, but it wont be as simple as transferring gold. We have metrics to flag gold sellers so we have to make sure it works right. Yes you can support your friends. So for example, certain requirements like being a member of the node etc.

Q: Other than the mayor are there any prominent leadership positions?
A: There’s definitely more positions that grants titles which are an access flag for certain NPC interactions. Director of a node, priests or acolytes of a node, patron guild leader, chief bounty hunter, there’s a lot of different things to work towards within the node.

Q: What game rating are you waiting for and will there be tasteful nudity?
A: We’re going for a Teen rating. We dont want to push it to mature. There wont be tasteful nudity, its not the goal. There will be sensualized atmospheres in the game, but no direct nudity.

Q: Will there be full loot systems like full gear drop besides corruption system?
A: No. No full drop. We want meaningful progression. We wont want a choice a player can make where they delete their character basically.

Q: Will you be able to see other players level and equipment?
A: We’ve talked about this early on, the concern is that it becomes a barrier for entry in certain activities. Its one thing to see another persons gear. We dont want to block players from participating because players care about gear numbers instead of skill. We’re trying to play on a fine line to give enough tools to players. We accept and know we cannot stop players from doing it, but we can slow it down. We expect people to utilize skill level to be an indicator. As a guild leader you should take multiple variables into account and help them get to where you want them. 

Q: We’ve been told a group of summoners can summon a golem together. Will the subclasses of summoners make a difference as to what they summon?
A: They’ll be able to change the attributes most likely, but not the summon itself. The different types of golems might be later content.

Q: We know there are racial augments, will they be cosmetic only?
A: They will be both, cosmetic and affect the ability.

Q: Will there be passive stats/effects?
A: Yes.

Q: Will one guild or alliance be able to advance the 3 nodes around the castle? Or will we need help from other guilds?
A: It will be very difficult to do it as a solo guild. But will be much easier if you had help.

Q: Will there be a contract system between players? Can I sign contracts between players?
A: Contracts are cool ideas, but tough to incorporate. There are some places where you can do that, but they will be limited. We have certain features like the mayor system where node funds are designated as a reward for contracts. With regards to caravans, when players come near they joining as defenders provides rewards which is a sort of contract. 

Q: Will I be able to participate in a node siege on any side if im neither a citizen of attacking or defending node and are there any rewards?
A: Yes and Yes. Only difference is with castle siege you need to be part of a guild, but for a node even if not a citizen, you can walk up to an NPC and join in. There’s some restriction by affiliation of citizenship etc.

Q: Will there be buffs and debuffs that depend on climate zones and seasons?
A: Not class based, but there might be dependent on the affiliations or seasons. Your items for like a frost cloak might have a bonus in the frost zone.

Google Doc Link

June 28th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares brand new concept art, in-game models, polished environments, development updates and answers questions from the community.

A Few Updates:

• • New Developer diaries on animation is out, can be found here.
  • The next Creative Directors letter will be out next month (Dates included!)
  • Divine node article is due next in the series.

 

Engineering Team Updates: Mark Storch (Lead Architect) is brought on Stream to share updates regarding the programming and engineering side of things. As part of the engineering team we have two primary goals, the first is supporting the artistic teams and the second is supporting the playerbase. We took a lot of our systems that were working on windows and leveraged them on the cloud to increase the scale and help manage the player base to help with the backend. Being able to scale capacity to meet our world size and to scale them to meet the player base demands. We need to ensure our distributed systems can scale to accommodate players as they move through the world. We’ve also been working on the weapons for the siege battles, moving them around, placing them and firing them. Building those to ensure they scale across instances is part of that challenge. 

Previously Alpha 0 was just in one zone with thousands of players and NPC’s, now we’ve got to scale that for all the different zones and nodes. Probably one of the most fun things we’ve worked on is the destruction mechanics come in to play from an engineering standpoint. The biggest challenge that we’ve had to overcome is the sheer number of possibilities that we can build. Being able to distill down what we could build to a huge array of features is a challenge. Part of what the engineering team does is not visible early on as their job is to provide design with the tools they need to build things. As we get deeper and deeper into testing settings and layer these different systems on top of each other, the later you find out these issues the harder they are to fix. Testing this early has allowed us to identify and fix issues much earlier in the timeline rather than later, which is incredibly beneficial to the end product. 

 

Design Team Updates: Garrett Fern (Senior Game Designer) is brought on Stream to talk about updates on game design. Data analysis is an important task that I work on, for example in regards to PvP in a PvX game, there’s a lot we’ve learned about Action Melee and Action Ranged combat in Apocalypse. We’ve certainly had this problem early on to identify what the characters are doing, which is why combat might feel floaty and through the development we realized if we were going to do this we had to do different things to accomplish that to bring the Hybrid combat to life. Destruction is obviously a big part of both Apocalypse and the MMORPG. We want destruction to be a core element of what you see in the MMO, it’s not something that’s done right and we want to get it right. Going through dungeons and having obstructions that need to be destroyed, it’s going to be a big thing. 

Besides this, we’ve been working on a lot of abilities, with 64 classes in game. The design team is in two modes, one portion is finishing up the polish on Apocalypse and the other portion is working on abilities and abilities and abilities as we’re going to need a lot. Newer abilities being shown such as piercing shot to travel through objects, super jump to allow players to jump high depending on how long they hold down the charge. These are all work in progress.

 

Environment Team Updates: Bacon (Lead Environment Artist) is brought on stream and proceeds to distribute candy. We’ve primarily been working on a lot of polishing. A lot of people of people want to see Alpha 1 progress, we have to be careful of what we show as a lot of people will view it and assume it is the end-product. Besides that we’re on 3 fronts, the MMO, castle siege stuff and the destruction stuff. New Kaelar and Nikua architecture concepts being shown. Part of the reason for sharing these concepts is so that the player base can see where they originate and follow the development. We’re working on polishing design to ensure it is to a high standard. The cool thing about the signs shown below is that they are player customizable and can be edited by guilds etc. to represent themselves.

 

Character Team Updates: Chris Atkins (Lead Character Artist) is brought on stream. The character team has been primarily focused on MMO stuff, with characters, mounts, marketplace stuff. We’re mainly focused on armor pipeline things right now, we’ve already had the system in place but we’re revamping it right now and fleshing out the modular side of the armor system. If you have an armor set in game, that one set with all its pieces is going to look different across every race. We want it to be different and have it’s own theme and not all look the same. So we’ve got a great understanding of what’s to be done and the others in the team are working on the other races and creatures. 

So for example previously the horse you’ve seen in-game was because we needed a horse. But now going through the various passes, things are being polished and being made better. So this is our basic middle tier horse, so when we step it up for a warrior/heavy horse and then step it down for a mule or something smaller. It functions as a baseline. We’re going to be showing the Tidebringer mount next up in the pipeline followed by the Quarrior pet. The next piece is the basic armor sets that’s pretty low level, each of these individual pieces are unique and you can remove or add, in total there’s 8 distinct individual pieces.

 

QnA Session

Q: Can you share with us some of the biomes that we can find in AoC?
A: All biomes are represented in some way or form.

Q:Can we have basements in our freeholds?
A: Freeholds are going to be a maybe, likely not, but maybe. TBD.

Q: Will there be options to auto-ui hotkey?
A: Not not possible and it isnt in the plan. We will have a UI hotkey.

Q: Do you think only having a single tank archetype will affect the 8-man group compositions?
A: It’s not that only the tank archetype can tank. But they’re better at it than others. So there’ll be plenty of tanking types available – such as evasion tanks, aggro tanks, damage mitigation tanks, etc. So you adjust them via your secondary class. Most viable will vary from the type of content such as raids.

Q: Can you share the number of crew required to sail different types of ships
A: 1-3 for small, group size (8) for medium and raid size for large. Battle at seas are going to be massive to be indicative of

Q: Are you considering using Nvidia’s RTX?
A: We’ll leave that question for the future.

Q: Will world changing events like dragons that bring about winter be open world events and how will rewards be distributed?
A: Yes they will be open world. We want to ensure drops are given to everyone so there will be some RNG involved in that, there will be quests involved with them. While everyone will have a reason to be there, the legendary gear etc. will be finite and will depend on participation.

Q: Can you give an example of what the team has learnt from other games and how you’ve incorporated it?
A: It’s primarily to do with maintaining the Risk vs Reward relationship. Its important for players to feel that their risk is some degree of variation to the reward. Also MMO’s only get one chance at launch from past experiences. We are releasing something to keep to our player base’s standards. It’s a process.

Q: Who will command troops during a node siege/war. If anyone can, will a raid leading comms be available to all citizens?
A: There are administrative functions that will be available, including VOIP functions and raid delegation, including on screen commands and target designation.

Q: Can we expect updates on apocalypse/sieges such as content and balance updates?
A: Yes. We’ll be implementing them in apocalypse and then the MMORPG, so you’ll be seeing them in both.

Q: Will you consider adding in-game voting for updates and features.
A: We already have a voting system in game for the mayor system and I imagine we could use that code for other features.

Q: You mentioned using agile development method and sprinting, could you explain it in-depth?
A: Sprints take 1-2 hours to take off and across the various departments it could take 7-8 hours. If we tried to explain it all it would take a long time.

Q: What are the chances there will be a mechanic that allows us to choose our stance or how we hold our weapon?
A: Very high chance on stances. We’ll see how it goes.

Q: Will the Vek be able to recieve a prophecy when they stargaze and what do they have to do with astrology?
A: Probably not in that way, but they will have class based abilities. It’s not like they are the only ones who can do it.

Q: How will we capture animals, will there be a menu that pops up or will there be traps?
A: It could be a nice humane trap that massages the animal. But seriously, TBD.

Q: Can we get an example on how bard music will work, instruments or traditional spellcaster?
A: Bards will have a wide range of techniques such as spellweaving, acting, singing, just like tanks they will also have the ability to customize their toolkit.

Q: Can you give us an update on the parkour system shown back in Alpha 0?
A: We’re still doing a lot of prototyping as it requires a universal solution. There’s definitely certain places/quests that allow interactions for parkour. However whether or not it will be relevant across the open world, we’re not at that point yet.

Q: Will we have adjustable UI and window scaling in Alpha 1?
A: We should have it for Alpha 1, yes. 

Q: Can you share a bit more about trophies, can we turn loot parts from bosses into trophies/furniture?
A: Yes.

Q: Banking between characters is being discussed, any new info on this?
A: In a game like ours where regionality matters from a gatherable standpoint. You will not be able to bank those items, but you will be able to bank furniture and completed items. You’re going to have settings/permissions to let different players access storage on your freehold/home.

Q: Can you elaborate on how combat pets will work? Will they limit your abilities in some way?
A: We dont want combat pets to be vertical progression. If you have a combat pet present it will incorporate some of your own power to keep power progression more normal. It will offer different options, you’ll be making some sacrifices.

Q: You said that a guild that chooses max size over skill is 300, what about the max cap if you maxxed out skills?
A: 30-50 for now, still requires fine tuning.

Q: Will we be encountering more like the Macaw in-game besides shop items?
A: Yes.

Q: Mayors are in power for a month. Can you elaborate on how it might work to remove the mayor prior?
A: We’re currently not planning on doing that. We dont want to have no counter play, but then again the fallout of electing a bad mayor to begin with is something we like. Currently the only way to remove a bad mayor is to destroy the node. We want consequences to matter.

Q: How many guilds will there be in one node, does it depend on one level?
A: Any number of guilds can be in a node. However patron guilds will be max 3 in a node. One starting at town, 2 at the city and 3 at metropolis.

Q: Will there be combos in your combat system?
A: Yes.

Q: How diverse and time investing will end-game content be? How many hours do I need to put in approximately?
A: Depends on the player’s goals. If it’s best in slot gear, you gotta experience a lot of end game content. If you want to be a crafter and take advantage of the economy, you might not need to participate in much but you’re going to need friends. There’s a lot of avenue in various different areas of the game, not just end-game. The node system changes a lot of things that players have grown accustomed to in prior MMOs.

Google Doc Link