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.

 

Google Doc Link

March 29th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid answers node questions from the community and discusses advanced mechanics relating to nodes.

Stream begins with no audio and Intrepid attempts to communicate using sign language. Introductions going around. Discussion regarding their trip to GDC 2019 (Game developer’s conference), which is primarily a business to business expo. Lots of back to back meetings. Steven hints at some of these discussions being revealed in the future. Contest plans for the community are also in the works. Hiring is going well and the next hiring phase has just begun, with 17 positions requiring to be filled which can be found on their careers page.

Nodes Information: Nodes developer diary being shown – Can be seen here. Future developer diaries will show things more in-depth, the next planned dev diary is the housing system. The goal is to show who is behind the scenes in development and how these systems work behind the scenes, however we cant go too in-depth as it is a competitive market. Usually companies stick to what has been proven as they have to answer to investors and boards as they dont want to take the risk, hence why we are able to innovate and work on things that have not been tried before. Developers usually record things as they are working on them so that we can grab these and use them for our dev diaries series.

Earlier in a segment we had stated that losing a siege would cause a node to delevel or be destroyed, however with the design changes, we’ve decided that when a node loses a siege it is destroyed all the way down to level 0. This is stuff that will require testing and there’s always room for changes, which is the entire point of testing.

 

Content Creator QnA

Q: Members of guild A are citizens of both Node A and B, and the mayor of node A wars on node B, are the citizens of node A now at war with themselves?
A: There’s various agencies that have hierarchy. Guilds, node citizenship, etc. All these affiliations have a hierarchy, your citizenship is your greatest superceding relationship. If you are part of a guild, and there’s members part of multiple nodes – the members of the node will be first and foremost citizens of a node that defend it.

Q: Will there be a way to see what type of node you are contributing to starting out?
A: When a node first starts out, there will be indicators of what node type it is such as the NPC’s that arrive etc. there wont be any map indicators. But you will have to get it to level 1 to see what type it is, not level 0. Your activities as a player dictate what you will see.

Q: If a metropolis locks out its surrounding vassal node at stage 5 and later it is destroyed in a siege, which of it’s surrounding nodes is chosen to level up to 6?
A: There is a hierarchy that exists within a node structure and if relationship is removed after a siege 2 separate “nations” they compete for stage 6 going forward. Nothing happens immediately, they have to earn that experience and it becomes a race. A race influenced by events and experience by players. For example, if there’s 2 neighbouring stage 4 nodes, those 2 stage 4 nodes are going to be at odds at one another until one hits stage 5. Achievements towards raid bosses, events, etc. all of these hinder or boost node growth. While there are no factions in game, there’s pseudo factions/agencies for players to align with.

Q: What will you if a server merge is needed?
A: As a contingency we have 2 scenarios, where 1 server becomes the dominant server and the other merges into it. The second is that the two populations will join a new server as a fresh start where you keep all progression of character/gear etc, but the nodes will be all level 0. These are the two server merge ideas we currently have.

Q: Given that the world size is 480sqkm with 103 nodes, can you tell us the approx amount of land each node has?
A: Dont want to give out that information and want it to be more immersive and not mechanical. There is obviously an amount of area covered by a node, it is large, it goes from small to big, but we dont want to give out direct information like that. We want you to see your actions change the world and react to that change. However not knowing everything at the start is a key part of the exploration experience.

Q: Since we know that nodes offer class and augmentation services for players, will these services be gated behind node level, will players have to travel to other nodes?
A: There will be world development that is necessary for certain progression. Destruction and Enhancement each has its own benefits, the idea is to place incentives in each category. Regarding the second half, that is related to citizenship, you basically can choose to give up citizenship at one node for another to get the benefits you want. And these benefits are set by players and mayors of the nodes where they have progression points. So as a citizen you might have to travel to a different node to access certain things or progress.

Q: What are your thoughts on node degradation lengths? How long will it take to degrade and will higher levels take more to degrade?
A: Yes. We want players to be active and doing things to help the node. Player activity will relate to what is going on the server, the amount of activity will dictate advancement rate etc, it will vary from server to server.

Q: Can we get a clarification on how underrealm nodes interact with server nodes? Can there be 5 underrealm metros and 5 above ground?
A: Only 5 can exist across both at the same time. If you are in the underrealm, the effects of your node will bleed into the nodes above ground. In the past we mentioned that they would be independent of each other, but we now want them to work together with each other. We want to include influence of the underrealm on the land above ground in terms of flora/fauna etc. We want to capture high fantasy setting.

Q: If im a citizen of a vassal node, why should I remain their and not go to a higher level node?
A: As a vassal citizen, you are contributing to the parent node. You can still go to the hunting area and enjoy the perks of the vassal nodes. There is an up-down relation between the vassal and parent nodes. Citizens of parent nodes can send out certain work orders only to vassal nodes to help support them, like certain questlines, items, weapons, resources. There is a relationship between a Vassal/Parent node. As a vassal citizen you have perks for parent node work orders. Specific resources available in your vassal node, cheaper living conditions/taxes and various other benefits. There’s definitely going to be reasons to be a part of a vassal node.

Q: What kinds of behaviours and habits do you want NPC’s to have in the nodes?
A: There’s a lot of things we want to acomplish with NPC’s and player interaction with them such as questing system feats, social organizations, establishing reputations within the city and special bonuses such as greetings, questlines, cheaper prices etc. All of it contributes to building your node and advancing its legacy. We want to ensure that the city feels alive, with not just player’s but also NPC’s.

Q: Can you provide more info on relations between vassal nodes and parent nodes?
A: We touched on this in the previous question. Is there a way to prevent a vassal node from being vassaled to a parent node? There’s no “You’re not welcome here”. The territory of the node expands based on an algorithm, where nodes want to move towards other cultures which is the backbone of trade and economy, including moving to the coast to move goods around the world. There’s no hard way to prevent others from being parent nodes to your nodes, its meant to be a competition.

Q: For coastla nodes, will they encompass parts of the sea?
A: It will definitely have parts of the water/sea that will be part of the node. There will be international waters and regional waters.

 

French QnA

Q: Are there any hidden quests like resurrecting a dragon, like with 5 necromancers being able to do so to defend the node?
A: There are hidden quests, but regarding reviving a dragon with necromancers, currently unknown. There are exploration quests and reaching places first, we want first discovery to matter.

Q: Can we have more details about military node functionality and class combat training?
A: This will be gone over in a blog post/article later. Military nodes augment your combat abilities in PvE/PvP and that ability stays within the ZOI of that node. This encourages those players to focus around that node. Stay tuned for more news.

Q: Will we be able to organize troop positions during assaults like in Total war?
A: Not like total war. We do want raid leaders with player run groups, but no prescribed troop directions. The idea is to have NPC mercs during battles. Castle owners will be able to place merc tags within their castle to summon NPC AI to defend – we want to do something like this, but no confirmation yet.

Q: Will we have the choice where each building will be or is it automated?
A: 2 components. One is procedural that they have no control over which is decided by the procedural tool shown in the nodes dev diary. Second is specific plots that they can build projects on decided by the citizens and the mayor to render those services. Base level stuff comes with the node, specific buildings are decided by the players.

Q: Will we be able to find tribes such as elf tribes that we can create relations with?
A: Yes, there will be minor race NPC’s. There’s a tier of interaction with NPC’s, major such as within cities and minor race interactions such as centaurs and the faye, additionally the antagonist npc interactions such as corruption and ancients. Yes, minor races will exist, regarding trade, it will be related to quest stuff. You wont subjugate their culture and take it all over.

Q: We saw that NPC’s on siege weapons join sieges. Will this happen in sieges?
A: NPC’s will participate in both node and castle sieges, but the extent which they do varies on contribution. Taxes for example can be allocated towards defences which ensures more NPC defenders. Allocations of taxes towards heightened defences, npcs, walls, granting nodes certain war abilities etc. Lots of ways castles interact with nodes. NPC’s cannot interact with NPC”s. Siege weapons are skill based. NPC AI will not be very skillful when it comes to siege weaponry.

 

German QnA

Q: Will players be able to steal items from other players?
A: You cannot steal items, there are death penalties and these relate to raw resources. So when a player dies, a portion of your raw resources you’re carrying are dropped. If your freehold is destroyed, there is a portion of your raw resources that are dropped. Same with caravans. But no gear dropping or completed items (unless you are corrupted).

Q: Since religions are part of the node system, will that relate to crusades?
A: In a way, yes. There will be conflict between the different religions and friction between them. One thing that might not be present at launch is how religion relate from a patronship to a particular node and offer incentives for them to co-operate with other nodes that follow the same religion or war on those nodes that dont follow their same religion, so somewhat like crusades, but this might happen for a future expansion.

Q: How can small guilds build up a node like larger guilds?
A: The key point – guilds dont necessarily build nodes. Guilds are a smaller portion of a community. Guilds might explore deeper and establish an encampment, but they wont be able to establish nodes by their lonesome. Nodes will require a lot more effort. What smaller guilds do have is that within the guild progression, they can choose to have more players or have smaller numbers and provide specific skills and abilities, there are unique quests and activites that are tailored to small and focused guilds, also activities that limit the number of participants.

 

Russian QnA

Q: How many buildings can I build on my freehold?
A: Roughly 4-5 (?), but the better way to explain it is that to find efficiency in the space that you have. Placement and finding synergies will be very important to get the best bank for your buck. It’s like playing tetris with buildings, yes.

Q: Will cities have unique names, can we change them?
A: They will not be player created names, but they will be player chosen names based on region etc. Chosen from a list.

Q: You mentioned losing a siege destroys the node, any way to delevel it instead?
A: No. Losing a siege destroys the node.

 

English QnA

Q: Since vassal nodes cannot war against their parent nodes, is there no way to cause civil war without renouncing citizenship?
A: No, there is currently no way to do so and there’s no plans to do so. Best thing to do is revoke your citizenship and try to take down that node by joining a different node.

Q: What constraints does a parent node enforce on its vassals in comparison to a free node?
A: A parent and vassal relationship primarily benefits them. The major restrains apply to the mayors and their duties. Most importantly when it comes to diplomacy and tax rates, these get superceded by the government of the parent node.

Q: According to the AoCwiki, underrealm nodes and nodes above them are not related, so how do they relate?
A: We department from prior ideas of shared ZOI, so the wiki will need to update that. Regarding how nodes below/above each other are related – we consider adjacency using 3D as vassal/parent nodes.

Q: Will there be parts of the world outside the node system or spaces between them where actions dont affect them?
A: Coastal areas of the sea fall under ZOI, deep international waters, this is something that needs testing in alpha 2 particularly. But on land no, all falls under the node, regarding sea needs Alpha 2 testing.

Q: Can we get more details on how node progress affects mob scaling?
A: There is a spawn table in the world that spawns monsters. The spawn table has a wide range of difficulties. As the node levels up, it upgrades the spawn table. Traditionally in MMORPG’s you have starter zones and end-game zones, which has a negative impact as players dont visit older areas. This leaves new players entering dead zones. We want nodes to influence areas, with diversification of monsters that can be found anywhere, so when new players enter in, they enter a live-breathing world. A low level player can travel anywhere on the map as there will be paths with relative safety.

Q: Will there be node bound gear or recipies – armor/gear that ties to a node?
A: We havent mentioned this system, but we will have personalized gear that represents a guild, similarly it applies to nodes as well where players can represent the node appearance with the crest etc. However if the node goes away, so does the appearance of that gear.

Q: Are quests geographically limited to the node?
A: No. We want to send you all over the world. There’s going to be local and far distance quests.

Q: WIll nodes near the 3 starting portals have slower progression?
A: There are 4 starting gateways, it’s almost certain that nodes in the starting area will see development faster. There is a chance that one server might have a large portion of the community rush to push a certain node. We want it to feel organic, dont want to bias it. Nodes will rise and fall and that’s okay.

Q: Leadership will be able to customize what gets built, beyond that how different are the metros and what differences will be able to see, canals? Multiple elevations? Or essentially the same layout?
A: Every metropolis will be different, no they wont have the same layout. Geographical markers such as rivers etc will be fixed and wont change on node progression. The procedural process of the node tool allows bridges and canals to be placed randomly each time a node develops. As nodes level, there is a sense of history. A merchant at a spot in level 3 might have a shop at level 5.  Each time a node builds in the same spot, it will be different each time. Long defended metros will become an iconic part of the history.

Q: Since node types pre-determined, how will vassal nodes of different types affect their parent node?
A: A level 4 military node will maintain its identity regardless of who it is a vassal to. It only changes when a metropolis exercises their super power which affects things. The idea of parent and vassal nodes, the way it works is, it doesnt restrict vassals, it only benefits them and offers them more. Its meant to offer benefits, not take away freedom. Vassals maintain their identity and obtain benefits of their parent node.

That wraps up all the questions, we’re going to be discussing scientific nodes next followed by the other types, and then delve into governments and player agencies, religions, classes etc. There is going to be – next week, that the next cosmetic set comes out with the Nikua race. Coastal Tribal race (Nikua). Next livestream is still due on last friday but it might change depending on plans. Thank you all for tuning in and thank you for your support!

Google Doc Link

March 8th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid talks about the letter, state of the game, FAQ, and answers questions regarding development.

Introductions – Steven, Margaret and Jeffrey. Steven talks about his past as a player and how that encourages him to have a connection with the community. There’s some FAQ questions they want to address, followed by a special video and a QnA. Content roadmap is exciting.

 

Updates regarding the Studio:

• We are growing and have a lot of growth to do. We’ve added over 15 people since the start of the year. This is a process of bringing people on board and training them to bring them up to speed, but this is a valuable investment.
• Were not able to meet the hiring goals of 2018. But we’re doubling down and are working with head hunters to get the right people that we’re looking for. One of the key points is their experience in an MMORPG perspective and their love for for MMORPGs.
• Plans to have a new pimped out stream room. The new location is being worked on. We looked at 2 other locations, but it did not go as planned. One of the locations sold their portfolio mid-discussion and the new owners had different plans. The second location was a sub-lease, middle floor of a labratory, however they decided to lease the entire building instead which is not what we wanted.

 

State of the game and the MMORPG

Leading into December we were moving into our new website as the old one was on wordpress and wasnt built for large traffic. Unfortunately some of the systems we had built for that website did not stand up for the traffic. Unfortunately due to 2 million visitors, it did not hold and we onboarded a new team to sort things out. New migration took place a few weeks ago and went smoothly to AWS (Amazon Web Services). Part of the new website is getting CS tools up to respond to people faster. Once we get our Customer Support Lead in-house, things will go a lot faster.

The Future – Moving forward, regarding development, we were able to take back end things from December’s testing and we’ve been able to rebuild and focus on the architecture to facilitate the large servers for the MMORPG and to ensure that it meets the standards that the players expect. 

Expanding on the Architecture Issues: A lot of these issues had to do with population on a battlefield. Initial target was 500 players on a battlefield and we will go higher than this, but this is goal for now. And making sure hitscan/projectile based mechanics and whether the server can handle all the data. Having a high population within an area is what we’re trying to achieve. A lot of work goes into ensuring all the data and information that goes into this is top notch. It’s about optimizing what the backend is doing and getting it right for what we want to achieve. The data provided through Apocalypse was fundamental to help us move forward. When we look at data we look at how the data comes in from the server. As such as certain level of performance is needed (making sure its not laggy etc). So we implemented a replication graph in specific zones to ensure the server doesnt have to replicate data of a player far away or behind a mountain/wall. (Replication refers to providing info to a player’s game client) There’s a lot of work goes into it.

Apocalypse Data: We went from doing kinda-sorta 100 players, but we can now push it to 250 stable. And we will continue to push higher to hit the numbers we want. It’s a lot of work to go through that data and figure out what we can and cant do. We can automate what we want, however we cannot get the kind of data that players provide. We also had to test our data gathering mechanics so we can gather data on what weapon is used the most etc. as it is essential for Alpha 1. We see every single shot a player makes, we see ability activation, whether the shot lands or not, and all of it gives us data to align with our core principles to judge whether X or Y is working the way we want it to. When pushing Apocalypse out, all of this design data such as accuracy etc, when is included in the MMORPG under the hybrid combat system, it helps us work on it.

Action and Tab Combat: The goal is if you want to go 50% Hybrid 50% action, we want it to be a viable option. It’s not necessarily about one or the other as tab and action have different tempos and speeds. We take this data, each of the designers comes up with their ideas and then we take a shotgun approach to test each prototype to see which feels like what we want, and then that is put into Alpha 1 to get community feedback and data.

Release Dates: Originally we announced Alpha 1 in Q2 2019, which was a decent projection, however we had to re-align. The delay is not in a number of years, but in a number of months. However going forward, when we give a date, we’re going to be confident about meeting that date. ALL PRIOR DATES ARE OFFICIALLY WIPED. Also we do not want to disappoint people as pushing dates is not fun. Our ideals –

• • No Pay-to-Win.
  • Not going to throw away effort by putting it in the cash shop.
  • We’re going emphasise risk vs reward.
  • AAA quality MMORPG.

All of this takes time. We’re incredibly invested in this just as much as you are. We had moved to a new payment processor ‘Xsolla’ however we listened to the community feedback and we moved away from it and plan to go to Paypal and Stripe.

Regarding the website and backend, we’re going to be re-designing the websites and make things better. These things are going to take time, to put blogs up and require some love. Regarding the forums, we cannot give you an exact date, however we are getting things prepped and will let you know a week in advance before it goes live. We’ll also have a proper FAQ set up for people to refer to. Concerns over old posts etc. will be in the FAQ.

Content Roadmap: It takes time to plan it out because we dont want to take away the time of people working on these various features and systems. However once departments have things done, we’ll share them with you. In march we’ll be focusing on nodes. We’re also working on a Dev diaries series to show you the people working on the project and what they’ve been upto. The first is the nodes system, it will show a lot of core systems. (Not nodes 3 yet) Art process, world building, level design, concept art process, all of these go into Dev diaries and will come out once every month to show you progress of the development. Initially everyone tried to share things but we all had our own work to focus on, however now with Margaret and Toast we now have people focused on sharing development with the community. Besides these, we’ll be doing livestreams once a month, these will happen on the last friday of each month at 11AM (Might change depending on community feedback). These will be uploaded on youtube the next day. And ofcourse monthly letters and fanart via fan-art-friday. More contests moving forward. GM events are fun and we’re looking forward to doing those with the community.

Regarding Events: We had originally decided to go to PAX East, however we decided it was best to focus on the game until Alpha 1. Going to these events is hard for us as it takes away from development as we have to take developers and then have a week to go there and a week of downtime. We will be attending events in the future that we’ll give you ample notice on when we are going to them. We are going to GDC, just a couple of us to meet handle business matters.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: With the delay for Alpha 1, what does this mean for the phases beyond Alpha 1?
A: It is very likely this will push us beyond 2020. We are no longer expecting to release the MMO before 2020. We will have an opportunity to catch up to speed later and we’ll take advantage of these. Moving forward when we are ready will give you a date. Alpha 1 will help you get a hands on and get a feel of where we’re from. We’ll be releasing a game that meets both our standards and the player’s standards. We’re working with bleeding edge tech and building a lot of features as we go. Each log in will be different, especially the node system. We as players have been there at the game’s launch and known instantly when a game felt rushed. We are not going to be one of those games. An MMO usually only gets launched once and this determines it’s life going forwards.

Q: Will you show us more in game stuff?
A: We want to share concept art, models and in some cases I might keep all of them to show it as a juicy leak. Even if steven leaks it, we will share it. Besides we cant stop Steven from leaking.

Q: What is the actual status on siege and the horde mode?
A: Obviously as we come across fundamental needs that require fixing, such as the architectural issue, it pushes back siege and horde, including Alpha 1. It doesnt mean other departments such as art/design etc stop, those keep moving. However sometimes engineering is working on something and it holds other things in the pipeline back.

Q: What’s the status on forums?
A: Already answered above. Working on it, will have FAQ and further questions will be added.

Q: Why did you not provide any concrete or specific dates on the letter?
A: Going forward we are going to give you dates once we have things ready and in QA, instead of when they will be ready. This way you can trust us to meet the dates. What the community wants is quality and we share this sentiment so that this will be the game we signed up for. And if this takes additional time, we will take that additional time. Our focus is not hitting a date, but to hit a quality of expectation.

Q: Will we continue to see a cosmetics on a monthly basis and if so, will they continue only being concept art?
A: Yes we will continue to do so because it was a promise since Kickstarter to release cosmetics up until launch. No power items or P2W mechanics, just skins and very little time to show you. However going forward we’ll introduce this pipeline to the character creation team and we’ll move into concept art and showing models in game.

 

QnA Session

Q: We know from previous info name reservation will happen in Alpha 1 and per server/per account. Does this mean we have to pick server as early as alpha 1 or can we pick it at release.
A: We will release the server names at launch and we will allow them to reserve names on specific servers. We will give you significant notice on these and a window to reserve them.

Q: Why is the currency called Embers?
A: It comes down to the core concept and idea of who the goddess of creation is and how embers and ashes correlate to the rebirth and death of the phoenix. Utilizing the soul of the phoenix that they represent. We wanted to make sure the whole thing is themed and feels right.

Q: Will epics be epic unlike other MMORPGs? And feel epic?
A: We havent named our tiers yet, just legendaries etc. In terms of powerscale, we want crafters to be responsible for their creation and how they create them. More in the hands of the players to make that feeling known. Having an economy where items are present and sellable with legitimate decay and not everything is soul-bound. We appreciate the mindset crafters bring to the game. We loved Archeage crafting in Alpha, but the amount of RNG and tier-dependencies did not help and supported their monetization model.

Q: Will we have roleplay tools for chat in game like /e or /dance?
A: Cant tell you exactly what we’ll be giving you, however our system is built around roleplaying systems. There will be plenty of ways to do in-character stuff and the chat system is the easy way, but we’ll give you more tools.

Q: How important will CC (Crowd Control) tanking etc. work? And diminishing returns?
A: CC is important. However in past games, balancing diminishing returns and ensuring it works across both PvE and PvP. It’s a very fine line. There will be CC and will be important but it wont be an “I win button” you wont see stun locks or control effects that last until you’re dead. They wont be a go to win button. There will be types of CC’s with their own diminishing returns.

Q: In siege mode, will there be captains?
A: There are group leaders and the group leaders can set waypoint commands and map locations. Additionally in the MMORPG you will have custom raid formations to utilize and each captain will have VOIP for their respective groups. However with apocalypse you’ll have inter-party VOIP and not with the raid itself.

Q: Will there be RNG during upgrading gear?
A: There will be some RNG, however we dont want enchantments and crafting system to rely on it. We want it to rely on gathering and we do want to rely on a bit of RNG to keep things interesting. In other games you see RNG to take money from players, however we are not building around that exploitative mechanic. We wont encumber the system with too much RNG.

Q: Are we going to see more heavy style/medieval style armor?
A: We had some in Alpha 0, which is post apocalypse timeline. The apocalypse armor is before the fall which is not heavy armor. There’s a wide variety of armor types due to the different cultures and races.

Q: Will gear matter in PvP?
A: Yes. Gear will matter. Gear is vertical progression. Depends on how much power. Is it more heavily inspired by skill or gear or rock/paper/scissors or is the monster you’re fighting got specific traits (Bonuses/weaknesses). Lots of components go into it and gear will be a large chunk of it, but not all of it. PvP balance is based around the group not individual players duking it out due to content focused around large groups.

Q: How do the guild halls work? Is it a separate freehold or another system completely?
A: There are 2 types, static systems that exist in a node and one that exists on the freehold. One of the ideas is that  a guild at a certain level will recieve a guild specific freehold plot and the guild leader has the ability to place it and have guild benefits and boons such as specific schematics for guild armors etc. If they dont have a freehold, and a static hall, then it’ll be available there. Freeholds can only be placed on nodes stage 3 or higher. The guild hall plot maybe can only be placed at stage 4 or 5, needs testing and is subject to change.

Q: How do you protect the city while the player is offline?
A: We have a system ready, when a node is sieged, there’s a period of declaration and takes prep days (Typically 1 day per node level). Additionally the time window where a siege may be declared depends on the server timezone. NA servers will have NA siege declare times.

Q: Long ago you talked about Apocalypse lobby being a house to invite over and customize?
A: We are going to re-assess that and look at it internally and we dont want to take away from MMORPG development as it is separate. And it’s not core to the game and more of cosmetic.

Q: Will the old referral system with the link still work?
A: The old system links will be forwarded to the new referral system’s code, in additional you will recieve a code to use and input into your accounts. Currently referrals only show if the user has migrated. However we will be syncing all data in the future so they wont need to migrate.

 

Steven: We appreciate you guys tuning in and our motivation is making you guys happy and meeting your standards. We watch discord/forums/reddit and read all the feedback good/bad/ugly. Margaret and Sarah turn it into reports that are easy to read which is great.  Moving forward – Things are going very very well. The data from apocalypse is invaluable. Getting that data now rather than later is a huge benefit for us. Stay tuned for node stuff this month. Next stream on March 29th. We love you guys, appreciate the feedback and love the support.

Google Doc Link

 

March 7th Discord QnA

– Steven’s extensive hour-long Discord QnA discussing the letter and addressing various community concerns.

Concerns over the BR, people claim Steven is out of touch with the community and want to know why the Battlegrounds for Phase 1 ended up changing into a Battle Royale.
The BR isnt about the BR, the purpose of the BR is to support development. It was not so much that the goal changed from Battlegrounds to Battle Royale, moreso that the Battlegrounds would have required additional designs that needed to be implemented such as class designs, objectives, additional mechanics, etc. However in order to create the BR, we only needed weapons skills animations, movement, populating the map, creating the map – All of this was easy to do and took less time. The battlegrounds for 3v3, 5v5, 15v15 does not allow for high population testing. Having multiple instances of such arenas does not test render replication from rendering one player in a single area to hundreds of players, having multiple instances of that spun up does not allow us to test this. Large population testing was only present in a game style which is currently the BR, unless we decided to build a whole new game mode for it.

Alpha 0 was a much bigger system, but was not using the new architecture. To update Alpha 0 with the new infrastructure would basically be creating Alpha 1. The timeline to get the Alpha 1 running was far more considerable than the time taken to set up the BR. It also gave us key stuff on account services, web traffic, etc. all systems that required us to be scalable for. The bottom line is – in open development, anytime something goes wrong results in negative publicity. The prize at the end of the day is still creating the MMORPG we are all working towards.

 

Q: What percentage of completion is the game at since you cannot give us timelines?
A: No percentage I’d be comfortable saying. Almost all of the key systems are in place, one of the key components is that backend architecture from apocalypse. The letter informing of the delay is not something I or the team wants to have to do as we cant do it until we have answers.

Q: Do you have a working hybrid combat system yet?
A: We have multiple working hybrid combat systems.

Q: What about constantly missing dates? Star citizen operates just fine and they never give any dates.
A: I agree, and that’s why we’ve also made the course adjustment to not give dates, it’ll be ready when it’s ready.

Q: You talk about how everything in development is going smooth, but we don’t see what you’re seeing. Do you plan to show us more mechanics?
A: 100% plans to show more mechanics in the future.Since September the studio has been crunching ridiculous hours,  when developers are in the thicket of it, we lose the perspective on the marketing aspect and the front facing image of development. Which is why we brought on Toast and Margaret to be a face to the public, they are getting up to speed, tasked with producing this front facing image of development to show you guys. They are doing very good so far and will start releasing content on a weekly basis this month. There are blogs scheduled for starting next week.

Q: There’s been a lot of concept art but not enough mechanics shown lately. It pushes the theme of monetization and gives the community a negative feeling.
A: That is a valid point, I would mirror this with the fact that I’ve had that discussion with the team. Since we promised monthly cosmetics in kickstarter, however the resources that go into this are mainly a concept artist who puts stuff into the pipeline and it’s fine as it does not impact development. Again, we’ve been crunching hard since September, had issues in December that prevented us with continuing with our normal timeline to display work to the public. Margaret and Toast help with showing the development we have prepared.

Q: Perception is reality, how does the BR support the main game. People have a negative opinion due to the Battle Royale. How many did you have in-game and per match?
A: We had 86,000 registered accounts actually play apocalypse and we managed to get 200 players in a single match during the test a few weeks ago.

Q: Which part of Apocalypse is not representative of the MMORPG?
A: The key component of the Battle Royale mode of Apocalypse not being representative of the MMORPG is – The Hybrid combat. The special combat systems did not have specific design data and we wanted that data which we obtained from Apocalypse testing. So what we have in Apocalypse is one side of  it that Hybrid system that helps build the system. The two combat styles (Action/Tab) have different tempo and I have yet to see an MMORPG blend them well. Games like Tera have soft target action combat, but I haven’t seen a direct correlation between the two. But that would be why this apocalypse gameplay isn’t representative of the MMORPG.

Q: It’s been so long since we’ve seen definite progress and the filter that view things through is skewered.
A: The plan is to execute the vision of MMORPG to release with expectation of what we’ve promised. We’re here to make sure we deliver on MMORPG, which is backed by my personal funding that makes up the largest portion of the game’s development. People might be upset, but once they experience the game, they will forget. And this will happen in a timely manner. Some people may disapprove with the direction now, but my prediction is that once the game releases to the standard and expectations of everyone, it will result in a good outcome at the end.

Q: It’s very hard for us backers to have the ‘Alls well that ends well’ mindset.
A: The reason I started Intrepid was because I wasn’t happy with how other studios considered options moving forward. We move forward with the best case and the recommendations of veterans in the industry who worked on some of our favourite MMORPGs. I expected some of this community response, but I strongly believe that people will forget development troubles but they won’t forget logging into the game. (Paraphrased)

Q: How does funding for game development normally work?
A: Most software development, banks will not leverage as they dont like that risk. Usually outside funds are raised through venture capitalists because they are risk oriented – however it isn’t something I have done.

Q: Can we see development progress in-game and not just art?
A: The content you’ll be seeing going forward is from the content roadmap, which will have information and news such as the backend tech for nodes, all through the UE4 editor where we create the game. The devs will be showing you how the tech works in the editor, this is all pre-recorded and is like an interview.

Q: Regarding the bear animation, the red tape around it, why did it take so long to release something so small?
A: It wasn’t so much showing it, but the manner it was being shown in. However I didn’t feel that it wasn’t major enough that deserved that attention, maybe I should have just hopped on discord and leaked it.

Q: Can we see things like the Bear animation, but more mechanic related?
A: Absolutely and this is what we’ll be doing moving forward and that’s what Margaret and Toast are here for.

Q: Can we not have moments of overhype about little things?
A: December, Jan and Feb are months where we had issues.

Q: Is there a better way for you to share content?
A: It’s being adjusted and will get better moving forward with content drops going forward. That’s what Margaret and Toast are here for.

Q: Mana forged armor sets, why should I care about getting them in the BR if I can get the same in the MMORPG?
A: The main answer is that the variety that will be present across them. The effort required to earn a cosmetic in the MMORPG might be greater than than the effort required to earn it in apocalypse or vice-versa. The means have to be considered.

Q: Do you still plan to keep the BR after release?
A: It depends on what the BR is providing. At the time right now, the BR continues to provide us data that is necessary.

Q: What % of the map will we have in the alpha and beta
A: For Alpha 1, 25% of the map. Moving forward it depends on the milestones we achieve. Our objective is 50% of the map in Alpha 2 and 100% by Beta. However this is a projection.

Q: Combat is extremely important for us and how it feels. It would be a great idea to put together the basics of the other classes and we’d like you to put out information on them as it would go a long way to satisfying the community.
A: It’s not a matter of finalizing the classes, but when we implement these classes into Alpha 1/Alpha 2, that’s when you’ll see theorycrafting around what people experience.

Q: At what point if negative feedback comes in on the hybrid combat will you take a step back from the drawing board? Since you are making a big leap of faith on this idea and trying out a new dynamic with risk.
A: Any time you innovate, you face risk. Everything we have today, was at some point innovative. So what we do is a ‘shotgun approach’ were we create multiple baselines and have the design team designers go back and lay out the foundation of what they expect the hybrid system to be, allow them to prototype and then you sort through them.

Q: That does not answer my question. IF those hybrid combat systems dont work, at what point do you drop it entirely?
A: Our contingency – If our hybrid system fails, is to switch to Tab-Target. However I do not believe it will fail.

Q: What made you decide tab-target over action IF it came down to hybrid combat failing?
A: It’s a traditional system that is well established. If we do switch back to tab, the other parts of the MMORPG are innovative enough to keep the players interested. However as to when we make that decision, is very hard to make. But definitely before launch.

Q: With all the cosmetics we’re seeing, we’re concerned the end-game armor will be dull.
A: The way I see it, things offered in the marketplace needs to be an alternative, not a higher rarity/quality.

Q: Concerned that outside of PI and the outspoken community members, other core players of the game may not get an input during development or voice their concerns.
A: We have extended Alpha 0 to the general community via random invites besides the PI and Alpha 1 testers, this ensured a healthy mix of MMO player demographic, ranging from players with lots of time to very little time. And the purpose of doing this is to have good sampling.

Q: Yes, but regarding similar feedback as A0 from A1, will you give out more keys?
A: The reason why I don’t want to hand out Alpha 1 keys, because those keys have some direct monetary value, unlike Alpha 0 which was invite only. I don’t want to undermine the value of alpha 1 by offering a lot of free keys. There’s also a lot of logistics that go into this as well, the engineers wanted to confine it to 10k players test.

Q: Why are you not lifting the visual NDA on alpha 0?
A: Because the moment it is released, it starts dating very quickly, because it will end up becoming the face of the project. We’re more content allowing a dry spell now until alpha 1 becomes available, to excite them with the world and the systems of alpha 1.

Q: What was the nail in the coffin for the Xsolla change?
A: It was a valid concern by the community and we looked into it and decided to make the change. The balance of stripe and paypal worked better for players in other regions.

Q: Studio represented events for the community?
A: We want to do more virtual events and events at trade events etc.

Q: Can we know about the name of the moon of Verra? Can we have a moon naming contest?
A: Who told you there’s only one moon? We have named the moon, it is lore related. I like that Idea, though.

Q: What about the #asheschallenge event etc?
A: (Community answered) That was an event run by Sarumonin that Steven wasn’t even aware of.

Q: Since we all don’t think you’ll be able to hit the previous timeframe/goal. There’s promises for the game such as the naval combat, various systems and so much more and it feels like there’s a lot of things that have to be filed out in a short time.
A: From a schedule standpoint, there’s 2 components. From a resource standpoint, we’re hiring more people as we mentioned in the letter. From a feature standpoint, most of those systems share or correlated in design, creating how those systems work fundamentally is shared. From that perspective, we’ll be able to achieve it by launch. However as I mentioned in the past, if there is a specific system holding up the release of the game, we will postpone the system as an update or expansion for the game to not affect release.

Q: Regarding Feature creep and the extensive features.
A: We won’t cut content. Again, I don’t foresee any issues with the feature list. If a particular system is holding up the game and as long as it isn’t a core structural system, we’ll release the game without it.

Q: How extensive do you expect your lore to be?
A: You will see aspects of the lore that are not just present in the game, from a film standpoint and there’s potential for the lore to have an expansion in that regard. It’s pretty deep.

Q: What’s your favourite AoC race?
A: Cant say that. However traditionally in past MMO’s I’ve played human.

Steven ends QnA due to having to get on a call. Thanks everyone for the QnA and says he does not shy away from such talks and appreciates them.

Google Doc Link

March 2nd Discord QnA

– Steven talks player feedback, Pet system, Summoner class, Open World structures and Castle Siege leaks.

Q: Will you be at PAX east this month?
A: I decided this week that it is best for the studio not to attend the PAX East event and instead stay focused on development.  Because we do not have a marketing team that manages the booth, it takes live developers out of the office for that week, and can include another week of downtime recovering.

Q: When someone is discussing something in discord about a decision you’ve made or your company. Do you feel like your more receptive to the positive feedback and that sticks with you , or the negative . Or both equally ?
A: To be honest, sometimes when I see a discussion on discord or reddit with certain assumptions, I hate having to bite my tongue. Lol. If I picked every uninformed opinion to jump on, I’d be fighting a losing battle. However, there are informed feedback and I enjoy relying on certain content creators to funnel the discussion in an organized manner.

Q: It must be a huge letter if it takes about a month to write.
A: The letter doesn’t take a month. It’s the answers that are dependent on development that take the time

Q: I’m still not sold on the “open world” PvP all the time with the corruption system.
A: Corruption will prevent most people from pking. But flagging may occur. Depending on the situation or rivalry. Meaningful PvP is the focus.

Q: Steven you still believe in game release before 2020?
A: Stay tuned for the letter on March 7th and tune into the live stream on the 8th.

Q: I actually just did get a question in my mind. Steven, will there be wonders of the world? Great, standing structures of either the past or the present that dominate the landscape they’re upon?
A: Yes. Mainly those are points of interests. The first ever area in the world map we built had a colossus like structure that had been destroyed. So the base of it was still intact and it was a giant foot. Wearing a sandal.

Q: How’s the A1 map looking? I don’t want to play other mmorpgs while I wait.
A: A1 map is the world map. And it feels very very large.

Q: Combat pets vs summoner pets, whats the difference?
A: Combat pets, cosmetics creatures and summoner pets are all three different things. Summoner pets level with your skill tree and only summoner primary classes can have these, whereas a combat pet needs to be nurtured and will take a part of the leveler’s experience to level up. Cosmetic creatures have no combat abilities and just walk around you or fly. I want to have a pet system that lets you leave cosmetic pets at your freehold and you can accumulate herds of them. And they will just wander in proximity to the freehold untargetable and invulnerable

Q: Does this mean everyone is gonna be forced to use combat pets for that slight damage boost?
A: Not necessarily, their damage is a percentage of the characters damage output and shouldn’t really  impact the overall damage output.  whereas summoner pets are a direct vertical increase in damage for the character output. But these things will be tested and played with in alpha/beta. There will be an option to remove pet targets from your tab rotation.

Q: Why be a summoner at all if you get a pet as anyone?
A: Because the combat pet system does not increase your damage output, whereas a summoner’s pets do. It has more horizontal skills that make your character more versatile. 

Q: Regarding the negativity around the game currently.
A: I wouldnt worry too much, when people begin to see our Alphas and Betas, discussion will be about gameplay/mechanics/art and it will calm down.  It is part of the development process, this is why triple A studios tend to stay quiet till they are in Beta. But I’d rather deal with the toxic times and get more involvement and discussion to gleam info from

Google Doc Link

February 17th Discord QnA

– Steven offers clarification and in-depth explanation on the Apocalypse Testing, potential delays, new hires and ships.

Q: Why does the game feel unfinished?
A: This is testing. Not a launch. Need to test these network changes in preparation for launch. Part of our development is having an open window to the process. Ugly, beautiful, good or bad. Last Thursday was a preliminary test of some of that new architecture. Needs polishing. But 200 players and much more should be possible. I can say, without a doubt. There is no more dedicated team of developers than who I see at Intrepid everyday.

Q: Has Apocalypse actually helped with testing of the MMORPG?
A: Apoc revealed architectural issues that would have been revealed later (which was partly its purpose) and while development is split into separate departments (engineering, design, art etc) some of these issues needed rebuilding from the ground up. I will go into more detail and our plans in the directors letter. Which I plan to have done within the next couple weeks. But am waiting on a few definitive answers first.

Q: Is Apocalypse considered a failure?
A: APOC’s qualification for success is to simply provide a tool by which we could identify necessary adjustments or changes in preparation for Alpha of the MMORPG. Anything beyond was extra.

Q: What about the reason for monetizing Apocalypse?
A: Monetization was intended to support high player counts. Since Apoc is free to play.

Q: But Apocalypse got spun off as its own product, right?
A: In an attempt to limit confusion about it as a testing ground yes.

Q: Still will never understand why utilizing the MMO world and creating battle arenas couldn’t of had the same effect though.
A: The desired timeframe of the testing was before the mmo alpha timeline.

Q: If I’m misremembering/misstating, couldn’t the Alpha 0 world have been utilized?
A: Not in the way we needed to test the new backend infrastructure.

Q: Forgive me for asking for details, and if you can’t give details that’s fine I suppose, but what sort of backend had to be tested, if you can put it in simple terms? I’d assume server stability, able to handle animations/multiple players fighting at once, seeing how it operates when put under stress, but what else was there to it?
A: Soooo, to recap the reasoning we developed APOC (or originally what we intended Alpha One Phase 1 to be) was to address concerns about combat, and specifically how we would integrate action combat into a hybrid combat system for Ashes.  When we planned how to best accommodate this intent, we desired massive design data from skill usages, reticle accuracies, camera pov, high frequency player populations, etc (long list) and we wanted to do all of this in a design that could be quickly made and adjusted sizewise (hence battle royale= little to no designs and a proven enjoyable game mode format).  This was also the perfect opportunity to begin to lay the foundation for the new account services and matchmaking backend for the in-game arena systems.  In addition, we wanted to use our proprietary AND patented distributed server backend that is intended to accommodate the massive amount of players we will see in the MMO, at battles like node and castle sieges, and we wanted to do this testing of THESE specific systems with enough time to implement the changes we discovered from the testing results, hence why we crunched to get APOC in the hands of testers.

Now, what happens in active development is the need to be agile and reactionary, and sometimes that is lost on many people who are watching our development, which is ok.  When the MMORPG begins it’s alphas and betas, people will tend to judge based on the merit of the content they are watching at that moment, and not content that is dated previously in the development cycle.  Additionally, during the testing of Alpha One Phase 1, it became quite confusing for those not following the project, that what they were seeing in this arena style battle royale was an atmosphere designed to test the aforementioned systems and services, in an attempt to alleviate that confusion we decided to brand it away from the mmorpg aspect, since it wasn’t clear enough for those less informed about the project and the reasoning for this testing phase and how it related to the mmo development, which of course had a secondary effect that caused confusion about the direction of the project being focused on creating a BR lol… Soooooo long story short, we are literally developing one of the largest mmos and with some of the most talented people in the mmo business, and development sometimes can require revision and fixing, I will more eloquently state these insights in the director’s letter.

 

Q: Looking forward to that letter, be sure it sticks with the honest train there Maggie. Even if some of the paths have ulterior motives as to why they’re taken by Intrepid Studios, give the honest answer, we’ll appreciate you all far more for it.
A: Don’t misunderstand the statement about BR being an easy to make, fun format. It wasn’t chosen as a monetization model, but rather the easiest mode that’s fun for testers and achieves what we wanted to achieve for development of the MMORPG in the timeline we wanted to achieve it in.  There was no ulterior motive, that’s the type of  commentary that is sad to see from us developers who are working night and day for one motive, the greatest mmorpg possible. It only had to do with 3 things; Testing the systems we wanted to test, spending as little time as possible creating something to achieve the previous point, and getting it done in a timeline that allowed us to fix/change what needed to be changed before alpha/beta of the mmorpg

Q: I see a lot of similarity between ashes and log horizon. Thats also how I hope legendary work. Steven will we be able to harness corruption to warp profession items into demonic and decayed things?
A: At the moment that is not in the cards.

Q: Can you use boats in rivers? or is ships stuff only in the ocean?
A: It will depend on the depth of the water.

Q: Steven, you’re also evading the 100x100km question (For Alpha 1). Does that include water content or just land?
A: The 480sqkm includes water and land content.

Q: Steven will fighters be able to play a life leech build?
A: The Highsword may have some of those features

Q: Steven do you think that in a future expansion possibly increase the map size like most mmo’s do, and with that add one or more castles, and metro spots?
A: That is a discussion for our expansion parameters.

Q: Steven do you think this game can go from A1 to Launch in 6 months?
A: Depends on revision and fixes necessary, but yes based on what I am told it is possible.

Q: How long before we can have a crafting systems blog post Steven?
A: Depends where it is on the community content roadmap. I think once the content release schedule gets finalized, the regularity of blogs/videos/and leeks will be robust.  also the 25th of this month we have 3 more  very talented people starting at Intrepid.

Q: 800 blizzard employees now jobless might find a few good ones.
A: Since December, we have brought aboard 12 new people, I will be spotlighting them as part of our next newsletter and we are still hiring more! so spread the news.

Q: Steven, will Ashes of Creation ships have Radar? If radar is being considered – is it being considered for all ship classes or a select few?
A: That’s been a design topic of some debate. One of the prevailing thoughts, is having more of a spyglass approach that gives a direction and skims the horizon. Additionally, radar becomes less necessary when ships must be launched from land imo.

Google Doc Link