May 30th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid shares a development update and plenty of new information from their various development teams + QNA.

A Few Updates:

• • The new Dev diaries on weapons is live. Chris is working on the Quarrior pet model  next.
  • The Economic node blogpost is out. Divine nodes are due next.
  • Lore of the hippogryph blogpost delves a bit into our animal husbandry system.
  • Summer shop images are fixed. The new cosmetics will be swapping over on June 5th at 11:00am.
  • Hiring is going well. 7 new engineers starting between now and July first. Veterans from the industry. The new studio is being built.

Things being shown are a Work in Progress. This is not an end-game look at things, many of these are first passes that will be iterated on in the future. As with Agile development, sprints are done that last about 2 weeks and then at the end of the 2 weeks, we all come together and show it on the big screen and we all get to discuss things.

 

 

Design Team Updates: As we move towards the last 10% of the apocalypse, we’ve been prototyping a bunch of abilities for the MMO and the Castle Siege. We have also re-tooled the melee combat system in apocalypse as many players felt it was floaty. So we’re working on making it heavier and feel better. We want combat to feel impactful when you swipe with a melee weapon and not just a pair of floating legs swinging a sword around. Work is being done on the data side as well after reviewing the logs. The team size in design has also been doubled. The design team is also working on objective gameplay that is going to be present in castle sieges and the MMORPG, having those systems work with proximity players, being able to channel on the castle siege relic, etc. Most of it is modular, we’re basically getting our toolbox set up to apply them to various things.

From a technical standpoint, the most challenging thing is the movement of the character with root motions as the server does not appreciate the movement very well. There’s a lot of interesting problems with that to reduce the lag and a lot of tricks were involved to make it feel good. It’s important to note that when we discuss root motion, we do not intend to lock characters down. We want players to be able to get out of situations, however in a tactical way. It’s more about control and positioning so you know what your character can do when hitting and when going to get hit.

 

 

Visual FX Team Updates: The new effects artist has been working on tweaking the effects to make them look better and be much less taxing. We’ll ensure that since this is an MMORPG it’s not too much. We’ll allow players to scale down the effects for optimization as well. Updated FX for Miasma, Nightfall, Wand of Light, Apocalypse Portal and more being shown.

 

 

Environment Team Updates: Bacon (Lead environment artist) is brought on stream. The environment team is working on 3 fronts – Apocalypse / Sieges / MMO. Lots of refinements being done. Recently we did an erosion pass to add new detail to a lot of things. The newer terrain has additional detail that does not look like it’s from the 90’s. We’ve been testing the new terrain and river passes in the apocalypse as they’ll later be applied to the MMORPG. The castle siege destruction system is still being worked on, we’ll share a video on it later as it’s part of a Dev diaries as well. When you shoot a wall, we need to ensure it falls the same way for everyone. New ocean/beach shaders being shown, wind moving through the grass. Most importantly, since all of this is done in UE4, you will not need a supercomputer to run this. The new grass looks better and performs better than the old one for example. Building an MMORPG from scratch lets us make all these great things, it helps us ensure that things are constantly worked on as we move through each stage. Bacon’s favourite thing so far is the destruction mechanic. With over 9 cultural influences in architecture, there’s a lot of different types of buildings that are created to ensure we can create a visually stunning MMORPG. Ensuring that the transition between village assets and city assets is difficult to maintain. The concept artists  also have to ensure that it looks the same.

 

 

Character Team Updates: Brad Constantine (Senior Artist on the Character Team) is brought on stream. This is Brad’s 8th MMO project. The character team involves a bunch of various disciplines ranging from creating characters, meshes, rigging, animations, fixing the combat, modelling and designing new mounts, weapons, character customization planning for down the road, etc. Besides the above, one of the big tasks the character team has is to categorize races, npcs into different teams to reduce the amount of work that goes into it. So being able to build and create different things that share the same base mesh. So there’s a lot of technical stuff that goes on under the hood, so when a player moves too far away, the model is swapped out to reduce the load. Also been working on the iterations of the root motion in combat to ensure its fun and replayable. Finding the right movement style and the visual presentation that you get needs to feel good because we spend a lot of time within the MMO. Dawnbreaker (Braver of worlds mount) WIP is being shown, still needs some light bio-luminosity on the wings and the textures need some updating as its on the first pass. Weapon variants now being shown.

Providing visual progression is incredibly important to provide variety to the player. Not everyone likes the same thing, hence providing this range of customization allows the player to define their own style. Ensuring that the weapons have unique aspects that set them apart from each other is essential to providing variety. It’s important to note that there is a crap ton of assets that need to be created to make an MMO make diverse and filling. All of these assets require setting up a pipeline to ensure that not each asset takes as much time as the first one. It helps them cut down on time and get newer assets done in a much shorter timeframe. So as Carson and the team work on this list, the time taken to create them gets shorter. We use 2 different 3D programs – Motion Builder by AutoDesk (Used for motion capture data and has keyframe animation tools suite). We’re able to create things in Maya, drag them into Motion builder, then back into Maya and then into UE4 seamlessly. These 3rd party tools help us move development much further along. From a physics standpoint, during your immersive experience, suspension of disbelief is important. As such oversized weapons/features dont make sense in a way (Personal opinion). Part of the job of the animation team is to create these various sockets to provide players the ability to select what they want to represent in their socket and then the animators animate the jingling and bouncing of the various toolbelt items. We feel companies are sometimes unwilling to take the risk like a game such as ashes of creation. Passion is needed to fuel the devs to complete the project. Much of Apocalypse’s design is asymmetrical in design. The MMORPG however has 9 distinct races and many more minor races. Keith Kovac was the first hire at Intrepid.

 

QnA Session

Q: Regarding weapon swapping in combat
A: We dont want instant weapon swapping in combat. For the MMORPG we want there to be some time between damage received/done before you can swap. It wont be substantial, just a few seconds. Keep in mind the weapons also work with a combo system which their skills are tied to.

Q: Regarding the last 10% of apocalypse work being done
A: We’re currently focused on stress testing and account creation. Mitch was running some tests with spawning thousands of characters to check the server readings. Focusing on stress testing the new architecting that was done and we’re happy to report that progress is substantial on that front.

Q: Regarding MMORPG lore
A: It’s being worked on but we cant really show that and dont want to reveal much too early. We’ve got a gigantic lore bible and it’s more about figuring out what pieces go where. As the Alpha 1 map is being laid out, the NPC’s for lore have to be placed at certain points as they have to connect with nodes etc. We will probably releasing this close to Beta as at that point it’ll be difficult even for us to keep it under wraps. All of the events and narrative quests are all based around storytelling. We want to make sure there’s context and relevancy. Questing system is very complex and a lot goes into it. Every system that’s created touches story in a way. We cant really show lore/story, but there’s lots of work being done on them.

Q: For the Melee sounds, will there be different audio for metal/cloth hits?
A: Yes. Based on what you’re hitting you’ll hear different sounds.

Q: Is the referral system work done?
A: Part of the work we’re doing on the website, the changes necessary are being incorporated. Some new features such as a code field where you can share the code for players to utilize when registering for an account. Additional tracking tools will also be included so players can check their referrals etc. These ancillery systems will come later during launch. Originally we wanted to do the code redemption later with the tools, but then we decided to do it earlier alongside the kickstarter code redemption etc.

Q: You mentioned private property sale certs. Is this like a landlord thing where you can sell it on the auction house?
A:There’s a few ideas we have. But this will allow players to transfer real property goods (Freeholds/housing/etc) and players can sell these. This will not allow you to go above your 1 allotment in game. If you already have one, you’ll have to get rid of it. Additionally we’ve got some concepts on rental/leasing where player can lease a property for a time to access storage/furniture/etc.

Q: How is the backend development going?
A: We answered this but it is going extremely well. The work mich is doing to get like 3000 characters on screen. We have like 5-6 people working on ensuring things look good on the server. We had 200 live players during the Feb test, but we should be able to push that number up significantly. We have grown leaps and bounds on our server architecture in the past 3 months.

Q: How exactly does the auction house work? Can we buy/sell or is it just a place to list items in the economic nodes?
A: AH will have a listing fee. They can be accessed from the economic node where they exist, you can VIEW items from vassal nodes of an economic node (Cant list there). You will have to travel to the AH that has raw resources or processed materials in order to retrieve them from that node and then use a caravan to move them. In an economic node, there’s an area of space where players may put up a shop. Additionally there will be rentable stalls that can be used by players to list a number of goods for a period of time. The stalls goods will be listed on a bulletin board so players in the region know where to travel to. At the metropolis stage, the economic node sells player shop certificates that let a player purchase and put up a player shop anywhere in the world.

Q: Can you own chunks of land without developing on it?
A: You could put down your freehold and not put anything on it or put farm stuff on it. There’s lots of things that you can put on your freehold that’s not specifically buildings.

Thank you all for tuning in today, hope you enjoyed the stream! Please check out the weekly blogposts and all the new information on our website and various social media channels.

Google Doc Link

April 30th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid showcases their new developer diary on building technology and answers community questions.

Few Updates:

• • Still no new dates. We’ll announce them when we’re ready
  • No ETA on the referral system, its being worked on.
  • Forum nicknames are being worked on and are nearly done. Will give you a 24 hour notice.

Mini Development Milestone: We’ve done some really fun tests and want to share some interesting things, we had a milestone last week with the PI – A first ever mayor election for a node happened last week, the system works. The mayor was cool but his helper the magistrate wouldnt show up. The magistrate is the NPC placed in the node that contains most of the accessible systems like tax rates and launching the caravans, he wouldnt spawn but we fixed it. We elected a mayor, we launched a caravan across the map, the caravan crashed and flipped over, then physics got crazy and it flew across the map, good times. We’ll be showing some footage as it gets a little more polished. We had some structure mechanics run through the internal mechanics, you could target the caravan and destroy it, the looting, we had merchant systems up and running buying/selling goods, lots of progress and its starting to feel like an MMORPG.

New Hires: We’ve been hiring more people, we brought on board a new character artist who just finished the base mesh for the dawnbreaker which we’ll be showing very soon. We have a few models and armor pieces that we want to show and some extra stuff.

Apocalypse: Lots of the backend stuff of Apocalypse is getting finalized, we’d say we’re at the last 10%. Hit detection/input feeling and UI that needs some things finalized. We’re really grateful for all the feedback.

New Developer Diaries being shown:

• • Modular/procedural houses and buildings.
  • Fast and easy setup by designers/artists.
  • Can swap out to any race with a few clicks
  • Highly optimized for large scale use.

The Building Technology tool primarily speeds up the development process. We’re pushing the limits with Unreal Engine to create the necessary assets in a timely manner. We dont want players to see the same asset over and over and over again. In the past, there may have been the technology to do so or it may not have been feasible, but we’ve built this tool so we can easily generate a lot of assets. Since Ashes of Creation is a large world, it requires a lot of assets that need to be created from the ground up. The tool helps speed up this process significantly. We can take elements of this tech and allow the players to play with specific constraints within the building system to change out the windows/roofs/gutters/interior/doors/etc. To change out aspects to make it unique and represent your own style to set yourself apart from the norm.

Currently the freehold/housing skins apply to the entire building. That’s not to say the team wont compartmentalize certain parts of the skin to re-use or adjust them, that’s the benefit of creating a modular system. As a player when was the last time you played an MMORPG with 9 distinct cultural races? We can think of a few but not one that’s as in-depth as ours. So these modular parts when slotted into specific categories, you can adjust them. So player housing will have an element of this tool, not all of it as its primarily a development tool. We also have to consider performance and how these various assets dont bog down the performance of your CPU. Since these are modular and share the same resource/tileset, its the same as having just 1 tileset. So if you walk into an area with 100 houses, it loads instantly and does not struggle to load 100 unique houses. This tool is also capable of procedurally generating houses which requires artist retouching to make it aesthetic, so this also speeds up development.

Also Steven did a bunch of interviews with content creators the past week which are all on our Twitter. Steven’s favourite interview question was on The Golden Feather on what he did in his spare time besides video games, to which the answer was board games.

 

QnA Session

Q: Will there be certain unique traits like birth sign/background etc with like small boosts like +2 int for scholars?
A: There will be progressive traits with a lot of subtle things you can achieve from a roleplay standpoint. Its something we want to have in-game. We want your character background to be influenced by religion, the nodes you belong to, the social organizations you belong to etc. We will definitely have a character sheet where you can write your own lore/info/etc.

Q: Will the buildings mayor/government choose be constructed in the same stage or the next stage?
A: They appear in the stage that you construct them in. When chosen they appear as a building site and has some requirements for citizens and non-citizens to achieve construction. So the main building is different as its not mayor elected, the main building automatically levels with the node such as the library.

Q: How much creativity can players have in their own building creation or is auto generated?
A: If you’re talking about freeholds, there is a decent amount of it. The freeholds is like a plot of land, not a housing system, its a building system where you decide like tetris what’s built on it. You dont necessarily have to build a house, you could build a blacksmiths. From a customization standpoint, as we’ve shown in the building tool, its part of us going into the process of allowing customization so your blacksmiths looks different from anothers. But the layout wont change, but the detail work/furniture/etc will change.

Q: Will there be any race crossovers for buildings?
A: The node itself will be specific to a race, one race will be the dominant race. The freeholds will not be restricted to race style. The node will however be restricted to one dominant race.

Q: Are there any plans for giving access to building tool to other users, like community building challenges etc.
A: It would be cool, but we’d have to put it into a module. If there is time and interest from the community it would be great to have and hold contests and use them in game, but right now its not on the roadmap. Things might change down the line as we go through development. We have plans for launch and plans for post launch. From a creation standpoint, we want a creature creation to go with animal husbandry etc. for players to create their unique creatures/pets. The idea is to provide as much customization as possible, it wont be in place at launch but it is something we’re looking at for post launch.

Q: So we can or cant build houses from scratch?
A: No, you cannot. You get a blueprint to utilize which you can accent and customize.

Q: What housing/decor editing will be available specifically?
A: Yes you can rotate decor in all 3 directions. Dont know about XYZ but you cannot place them floating in the air. Yes for the free placement. You’ll have a max height ceiling on your land and other confinements. Regarding Scaling, its something we have to look into, we’d have to provide constraints and need to make sure things make sense from an immersion standpoint.

Q: Will the player stalls/kiosks be modular/customizable?
A: There will definitely be flags of what you can choose to show on the counter of your kiosk. Its a great indicator for prospective buyers. We have to keep in mind all of this is in the open world and have to be careful.

Q: To what extent will buildings be destructible in the sieges?
A: We’ll be showing this in the future. It’s still being worked on as replication of the destruction needs to be synced across different players. But yes, completely destructible. There’s two prevailing thoughts – First is the traditional method where the mesh is swapped out for a destructed state based on the hitpoints of the building. So like the side of the castle wall would slowly swap out for a new mesh with a hole in it. So now what we’re doing and going to show you is new destruction where the projectile lands will actually cause the destruction, so you can grapple through it. Its real, organic destruction, so players can focus their attacks on one area and maybe create a hole to crawl through.

The idea behind sieging is that when a siege is declared, there’s preparation time and then the siege itself. During the siege, yes you can destroy buildings. So lets say Attackers realize they are not going to win the siege so they decide to just cause as much destruction as possible which will cause the defenders to have to rebuild them. So services can be disabled/crippled to hinder the growth of nodes. With regards to freeholds, they can only be attacked and destroyed should a node lose the siege. So once a node loses the siege, freeholds become vulnerable for a few hours where players can defend it. Once the timer is up, the freehold becomes invulnerable again. But if its not under a new node after losing the siege, they’ll have a small grace period to save the layout for the decor and save certain things.

Q: How are you going to deal with realtime updating of node levels from town to city?
A: Currently the way it works is that it’s all realtime. If you’re in a node and it advances, first the system checks if you’re in a collision spot, if you are, it moves you and then the node upgrades. Once we get to alpha 2 we’d like to make it a bit more cinematic with like builders showing up and a few hours for it to happen. But right now it’s instant.

Q: How much customization will there be for the inside of the home and will they be crafted or looted?
A: There will be some things that you need to hunt for, some recipes, some things you need to craft, etc. You’ll have a lot of things to populate a house with. We’ll have to make an ale pong table for parlour games.

Q: Are there any buffs/advantages for having a house?
A: In order to be a successful processor, you’re going to need some kind of industry on your freehold. If you want to run an inn, you’re going to need to generate food. Taverns are an example of freeholds that provide proximity buffs. If you freehold, you’re a citizen, which provides advantages compared to people that dont have citizenship.

Q: Can you touch on what Naval combat will be like in AoC?
A: The ideas behind Naval combat is to have classes of ships with different amounts of material requirements to construct them in a drydock space. So like if you win a battle at sea, we dont want you to immediately respawn your ship in the middle of nowhere. So a penalty for them to respawn their ship near land. Its pivotal to reward winning combat. The ships you build in a drydock, we want you to constantly upgrade it, reinforce the hull and upgrade systems. You can always re-summon your drydock and upgrade your ship.

Q: Buildings are located next to roads usually, do you already have plans for a node network?
A: Yes we’ve thought about it, its a difficult system and we’re working on it. As the nodes upgrade, a dirt path will upgrade to a better path, we even have a system for bridges as well. Linking up the different communities is a pivotal part of the world. Roads are also important for the caravan systems as they have systems for road friendly or frontier friendly. So you may choose to have specific wheels for a caravan to do better for certain terrains or armor.

Q: How are we going to prevent every part of the map be covered by freeholds?
A: Part of the reason is we wanted to avoid the ugly tetris-ness. From the onset the idea was to make it more free-hold. We want it to be more environment incorporated and immersive. 480sqkm is relatively large and is a big area. There will be considerable space between freeholds, if friends want to place their freeholds next to each other, they can and have a little hamlet. There will be certain hunting grounds where you cant build freeholds ofcourse and other areas. We have hidden a sandal every patch, which no one has found yet. And yes, you can build your freehold in the under-realm if there’s nodes down there.

Thank you all for watching and we hope you enjoyed watching all the interviews we had this month. The building technology video will be up shortly after this stream, follow us on all our social media!

Google Doc Link

April 19th Golden Feather Livestream Transcription

– Steven joins The Golden Feather on their podcast and discusses his inspiration for the MMORPG and specific lore and game mechanics.

Stream Hosts: ChibiBree, DJvirtek | Stream link

Q: So the new forum QnA series, what’s that about?
A: Yes our objective is to get feedback from the community.

Q: What is your favourite part of AoC’s development?
A: I would probably say its a tie between first and foremost, reading the discussions in chat and interacting with the community, especially meeting the fans at events like PAX, secondly I enjoy getting to walk into a studio each day and be surrounded by other passionate people. The two of them are definitely my favourite parts of development.

Q: If you could be an animal what would you be?
A: I would like to be some sort of bird so I could fly a lot. If a mythological creature, then a Sphinx.

Q: Was there ever a sandal in Apocalypse?
A: Yes there is a sandal, one in the lobby and one in the world, nobody has found it yet. I cant give too many clues, but it is in the world. No, not in the sky.

Q: Could you give us a brief rundown of your life before and your life now?
A: I’ve always been playing video games since 6-7 years old and started my first video game as an MMORPG, Neverwinter on AOL, my first experience was getting in trouble for the 6$ an hour bill at the end of the month. From there I played console games, strategy, RTS, but I always enjoyed the social aspect on games such as the CIV series. But even as I was working throughout my late teens and twenties, my social attraction was always towards the MMO community. I ran a pretty large guild and would not have met the people I did and that’s a cool aspect of MMORPGs. As i grew older and got retired by 28/29, I was disappointed by the games I was playing and hence I decided to make my own studio since I had the funding to do so. I firmly believe in the passion that we’ve pooled together in the studio.

Q: What do you do in your leisure time?
A: I enjoy, and enjoyed social aspect of gaming. I love DnD and pathfinder, tabletop RPGs. I used to play a lot of warhammer fantasy and loved the old style where we had large battalions and could customize your characters with weapons and whatnot.

Q: Where did you draw the inspiration for the 24 hour verra campaign from?
A: Many years ago I created a homebrew pathfinder campaign. I wanted to move away from traditional campaign worlds with well established history and lore, instead I wanted to make it more about building the world up. So I created this story about returning to an unknown world with artifacts and history to discover while exploring. And that was kind of the driving force for me, then as I would play with my pathfinder group, I would flesh out the backstory and the antagonists, gods and religion of the Verra mythos, a lot of it derived from Deep space 9. I then put it together around 2008.

Q: If we hunt down some of Steven’s old pathfinder buddies, we can get llore leaks?
A: All my old pathfinder buddies have signed NDA’s

Q: You plan to have sinks in the game even though its a sandbox?
A: We have sinks that evolve with the life of the server.

Q: You’ve been very firm on the Anti-P2W stance as well
A: From a stability standpoint and population, One of the things I didnt necessarily like was the access to those things as it becomes a necessary feature from a competitive standpoint, especially near the upper echelon of end-game features like castle sieging or guild wars or competitive raiding etc. Which is why I think when we have a strong subscription model, players dont have to worry about their confidence being subverted by the outside company.

Q: You mentioned wanting players to discover this lore by themselves
A: So there’s venturing into the wilderness, then you’re going to make the choice to continue that wanderlust objective to discover places off the beaten path in order to try to find those benefits.

Q: With some creatures being tameable and some being exclusive, can we find a wild Pridestalker? If so, it wont be exclusive. Since you can customize mounts, how does that work?
A: So you will not be able to find exclusive cosmetics in the world, even through professions such as animal husbandry, however that’s not to say that there wont be similar creatures out there. Part of the animal husbandry system is to reveal – even the exclusive cosmetics will be customizable via animal husbandry.

Q: Speaking of pets and such, the dragon eggs in the wild, do they have to be raised or do they just spawn full grown?
A: So royal pets, even from legendary bosses, have a hatching period that they exist in and require several different quest lines and materials to raise the mount to adulthood where it may be rideable. We may include phases where its land mount for a period of time and flight when full adult. It’s just an idea for now though or might show up in an expansion. But yes, the egg will require tender love from the player.

Q: We really like the ideas and concepts of the rewarding
A: So the core concept or gameplay loops in Ashes are what deviates us from other projects. We embrace the investment and return for your time. You’ll find that philosophy present in many of our systems. We have ideas that range from casual players that can only spend several hours a week to hardcore ones. A lot of games believe they should cater to the casual audience only to get significant return. But we’re willing to take those risks as a studio.

Q: Love the idea of raising the dragon from an egg and it being a baby hatchling.
A: Lineage 2 had a dragon which you could fly if you had a guild hall or if you were a guild leader of a castle. It was ineffective and was just a status symbol and cumbersome and couldnt use it in battle. But before you could spawn the dragon, you needed a strider which was a land dragon and then turned that into the dragon. So the idea behind the royal mount is to provide a relevant mount that is powerful in combat and is the best you can get.

Q: Will there be a period of time before I can be revealed out of stealth in sieges?
A: The setting will not dictate the cooldown for skills like stealth, however combat with another player will disable stealth or turn it off.

Q: Are there any lore blogs coming up in the future?
A: We dont want to give away too much of the story before release.

Q: Are skins like the Eldritch model in the BR, is it limited to only a certain class of swords?
A: There will be a few crossover types that they can apply to, like one-handed maces

Q: Can we know if there are japanese weapons/armors?
A: There is some Japanese influence in some of the cultures in Ashes of Creation, you wont see a 1:1 but you will see some aspects of them in game.

Q: Are all cosmetics able to be dyed and are they able to be dyed in different parts?
A: No, not all of them. But the ones that are capable of being dyed, those have a range of applicable cosmetics that can be dyed. And for those cosmetics there are specified highlights/textures  which can be dyed.

Q: Can you dye the kickstarter racial wings?
A: No you cannot dye the kickstarter racial wings.

Q: Since resource points can deplete, can they be completely depleted? Respawn timers?
A: There’s 3 different types of resource node points. These resource nodules that exist are of different types, like Herb beds can be depleted and can spawn in different places in the world. Then there’s Veins and others which can be excavated completely and spawn elsewhere requiring travel.

Q: If a resource module is depleted, does it respawn nearby? Like an iron node/vein?
A: They will spawn elsewhere in the world. The idea is that there’s a plethora of locations that have nodules for resource spawns, so when one is depleted it will spawn elsewhere in the world, when its depleted there, the previous site becomes available. The idea behind them though is that they’re a large collection of resoruces before they get depleted. The reason behind that is to centralize the social aspect of the gameplay. We dont want a tiny dots of resources, more like huge chunks so people all group up to gather there and safety in numbers etc.

Q: With the mastery, can you master all trees or is the mastery locked to specific types?
A: The artisan is broken into 3 trees and you can only be a master of 1.

Q: Is smithing broken up into 3 parts as well or only 1 type of armor?
A: We have a couple of thoughts on this for alpha, but we’re thinking of lumping it into 1 or breaking it into specifics, same for weapon crafting, but we’ll talk more about this closer to alpha.

Q: Besides the monetary gain of nodes, what about guild hall vs guild fortress?
A The guild hall is purchased within a node built on a guild freehold  Once a guild reaches a certain level the guild leader can build a guild hall on a freehold. The fortress is kind of competition based and the design might be on the shelf. It’s meant to be a competitive guild hall that needs contending on a regular basis, whereas the guild hall is a freehold structure. Fortresses are a separate idea from castles, they were like mini castles, but as I said it might be shelved. The castles however offer taxation and much more, its scheduled for one of our upcoming blogs.

Q: Can you sell cooking items on your freehold?
A: You can sell cooking items, vendor presence to sell crafted goods to avoid taxation of the node, stuff like that, quest hooks that can be accessed from your freehold.

Q: When a metro is destroyed by a siege, can the node leadership communicate with their citizens in some way to co-ordinaten to move to another node?
A: Once the siege is complete and the metro has lost the siege, there will be a destruction state where you have loot mechanics for the attackers, destruction and attack mechanics against freeholds outside the node but under ZOI, etc. As the city burns, you still have your communication system online. But once that period is complete (which could span several hours, currently 2 hours) those systems will cease to exist, all citizen systems will cease to exist, they will have to co-ordinate in other ways.

Q: How does stealth work out of combat instead of in-combat? Does
A: You cant have stealth in combat, once in combat it dissipates. So when out of combat, your stealth period is the length of the skill duration. In Apocalypse it was 30 seconds. There could be augments that increase the time of the stealth with your secondary class or racial/society augments.

Q: When a player dies by a mob after a player brought them low, how does corruption work?
A: No, the player must kill another player in order to gain corruption. It does allow certain griefing mechanics, so unless you’re in party, you cannot see the health of another player. So right now, when you select a player, their nameplate will be damaged depending on their health status, but it doesnt tell you what HP they are at. If you heal a corrupted player, you become flagged for PvP at which point players can kill you with no penalty.

Q: Regarding the remote developers on Intrepid, how are you countering the cohesiveness of the team as a whole?
A: First off we have individuals working from home, there’s a very small handful of those, less than 5. Secondly we have groups like the one in France which are at studios which have management etc. As a general rule, im only hiring full time employees who are capable of coming into the studio as I believe the cohesiveness and collaboration of them being in-house is important.

Q: Will character creator let us make tulnar similar to Kobolds?
A: I wouldnt say exactly, but yes.

Q: Do the royal mounts have skill trees and armor sets?
A: Yes there are definitely bardings for royal mounts and there’s some skills they can acquire that we’ll expand on in our mounts blog.

Q: How is the new studio going?
A: We are still constructing that one, but we’re adding 17 more seats into this one which is making it cramped. We can fit upwards of 70 in this studio, but we need to make that much larger in a quick period of time.

Q: Will we be taught how the game mechanics work through the game and not tutorial?
A: The idea behind introduction to complex mechanics is to give you an early taste through levels 1-10 and then expand on that as you level. So we’ll touch on those vast systems early and you’ll explore more.

Q: How different will the classes be from each other like Highsword/Spellsword?
A: They should feel very different as it comes down to your archetype providing a primary role that you can customize and move based on how you build out the skill tree. And then the secondary class augments which radicalizes the taste/feel/role of the primary archetype. So either moving it further or doubling down in the established role of the archetype. Short answer, they are intended to radically change the base archetypes.

Google Doc Link

April 17th Simurgh Livestream Transcription

– Steven joins the Ashes Pathfinders on their podcast and discusses the scientific node features, citizenship and the progress on web systems. 

Stream Hosts: Simurgh, Daedelus | Stream link

Q: Are the armors from the blogpost obtainable by players?
A: As a member if you choose to participate in the questline the Iron lion has to offer, you will be able to wear those cosmetics as a reward.

Q: Will these be tied to any specific race? Or can anyone partake?
A: Any race can do their questline and take part in them to get their rewards, the Kaelar accept all races.

Q: Since the organization focuses on dampening magic, as a magic user will I have a negative reaction from them?
A: No, based on your class you won’t see a different quest narrative. That isn’t to say there aren’t other quests related to classes, obviously there are, but not with the Iron Lions.

Q: Do you expect to see any synergy between the library and taverns, battlemaps?
A: Those are two distinct systems, since the taverns can exist regardless of node type unlike the library. They are somewhat independent.

Q: Will the specific node type benefits be unavailable to other node types?
A: The benefits to having a broad based diversity of different node types, you’ll see that each type has specific routes for advancing/expediting progress between certain mechanics and systems within the game. Scientific node relates to scientific and artisan branches that help with crafting, building types, etc. While they may be available outside a scientific node, while within one, the process is expedited. So node specializations basically allow you to do certain things faster than other node types by providing faster access than others.

Q: Can a non-citizens access the library?
A: Regarding citizenship, as its a flag present on any character, we have designs ready for Alpha 1, but its something that needs heavy testing in A1/A2 to decide which particular systems are needed for citizens and non-citizens. Its cool because you dont see this in other games, we want players to utilize systems to gain an advantage when gathering/farming etc.

Q: Given citizenship takes priority, what happens when two guild members of opposing nodes are at node war?
A: Then the two guild members are at war with each other. The objective is to provide players with choice so they can choose who they want to support. The reason citizenship is higher than guilds and other player agency, this is due to the fact that nodes are the core of a multitude of systems, hence they are paramount in the affiliation hierarchy. Hence it is normal for conflict to exist between family/friends/guildmates.

Q: Can node wars be at any time unlike sieges which are scheduled?
A: Yes, node wars can happen at any time with a defined win/loss objective for either side to experience.

Q: Does your progress in a certain system like artisan benefit or affect other systems?
A: Yes.

Q: When we talk about mastery certifications for professions like Artisan, do you have to be a citizen to obtain that certification
A: There are 3 states of access that nodes offer.

1. 1. Non-Affiliated: Just a person passing through
   2. Affiliated: I have progressed in some organizations/quests in the city
   3. Citizenship: Full benefits/services of the node.

Mastery certifications are available via Affiliated and Citizenship, so you might have to do some quests and earn some reputation with that city to be able to acquire the mastery certificate.

Q: Are power and enchantment stones on par with crafted ones?
A: Yes they are on par with crafted ones, however what they differ in is abilities and bonuses provided.

Q: Do you expect runic power stones to be gated in some way?
A: Yes, they will be gated in some form. Some may be gated by citizenship. There are grades of stones as well that offer vertical progression. These grades are made available at higher hunting/crafting and require higher grade materials to craft.

Q: Enchantment and runic power, will this be done via a combination of things or via additional reagent?
A: There will be a process to consume the stone in order to socket it, if you want to re-socket, you’ll need to go through a process to remove the materials and place a new stone. Also applies to essence stones.

Q: Tattoo artist profession still on board?
A: Tattoo artist will most likely be a specialized path that will not necessarily be its own profession. I see it as a slot on the player that can be equipped. Depends on what you want to specialize in.

Q: Will ship building be available at launch?
A: Yes.

Q: What kind of freehold adjacency bonuses do you expect to have for nodes?
A: Gonna save those answers for the upcoming blog.

Q: How is a legendary freehold schematic different from regular schematics? Different tiers are different how?
A: The idea we currently have is via ZOI that freeholds exist in. Each building type and service will have a legendary feature that can be unlocked. The idea behind this feature is to grant it to specific freeholds within a ZOI, remember that freeholds need to be tied to a ZOI. Each metropolis will have an allotment of legendary freehold bonuses that they can allot to freeholds. So those freeholds will have access to it. It will be a mix of first come first serve and performance related factors to acquire them. So after the timer ends, the legendary slot goes back to the node and players try to obtain it again. So its legendary in the way that it’s limited and has to be cycled.

Q: Is freehold earned through lore and story or is it purchased?
A: The freehold flag – which has to be placed in the open world, is available to be granted at stage 3 nodes. There is a questline and material component cost for the player to fulfill.

Q: Will all races be able to wear all cosmetics? Like Elves wear Nikua etc?
A: All cosmetics that are released on website monthly are wearable across all races. There will be race/organization/node/guild specific costumes that can only be worn when meeting criteria etc. For example a crown can only be worn by a king or queen. There will be guild specific armor that can only be worn players if they meet the criteria of being in that respective guild, organization requires being a part of that organization, etc.

Q: The PvP zone around the caravan, how much of it is exactly the PvP zone, climbing over it etc?
A: All caravans conform to a specific min and max hitbox. There’s some degree of difference in sizes, but they will never exceed a certain structure. Caravans are of two different types, system generated ones for quests and player driven where their hitpoints pool becomes one. Can you use it to kite players? Yes you could try that. Can you try to have defenders use LoS? Yes you can do that.

Q: Will you be able to mix and match pieces of sets?
A: Depends, there are some that are full body pieces, but most armor is on a per item basis where you’ll be able to mix and match between the different armors.

Q: In the character creation tool, can we expect custom creations by the staff?
A: You mean character presets? Yes absolutely there will be presets. Things made by our character team etc. so you can mix and match.

Q: Racial specific spell effects are still a thing?
A: With regards to racial variants, there are still plans to have racial specific augments that are presents and passives. The passives obviously wont be from a visual standpoint but the augments will have racial influences which you will see before you hit the secondary class augments.

Q: Will the political features of the node expand after launch? With princes/courts etc?
A: I dont want to reveal our expansion plans, but one of the key development designs is that its going to be one of the primary vehicles of expansion and updates. We’re going in with the understanding that we’ll be utilizing the node system to upgrade content. You’re going to have areas, points of interests, skill updates, class updates, but asides from those things, the node changes with expansions/updates is what changes the majority of things and yes keeping that in mind, post launch nodes will see heavy updates.

Q: Will each races have unique language/dialect that other races cannot understand?
A: No. Language system is not in our roadmap. And we dont see it being a feature.

Q: You mentioned the tulnar having a caste system, and how it might affect tulnar players?
A: The caste system affects the lore of the Tulnar, not sure about the mechanical standpoint or normal game mechanic systems, but from a lore standpoint, it came from the diversity of the various races that came together to make the tulnar.

Q: Are you planning on an in-game roleplay toolset?
A: From a platform perspective, I love those types of features and are important for immersive gameplay, I think it’s a great flavour for what MMORPG’s are meant to be as I think it enhances the general gameplay. From our perspective, the more features we can include the better. I’ve enjoyed them in the past and would like to accomplish what we can. But right now, we’re focused on the foundation. If not for launch, maybe after launch.

Q: Will there be custom text emotes?
A: No, no plans for that. But we haven’t deep dive discussed emotes yet.

Q: Will there be some rolling features.
A:There will be some rolling features.

Q: If I go up against 2–3 players alone, what’s the chance that I’ll be able to outplay them?
A: Are you asking what role does Level/Class composition and gear play against the variance of skill, okay, so right now can’t give a hard number specifically. From a balance perspective, I want to take all of them into account as each of them is important. Especially with skill being important for Action and class composition matters for the holy trinity playing a role, gear composition is indicative of progression and time in the game. So we want to make sure each is relevant, cannot give a hard number though.

Q: How will the Hawkey be different from the Predator like in Apocalypse?
A: It depends on how you build those classes. I don’t want to say here is the hawkey and here is the predator, we want them to go in multiple paths. Predator is more stealthy and burst capability, whereas the hawkey will keep his distance and lay down consistent DPS. The idea isnt that there’s a set path, but that the player has customization over the role they want to play in PvE or PvP. Regardless of class, you have roles like backline supports or frontline tanks or the dps line that’s taking down the supports. The idea behind the trinity system and class counterplay is that you’ll have certain classes that excel at certain types of roles and how you can perform what you’re best trying to achieve. So no specific cookie cutter definitions.

Q: Could you talk about the mentor system which you mentioned last year? Like building reputation etc.
A: There will be tracking systems for contributions amongst players. One of the key issues that MMORPG’s have is the start date where if players don’t join near the start, they are unable to get into it and one of the reasons for that is because MMOs have starting area dilemma where after release the starting areas become empty/dead zone and in a genre where socializing is a big part of it, it affects it a lot. It’s why Ashes of Creation will maintain relevancy throughout the lifecycle of the MMORPG as due to the node system players will keep coming back for questlines etc, so when new players come in, they will see a bustling city. Ofcourse new players will not experience the rush and the race at the start, but instead they experience the history of the server and are able to define its future. The mentorship is meant to capitalize on this feature and incentivize players that are more established to help newer players or alt accounts. We’ll have some safeguards so they don’t game the system.

Q: Can bounties be put on a particular ship?
A: That’s a great idea that we discussed about 3 years ago to be placed on buildings etc. But for ships, yeah that’s a cool system that interacts with the community. No plans for that yet, but expansion stuff is what its great for. One of the good things about open development is you get to take ideas from the community.

Q: Will vessel/ship skins be locked to sizes like small/large etc like canoe skins only for small ships etc.
A: Yes, there are size restrictions. We have to specify specific classes of vessels so yes size value is assigned to different ships.

Q: How will summons work in game/
A: 4 different types-

1. 1. Mount summons – Summoned from inventory
   2. Cosmetic pets – Look pretty, activated via cosmetic pet slot.
   3. Battle pet summon – Will take a portion of your power and portion of your EXP. We wont have it give y. Its to give the player a horizontal power slider to give them benefits.
   4. Summoner pets – The primary feature is through summons, some classes will have one, some will have multiple. Its a vertical slide of power that adds to your power and you gain access to stronger summons as you level up.

Q: If mobs drop materials, what gives coin?
A: Quests, taxations, services like player run businesses, selling goods to a shop, redemption of our ticket system. I don’t want monsters to drop coins, maybe bandits, but not wolfs/bunnies dropping coins as it doesn’t make sense. Instead particular monsters will drop items that is marked as a certificate or ticket like wolf claws or bunny tails (droppable so if you die you drop them) so you can turn these into your local node at the hunters lodge to get coin. So you can hold onto these materials or tickets and turn them in farther away node for more money. Or hold onto them for a longer time and sell when the price goes up. (Similar to Amazon’s New world talisman system)

Q: If Steven is still running a guild in AoC, which node type would you have your members join?
A: First I want to say, I will not join a guild or run any guild in AoC. But if I was a guild leader, I would not reveal that answer.

Q: What’s the newest feature idea that has been added that we havent heard about?
A: From a feature standpoint, we try to have them as defined as possible internally so we can assign them as tasks to the development process. So the newest feature would’ve been a loooong time ago. Dont know the answer to that one.

Q: Can we expect to see more rendered gear/items/cosmetics/buildings?
A: That’s what Margaret and the community team is focused on – Steady schedule for releases, so you’ll definitely see more renders as we go forward since I know its in the schedule, no dates though.

Q: Any plans to have Ashes of Creation coffee mugs?
A: We’ll be revamping our merchandize and adding to it, but that will be post Alpha 1. Our current entire momentum is focusing on Alpha 1. From a merch standpoint, we want to do all the testing and alpha 1 first and then move to marketing etc.

Q: Is there any plans to have a penguin or penguin variant cosmetic pet?
A: There’s definitely biomes that offer various pets, so there might be something along the lines or features of what might be considered a penguin.

 

Google Doc Link

April 15th Jahlon Livestream Transcription

– Steven goes live with Jahlon to clarify years worth of information on numerous systems, state of the company and game mechanics.

Q: How was the forum launch for Intrepid?
A: I would say it went pretty well. We discussed on the DCN stream that we didnt spend the past 3 months getting the forum up, it was actually to set up the SSO (Single Sign On) feature in order for us to do additional things in the future like with the website etc. There was a lot of stuff that the platform team was working on like the database etc.

Q: You stated quality assessment had to be done, have Sean and Ryan gotten to Apocalypse QA yet?
A: QA continues to work on Environment QA, Map QA, Items, Character art, interactions etc. that is being worked on.

Q: You wear two very large hats, you are CEO and the Creative Director, so originally it was a 100 in house 100 contractors goal, recently it’s 140 in house employees. What caused you to go from 100 in house to 140?
A: Yes that 100 contractors is going to need to increase by another 100 or so. From a creative director standpoint, I felt that some of the contractor positions needed to brought in house.

Q: Back in December it was 52 people working in, since then a bunch of people have been brought in and the Intrepid website has 44 people on it. How many butts and chairs in SD right now?
A: Just over 60 in the studio and more remotely in SD as well as we dont have enough seats.

Q: Are the 28 people in France working on AoC directly or are they from Stormancer?
A: Stormancer is an integral 3rd party component for the game. We’re using it for Interfacing with our grid solution for seamless zone travel. Stormancer is capable of working with our design for that. Malaysian team was art asset team, we have disengaged with them and are looking for other solutions.

Q: Have you done a few variants of nodes 3, has there been some gameplay changes or design changes?
A: The nodes 3 is a marketing heavy series that provides a lot of information for AoC. We need to make sure that its representative of the key marketing of the project as it’ll be viewed by so many eyes. We could put it out yesterday but it wont be representative of what I want it to have. I view the 4 part series to be an indicator of the phases the game is in. I see nodes 3 during Alpha 1 and Nodes 4 closer to Beta.

Q: What was the driving force for the game design change between castle sieging and
A: Destabilizing a node after a siege, we moved away from it as we felt it was punitive enough that an event was that effects the node should attrition take effect.

Q: Originally each of the 3 military nodes tied to the castle would be sieged each week. Is that still a thing?
A: Yes, that’s still a thing.

Q: Didnt the 3 castle nodes get reset and need rebuilding?
A: If you siege a castle you own it for a month. The first week, the guild has a week to establish defences of node A. Following the week, attackers try to siege and take it down and disable the defences. Then node B gets the next week and node C gets the third week. Depending on how well you defend, it affects the benefits and negatives which affect the final week of the castle siege itself. What’s been changed is that a node no longer de-levels through an event, instead it it affects the services/NPC’s of the node.

Q: Regarding leaks on the Discord and information going out.
A: Margaret helps us move from sporadic leaks to having well constructed flow of information. Leaks are spontaneous and arent reliable but what Margaret does is more reliable.

Q: How many times a day do you feel like wanting to jump into discord?
A: I really like Discord and it allows us to do a lot that couldnt be done before. Glad we have the forums back up as it helps keep things in fixed places. Going forward on the forum, staff created threads will be highlighted.

Q: How much of the iceberg (AoC) are we seeing? Do we have 5% of info? Or what?
A: From an information standpoint, the community is getting a good amount of information on systems and mechanics. However from a Lore standpoint, you’re getting a very little amount. Want the story to be related to individuals inside the game. From a visual Standpoint, I think when Alpha 1 hits, because its not under NDA, you’ll have a pretty in-depth look at the game.

Q: Back in the day there were no websites to pull information from and now everything is on websites. Regarding players having access to information prior to launch.
A: I think there’s a comfortable blend between not seeing it at all on day one and the modern trend of everything being available online. I dont want players to know everything about the game before they step in there. The alphas and betas will be limited and tucked away for release so players at release have fresh experiences.

Q: So we have 8 Archetypes and 64 classes, no monk and no druid. Initially you had 12 archetypes planned, would you like to talk about them?
A: There wasnt just 4 that were cutoff, there was a long list that could’ve taken those 4 spots. With the combination of archetypes, balancing becomes very important.

Q: Regarding Insects and Amphibian styled Tulnars?
A: There wont be insect or amphibians. The way Tulnar works is they have 3 influences, bestial, human and reptilian. The tulnar are essentially 3 races. When you make your character you have dials that you can turn up or down. Bestial is like fur/snout/claws etc. Humanoid bar will pull the snout, take the tranquility down, more skin, etc. Reptilian would be more circular eyes/head, scaly skin influences instead of fur etc. The idea is to give the player influence over those races.

Q: Regarding the corruption system, why can a non-combatant attack a corrupted and not get flagged as a combatant?
A: Corrupted players are basically PvE/mobs. You arent killing players from your own faction, you’re killing a being that is corrupted. Theoretically you’d have one red player in a large group, but this would have no penalty as only one player would take the blame. So what we’re doing with our corruption system is not taking away player choice. So if you want to defend yourself, you keep gaining corruption till you lose your soul.

Q: Who gets to pick up corrupted player loot when they die since they have a chance to drop gear?
A: Your corruption score determines the chance of a corrupted player dropping an item or dropping multiple items. Anyone can pick up the corrupted player’s loot. Yes your friend could pick it up for you, but also anyone else, so there’s a risk.

Q: Do personal caravan’s share the same attack/defend mechanic as node caravans?
A: Personal caravans can go beyond those node caravans as personal caravans rely on a construction effort of pieces as players create different pieces through artisan aspects. Basically crafted version of caravans which are stronger etc. And yes they still work in the same attack/defend/ignore mechanic.

Q: Who pays the reward for defending the player’s personal caravan?
A: So there wont be a way to farm that, you could have a short run, but the distance calculates the reward. The person who starts the caravan can list their own personal reward like a % of the turn in reward for defenders etc.

Q: A personal caravan can be launched from any point of storage including freeholds?
A: Yes.

Q: Destroying a caravan drops redeemable certificate. Where do I claim these/turn them in?
A: Destroyed caravans turn into wreckages, which players can walk up to and claim these certificates, these will have to be turned into point of origin or area in the region etc. We dont want players to game the system by abusing it to move resources around via certificates, so it requires some testing.

Q: What happens to a personal caravan when its destroyed? Can you repair or is it lost?
A: We have a few ideas on that, some of the ideas relate to higher grade components of the caravan, you might recover those pieces in the wreckage to salvage and build new caravans.Alternatively,If your caravan is destroyed, you can salvage some of the component pieces. But yes it requires testing. It wont be a consumable item that restores it after X amount of time. We want to reward players for the risk they take, such as destabilizing them etc.

Q: Let’s talk notes sieges we know that the instance department building can be targeted independently during node sieges we know free hopes can be looted after a successful siege what about in node housing are there any special rules or quirks for in node housing during siege?
A: Any building within a node during a siege can be damaged. When damaged, its services, NPC’s can be interrupted for a time.  You can repair them once the siege is complete.

Q: If I dont think I can win the siege, can I run through the node and prevent you from destroying buildings?
A: Yes. Even if you lose the siege, you can still try to defend things.

Q: Are airships going to be instanced loading screen or ship ride in real time?
A: The goal is to have an actual ship ride in real time. I think being able to see the world from a different perspective is a fun experience.

Q: Will people be able to see the airship moving around?
A: Yes.

Q: Can events happen on the airship?
A: We talked about it. Right now no. But we might in future content.

Q: Will there be pirate NPC’s roaming the waters?
A: No plans for pirate NPC’s, but lots of plans for actual creatures in the waters. The other game outside of Sea bugs there was nothing.

Q: The word legendary appeared a lot during the last blog. Do you think the differences between Legendary and Legendary Unique?
A: In our game design document (GDD) we have our nomenclature, its possible as we do a review closer to Alpha 2, some of those names will change. We might do it on purpose and change them by talking to the community to reset information that players know before beta.

Q: Would you consider a contest to rename some nomenclature?
A: I dont know about a contest but they will see changes occur.

Q: Skills available on hotbar fewer than 30, any updates?
A: Nope, still less than 30.

Q: 75%/25% action/tab split, any ballpark or changes?
A: More about that during Alpha 2 as we’ll be able to present it in a testable format.

Q: Lot of discussion over what’s action and tab. How do you classify a ground target ability like the grimoire?
A: Any placeable template skill I would consider as an action ability. A tab target ability is something that must have a target in order to utilize it. An action oriented skill is anything that can be utilised through placement of the player. Whether that be placement on a reticle, placement on the ground, template directional placement, those, I consider, skill based action skills.

Q: Any chance of endow life restoring negative EXP on death?
A: There’s a few resurrection abilities that will allow for augments to restore some negative EXP gain, this requires testing obviously, we dont want it to subvert the flagging systems etc. But the idea is to create relevance in the classes that house these skills.

Q: Lifeline skill in A0, can we expect a shadowpriest or chronomancer that does healing by doing damage?
A: Best way to say is Vampiric spells that do damage and provide lifesteal, those will be spread out across a few classes.

Q: Is there a lumberjacking and tree harvesting.
A: I can confirm that there are tree gathering skills. (?) Audio cut out.

Q: Fishermen want to know about Fishing
A: I think Fishing is a great vehicle for specific material gathering as well. Like specific chemicals from certain fishes. We’re thinking 2 forms of fishing, mundane fishing in lakes and sport fishing which is deep sea.

Q: The fog of war still the plan?
A: Like recent scientific node blog, it offers certain features that address certain aspects of fogs of war. Its beneficial to be active to avoid perils of fog of war.

Q: Since locations ores and resources are shown in the library, is this meant as a way to draw players to certain node structures?
A: Yes, go to the library in-game and study. We want a flow of information to exist in the library, where information is contributed to and taken out from. We want to provide buffs from the library if they are part of that system.

Q: Player made maps still in or  shelved?
A: We did a review on it 6 months ago, for now we’ve pulled out of the design for a bit, we will revisit after alpha 1. But for now, player maps are shelved.

Q: Battlemaps from taverns?
A: Still on the roadmap.

Q:  You’ve talked about castle sieges, node sieges, caravans, node wars, but what about open world battleground? Is open world battleground a separate feature?
A: I would say open world battleground where you have objective based gameplay contained in an area, that is what I consider open world battlegrounds. I consider a BG to be a location that used to be instanced that has an end objective for a group of players. A lot of other games have guild war systems for player kill counts in a time period, I think those are lackluster. When you are in a raid in PvP/PvE the whole purpose of rallying the troups is to come together and establish a plan for strategic elements. Wanted to move away from bodycount and towards objectives.

Q: Has the 20-man FFA been shelved?
A: Still too early to know, I’d like to have it above the cut.

Q: Node wars/Node sieges, what’s the victory condition of a Node war?
A: Node war objectives depends on the type of node, the stage of development and the patron guilds/societies of the node. For example if you were to have a guild which is the patron guild of a node that is stage 4, that guild might have a statue dedicated to it in the city, one of the objectives might be to destroy the city. You might see a midnight run to destroy/defend the statue. If an organization like thieves guild might have an important relic, it might be an important objective to steal the relic by casting 2-minute cast on it with encumbrance while you carry it back. So these types of small gameplay loops make it interesting/fluid/dynamic.

Q: You mentioned a midnight run, that’s for a node war, but sieges are still at a set time, yes?
A: Yes. Sieges are are set server times and will always reflect upon the server’s timezone. Sieges are declared during a window. Castle sieges are also the same.

Steven: We love the enthusiasm, support and love. We’re working to make you guys proud and appreciate the support from all the content creators.

Q: Are you doing an interview wednesday?
A: Yes, an interview on Wednesday with Simurgh.

 

Google Doc Link

April 11th DCN Livestream Transcription

– Steven joins the Dungeon Crawler Network on their podcast and discusses the scientific node features, citizenship and the progress on web systems. 

Stream Hosts: Aggelos, Stormlordz, Alpha Soul, Krojak | Stream link

Discussion opens with talking about the armor leak released last week:
The above is an armor model that we used in PAX but it’s been overhauled to match the current art. It is NPC Guard armor, however it can be obtained via in-game questing by becoming part of the Knights Order. There’s 13 distinct modelling styles that go into the 9 races and their styles. Apocalypse is primarily Aelan and Pyrian styles (Human and Elf). Margaret is planning a blog on how such armor is made from concept art to modelling. (Colours, textures, pieces, etc). You will not be able to change the fabric, but you will be able to adjust the metal pauldrons and certain other parts.

Q: With SSO being pushed through, how is the back-end infrastructure doing?
A: There’s game backend, server architecture and platform backend. The SSO touches a lot of different things. SSO allows us to touch on our various plans that we have, especially for the future. Regarding the back end of the game, moving from Azure hosting to AWS, you’ll see a lot more about the SSO with the blog posts that will go out to prep for Alpha 1.

Q: How is the new back end going to work going forward since we saw how the old one worked in the past apocalypse tests?
A: As the backend keeps developing, we’ll slowly push it out to the testers to get the feedback we need. Quality Assessment needs to be done.

Q: When is Apocalypse coming back?
A: Apoc was built for testing and it’s given us great data. It’s why we split Alpha 1 into 2 phases. So no ETA.

Q: When backend works out, do you plan to bring up just the BR or both the BR and the sieges simultaneously?
A: No answer on that right now, we’re working on systems that are needed for both apocalypse and alpha 1. This is something we’ll reveal later.

Q: How is AoC and Intrepid studios going to handle meta-game since all the nodes are static?
A: It depends on what kind of meta-game you’re looking to avoid. We dont want node location/information to change. When it comes to curating content to a particular node, those node types need to be static and that’s a form of meta as players know where X or Y node type exists. And this might become a meta that a group adheres to and we cant stop that. Players will always tend to do certain things. If it comes down to whether a meta MUST be followed in order to succeed – that’s what we want to provide. We want to provide multiple ways to achieve an outcome. We dont want a need to adhere to a meta, but a selection of options.

Q: Will all 5 metropolii cover the entire world once they’re fully built?
A: Yes.

Q: Do city ruins show up once a metropolis is destroyed?
A: There will be things that are present for a period of time following a siege, after which it will be a fresh area for the node to be re-settled in.

Q: Does Essence play a role or is it just flavour text?
A: It does play a role, its part of materials, equipment, items, skills, it is the foundation and driving force of magic in the world. It can be used of good or bad. However it does not affect abilities to provide bonuses to traverse or move around, what it does affect is creation of items, skills, certain NPC’s and antagonist, a large mechanic, but its not prohibitive.

Q: Will any activity contribute to the node or are certain activities more beneficial?
A: Any activity will contribute to the node’s growth. Regarding scientific nodes requiring chemicals etc, it’s moreso about the flavour of quests involved. Not all quests are going to be related to that specifically (Like collecting reagents). You might recieve quests that are like those at the start, however later on you might find that some antagonist has exploited what you collected. So it’s not like a ‘collect x’ quest, it comes back to you later.

Q: Is there anything that contributes to negative EXP to the node? Besides inactivity?
A: Lets say monsters spawn around a node and attack the city, if those events are successful in killing certain NPC’s or destroying certain buildings, it diminishes the nodes ability to contend with nearby nodes, this causes negative experience. Additionally there’s node wars and open world objectives if achieved will result in a loss for the node and these losses will modify incoming experience that will reduce the experience received. So a rival node can reduce the amount of incoming experience by declaring war on a node and taking out key objectives.

Q: Didnt nodes get destroyed after losing node wars?
A: Node wars and Node sieges are two different events. Losing a siege destroys the node entirely. Node wars on the other hand is more like a guild war,, wheere a mayor may declare war on another node that puts the citizens in an open flag state of PvP with the other node. It doesnt destroy the node, but results in benefits for the victor and losses for the loser.

Q: What is construction going to provide to other players and is it a profession?
A: Construction encompasses building, within a node or by players in a freehold. It also relates to certain points of interests in the world. Scientific nodes offer a specific material components/certificates that are necessary to capitalize on additional features of buildings and activate adjacency bonus features that are offered. It yields certain benefits for certain paths. Along that upgrade path of buildings, whether through citizenship or trade/questing with a scientific node, they are able to unlock these certificates to attain the bonuses.

Q: Scientific nodes seem to be very crafting heavy, is it tied to this node type?
A: You’ll be able to learn and achieve these at any node type, but it will be harder at different node types and scientific nodes might offer special masteries.

Q: Do node benefits only apply while within the node’s ZOI?
A: Generally as a rule, there are certain benefits that only apply to a ZOI of a node. If you want to benefit from a buff/droprate/higher EXP, it needs to be within the ZOI of the node. There are citizen benefits that will travel with you outside the ZOI as well.

Q: What are Runic power stones? Could you give us an example or comparison?
A: The stone system, whether power or enchantment stones, there are slots in armors and weapons that can be slotted with a number of stones. These stones range from damage bonuses, ancillary effects, providing buffs or passives and much more, all of these things that the stones can do for you, they exist in tiers of relevancy and power. As you increase the grade of the item that you own/craft using materials you can potentially increase the number of slots an item has. Runic power stones in particular are temporary stones that you can apply for a period of time and are situational which offer certain benefits. Enchantment stones can be unsocketed but they are permanenet.

Q: Do runic and power stones share the same sockets?
A: Yes. You need to make a decision as a player to plan out your slots to decide how you build your character and plan for dungeons or PvP with their respective stones.

Q: Do schematics refer to freehold designs?
A: Schematics are blueprints that you utilize to build structures on a freehold or community projects on the node.

Q: Since level 3 scientific nodes offer a library that lets you see history, what history exactly?
A: History of narrative can relate to downing of certain bosses, progression of certain questlines and meta questlines, mayors who have been elected, destruction/sieging of castles/cities, relate to certain area quests that pop up around the city, it can relate to events that spawn around the city, etc. Lots of things that players can choose to track/learn.

Q: Players can choose to track/learn info in the library?
A: You basically have to get your library card first through a questline to gain access to information. It turns into an ongoing return feature where players contribute information to the library that other players can view.

Q: Regarding legendary weapon crafting, relics and tracking them?
A: Dont want to reveal too much. Relics are a high tier item. They can be granted on a limited basis to its citizens. One of the primary incentives for PvP in nodes is to raid their relics. The legendary crafting benches relate in a way to need different metropolis types.

Q: Are there going to be certain legendaries that cannot be deconstructed?
A: Deconstruction mechanics relate to materials and unique components that can be taken out of an item. Items usually will yield a random assortment of available componenets. The identification mechanic in a scientific node will allow players to identify what the deconstruction will yield before you actually deconstruct it. Gaining these deconstructed items help in crafting or lesser but higher tier items. Lets say a guild beats a raid boss and gains a legendary weapon, they might deconstruct it to craft 3 weapons of a tier just under legendary as it might be more beneficial to them.

Q: Say a server has no level 6 scientific metropolis for some reason, how are legendary crafting/relics managed?
A: There’s 2 thoughts on it, one is that its possible and that it isnt possible. However it requires testing. It is possible but very difficult to achieve.

Q: What’s stopping a citizen of a vassal node – leaving their citizenship at scientific metro A to go to scientific metro B?
A: As a citizen you contribute to the building of the node. We dont want to restrict your ability to make a choice and leave, but we do want to provide incentives and dis-incentives. Some dis-incentives are – there’s a cooldown on citizenship when you leave to join elsewhere. You lose access to the unique items and merchants that you gained trust with. You lose access to the buffs or achievements provided by your node and work to get it all back. There’s certain costs that go into declaring citizenship, while there isnt necessarily a cap on citizenship, there is a soft cap on the resources required to obtain citizenship.

Q: Does the soft cap apply right away or only once the cap is hit?
A: The soft cap increases and scales. It might be low for the first 200-300 and then get harder. We do want a softcap that changes between the various node stages. It is not retroactive.

Q: Are cosmetics shown during PvP in the open world?
A: There’s a default player appearance setting that they can activate, this helps accomodate large player battles and helps hit the performance we want for large battles. We want to lower rendering load to make it easier. So yes it is available.

Q: We were worried about plate armor players wearing cloth cosmetics to hide their gear
A: You can disable this in settings.

Q: Can crafters leave signatures on their work after a certain rarity?
A: Crafted items will contain crafter signature by default unless they choose to turn it off.

Q: Can anyone obtain legendaries with enough luck and time or are they single drop items where if one obtains it, it is gone for good.
A: Anyone can obtain it. There’s 2 references to legendaries, there’s legendary items and legendary unique items. Legendary unique items are only one on a server at a time. Legendary items themselves are multiple on the server through multiple ways such as trade/craft/world bosses etc.

Q: Mayors of military nodes are chosen via gladiator style combat, is it a 1v1 or free for all?
A: The current design behind the gladitorial arena… (contemplating whether margaret will get mad) …the idea… nevermind, will probably wait for the military node blogpost!

Q: Is there a cooking profession?
A: Yes, there is.

 

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