July 25th Reddit AMA Transcript

– Steven hops onto Reddit for an AMA with the community to discuss development progress.

Q: When discussing the breakdown of rogue archetypes, you said only rogues will excel at delving the deepest dungeons, what else can you tell us?
A: Yes – We have what we call utility skills. Most MMORPG’s only focus on active combat skills. The way we’re implementing utility skills specifically to rogues is their ability to discover hidden doors, traps, additional loot- they will be able to discover these within a dungeon. The way we ensure its not the same locations each time is because these locations randomly spawn at different times of the day. (This is in particular to the rogues)

Q: How will EXP be affected by grouping for killing/farming?
A: If you are in a group and kill a monster or raid boss, EXP will be divisible by the number of party members. Additionally, there is a multiplier applied based on how many additional party members you have in your party. This way it balances itself out because at its height its a 1.3 or 1.4x multiplier. On the questing side, the quests will maintain their EXP values to the individuals. Even for farming, it’s the same.

Q: Considering the number of nodes, how many world bosses and dungeons will there be? 1 dungeon per node?
A: Considering the number of nodes, the initial ZOI is relatively small. So dungeons have a region that is shared with numerous nodes. Eventually the highest parent node influences the dungeon. As for world/raid bosses, initially there are going to be 12-15 world/raid bosses, not including the dungeon and regional bosses. The differences between these are the drop tables and the number of players needed to kill it. So legendary equipment drops from legendary world bosses. Legendary world bosses are static, regional bosses change based on nodes and their types.

Q: Why is multi-boxing be allowed in AoC as it might be considered a p2w picture?
A: I see both sides of the coin. I do want to clarify that there will be absolutely no p2w in ashes of creation purchasable. I’ve been burned in the past when playing MMORPG’s where there are game mechanic influencing items. For example very early on in a game I played, there was a resource that was farmed in farms/illegal farms where the resource could be struck by lightning and become a rare resource. This particular resource was a gateway to tractors and other special items. So this item had a high value due to its rarity. The game creators then added an item in the pay shop which was a seedling with a higher chance of proccing, so it completely destabilized the market, flooding it, destroying the economical balance. This is one example. I also consider Pay to Convenience like inventory items or slot spaces an advantage. With regards to multiple accounts and multi-boxing, it could be considered as pay to win since you can progress on 2 characters and gift the progress to another one. Multiboxing will be allowed in AoC, but there are some restrictions, for example the freehold system is tied to an account, its not like other games where each character can have multiple properties. Additionally its very difficult to enforce restrictions on multiboxing, like IP restrictions, but there’s families and roommates that play together. 

Q: There are concerns that costumes from the cash shop will let you hide your gear to appear weaker
A: You will be able to target a player and see a buff on the character to see the type of gear they are wearing (Plate/Leather/Cloth). Next you will also see a border on the buff to see the tier of their gear. So this lets you quickly assess the threat of the enemy. With regards to turning off cosmetics, previously I mentioned there would be a default player appearance- Now the primary reason for this is to help the player client render multiple targets in siege or high group content scenarios. We are going to enable that scenario when there is a certain number of render clients in range or at specific events. The reason for that is that cosmetics are an important part of the game. 

Q: Have you decided what happens to a caravan if a player has to log off midway? Can I go halfway, log out and then log in the next day and continue?
A: There will be a 5-10 minute time delay if you log off during a caravan run. So if you disconnect or log off, the caravan will persist and exist in the world.

Q: What are the benefits of the religion system and can you change religion?
A: You may only choose 1 religion to follow. Religions have unique religion quests for that religion’s followers. Based on your progression within the religion, you will advance in rank, giving you access to unique titles or ranks. You can change your religion, but you will lose your progression. The top tier access of religion is to obtain unique augments that stack upon your secondary class augments.

Q: Will base class clerics be the only ones with direct healing for other players?
A: Cleric and Bard classes can directly heal others. Bards will be much much less and they will be proximity based as opposed to cleric’s direct target heals. The base cleric will indeed be the predominant healing class. With more proc based healing for the bard role. Through the secondary class augments you can grant yourselves or mitigated healing for your party members by augmenting your primary skills.

Also we tested this in our castle siege test with PI where we had action based skills where you could fire off heals in a direction and they would home in on allies to heal them. We have not yet decided on whether we will implement this though.

Q: How will food consumption work in AoC, will they be longterm buffs?
A: The higher quality the food based on cooking profession, the greater potential for the buffs duration. You can increase the buff that food gives through the furniture system placed in homes. So if you have a completed dish and you process that dish in an oven placed in your home, you can increase its stats. So if a player constructs a tavern or freehold, they can offer food through that tavern, so players who are visiting the area, eat food if available, they will receive a greater buff, that is proximity based where if they hunt around that building they get a buff. The building (Tavern) when upgraded increases its proximity buff area. 

Q: Will players be required to play through the starting zone or they can branch out immediately?
A: There is no theme park rail road. You can create your own destiny, you don’t have to participate in the questline or partake in events. There could be a meta around min-maxing and doing that but you can branch out and do whatever you want. Since we have so many progression paths, your objective is determined by your goals. If you want to go with your guild and establish an area far away, do that. If you want to upgrade your adventuring class asap, do so. If you want to focus on crafting and gatherables, go ahead.

Q: What is the team perspective on limited gatherables and their scarcity? Will they be one-time-gatherables?
A: Yes there will be some one-time-gatherables that have a spawn table. However there are also large vein gatherables. So you may have multiple gathering points where it attracts lots of players to basically gather at a large mine or a horde of large animals to collect fur from. On the scarcity side there will obviously be higher tiers requiring higher end tools.

Q: Large guilds suffer from server lockouts at times, where a server is locked by devs forcing the guilds to split up. While we understand the server load at launch, will you guys plan ahead and will server transfers be available?
A: I was the guild leader of a very very large guild which was built up over around 15 years. We had around 14,000 members on our mailing list at one point. To clarify I did step down before I started Intrepid – But 100% I do understand the absolute travesty that happens at new launches. One of the things I would like to introduce probably during the beta phases is to allow server reservations. This will allow players part of large guilds to reserve their spots on the servers. It’s almost impossible to really stop overpopulation at launch. Locking the server temporarily is really the only solution, however we can mitigate that issue by allowing character slot reservations. This is mostly to be used by guilds instead of solo players, solo players may have friends can obviously still use the system, but fresh players probably won’t want to do it. But I do want to state that its why the testing phases and feedback is so important to us. I’m not talking about pre-ordering the game since I’m personally funding the project to completion, but its about having people engaged and constantly providing feedback to help us progress. It’s important to me to understand the community sentiment, so much so that sometimes scrolling through the discord/forums reading on my mobile and I fall asleep, letting my mobile fall on my face.

Q: I heard that the character creation is planned to be close to Black Desert.
A: I loved BDO’s character creation, I thought it was cool and provided a lot of customization to players. However as a developer I do believe in providing a little more confines to it due to different races. Yes there will be a specific type of slider. The goal is to have a character creator on par or much better than what BDO provided. I would love to give out the character creator early to let players spend time to make and save the profile so they are ready to go on day 1 so you can jump into the game quickly. I can’t tell you how many times my guild and I would just be waiting for the server to go live, people trolling saying its live when its not, so I know the goal to get in asap, so having the character creator out early is important. 

Q: How limited will inventory space be and cant we just stuff materials into people and run them over?
A: Initial capacity will be limited, so the node system progress and different quest lines will allow you to upgrade your inventory. Your inventory will have a separate section for quest items which will not interfere with your regular item capacity, I hate it when games do that. So the capacity that a player can have of raw gatherables or processed materials can also be upgraded. You can get a mule to summon it to carry extra stuff. So Caravans have multiple applications besides just transferring stuff. You could move stuff with just friends, but you would need a LOT of friends to match a single caravan. There are quest systems related to completing trade routes, there are NPC caravans used to establish trade relations requiring escorting. There’s also bonus returns for specific node caravan runs. So there’s plenty of unique benefits besides just the carrying capacity.

Q: As we come closer to Alpha 1 and eventually Alpha 2, will see more about the archetypes and classes?
A: Absolutely. We want to vett a lot of the design ideas behind player feedback and on the flip side we also want to do it in a structured manner. Its important not to ruin the discovery feeling that happens with a new MMORPG. As I’ve said in the past, transparency is a double edged sword. By doing so much testing, we ruin the testing experience. One of the former Blizzard designers reviewed Peon’s video and said he was very excited for AoC and I almost dont want to watch the development progress anymore to not ruin the experience. While on one side we want to vett our ideas, we dont want to ruin the player’s experience. Since we are not putting NDA’s behind the Alpha/Beta phases, it speaks to the confidence in the product. Seeing our philosophies resonate with the community is very encouraging. We are not revealing any of the lore during the alpha phases, so in the alphas stuff will be placeholders.

Q: Is there a chance the monthly fee will be adjusted for regions? I’m from brazil
A: Price harmonization is pretty standard in the industry where in foreigen territories, the price is adjusted. We will indeed be doing it for Ashes of Creation. However keep in mind that this will occur only on servers for that region, so a brazillian player would be paying the reduced price for the brazillian servers.

Q: Would it be harder to assault dunir vs nikua cities?
A: No. That would be an unbalanced feature that would create a population imbalance. So no, standardised siege process that is determined by the direction that citizens take with their mayor to direct resources towards defences. So the community has to direct resources towards defences, but you will end up sacrificing on growth. So if you elect to grow your city more, you will likely lack defences. The reliquary is a status symbol for the achievement of which some can be utilized for player buffs in sieges.

Q: Who gets the drop from world bosses?
A: When a raid is formed, the raid leader sets the loot distribution settings. This is determined by a wide variety of options, specifically loot master etc. But if you have two competing raids, it will come down to tag vs DPS system. So tagging provides a slight benefit over DPS for looting rights. So for example if you tag the target, you only need to do 40% of the damage done for looting rights. If you dont tag the target, you need to do 60% of the damage for looting rights. We definitely want more feedback on this from the community.

Q: Any time I look up the combat, I end up looking at apocalypse battle royale footage
A: To provide some clarity, let me explain the reason for the direction of the battle royale. We’re trying to create a hybrid system between tab and action, obviously they have two very different tempos. Early early on in 2017, we got a lot of feedback from the community, rightfully so, its what you must get right, it must be good, fluid and mobile. Its a very important component which is incredibly iterative. The feedback early on was the combat is not fluid and does not feel good. So we needed to really test how to implement action combat to get data on projectile data, hitsan data, area of effect data and vetting the backend systems like matchmaking, concurrency, culling and rendering algorithms, optimization of environment and terrain- all of these were needed to vett early on.

Now a battle royale is a very easy mode to implement design wise. We went down the road to test things and luckily we found a lot of things that needed to be reworked, it would have been far more difficult if we hit alpha and had to go back and redo things. So the combat in Apocalypse was purely the action system which is NOT going to be representative of the hybrid combat in the MMORPG. Alpha 1 will contain a very barebones type of the hybrid combat, we will be watching the metrics and consistently adjust it. Game development is very difficult, especially for an MMORPG and especially difficult for an MMORPG that is trying to be as ambitious as AoC. We are not going to go down the path of scope creep. We have a very clear vision and a game design document for the game, we are not prolonging development, we are incredibly aware of scope creep.

Q: Thanks for the recent interviews, will the enemy player level be a mystery to me? What power difference can we expect between 2-4 levels in PvP?
A: I had no idea the interviews were going to happen, I just reached out and said if they were interested, I would love to hop on. I enjoyed the interviews thoroughly. No, levels will not be a mystery. You will see it immediately. Unless you are in a party you will not be able to see the health pool of a target unless in a party/raid with them. So the enemy player will have a nameplate which will slowly deteriorate as you damage them, but you wont get granular data. I think that’s a very important component as I think it makes things more interesting and will be a fun component for PvP. I would say that the power difference would be somewhat same in gear and levels. I cannot stand when MMO’s apply dampers to abilities if a target is outside level range in PvE or PvP. So if I do 1000 damage, I dont want to do 0 damage to something 5 levels above me. I like batting out of my weight class and to see what I can do. 

Q: Wont family summon ruin the no-fast travel mentality?
A: There’s a cooldown period between leaving and joining a family (its in days). The summon system is contained within the family unit. So if I have 8-man family limit and I want to summon one of them, I cant summon someone from the guild part of another family. Limiting fast travel limits the zerg mentality. It becomes very difficult for players to avoid zergs, because if they get wind of something, they can very quickly open a portal and stop your fun. That’s not to say political information wont play a role, I could have a spy in an enemy guild, know the time place and numbers, I could set up a trap. We want it to take some time, we dont zergs to quickly group up. The family summon lets you go with your party to group up, but limits mobility for large groups of people. Tear apart my systems, I enjoy reading that stuff.

Q: Because of the cooldown after a successful siege defence, false flagging could become a viable strategy.
A: Anyone can participate in a node siege, the idea behind a false flag is to undertake the quest progress (which is substantial), then you want to obtain the siege scroll with the intent of organizing a group of people. Let’s say there were a group of people who DID want to siege, you can’t exclude them, they can still participate. Now if there was not an interested party, then it’s not really a false flag. So yeah, doing so just opens the door for others.

Q: Love necromancy and raising fellow players as undeads, does the philosophy behind necro match zombies/skeletons etc?
A: The way summoning works is, players have active abilities to summon summons. The types of summons you can summon will be split into Tank/Healer/DPS summons. So you gotta choose which ones you want to use for which encounter. As you apply the cleric secondary class and activate life or death, you radically adjust the types of summons and they take on the sub-type of undead, zombies, skeletons. Are the summons permanent? When you make a summon it will not time out, it will exist until you log out or it dies. Your abilities as a summon can be through augmenting and buffing or healing your summon or you will have more complimentary type active skills to cast and synergize with summons. Your decision as a summoner to allocate skill points will be your choice. 

Q: The augment system is a key component for character progression, though some examples have been given, many players are confused. Could you clarify the impact of the secondary archetype?
A: Lets take the fighter as an example. If you were able to take the teleportation augment and apply it to the rush skill. Normally the skill would take X time to travel X distance, upon reaching deal X damage. So the initial rush skill might only require 10 skill points, so you can continue to invest skillpoints to increase damage done or travel speed. So if you apply teleport, instead of travelling, you teleport to the end point and do the damage. So this is not just flavour, but also changes the core of the skill. When you are charging you could be interrupted by CC, target could teleport away, you could be led into enemies if the target runs away. But if you apply the teleport, you have completely removed all those potential downsides during the charge since you instantly teleport to the target. That’s a significant vertical power increase on the skill. The ability to radically change the core components of the ability is what the augment system is.

Q: I’d like to know a little more about questing, will there be cross node quests?
A: Yes! These cross node quests will come online as relationships are developed between nodes. Questlines are gated by the advancement of the node from a stage standpoint and also by the types of buildings that are constructed by the players in the nodes. On the society and organization side, within organizations, there will be unique questlines. Let me give you an example, lets say a node constructs a temple and the highest title in that temple is bishop or cardinal. The first person who gains that title, there can only be one person who can hold this title, so yes there would be quests restricted to them. Certain titles like bishop have special abilities in sieges, so they would have a secondary hotbar in these sieges that come online, you may have additional hit points or damage mitigation. 

Q: What is the philosophy behind the cash shop and how will it not destroy visual progression?
A: When it comes to monetization and business model, I believe the quality of the product should speak for itself. Its also why the game will have no box price. So a box cost is a high barrier for entry, sometimes too high and in some cases too greedy, so I dont want a box cost. Population is important for MMORPG’s, especially when there’s different demographics of players PvP/Social/RP/etc. So you want a large influx of players. So a sub cost provides a barrier of entry to mitigate some gold selling/bots/etc. And its not too high that it gets on the greedy side. It lets people try the game and if the game is good, they will continue to sub. This ensures it can support the developers and can continue to support the game. 

I like BDO, it does great things, but you look like trash unless you spend money in the cosmetic shops. Take that feedback with a grain of salt. In AoC there will be legendary cosmetics that can be earned and achieved through the game via in-game systems but it will require a significant amount of effort. These will be on par with those on the marketplace. There are casuals and hardcore players. The MMORPG community is an aging group of people. People love collecting cool lookin cosmetics and may not have the time to invest into that progression. The key is to provide both the in-game means to look fabulous as well as a cosmetic shop for it. This funds the developers additionally that bridges the gap that not having a box cost has. Many developers say they wont have p2w and then boom they add p2w. In the kickstarter and pre orders, we did not provide any p2w, we talk the talk and walk the walk. 

Q: Will ship building be available for coastal freeholds?
A: No, not for freeholds. This will be housed within development of nodes and these crafting stations come online as the node progresses. The node may not be on the coast but near the coast and it will have hooks where harbor station hooks come online where shipbuilders can use blueprints to construct different classes of ships. The higher the node becomes the players can then craft higher types or classes of ships. To be clear you dont need to be a shipbuilder profession to craft the ship, but the shipbuilder profession lets you craft components that affect speed, mobility etc. to sell to other players. 

Q: Considering other AAA games have a content drop at end game that devs take months to add which gets cleared in a few weeks, how is AoC going to handle this? Even wow does not have enough.
A: The ways the nodes are constructed, multiple nodes will advance at different rates. Nodes lock each other out when they develop. Nodes change spawn tables and loot tables, open access to certain content. All of this is curated content of course, we’ll get to player driven content later. We are not creating 103 different zones, but we are creating modular systems that affect the world built by players and the catalyst for change is the PvP systems that destroy existing nodes to build new nodes to experience different content that did not exist before. The Sandbox element of MMORPG’s has often been used as an excuse to not add curated content or cut down on production time necessary for MMORPG’s and to lay the responsibility on the player driven mechanics for end-game content and this gets boring quickly. My favourite books as a kid were the choose your own adventure books. The nodes involve you in the story where as a community you build the world. In order for a sandbox to work it must have equitable or more content than a theme park style game. That does make a huge responsibility on the developer side of things- Which we are pretty confident we can achieve in a content regard. 

I know we as an MMO community have been hurt a lot over the years and I understand the skepticism that comes with new games. But we are dedicated to building a quality experience built on quality feedback. We want to answer the call that the MMORPG community has made over the decade and it’s high time it happened. Don’t tell people to buy into the game, but spread the word of the game, tell them to join the discord and be a part of the development, make AoC a reality that takes into account the feedback which we need. It’s important that consumers use their voice and this is done by engaging. I’m incredibly passionate and I want us to succeed to make you all proud.

Google Doc Link

July 8th Jahlon Interview Transcript

– Steven joins Jahlon for his annual interview, covering a vast majority of questions relating to MMORPG development.

Unlike other transcripts which are shortened, we’ve kept the majority of this one ‘as is’ due to it being an interview. However we’d strongly recommend that you watch the interview instead to support the content creator.

J: I just wanna say – it’s great to have you back again after a year, I do appreciate it. I know doing a show with Jahlon might be like taking a little test, like a little worry.
S: No, I think that usually for me there are so many moving parts to an MMO, especially that of Ashes, and part of my job is to make sure I know every moving part. That sometimes can be a little difficult when pulling up parts that maybe have either been already developed, and I have not touched them in a while, or haven’t been spoken about for a considerable amount of time. I noticed that on the last stream I made a couple of mistakes, I am human, I went back to rectify; but usually what that stems from is that I don’t pre-screen questions – they come as they are and I access my databanks in my mind in real time in that regard. So for today I did request last week that you forward the questions so that I can make sure that I, if I need to reference stuff, have that available.

J: Yeah. And I think after that last stream, you had made a couple of mistakes; and you and I spoke right away and you were able to have that light bulb turn over your head and you were able to go like “Wait, what did I do?”. And you’re probably the most down to earth developer, ’cause I’m following all the games in development and you’re here hanging out with a small content creator, talking about stuff. We had that real quick meeting, and it shows that you’re not pre-screening those questions, even though I know you’re beating yourself up about the last time. So we’re not just cherry picking out the easy ones, you’re getting to the batter’s box and you’re taking the hard balls.
S: Yeah, and we’re not the only studio that is this way, I don’t think. There’s a benefit to having someone who’s controlling the company and the project and them also being passionately a gamer. <…> I mean, AoC right now is my life. That is 100% of what I do pretty much every day in and out. So when you’re passionate about something and it’s the only thing you ever do for these past years, it’s no skin off my back to jump on and talk about things. I love talking about Ashes. And with regards to the content creators standpoint, we haven’t really done any marketing for Ashes. Everything that we have cultivated from a community standpoint has really been a result of the community spreading the word; we haven’t entered that marketing phase. We provide regular updates and whatnot and it’s always exciting to get the feedback from the community. Engaging with the smaller content creators now, that I wouldn’t say so much small, I mean you’ve grown overtime in your coverage with Ashes and I think that’s great. It’s wonderful to leverage the community in such a way that you can produce quality content and I’ve seen your content grow to a good quality standpoint, which I think is awesome. But my ideal interaction is to be able to interact with everybody whether they be big, small, or whatever, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m watching everything I possibly can and any content that gets created.

J: And a lot of people don’t know this about you, but you do watch all the content. You’ve found stuff. Like, I know a lot of people from other projects I work with watch the first couple of minutes of my videos and they’re like “Ok, it looks good”, but you have plucked math errors out of minute 18 and I’m like “Wait, what”. So yeah, I want the audience to know that you do watch as much as you can.
S: Yeah, well, usually that type of responsibility for most companies gets delegated to marketing teams, which then are responsible for that. And we have a great marketing team, we have a great community team; <…> my position on what you just described, I think, it’s important to keep the pulse of the community. And the best marketing person is the one that understands its audience; and in order to understand your audience you have to be intimately involved with the opinions and content that they create. That obviously brings up a separate point of not allowing the minority loud voices to dictate the direction we’re taking and that’s not my intent, but rather just to make sure that every possible opinion that’s had, whether it be from smaller communities or larger voices, they have an opportunity to reach my ears and eyes. And then that’s where I get discerning of how to essentially interpret those positions and opinions.

J: So you guys have just put this up this morning your time. The cosmetics have gotten so much better over the years that we have been following them monthly. Margaret had mentioned she has been doing the concept designs for a while, not the art, but the description of the direction…
S: Yeah, I think she’s done a great job. Usually what that process entails is some brainstorming sessions that happen between designers and Margaret and other people. We kind of put ideas for themes on the board for months going forward that kind of adhere to the categories that are established for production. And then Margaret really takes those brainstorm ideas and starts referencing different arts and ideas on the types of creatures or caravans, or buildings that adhere to the theme of that month. And then she goes back and forth between all the artists and I kind of take a final look and approval, and we spit those out. And I think they’ve been doing a great job. I kind of think of it as a TV show. You know the first season in most TV shows are kind of a little interesting and weird. I know this especially with Star Trek, but it’s kind of like a recurring theme for each type of Star Trek series that the first season is funny. I think that’s similar in production and concept where a lot of the artists and ideas, and guidelines are getting kind of established and as it moves forward it continues to get better and better and I think that’s been demonstrated with these concept pieces and the art there.

J: So it’s been 5 long years for you. I’ve watched you kind of get tired, the same way you watch a president get tired, because Intrepid was founded in 2015 and then development on Ashes has really been going full-court press since Kickstarter.
S: Yeah, I would say Kickstarter is when it really started to ramp up. May of 2015 we started the company, but we didn’t hire our first group of people until about December of 2015. So the actual pre-production and planning started at about the first of 2016, and about until up to May of 2017 we got up to 13-14 people just kind of establishing the base stuff. But from Kickstarter days to today, yes, that’s where production really started kicking up like crazy. So about 3 years now of major production stuff. And as we move forward to the next Alphas and Betas, it just continues to ramp up because we haven’t even hit our peak yet.

J: I want to make sure that everybody knows the staff page at intrepidstudios.com used to show everybody and you guys have deliberately chopped that down to just Team Leads and top people.
S: Yeah, I was asked about it a week ago and I gave approval for it. Essentially, <…> It’s a very competitive market out there. Not just for headhunters that try to poach from studios that are doing things, that get on the radar of other studios. I believe Ashes, even though we haven’t entered marketing phases, is pretty well known in the MMORPG space as an anticipated project and we have a lot of eyes on us. So when I take off my community hat and I put on my business hat, we have to take certain safeguards in order to mitigate the potential for larger companies like Amazon or whoever to take notice of what we’re doing and to take interest in our team. That’s the reality of business. There’s concerns on that front, so you don’t really find a lot of studios that post all of their developers, especially of studios of our size and the size we’re moving into. So the decision was made that it’s best to try to mitigate that potential.

J: Yeah, I just wanted to make sure everyone understood that, because I didn’t want anybody to go to the website and say “Omg, they’ve pulled a <…> studio and they’ve just cut down to 11 people”. You still have a robust team. There was a conscious decision there; it’s not a web-page error and it’s not that you’ve shrunk – you’ve just deliberately moved towards maturing a bit as a company.
S: Yeah, I think there are different stages of which companies obviously exist, not just in this industry, but across the board. And as you begin to move to over 50-70 in-house people, you’re starting to enter the middle realm of a company size, especially for game development and projects. Now once we start entering our full goal of having 150 in-house and having another 150 that are outsourced or contracted, that’s when we’re kind of playing with the Big Boys. Intrepid started out as an independent studio and in the sheer sense of terminology, I suppose we’re still an independent studio in that regard, but the product we’re producing is a Triple-A product in budget. That’s going to attract a lot of interest from other teams that have an opportunity to gain insight. Like I’ve always said: a transparent development is a double edged sword – there’s a lot of things that are positive and a lot of things that are negative. One of the negative things is that speed-to-market is a very important aspect of a project and there’s a reason why many games in development do not showcase their active designs and their active staff, and timelines, and a lot of different things. The reason why they don’t do this is because you have to be cognisant of that competitive market. So we try to show as much as we can in order to benefit from the good side of the sword, while trying to also mitigate the bad side.

J: Yeah, unfortunately, intrepid is stocked by lots of people in your community. Last April we had about 60 people in San Diego. When the pandemic eases off and everybody can get into the new Studio, how many people ball-parked do you have ready to report to work in September?
S: I think in the September time-frame we’re probably going to be staffed up to around 70, and that doesn’t include our independent contractors, as well as our contracted companies. But I think in-house, once we have the ability to ramp up the additional hiring phases, as we’ve been promoting on social media. Which by the way, everybody out there who is watching who helps us repost and follows us, all of that helps us recruit, so by all means continue to do so and if you haven’t done thus far, please take an interest in potentially doing that. But the goal is to very quickly ramp up on the production size. I’m not going to give up specific growth numbers, but the aim is in September we’re up to around, maybe a little bit over, 70 in-house.

J: And speaking of that new Studio, last time you were here, you had horrible luck trying to move out of your old Studio and get into your new one. And you finally did it. I felt sad when you posted that video of you talking in that Studio and you could see all the empty desks. How is it for you, as a leader, being the last person out – leaving your first home?
S: It was a surreal moment. You spend 5 years at a place and a lot of memories get made during that time. There were definitely some fun, super late nights; ordering food for the developers, who were staying late; we were there sometimes til 2-3 in the morning. It definitely creates that brotherhood type feeling with your fellow developers and team and the surreal moment comes when that tangible place now is in the past and there’s a future ahead of us. So I think it’s just a nice moment that you pause and reflect on the time that you spent with your team at a certain location. There’s nothing truly unique about the location itself, but it is a place where those memories were made.

J: Have you done your Captain Picard of the enterprise E, your walk around at the new Studio now? Have you soaked in the new Studio like “Wow, my dream is now solid reality”?
S: Not yet, that probably won’t take place until around the middle of August. Our goal, unfortunately, is looking more and more like it’s going to have to be adjusted. The current situation in the US, with the spike with Covid-19, has rolled back some of the re-openings. We’re not an essential business that requires people to be on site, per-se; as a matter of fact, we’ve had some productive uptick in working from home with that regard, regardless of the on-boarding process of the actual development. So, no, I haven’t had the opportunity yet, but I like your reference. It is sort of like Captain Picard, I remember a specific episode in Next Generation from Star Trek, The Best of Both Worlds episode, where before they go into battle he walks around the ship. That was how I kind of felt like at the Studio when I was leaving, even though John and Zim(?) did literally almost all of the moving work and I came in there for the final day, and just did one final walk-through, and went into battle.

J: Moving into the Servers for Alpha 1, you’ve announced there will be EU servers for A1 housed in Germany.
S: Yes, the servers are located in Frankfurt for A1.

J: Some people didn’t believe the NA plan, because those prime-time events are so time sensitive. You played Archeage and being a West coaster, you were doing the prime-time events at 2 o’clock in the afternoon because they were all geared for 5 o’clock East Coast. You originally said NA was going to have multiple regions so that the prime-time window varied. Is that still the case?
S: Yeah. One thing I think is beneficial for server selection is that servers have prime-time descriptions next to the server names. West Coast and East Coast times obviously are significant differentiators between the ability of players to participate in these events. So if we’re able to essentially timestamp servers, as either being primarily West or East Coast for at least US or NA, I think that’s beneficial. And then partition them accordingly. Now people can obviously still choose whatever server they want, but I think that’s beneficial.

J: Yeah, definitely, because you don’t want people pulling an Eve Online, sieging Nodes at 2 o’clock in the morning. You want that to be respectful of prime-time.
S: Yeah. So the mechanics that revolve around player instigated events, those adhere to the server prime-time rules. So when players have an opportunity to initiate a Siege against a Node, which is one of the primary player agency type decisions about timing, there’s a window that’s respective of server time for the region. And players must declare that siege within that window. Now there’s going to be some variable there, it’s not going to be “Hey, you can only declare this Siege and it occurs at 7 o’clock Eastern time” or something, instead, it’s probably going to be between 4 and 9 and they can place any time at that point.

J: Right. A window. But you’re not going to be getting up at 2 o’clock in the morning to defend your Node?
S: Correct.

J: About OCE and SEA. You are cognisant that there’s a big Australian population, you’re just not at the stage where you can make specific statements about that region. You haven’t forgotten them, but you just can’t give them a definitive of where the servers are going to be yet…
S: There are definitely going to be OCE / SEA servers. Now whether or not those servers will be located in Singapore or in Melbourne, that’s a decision that has yet to be made. But the Australian player-base are not going to have to connect to a West Coast server in order to play the game. They will have a SEA or OCE server that they can connect to.

J: Let’s talk about my.com games for a minute. This is probably the one area that people are the most unhappy about, specifically the cosmetic purchases. Now you and I have talked about it, but viewers don’t know this; my.com games people want to know if there is a plan whether they will be able to buy monthly cosmetics. And that’s kind of towards when these cosmetics are on sale on July 15. The NA Intrepid account holders have a month to decide if they want them. If we don’t buy them in that month – they’re gone forever. But how are the EU players gonna ever be able to buy individual cosmetics?
S: So we have a few ideas on how to approach that best. I’m not going to elaborate at this time on those ideas because I don’t want to give false hope if those decisions don’t get approved; we haven’t had a full discussion on how to approach that yet. There is going to be an answer to it, it is something that will be available at some point, <…> it’s just going to take a little bit of patience. It’s a relationship that we’re continuing to cultivate and we are understanding that not everything is going to be perfect at the first go-round, but it has always been our objective to make sure there is an appropriate method or means by which these types of things get solved.

J: Is Intrepid gonna make sure that NA players, Intrepid account holders, can’t port to my.com games, back-purchase old cosmetics and then come back to NA?
S: Any type of solution will incorporate a validation of the accounts eligibility. So that would not be a feasible mechanic.

J: Working with Margaret and Toast, and I’m sure it came past your desk, those first months where the database migrated, you guys did an excellent job of validating. I’ve seen people try to make a purchase from those December 2018 – January 2019 cosmetics, wanting to buy them and then they try later and realize they’re not eligible. You guys successfully did that once, so it’s good to hear you have a plan.
S: Absolutely. Part of establishing the initial infrastructure of the account database in systems is ensuring that all types of metrics that we have available to us in order to service customer service requests or to backdate and fix certain account related issues, that information is available to us and we can always query the database in order to facilitate that approval process. So there is no concern there in that front. It is really more along the lines of a business decision to ensure that we’re fair in our approach on how we accommodate either mishaps or things that need to be accounted for that weren’t developed at the time.

J: Is the Referral System going to be only for NA or my.com, or too early to know how that’s going to work for the EU community, given the EU law?
S: So the Referral System, minus the cash portion of it, will for sure be available through my.com games. The cash I don’t have an answer yet for the EU residents. That’s something that needs to be determined from a legal standpoint. If you’re Intrepid and you have participated in the program then all features will be available, regardless of whether or not you’re an EU citizen, because that’s still Intrepid. We have yet to come to an announceable guideline for the community on my.com games site.

J: The old Referral System gave you a lot more information. It showed what your people were purchasing, how much you were owed. And then you guys re-did your whole back-end on your web-page 3 years in. Switch places with me for a second: you’re selling my dream, you’re out there making content, you’re hustling and you have no idea. I know how much I was owed a couple years ago and I have no idea now. So I know you guys are trying to hire a web developer. When are we going to get a full update?
S: So, first of all, I understand the dilemma of not having as much insight to the metrics that the old system had. From an information standpoint, everything is there. From the ability to continue to use and accrue referrals and track expenditure – that’s all still present. It’s just not displayed currently. Secondly, with regards to development and exposing that type of dashboard functionality and additional information to the referral person, there’s a lot of stuff that is on the plate of the platform from the development standpoint. And, like all companies, we have people that come and go; I’ve had to let people go. That can interrupt a little bit of the schedule, especially on the platform side. So we’re in the process of attempting to continue to hire additional platform team members and that is a very competitive market from a hiring standpoint because those individuals are not game-specific, not gameplay coders. They are platform engineers and they are applicable across the spectrum, whether it be Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. We’re a very competitive environment in that regard. So it’s a little bit more of a process to onboard and to recruit those individuals, which then delays the functionality and, unfortunately, the referral program takes a significant backseat, as well as even the Exola(? 00:32:30) changes. Those take significant backseats to the game related account services, the CS tool services, the server instances and architectures, and setup of our microservices, the Kubernetes work and the Akka that needs to be completed. All of those things take priority over the community facing stuff; though that’s not because the community takes a backseat, but it’s because the focus has to be on the game development. I try to continue to give updates on that. We’re still trying to work towards that, trying to onboard additional people that can help with those types of backseated tasks, but right now it’s going to require some patience.

J: You played Archeage and you seemed to be very passionate about making a housing system that works.
S: Yeah, I’m very passionate about the housing system. I think it’s a very significant backbone of how not only players get to enjoy their time within a game, AoC, but also is a complimentary piece, a progression to certain economic / crafting oriented systems of a game.

J: When it comes to in-node housing, is there going to be an artificial system driven cap on the real estate or is it just a free-market economy, where you can sell your house for whatever you wanna sell it for?
S: There’s no cap in player originated sales. Those are determined by supply and demand within a game. There’s no artificial barrier to how high that demand can go.

J: The housing that was shown last month was worth the wait and so many people were excited that the in-node houses have gardens. What else can you do in an in-node house? Because at some point you talked about taverns, shops… but they aren’t tied to the in-node housing, are they?
S: No, the taverns and the shops are not tied to in-node housing. There are Freehold related businesses that can be established, but each of the different types of housing have certain benefits that are granted to the owners and additional benefits that get granted to those owners who are citizens of the Node as well. Essentially, as we get further down the road to getting closer to Beta and whatnot, there will be some in-depth blogs that kind of showcase some of that stuff. Obviously, my intent always is not to reveal everything, so we kind of just give a tip of the iceberg tease of some of these systems without spoiling some of the discovery and surprise of what the MMO launch is.

J: That’s hard for my style of content creation. I got so many questions that were so much further in the weeds that I would go and I’ve responded to people “He’s not gonna tell us that”.
S: Think about it like this… you follow a lot of games and I think if you compare just over these 3 short years, that we have been interacting on the community front, and you go and take a look at, lets say, Wikipedia, like the one that Lex has so graciously been a part of creating, there is an absolute shit ton of information. I don’t think we’ve been short in providing design, mechanics and essentially content creator material, but we do have to be cognisant on revealing too much. And going back to that competing market idea as well, outside of just spoiling the surprise and discovery of our fans, I think that many of us have seen recently some games, that need not be mentioned, have taken a loot at our designs and have implemented them.

J: One thing people were upset about was the Node changes. It’s architectural style, based on the race that contributes the most exp. And then there’s a lot of other systems to make sure we don’t end up with 100% Vek-Ork dynamics. You’re already going to be doing the toggle to stop your house from growing when the Node grows; you can keep a cottage, if you buy a cottage, and then the Node goes from stage 3 to stage 4, you can lock in to stay a cottage. You don’t have to upgrade to the next bigger size. People have been asking whether you’ve put any thought into allowing the person to lock their racial style? E.g. If I buy a cottage in a Vek Node and then it goes into dirty Elves, can I lock my architectural style to stay a Vek cottage?
S: No. The reason for that comes from two points. First: from an aesthetic standpoint. We want the cultural identity of Nodes to be fairly consistent from a visual standpoint. And there is such a shift in the visual presentation of one culture vs another, from an architectural standpoint, that it really would present a sore thumb in the overall appearance of the Node. <…> And then additionally, there’s something to be said about our philosophy on game design as risk vs reward. Well, one of the motivating factors for a homeowner to participate in the advancement of that Node and do a significant amount of questing for the Node so they can assist in presenting what they want to, players should have that agency, and as a community you may be outnumbered from a specific race. I think that’s part of the paradigm of what agency has. It has to have a result, it has to have a consequence or reward, based on your perspective.

J: You can’t change the windows and walls in your house, you’re just decorating them, right?
S: Structurally – no. You won’t be able to structurally change the location of those windows or walls. You’ll be decorating the layout that is predetermined by the building itself.

J: Will there be exterior decorations on the exterior walls or garden gnomes, or are you keeping to only interior decoration?
S: Different types of items, decor items have flags on them where the appropriate placement can be. You won’t be able to place a painting on the floor or put a chair on the roof. There will be garden / property / deck / patio related furniture and furnishings that can be placed. You used an example of a garden gnome – absolutely, there are little statues that can be put out in the yard. The property line itself is encompassing not just the actual house, at least if we’re talking about in-node housing. It’s not contained to the house, per se, but there actually is a plot there where the player has the ability to affect the landscape to place down specific items that are flagged for those locations.

J: For the pre-decoration of houses, is that going to be on par for what you’ve shown in the last months video, or are you going to take player feedback on just how much pre-decoration you’re gonna get?
S: One of the things that I would love to see, and I believe this is part of the design of the in-node housing, and the apartments as well, is the different sizes and / or qualities of either the apartment housing or the in-node housing will determine the applicable pre-furnished types of furnishing. You could choose the purchasing of the house to upgrade the furnished set that the house comes with at a cost and then that cost obviously lends itself to the taxes of the town and augments its treasury. 

J: That’s going to make a lot of people happy, because some people were upset at how much furniture you were showing.
S: To be clear, those furnishing are almost entirely visual and aesthetic. The furnishings that grant in-game functionality and / or augment in-game mechanics, those are restricted almost entirely to the carpentry profession that creates these furnishings.

J: Could we get a teaser of what sort of bonuses we could expect from the carpentry profession?
S: One example: let’s say you’re a cook and you’re utilizing a crafting station to create recipes of meals that you want to either sell to other players or use yourself in order to grant you a temporary buff. One of the types of furnishings that might interact with the cooking profession, would be a specific type of graded stove top or a cooking facility. You could take a finished product, like a tenderloin meal, or something you’ve caught in the ocean, and you could eat that for it’s normal buff; but based off the quality and grade of the constructed cooking equipment that you would place in your home, you could take those meals up to a certain amount, based on the quality of the furniture. You can place it to be processed within that piece of furniture and, when you receive the item, there will be a freshness period on that food that if you use it while it is fresh it will give you an augmented benefit that is higher and better. Maybe it gives you additional stats or additional time period, or you can kind of focus on what some of these items will do.

J: Some people are convinced that Freeholds get bigger as they level up. I am pretty certain that the Freehold size is static and that by leveling up, your tavern would grow from a level 1 to a level 2 tavern, not that your Freehold would double in size.
S: The footprint of the land that is granted through the Freeholds system doesn’t change. There has been some thought on the design side about the Guild Hall related Freeholds that guilds can achieve at a certain level; and whether or not those might have expansion related components for ancillary buildings that augment the guild benefits for the Guild Hall. We haven’t decided on that direction, so I wouldn’t say that’s a thing yet. But the personal Freeholds don’t change in their size from a land standpoint. Now, the building development, those footprints are also maintained within the Freehold plot. So you lay down a blueprint, it’s not going to change in size, however, as it upgrades, you’re going to see changes occur to the building to kind of reflect that higher level building. You may see in certain cases the verticality of the building changes a little bit: it may grow taller, add an additional story. The general silhouette of the building will change, but not the footprint of the building on the property.

J: Could you use 100% of your Freehold footprint to build a mansion out in the wild?
S: No, you won’t be able to have a 100% of it to build a mansion. There’s definitely going to be variable sizes of the home building that you’re discussing: from small, to medium, to large, to mansion size; but at most, I believe, the goal there is probably to achieve 50% usage with the mansion of the Freehold size. And then beyond that you’re going to be able to utilize that space for all of the other mechanics.

J: You flipped your position on User Created Images. And you played Archeage with lots of inappropriate stuff. What’s going to happen to your account if you upload something that is vulgar or offensive with your UCC’s?
S: Well, there is that risk. And being on the internet, you’re going to see that kind of stuff happen. The benefit of the direction that I’m taking Intrepid as a company in is that a significant portion of the revenue created by the game goes into not only creating additional content and updates for the game, but also goes into, I think, caretaking, as I like to call it. And that caretaking is multiple things: it’s having active and present GM’s on servers, it’s having an interacting community team that is always present and on call for participating in forum discussions, and streams, and updates and stuff. And with regards to this UCC question, I think if you have an active GM team that you have directed to caretake the product, you’re going to mitigate a lot of that functionality you don’t want to see in this Custom Image system. People who look to “meme the system” are going to be met with the type of enforcement that they’re not going to want to have on their account. And being a subscription based product, and being a risk vs reward, and maybe a bit more of an old-school approach to character development and progression, I think they’re going to take a significant risk in doing things that we don’t want them to do, which will result in a jeopardy in their account. So I think that is not going to deter 100% of things. I don’t think you can ever deter 100% things, unless we go away from Custom Images, but I think that we can achieve some parody of enforcement vs infraction ratio that’s going to be livable for everybody. 

J: What happens if you buy gold?
S: I think that following a standard approach to an escalation system, where certain infractions are immediate, and automatic bans and some infractions provide a path forward where action is taken that might ban the account or strip the account, or provide some chat bans, or the ability to play over a week or so, those types have some pretty standardised escalatory plan which we’re going to incorporate. So if you buy gold, depending on the seriousness of the infraction, you could go anywhere from being stripped, to being banned for a period of time, to being permanently banned. 

J: Divine and Military Node blogs. You kind of left us hanging. What happened there?
S: So I think back when we were doing those blogs, the Divine and Military mechanics were in an active design discussion point where there was a potential for it to go in a few different ways, which it did. They will be released in the future, at some point, but I want to make sure as we release blogs, even though there’s always a subject to change during this period in development, that they’re pretty footed in their application and implementation. 

J: You mentioned on Discord that the Military Node election system kind of changed because you’re not balancing PvP for 1v1, but more for group play. There will be some classes that would struggle to be the mayor of a Military Node if they had to compete as their class, so you talked about a Champion system.
S: On the Military Node front, I believe it was Akil who had brought up the Champion system, and for me, in the games I played with gladiator arenas, there are many different approaches that games have taken to try and curtail the problem of 1v1 balancing, as you just described. They have equalization where your gear doesn’t count, or where you’re categorized only against your fellow class, or a lot of different things there. It was difficult to solve a problem that’s been present since day 1 with those types of systems where a lot of people have already tried, so I really liked the idea of the Champion. That has to go through testing and whatnot, but essentially what that system was, upon citizenship of a Military Node, you gain a Champion and you kit that Champion out, and you gear him out based on progression with certain systems; whether that be quest related, whether it be a combat pet that’s out while you’re leveling. And when the arena system begins your Champion faces other Champions where you control that Champion. That’s the next direction, at least on the electoral method of the Military Node system. That just gives you an example of kind of how designs get changed as they’re further flushed out.

J: Stalls, shops, markets, marketplaces. Do all Nodes have player stalls or a way for players to sell goods?
S: All Nodes do have the ability to spawn player stalls. If you’re not an Economic Node, and you don’t have a market that’s your unique building, then you can construct a marketplace and that marketplace will then come with certain services and a certain number of stalls. The Economic Node has the ability to construct an auction house and it serves through economic means, with the ability to list and sell items. That comes with additional stalls for the players as well.

J: Economic Nodes get the unique building that starts at market. Non-Economic Nodes have a mayoral building called the Marketplace.
S: Correct. The Marketplace comes online at Stage 4. Which is, when you say a mayoral building, the correct term would be a Constructible. These are buildings that the mayor has agency over determining whether or not they should be a constructed project. These Constructible buildings can be selected at open plots that are gained as the Node advances. If they elect to begin construction of one of these types of buildings, one of which is the marketplace, it’ll grant certain trade benefits, as well as some stalls that some citizens may participate in.

J: During Sieges, we know apartments can be targeted and destroyed, does the loot inside become spoils?
S: So essentially, as we know, lootables are raw gatherables and processed goods. Housing has storage capabilities; the storage containers that exist in-node housing or within the apartment buildings do not become lootable unless the city falls. If the city falls, then they are lootable. If the building is destroyed or damaged and the city successfully defends itself, then the service, or the NPC offered through that building, is not available until the repair project is complete. What you’re going to see is: these buildings can be attacked, they have hitpoints, they can be damaged. Once they enter a damage state threshold, which will probably be at around 25% damage taken, and once the Siege is over, there’s going to be a repair project. And in order to reestablish those services, citizens will be required to contribute resources to the building, as they did during the construction phase, in order to repair it. Upon its successful repair the building becomes open again and available.

J: Can in-node housing be targeted during a Siege?
S: Yes. Depending on the building type, an in-node housing will be the least required resource standpoint from a repair standpoint. Depending on the size of the building of its stage, whether it’s leveled up and whatnot, will determine how much resources are required. So, yes, in-node houses can be attacked, but they’ll be very manageable to repair even for a small group of people to do so. It’s not going to require a large community effort to repair a house as it would, let’s say, an alchemist. 

J: During a Node Siege, normally you can’t have two Nodes of the same level next to each other because of the way they block each other out, but if you had a level 5 Node, with a level 4 vassal, and that level 5 Node were to atrophy, can it atrophy to a 4 and violate the two Nodes at the same level next to each other?
S: I can give you some general information about that. Yes, normally the algorithm that’s applied to the Node territorial expansion will prevent significant Nodes from being in close proximity to each other. It’s not impossible, there could be a perfect storm where all of the algorithmic progression of territory leads to having these Nodes being very close to each other, because there’s certain requirements that need to be available to satisfy Node vassal takeovers. It’s possible that two Nodes would never take each other over as vassals and would end up close together, spawning territories spanning to opposite directions; a tale of two cities, kind of thing. So that is a capable thing. <…> With regards to how Nodes progress territorially and how they de-level, atrophy being the only mechanic that allows a Node to de-level, as opposed to be destroyed. The atrophy design needs significant testing. There are intrinsic problems with reducing the Nodes level as opposed to removing the Node. We don’t actually atrophy Nodes to de-level, but rather accrue atrophy points that must be replenished overtime and if not – it begins to disable services and further compound the atrophy problem. At which point, when it reaches a certain atrophy point, then the Node would just disappear. The problem is, when a Node levels up, so many systems start to come online. A lot of connections get made, people own houses. There’s issues with just de-leveling a Node because you have to go back and reverse all of that and that is a difficult idea. From a design standpoint, in my mind, I would love for Nodes to de-level, but from a practical standpoint – it’s a difficult achievement. So instead what we may do, because the siege mechanics require that the Nodes can be destroyed, we may take the atrophy mechanic and we may reduce it to that being the end result, but then expand the atrophy required to actually get there.

J: Do Nodes require materials to start off an atrophy or just experience?
S: So in an indirect way, you can use materials. The way that the indirect method of combating atrophy is: the mayor has at his discretion certain tools to initiate quest driven systems that non-citizens can come to participate in; he can use a portion of the treasury and or goods that the Node has available to him as an incentive for those quests to be completed. So you will be able to interface with the applicable Node that you want out in the world and say “Hey, what’s available at this Node for me to do and what’s the reward?”; and mayors can drive those rewards up within an acceptable window that make it more advantageous for you, as a player, to go there and participate in that. Some of those quests might have material components. And so indirectly – yes, materials could be applied in a way to curtail attrition.

J: Corruption system. <…> Have you thought about, specifically healer love, the flagging system?
S: It’s not just healers. It’s also any type of AoE class. You may be out there dropping a meteor or doing a whirlwind attack, or whatever, and some griefer wants to come up and flag when he anticipates you’re going to do that, in order to get you to flag and then kill you. So to answer this question in a short way – yes, absolutely. There will be an option that, by default, is available by the player, which prevents them from receiving a third party flag. The way that is achieved is: anytime you activate a skill, there are certain calls and checks that get made on the backend that you don’t see and one of those checks “Hey, are there any members that are currently flagged” and if there are and you have that checkbox for flagging with your AoE’s and Heals available, then you will flag; if you do not have that box checked, then on completion of that skill, it will not flag you, because the check was made at the start that there was a flagged party member and they will not receive the beneficial effect as a result, or the damage, if it’s an offensive spell.

J: A couple of years ago you’ve told us that the target was 45 days to reach max level. Is it really 1080 hours to reach max level? Has your 45 day marker shifted or do we keep that?
S: I don’t recall the number of hours that was used in that calculation that I was deriving that answer from. But the 45 day comment was, at least in leveling your adventuring class, to max level at launch, which was 50, that is in particular to a person who is playing a considerable amount of time per day. And I’m not talking 12 hours a day, I’m talking about maybe 4-6 hours a day. Take that with a grain of salt because I don’t recall what the hour figure is, but the idea is not to be a game where somebody can no-life for a week and be max level. The idea is to incorporate some significant chunk of time but still respect the casual player. The way we respect the casual player is… not everything is driven in our game through the progression line. Not everything is driven through your class level, per se. There’s a lot of different progression paths that are available and make you relevant within certain systems and mechanics within a game, and some of those paths are more casual friendly while others are more hardcore friendly. So with regards to the adventuring class, the idea is to make sure that that investment needs to be pretty significant and that the reward is respective to that investment. 

J: You have an adventuring class, but then you have a locked primary arch type. <…> But you also created a game where you’re never going to find your pure dopleganger.
S: Part of my frustration as a player, before starting this project, was that sandbox terminology really wasn’t what it should have been in actuality. A lot of, and this is no bash on any particular developer, but a lot of designer / development use sandbox as an excuse not to curate a lot of content and not to create that complex type of system and support, but rather to fall on “player driven content” that is intrigued, political. That can get really boring if you’re given 8 doors and you’re told “Hey, make a choice and your choice is gonna matter”, but you open the door and there’s nothing behind it from the content perspective. Then what does my choice really matter? I just made a choice about nothing. So the idea behind Ashes is that, yeah, Sandbox is a great game philosophy, if it is accompanied by almost more content than a Theme Park has. We will see how it works out with Ashes, but that’s the way you make a successful sandbox experience, in my opinion. 

J: Some people are asking: if I am lower level because leveling takes a significant chunk of time, am I gonna be relevant in Sieges or mass combat?
S: The answer to that is: Sieges are not a 1 dimensional or 2 dimensional type of experience. It’s not just going to be “Hey, your class vs their class and that’s what’s gonna matter”. There are many different roles that are present in Sieges, whether it be firing the stationary siege weapons, helping to repair the walls or the gate, bringing relevant proximity based buffs from the town center and NPC’s out to where the people on the ramp parts are or out on the field, stealthing into the encampment or HQ’s. A lot of different things that aren’t as reliant on your adventuring classes level, but rather provide a role and opportunity to affect the tide of battle that are specific to certain things players are interested in from a role standpoint. (??? 01:14:00) I wanna scale a wall or use a Siege weapon and drive it around. Those types of things are relevant to the type of battle and they don’t require you to be max level or combat stats.

J: Last thing I wanted to mention is that you don’t call Ashes a Sandbox, you call it a Themebox.
S: Yes. I call it a Themebox or a Sandpark. I’m not the first one to use that term, but I think that we’re probably the first that are actually going to implement it. I don’t want to get into specific other games, but I think we’re the first ones that are targeting that type of combination between the Themepark and Sandbox elements. 

June 26th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares new housing details, addresses node citizenship and delves into a community questions.

Quick Updates:

• Creative Director’s letter at the end of this month
• Not anticipating moving into the new office until the end of August at the earliest.

Studio Update: The studio move is planned for the end of August at the earliest, but our team is great at working from home, so much so that we’ve seen an increase in productivity. We do have a couple of new hires coming in, including an engineer that starts next week. Hiring has been a different experience as we dont get to meet the people we are onboarding in person. 

Design Team Update: We got plenty of feedback from the playtest we did and the internal playtests we’ve been conducting. Things were overall pretty stable and we were really happy to see it all except the caravan issue. We’re able to get tons and tons of people on and are continuing to work on expanding this. Also been working on squashing out the bugs we came across that had come up. The new hires are being brought up to speed and we’ve been focusing on the documentation so all the different departments can work better in sync. We had some collision issues with certain objects in the node, with the limited number of people in our studio that we can throw at it, we don’t see certain issues, but when we do the large playtests, we’re able to identify issues that would have been a large concern later on and address them quickly. We’ve reached a rather large milestone on the way to Alpha 1. Ensuring all our boxes are checked so we can start carrying things forward towards the next milestone. The anticipated fall estimate for Alpha 1 is going well, we’re making adjustments based on what we’ve learned from the current testers and we look forward to having the future Alpha 1 testers as well, since it’s going to be a true alpha – It’s not going to be pretty. 

The amenities offered by housing:

• • Storage: Players have to essentially build containers and place them for storage. Different grades of storage have different storage capacity
  • Furnishing: This is the amount of decor items that can be placed within the house
  • For Sale: This states that the house can be sold again. Freeholds cannot be sold
  • Gathering: The different types of gathering that can be done at this house
  • Destructible: This particular house can be destroyed if the node comes under siege
  • Size: This shows what size the house is (Small/Medium/Mansion/etc)

Character Team Updates: Our character’s base models and hairs are constantly improving throughout development. Work is continuing on creating a more polished output for things. When we say concept pieces, we don’t mean mood pieces etc. Our’s is more of a production concept, where our objective is to give our models a more realistic look. The armor pieces are made with modular pieces so that players can swap them around between different sets. 

 

QnA Session

Q: Will you give us the ability to give permissions to friends/family for housing?
A: Absolutely, you will be able to assign permissions on a per-item basis. So if you only want them to access the door, you can do that. You want them to be able to decorate your house but not take anything, you can do that too. You want to restrict storage to deposit only or withdraw only, you can do that too.

Q: Is the house going to be furnished from the get-go?
A: These houses will come empty and its upto you to decorate them.

Q: How much will these houses cost?
A: There will be an initial set price influenced by how many citizens are present. So if there are many citizens it will be valued a lot more. On the real estate side of things, players can own things early and list them at a price of their choice.

Q: If two people are competing over a house, how will that work?
A: This is something we’re planning to test in the alphas. We’ve got a few ideas in mind, one of them involves the housing being available as an auction once the node levels, at which point the highest bidder wins at the end. Right now we don’t plan to allow freehold sales as it’s a very restrictive and achievement based development and we don’t want players to curtail that process by outright purchasing everything. Since freeholds are limited to one per account, it would be a limited system. But this might change in the future.

Q: What if two players want to buy a duo house together?
A: There will always be a single owner based system, but there’s nothing wrong in collaborating and pooling together to purchase a house together.

Q: Can we hire guards to protect our freeholds?
A: This depends entirely on the mayor of your node. If they activate certain questlines and invest in defence funding, yes you can hire mercenaries. 

Q: What happens if your house gets destroyed?
A: If the house gets destroyed, you don’t lose the decor or items in it. You will also have the option to advance your house once the node levels, or choose to stick to your small house. The idea is not to make it cumbersome, but to ensure you can get up and running. 

Q: Any plans to have active shield blocking?
A: That’s something we talked about. It’s problematic, so we’re not sure based on the test we played around with in apocalypse. We’re leaning towards a buff that applies around you in a traditional tab format. We’re still going to actively be testing this in future tests. Maybe the default skill might say 80% mitigation or maybe how soon you activate it might determine how much damage is mitigated, we’ll be testing it out. But we wont have an active blocking toggle key like TAB or CTRL.

Q: What about dodge roll?
A: Our plan is to house mobility controls like the dodge roll into active skills. So it wont be present outside the skills, but will be present in various forms within skills to provide various types of mobility.

Q: Looking at the world map, is the geography going to have boundaries like choke points?
A: Absolutely.

Q: Previously it was mentioned that you had to own property to become a citizen, however in the most recent video it appeared to be the reverse.
A: Yes. Originally the intention was that housing was required for citizenship prior to citizenship, but this has now been reversed. So this is something we’re going to test but we’re not going to require citizenship to have home ownership. It does not make sense to force players to co-locate all types within one node. We want you to be able to have a summer house. EDIT: This was later clarified by Steven in the following – Greetings glorious Ashes community, today on stream I made a slightly inaccurate statement regarding citizenship and housing. It is being implemented for testing the way that was originally documented and will require housing ownership in a node before citizenship can be attained. Apologies. My mind is melting)

Q: Will power/gear/ability level increase with expansions?
A: Yes. Level cap will increase and bring new content with it. Including gear chase to continue and utilize content. 

Q: How do you intend to prevent players from abusing the armor appearance or transmog systems to deceive other players in open world PvP?
A: We’re going to overcome this by being able to target a player or hover over a player you will see the type of gear they have equipped (Leather/Plate/Cloth). It’s important from a threat assessment standpoint to be able to ascertain this.

Q: Will there be events or other reasons to cause a season to be longer/shorter than usual?
A: For sure. There’s opportunities where world events can change seasons such as a world boss. Seasons will also affect caravan routes in a way.

Q: Will there be movement based advantages like back attacks or side steps or bonuses to block/parry while moving backwards?
A: Not necessarily in that way but there will definitely be position based skills/buffs.

Q: Do members of guilds need to be part of the same node to take advantage of guild passives?
A: No.

Q: Are there going to be areas in the world where casting will be enhanced?
A: We talked about it during seasons/weather, but we’ll be seeing how it goes through development. You will definitely see it in siege systems as part of defense mechanisms where you place relics and more that may grant bonuses to mages. 

Q: How would armor cosmetics fit into gear showing progression?
A: The thing about transmogs and cosmetics is to replace the tier based system. So you won’t be seeing silhouettes if a cosmetic is replacing it. So as mentioned earlier, when you hover over the buff that a player has, you can see the tier of the buff to see what level of gear they are wearing.

Q: Can you talk about what the first week of AoC would look like for someone in an organized PvE/PvP guild, so what can we expect in a play session?
A: If you’re starting out in a game with multiple progression paths that are reliant on each other in some way or form, you may be levelling up fast to focus on world first bosses, or crafting for your guild, or maybe acquiring funding your housing, or maybe you are focusing on your guild, or maybe you are going to focus on a node and help establish it, or maybe you may focus on animal husbandry to breed the fastest mount, and so on. There’s so many decisions that have to be made. While all of these systems are intricate, they are pretty straightforward and traditional from an understanding standpoint. The idea is not to push away players with complexity, but to provide them with the depth to dive into. Our party/raid system will have in game VOIP so you don’t have to add players over Discord. 

Q: Will cosmetics look different across races?
A: Yes, they will look slightly different across races.

Q: Will mounts have an unlimited lifespan?
A: Certain mounts will. However legendary mounts will have lifetimes and the lifetime will begin once they are rideable after their egg growth state. 

Q: What happens if two guilds try to drop declaration flag for the same castle for the same week?
A: Castles don’t have declaration flags. They instead have a registration/sign up window to sign up for the siege. Once your guild has attained a certain level you can register for the castle siege.

Q: Is the goal for the Phoenix initiative region to be cross region?
A: The intention is to have players port over a cross server through the town hall. However you can’t go between regions like NA/EU.

Q: Will only military nodes offer bounty hunting or all nodes?
A: We may expand that questline to include other affiliated nodes/vassal nodes or diplomatic alliance nodes which are related to military nodes as well.

Q: How realistic do you want mounts starting/stopping to be?
A: We want spawning/despawning to be quick. If you are talking about acceleration/ deceleration, those are planned too.

Q: Freeholds cant be placed near dungeons. But what about when you place a freehold at a low level node which later upgrades?
A: Essentially you will be notified that X or Y location is unavailable regardless of whether it has advanced or not.

 

Google Doc Link

May 29th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios announces bonus Gameplay Stream, talks alpha 1 update and announces freebies for all registered users.

Quick Updates:

• • Bonus 1 Hour Gameplay Stream | Saturday, May 30th 2020
  • We had our first external playtest with the Phoenix Initiative testers yesterday which lasted around 8 hours, it went incredibly well. 
  • We’ve had even more new hires join the team. The team has enjoyed listening to the feedback from both the testers and the community.
  • We’ll be giving all registered users an in-game statue for what we’ve all gone through in this pandemic together. A small figurine that symbolizes people helping each other out, a theme shared by AoC’s lore.

Design Team Updates: We lifted the text/voice NDA for Phoenix Initiative testers with the visual NDA still in place. It was great to see the feedback from the testers, we had some exploits and bugs like infinite money and a few more fun ones that are all being addressed. Shoutout on the record to Shaze for the writeup he did on the PI test which is shared on reddit. Players will be able to place animals or creatures that they breed through the husbandry tree on their little stable area within their freehold. Crops are intended to be a rotational system dependent on the appropriate seedlings, necessary tools and more. Obviously you can devote more land to farming if you choose to. You’ll also have small ponds for a fishery, a lot of the contents of the freehold system are intended to be processing areas for various raw materials. Additionally there will be a furnisher type profession as well where certain higher tiers of furniture will offer additional bonuses that you can rotate based on what buffs you might want. 

The idea behind husbandry, to give you an idea from the backend perspective, each of these animals have a unique ID. Players will explore the genetic system to determine what is possible, there’s going to be RNG involved as a factor, so you may end up with a dominant genome coming through or a specific breed or species that you can discover by becoming an expert in the husbandry system. So you could increase the chances of obtaining a unique or special mount, which you can then sell on auction to other players. There will ofcourse be restrictions to prevent any crazy outputs. It’s important to keep in mind that we’ve still got a long way to go. This is not Alpha 1, this is on the way to reaching Alpha 1. All of this so far is a very important first step though. 

 

Character & Environment Team Updates: Regarding armor, a fine line has to be drawn, we don’t want armor to be wrapped tight around different body parts to look unrealistic. We’ve also been tweaking the lighting so you can see how each asset looks in the lighting to ensure things don’t end up looking unrealistic or popping out of your screen unnecessarily. We’re considering giving players the option to augment visual textures on items in the future, but that will come later. To answer someone in chat, we have plenty of cloth simulated physics, but we have to be careful to ensure things don’t start affecting performance too much. For example, earlier iterations of our waterfall particles were incredibly resource heavy, but the newer iterations we have now look much better and are also less taxing resource-wise. 

Engineering Team Updates: I do want to mention that a lot of things we show on the livestream are all on the visual side, but there’s a ton of work that goes into the backend side of things, the code. You don’t get to see the lines of code and the nitty-gritty that makes all of these things possible through the engineering team. Customer service tools, communication between the player clients and the server, on the UI front as well, there’s a ton of programming that goes into all of it. There’s also the QA (Quality Assurance) team that has to put in so much work to ensure everything is up to par.

 

 

QnA Session

Q: Will you be switching to Unreal Engine 5?
A: Obviously as a project in development, we are consistently keeping up to date with engine updates and more. With regards to UE5, it’s obviously something we’re taking a look at and evaluating. When we have an answer in the future regarding migrating to UE5, we’ll let you guys know. But for now we cannot say much. I will say that UE5 pretty promising so far, we’re keeping our eyes on it.

Q: How will you handle one-shotting in AoC?
A: We factor in all the roles, the TTK (Time to kill) for every role, baseline attack powers vs skill usage and so much more that all factors into TTK. There’s plenty of iteration that happens on that front, ranging from the spreadsheet to actually putting it into the engine to ensure the numbers match the spreadsheets. You are not going to see balancing in these early tests, it’s definitely part of Alpha 1, but it’s something that will keep being iterated on. But we will say that because of the freedom players will have in this game, due to the extreme flexibility and customization, they could spec into a full glass cannon build to potentially one-shot, but it will have drawbacks.

Q: What is a feature you’re excited by that no one has asked about yet?
A: We’ve answered so many questions over the past few years, we’d have to think about it. There’s specifics that we haven’t touched on yet. But something we’re excited to work on is probably the naval system, it’s particularly exciting where in other games I’ve had fun naval experiences that add a new dynamic to the game. Additionally the crafting/gathering system which will go back to a different period in the crafting genre similar to older MMORPGs. Also the variety of classes, races and the experience of raiding.

Q: How do you craft in a node (defensive items, siege engines) when a siege has been declared if all your gatherables are locked in storage?
A: The gatherables and materials utilized in specific siege equipment, which are crafted at crafting stations, those crafting stations are within the node. When you access the crafting bench, you access from the crafting station repository within the node. 

Q: Will we be able to use text emotes like /me to roleplay and more?
A: Yes. 

Q: Will the NPC’s befriend you and give you stuff like Animal Crossing?
A: Not in the way that you’re thinking but there’s various rewards that you can obtain by achieving levels of reputation with different factions in the game. 

Q: We saw spells that used ground visuals to represent the cast time of that particular spell. Is this a standard with all cast time spells and abilities? Or will we eventually see traditional cast bars?
A: You will see casting bars implemented a little later, we know it’s an important visual indicator for timing and more. Keep in mind that a lot of things you are seeing are for a low level character. At higher levels you will be able to augment various skills and their cast times, you will also see much faster paced skills. Base cast times and supporting cast times are different.

Q: Who is the most skilled developer in the development team?
A: Probably QA team because they have to go over every aspect when touching things. While other developers are fine tuned to specific fields of work, QA has to touch on everything.

Q: Is there a plan to include the weapon in every skill and cast animation instead of the character only using it in the basic attack /combo?
A: It depends on the skill in question. There’s some skills such as the tank abilities that utilize certain skills. The difficulty is that we cannot always predict what weapon the player is going to use. Especially on the magical cast animation stuff for mages and clerics, spells often have a cinematic component to them, from a lore/story perspective, the caster is trying to focus on manifesting what they are focused on. But from a technical standpoint, it’s hard as players will all be using different weapons, because any class can use any weapon. If we add a new weapon type down the road, then we’d have to redo all the animations as well. At the end of the day, using a spear is different from using a staff. It’s not feasible to do so across all abilities, all classes and all racetypes.

Q: Weight or volume (meaning stack limits) for inventory management?
A: It depends on what types of stacks we’re talking about. If it’s materials/gatherables, there’s a quantity limit that is not based on weight before the player needs to use a mule/caravan. But a general item like potions, a single stack would have a quantity limit. So potions would be like 100, but food might be 999 etc. 

Q: Can naval caravans only be summoned at a port/harbour like other ships or is it an exception to the rule?
A: At the moment your character model interacts with an ocean it will spawn a conversion structure that will require a period of time depending on the capacity of the caravan that will convert your caravan from a land caravan to a naval caravan, then the process repeats to switch back. Yes you can attack a structure while its transitioning, it’s the risk vs reward. You won’t be having your added damage mitigation and bonus hit points when you are transitioning.

Q: What was (is?) the most challenging or annoying part about working from home during this time?
A: For me, I like to walk around and chat with all the different teams. Not being able to do that is difficult. 

Q: Will there be any best in slot weapon or armor for a specific type of monster?
A: There will be best in slot items, yes. But what determines if they are best in slot, is based on the customization and role that you want your class to achieve. There is some autonomy between your skill tree choices and augment choices which lets you change what your role might have traditionally been. So certain items would be best in slot for various roles. Monster types will have specific strengths and weaknesses. So there will be specific areas that are better for you to hunt certain areas. A cleric might be better suited to kill monsters in an undead area due to the holy damage bonus. 

Q: Seeing all of the leaks in the past month, and seeing the overall reaction from people, how does it feel for you guys and gals to see your soon to be players excited?
A: It definitely feels amazing. I’ve said this before but, our motivation is not only our personal desire but really the driving force behind our drive to get things done and ship this game is that your excitement fuels our excitement. There’s a fine line to what we can show because it’s a competitive market. We want to share just enough to get you excited and get feedback, but other people in the market are watching as well. Obviously it’s a bit demoralizing when we get negative feedback, but we take it with a grain of salt. But we know if we put out a good product, people will be happy. 

Q: For the Demonic, Angelic, Fire Elemental, and Ice Elemental Racial skins. Will these looks be based off of the race the character is, or will they have their own unique look separate from the playable races.
A: From a visual perspective, you’ll just be changing your race to that. Full change. 

Q: Can you modify your base stats.
A: You can modify stats with gear. You can directly change the base stat with potions/tattoos. Stat progression on races and classes is static. You’ll be able to augment it in a give and take, so if you boost a particular stat, you will face drawbacks on another stat. You cannot manually allocate stat points to your character.

Q: Will you use geodata to calculate damage, like pushing someone from a cliff?
A: Will there be fall damage? Yes. Some of our testers wandered to close to an ancient head, and there was some corrupt water around it that instantly killed them because they did not have the correct resistances.

 

Google Doc Link

April 30th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares new dungeon gameplay, character visuals, gathering resources, design and environment passes.

Quick Updates:

• The first group of Alpha 1 testers will begin testing in May.
• May test is for Phoenix Initiative and then Braver of Worlds backers in fall.
• Hybrid Combat iterations 2.0 has been achieved, not 3.0 yet.

Design Team Update: The VFX you are seeing is still on its first pass. We later take the time to do a second pass, third pass and so on so to refine visual FX over time, so please keep that in mind while looking at the first pass of the VFX. We’ve been putting in the first foundational systems for crafting and gathering. The skillbar you’re seeing here is for testing, the max level intended for release is level 50. There’s a long way to go regarding skill fidelity, hence we’re starting with a limited kit for each of the classes and then building on this as we go through development. For those of you out there wondering how our levelling process is going to be, if you have played lots of MMORPG’s, we would say we are more towards the more hardcore levelling time than the softcore levelling time. But we’re definitely not going to be one of those max level in under a week type of game. Mana in the game is a resource that you’ll have to utilize carefully. A lot of the older MMOs have mana dependent classes that run out of mana quickly and run out of it. At first we were leaning more towards that, but now we’re leaning towards a compelling gameplay experience and sitting down is not compelling. It’s still going to be a resource that you need to manage carefully. In our previous experience with MMORPG launches, launch day is the foundation for games with competitiveness. We’re going to keep you guys a part of the process as we develop and re-iterate. 

 

Character Art Update: We intend to have plenty of variation in character creation. You’ll be able to have blemishes, imperfections to make your character look unique. Do keep in mind that art and visual assets go through various passes over the course of development, for example we’re now on our second pass for hair that we’ve iterated on since our first pass. Since we’re allowing players the ability to mix and match pieces of armor, we dont want them looking out of place when you mix for example an alliance set and a wolf set. Being able to identify what type of armor a player is wearing from a distance is pretty important, so you need to be able to see if a player is wearing plate from far away so you know how to initiate the fight. 

You’ll be seeing various tiers of both fishing and fishing poles that you’ll discover as you progress in your fishing tree. You might even have some rather dangerous fishes within the tiers. We want mounting/dismounting to be fast, especially from a PvP and PvE perspective. Movement and positioning usually is key in winning fights so we want things to be smooth. Again, this is one of the passes that will be iterated on. 

 

Environment Team Updates: Caravans are able to transition from land to naval caravans. So if you start off a caravan on land and want to move over water, it will take a minute to two minutes to transition your caravan from a land based caravan. Players are going to have caravans that are representative of their race. As we’ve transitioned from concept art to actual in-game models, their environment team has been doing amazing work in putting all the racial assets together

As with any in-depth artisan system, it requires assets for raw materials present in the world that need to be gathered by players, resulting in a huge swathe of materials that require assets created for them. Each of these gatherable resources needs to be presented live in the world for players to gather. The Apocalypse Castle (Karthmere Keep) has now been upgraded and turned into a stronghold for the Alpha 1 playthrough. Atmospheric lighting is another thing that the environment team has been working on, it’s a large part of providing the proper mood to the game, the visuals being shown now are all in-game screenshots and not concept art.

 

QnA Session

Q: Are there going to be hard CC’s in PvP?
A: Yes, there will absolutely be hard CC’s, however balancing application of a skill in PvE and PvP, one of the biggest components from a CC perspective is diminishing returns, which will be prevalent from both a PvE and PvP perspective. 

Q: Will we be able to Target of Target?
A: Yes. Target of Target or assisted targetting is an important aspect of group based PvE and PvP. Party and Raid leaders will be able to assign overhead icons over targets. 

Q: What is the max party size?
A: The current max party size is 8. We are designing group combat over 8 player parties based on the 8 different archetypes. 

Q: Are there ways to customize the information on the mini map?
A: Seeing monsters on minimaps is not something everyone will have access to, it’s probably something that will be tied to specific classes or perks. Especially in a dungeon like this we would not want to give away where the monsters are hiding etc. 

Q: Will we be able to freely switch classes?
A: You will have to pick a class, you cannot freely switch between classes. 

Q: What’s the +1 next to the monster nameplate?
A: Once the UI is fully implemented, the mob nameplate will have a different colour/type to give you a rough idea of how much stronger the monster is in comparison to you. Currently for development we have it listed as +1 on the nameplate which will later change.

Q: You have mentioned Castle Regions (static) and Zones of Influence (flexible) but can you go into more details about Economic Regions?
A: The economic regions as well as the castle regions share the same static boundaries, those are more geographic in nature and align with mountain passes, rivers and more. These are the geographic divisions in the world that we’ll use to determine transit rates, transit of goods, boundaries of warehouse deposits, the influence of castle taxing regions etc. These are static as the design team wants to add a specific systems to things. The node regions are more flexible, is there a closer border to a coast, can I take a node over, there’s a lot of different components to that algorithm.

Q: Can we expect a reticle (like in APOC) which would be tied to the mouse movement in Alpha 1 or will it be added later on (A2 perhaps)?
A: It is there right now. We have 2 modes, the MMO mode (Tab) and action mode (Reticle). You can press the toggle button and switch between them.

Q: Will Elves be able to appear bulky and tanky or will they be ‘sleek’ and agile as designed in other MMO’s and media?
A: So there’s going to be a degree of acceptable deformation when it comes to the different races. There’s also going to be body types that you can cycle between to start at the middle of a deformation range. But there will be confinements to a degree at which you can manipulate something. So you cant turn your elf into the size of an orc. 

Q: Will there be wieldable banners in the game? (Like in Guild Wars) Either summonable through skills or as a an ordinary weapon you can buy and own.
A: There wont be buyable banners as weapons. But there may be for certain variance of the Bard archetype that are banner oriented skills that use the banner archetype or a Guild position for like officers so if the guild chooses to spec into like a banner skill. It’s one thing to go into a guild, become an officer and get a few basic permissions. But one of the things we want to achieve is to have ranks mean something on the battlefield. Banners represent cohesive nature on the battlefield and provide a boost to people. So that could be put in as a active skill to provide a buff so players can be “Hey where is my officer at so I can be next to him and the banner for buffs”

Q:Will bosses and bigger/”senior” monsters give a visual representation of their degradation while fighting? Ie. weapons and armour break, wounds appear etc.
A: Likely not, there may be special cases where we do something like that, but generally from a development perspective, its expensive to do. So generally no, but in special cases, yes.

Q: What will happen to stored materials or goods in nodes, in banks or such things, after a successful node siege and destruction?
A: Depending on the type of item, if its a material based item like a crafting compenent or raw gatherable, those specific items – a portion will be lost and made available to the victors of a siege. There’s a declaration period that exists for war. The way we prohibit players during the declaration period is by locking the resources of the player so it gives them incentive to contribute to the protection of a node to save their resources. It also keeps people from hoarding to ensure things continue to go in and out of the economy. The concept of risk vs reward is important. So if you bank everything you own into one place, its high risk but its high reward as well. Risk and opportunity go hand in hand, we want to convey that design in the game. 

Q: What is the team’s stance on moving while casting? Is it like World of Warcraft where it is the exception, or Guild Wars 2 where it is the rule?
A: Generally we want to tend to be more mobile in our classes. It’s fundamentally an old school philosophy to have stuck in place skills. That doesnt mean we wont have fixed casting, but its a blend between the two. So we’ll have both in all classes. It’s again a risk vs reward thing. Skills that have an overpowering nature to them will require fixed casting in place, so you are now at risk but face a big reward if you get it off.

Q: As a dedicated citizen of my node, – instead of selling for money, or disassembling for materials – will I be able to “donate” my obsolete gear to my node, so to upgrade the defensive abilities of my node”s NPCs, or for example bolstering the strength of a caravan guard?
A: Not directly. You cannot directly give gear to the node in that regard. But you can indirectly participate to boost the nodes defenses by helping levelling up the barracks that lets the mayor hire more NPC mercenaries. There are ofcourse deconstruction options that lets you breakdown gear that you dont want to get various materials.

Q: What is your take on about rollbacks? Is it an last resort that you try to avoid or is it something you will do frequently if problems and bugs appear?
A: Definitely not frequently. Rollbacks are so problematic from both the player side and technical side. It’s a last resort kinda thing. The way we’re building our systems it lets us address things granularly. Rollbacks are when the effects of an exploit are so widespread that going through it with a fine toothed comb would not be possible, its a last resort.

Q: Will there be criminal activities for PvE content, like stealing from shops or pickpocketing NPCs?
A: Absolutely. There will be a load of cool hosts and interactions, fun skullduggery that occurs in those things.

Q: Is there anything you can share with us about the enhanced mounts unlocked in the Kickstarter? I hope that the group mounts are rhino or elephant sized.
A: Some that are even bigger than elephant size. They will be grand.

Q: When thinking about moving resources, will players be able to get storage in different cities or only the node they live in?
A: You’ll have access to the storage facilities in other cities. You can visit the warehouse in other cities and freely use them. 

Q: In kickstarter, it is mentioned that there are “additional customization options” leveling from 1-3. Can you give us an example of what backers will have access to that non-backers will not?
A: That will be defined further out, probably after alpha 2. Kickstarter backers with specific rewards will get an email for things like that when they go out. 

Q: Will there be different potions for the potion launcher weapon?
A: Not so much ingredient based. But enhancement based. So if the potion launcher does end up being included in the MMORPG, it will probably be augmenting the types of potions or damage done

Q: Will it be possible to rent a private game server to test things?
A: No. That’s not to say we wont include a test zone for players locally to try out cosmetics/skill builds. 

Q: Will spears be primarily melee or ranged weapons?
A: Primarily melee.

Q: DPS Meter?
A: It’s a subject with a lot of debate around it. I’m still of the opinion that those functions can be a bit toxic to the social aspect of MMORPGs. I know that competitive guilds and players want pertinent metrics and information. Cultivating good players and increasing the skills of your players and friends through interactive way and co-progression is a better and long lasting way to develop camaraderie. I know this is very subjective, but at the same time I’m making the game so.

Q: You cant push harder content without logs
A: You most definitely can, it becomes a function of trial and error. And in and of itself, that is content that hardcore players should be willing to work on. I dont like doing the same content over again, but I like the challenge of trial and error and I like it being based on experience and not a data table. So from an immersive standpoint, DPS meters are less a immersive factor and less of a social factor.

Q: Knowing that open dungeons are available for everyone, will the difficulty increase the deeper you delve?
A: Difficulty is definitely a progressive component. So the dungeon entrances will have lower level mobs and the deeper you go in, you’ll find either more difficult mobs or difficult mob mechanics or specific pathing mechanics in a room or terrain and environmental curses that are found deeper in the dungeon.

March 27th Livestream Transcription

– Major Alpha 1 development update and 2020 A1 GDC preview.

(Note from Shaze: I recommend watching the stream instead of reading the notes for this one: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/576760259)

Quick Rundown of the Pre-Alpha preview:

• Large Alpha 0 Map slice
• Updated Quest system + Quest Sharing with party
• Updated UI elements (Party UI/Minimap/Quest Log)
• Resource Collection (Mining nodes)
• (Royal Grade Mounts) True flight/Gliding on Griffons
• Hybrid Combat 2.0 (Tab + Action early stages)
• Basic Mayor node management systems
• Realtime Node development
• Basic Fishing System
• Caravan PvP-Flagging system
• Dungeon slice (Emberstorm Dragon Boss fight)
• And much much much more- Watch the stream!

Mayors dedicate a certain portion of the coffer money for conscripting mercenaries, escorts for caravans, issue buy orders, send emissaries to build trade agreements. As players keep pledging their citizenship to a node, the buy in cost keeps increasing to prevent everyone from joining that one node. The Mayor could also hurt the citizens in a negative way, which results in players having to take control and ensure the Mayor does not get re-elected in the next election cycle. Early fishing provides materials for alchemical progression. Larger fish whose materials will be required for more expensive crafts. Certain types of fish can only be caught while fishing from a boat or ship. Once a building has its banners assigned, the building becomes ready to interact with.

Q: Has Corona affected Intrepid’s milestone dates?
A: We have been incredibly fortunate and not lost any jobs. We did have to do some things differently and there could be effects if we have to do this for a long period of time. The biggest hit is taken by our hiring schedule.

Few Updated UI Snapshots:

 

Google Doc Link

February 28th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares GDC update and status of the Alpha 1 preview due in March.

Quick Updates:

• Intrepid will no longer be attending GDC. But will still present the Alpha 1 preview on livestream.
• Will still be having partner meetings over call instead of physically at GDC.
• Had great success bringing on additional talent to the studio.
• The new studio tour will be done once the move has been completed. 
• We are still intending to move away from Xsolla, but it’s a process.

Design Team Update: We’ve been pushing for the March GDC milestone for a while now to showcase the state of the game and where we’re currently at. We want to have hybrid combat mostly figured out. The combat will still be weapon based as we dont want to cement anything in yet. We’ve also been working heavily on monster behaviour and how the monsters interact with nodes. The node levelling tech experience switch from level 2 to level 3 is getting some testing to get the feel right. The alpha 1 will be a broad swathe of most of our systems. There’s a few that wont be there, but not all of them. There will be some crafting, some gathering, etc. It’s about figuring out the core gameplay loop before we flesh it out. Later in the year when we announce the date for Alpha 1, we’ll be ramping it up in single day testing, weekend testing and so on based on phases. The Alpha 1 walkthrough will start in a starting area, accepting some quests, progressing to a node, levelling the node up. Taking up quests, scary monsters, maybe some dungeons and maybe a PvP fight. Jeffrey is most excited about the public event stuff that we’ll be showing off next month.

 

Character Team Update: Chris Atkins (Lead Character Artist) is brought on stream. We’re working on polish right now while pushing for this upcoming March milestone. The new starter outfits are in. We usually push models into our environments to gauge how their colours look and whether they need tweaking. The NPC models are also being worked on. I’m most excited to showcase the variety of characters and creatures that will be seen across the board. Carson and Jincy have been doing some amazing work pumping out the models along with everyone else.

 

Environment Team Updates: Michael Bacon (Lead Environment Artist) is brought on stream to supply candy to the stream. We’ve been doing some great work on the Nikua architecture. We have new additions to the environment team. Excited about having elevation added to the cities as the nodes level up. We did run into some issues with the skybox in Apocalypse. It resulted in laggy instances to the point where the design team wanted to get rid of the clouds. But thankfully we’ve gotten some new skybox tech and it should ensure the sky looks beautiful in the Alpha 1 preview. I’m incredibly excited to showcase the new Dwarven stuff next month, both the Duniir and the Nikua.

Community Team Updates: Lt. Toast (Community Manager) is brought on stream to handle the QnA Session.

 

QnA Session

Q: Can you please elaborate a bit on what benefits guilds get from being patrons of a node?
A: Guilds that claim patronship can unlock certain benefits like specific emblems that can be applied to guild armor. They can participate in that node’s stock market. They can undertake certain guild based missions to progress the guild levelling and development. They can also allocate points for node development to unlock some abilities. Nodes also let guilds inhabit guild halls and in order to partake a in-node guild hall, you must be a patron of the node. You can always have a freehold guild hall, but more perks in the in-node one. 

Q: Has there been any discussion of reducing the guild cap below 300 if the Castle Sieges end up being capped at 250 vs 250?
A: Not necessarily, because you wont always have 300 online in my experience as a guild leader. If I have 2 or more characters in the guild, it will take up more than 1 slot. Obviously when we test during the betas we can change the numbers from a data standpoint as there is an opportunity to change. So expect things to change. 

Q: Regarding the combo system, if the combo is made of 3 attacks for exemple, does using skills reset the combo, or can we use it between skills where we left it ? Like attack-1 > attack-2 > skill > attack-3 > skill. And if yes, how much time can we hold it before the combo resets ?
A: Right now, yes. Using an ability will reset your combo. We plan to have procs that reduce the cooldowns of other skills.

Q: It has been said that the purpose of the Dev Discussions on the forums are to spark conversation between the developers based on community opinions. Were there any memorable developer conversations in reaction to that thread (that can be disclosed) that raised any new points or changed any developers opinions on class themes or mechanics?
A: Off the top of our head, regarding deserts, many players hated desert biomes as they were too bland/empty. Our deserts are planned to be filled. Deserts can be interesting if designed well. 

Q: Will there be plot characters that will follow us through the main story line? Memorable characters like Arthas, Garrosh, Sylvanas, Anduin are all a big part of the WoW universe – but how can you fit in such characters with the dynamic world of Verra?
A: The goal is- Yes. From a storytelling standpoint, characters offer a cornerstone to anchor you and invest you into the story.

Q: How many raids and dungeons will the game have at launch?
A: Many. As many as we can get done.

Q: Once a player is corrupted, how will town guards react to them? Or will they not notice one way or the other?
A: They will Kill on sight.

Q: Will some archetypes have some other resources rather than mana? For instance, will rangers/rogues have something like focus/energy? Will fighters have something equivalent to rage? Or will everyone use mana for spells? It would be very cool if everyone had something different, as it would add an extra flavour to each archetype.
A: We have talked about it- Right now the answer is no. But that may change later. When we first implemented our initial combat system we had a resource called focus, but we ended up veering away from it due to community feedback.

Q: Can you clarify this statement from Know Your Nodes: The Basics? “Vassal Nodes … are able to have their own Vassals, as long as they fit within the Parent Node’s Zone of Influence.” Wouldn’t that mean a node could lose some of it’s Vassals when it becomes a Vassal to a more advanced node, if the parent’s ZOI does not extend as far as the Vassal’s ZOI?
A: No, the Zone of Influence is directly tied to the ability of the advancing. The algorithm would never say X is an acceptable node while cutting off others.

Q: How is your choice of Class going to affect noncombat content? For example will an enchanter get benefits for doing the profession enchanting, or does a assassin have to pay more at public locations because now one likes assassins?
A: Outside of the narrative, there wont be restrictive content behind classes. It does affect utility skills, but even then if you cant do something with a utility skill, you can do it in another way.

Q: Are there any plans to add in combat without the need of weapons, such as fist to fist, or fist to weapon combat?
A: We’ve talked about it a lot, its something we want to do. But maybe in the future, not for launch.

Q: Is there going to be a whole underworld for the people that want to play the role of the mercenary or villain? For example black markets, illegal brawling clubs, lawless island for pirates etc or is the thieves guild the only “clandestine” kind of content that is planned for now?
A: Yes.

Q: What should we expect to see at the GDC?
A: You’ll be seeing that next month.

Q: How much progress will be account based versus character based?
A: Most will be character based. Outside of the cosmetics that you can allocate to a character, there’s nothing you can share across characters. 

Q: Will there be the polymorph ability in Castle Siege?
A: Right now it is not.

Q: What did you learn from the last Dev Discussion, regarding your favorite and ideal classes?
A: We heard how you guys want variety in healing classes. Tons of love for support classes that are not direct healers like the bards. We also discussed scalable content, which I am not a huge fan on.

Q: Are there any plans for speech bubbles or other instruments (best solution optional, because some love them as me, but also some doesn’t like it) to the the local (say channel) written text above (or near) the character.
A: Not right now. When there’s a lot of people in one area it gets really messy.

Q: Part of the kickstarter was in depth economic metric and systems. Like items listed on the auction house, will we be able to see the price history on a chart, and perhaps use moving averages and draw trend lines?
A: There’s going to be a progression path within auction houses in economic nodes. 

Q: Because the environment always reacts to action taken, there is a chance something will be permanently missing or cant be obtained, how will you balance out for those who start the game 3 or 6 month or more after the game launched?
A: The goal is to have tons and tons of content. The person that missed out, will miss out. But there will totally be tons of stuff for them to acquire. This is not the type of game where you can clear it 100%. There’s linear historical progression, so there’s a story to tell.

Q: Which class has been your favourite to play during the A1 closed testing? and why?
A: Cleric for Jeffrey. The Ranger class is being massively overhauled into a skirmishing type classes to weave in and out of combat while maintaining range. 

Q: Which kickstarter goal is going to be the most challenging to develop successfully and why?
A: The most challenging would be the expanded Naval content. It is basically a separate game. We’ve made lots of progress on the physics and buoyancy, but it is challenging.

Q: Will there be weak spots for NPC’s?
A: We want to have directional importance. Susceptibilities for certain types of attacks.

Q: Since the mounts will have abilities and stats, how will they gain experience and levels?
A: They will share progression EXP with the character and a separate experience table for the mount specific questline system like ‘training’. It might include getting certain types of items/foods or achieving certain tasks and more.

Q: Will all freeholds be the same sizes for the start?
A: All freeholds will be the same size.

Q: What will be the main focus of end game? PvE, PvP, Wealth, Fashion, or Community?
A: Fashion. Jokes aside, there will be plenty of stuff to do. So many projects use player driven content as an excuse to not make content. But our idea is to use the player driven mechanic with a plethora of content to accommodate it. Not any one specific category will be poured into. Your fellow player will have a hand in influencing how that experience looks to you.

 

Google Doc Link

January 30th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares Alpha 1 progress updates and first look at the new UI changes.

Quick Updates:

• We’ll be having new character models for all the races soon.
• Parts of the Alpha 1 map will be shown at the Alpha 1 demo at GDC.
• Studio move will be taking place very very very shortly.
• Valentines Day event planned for February, more details later.

Design (UI) Team Update: Ryan Pearson  (Senior UI Artist) is brought on stream. Spent over 12 years at Blizzard on projects such as Battle.Net for 8 years and Diablo for 4 years. I worked pretty passionately on the Blizzcon reveal. As a big fan of form following function, if its designed well and plays well, that’s most important to me. With Castle sieges, the challenge involved creating UI that helped provide all the necessary information but was still modular and aesthetic. Our UI designs for Ashes of Creation are meant to be modular to let players customize how they want their UI to look. The capture points for sieges require dynamic icons that provide the player with information on the compass so they better understand what’s going on. We had to decide between how information was displayed, information displayed above a player’s head, all of it is greybox currently, so its not final yet. 

Design Team Update: Dave Oelkers (Senior Animator) is brought on stream. I’ve been animating in games since 2000, working on games such as Mark of Kri with a background in 2D animation. I then moved to Trion to work on an action RPG, following that to Amazon Games Studio. I joined Intrepid near the end of Apocalypse and got to work on the 2H Greataxe animation polishing. We take the general frame of the Bear for example and are able to pump out additional assets that share the same frame/mesh/animations/etc. which helps speed up the content generation speed. Also variants of the swiftclaws and raptors.

Envvironment Team Updates: Michael Bacon (Lead Environment Artist) is brought on stream to supply candy to the stream. Our team has been going through bugfixes on Castle Siege while also working extensively on the MMORPG. We saw the downsides of the prefab approach in Apocalypse and figured out a much better alternative for the MMORPG, which was incredibly helpful. So the node system right now uses blueprints so we can easily swap things around, especially with swapping out assets inside the houses relating to racial stuff. Depending on wealth levels, we can now showcase node buildings as they’re falling apart or gold-trimmed based on the wealth of the node. Previously in Alpha 0, we brute forced the node system to manually create the nodes and we simply couldnt duplicate it for all the nodes. But our environment team figured out a solution to build this tool to produce procedurally as well as authored node layouts. So even though the nodes are partially procedurally generated, they have parameters to account for placement for sieges, town halls and more.

Since we were able to try out various building structures in Apocalypse, we were able to find areas that we could expand on in terms of housing, such as raising the ceiling and adding more detail to the houses. Construction will also have actual progression from stage to stage of construction with transitioning animations.  We’ve got a large scope ahead of us to incorporate all 9 different racial cultures within the MMORPG, all of which is entirely player influenced. We’re dedicated to hitting a standard that you the community and we are proud of. We’ll be showcasing a new biome next month, the grasslands and the magical forests.

Community Team Updates: Lt. Toast (Community Manager) is brought on stream for the QnA Session.

 

QnA Session

Q: Will mounts have emotes that the players can use?
A: Mounts will have access to certain skills as they level up. For example a charge or a stun etc. We did think about the ability to give them emotes, I dont know if we’ll be able to fit it into launch, but we definitely want them in.

Q: Please clarify, I thought we would not be getting such traditional outfits early on?
A: When you achieve armor at the early stages, it might be a little grandiose compared to other games that you have played. But we just wanted that transition from a civilian from a world you know nothing about to this new dangerous world.

Q: Any news on the usage of chaos system of Unreal Engine?
A: We kinda moved away from it. For an MMORPG optimization is a key component. We want to see more established technology from Chaos before we implement it. So there is potential in the future, but for now, no.

Q: Why the Sunglasses?
A: I (Steven) saw them on the table before the stream and said we should wear sunglasses for the stream. The end.

Q: Can we get some clarification on the world map, specifically how much of the 480sqkm is land and how much is water?
A: We were referring to playable area. The edges of the map ofcourse wont really classify as that, but the water will be filled with content and more.

Q: Will there be emphasis on visual clarity for PvP?
A: The player is to leave that upto the player to decide. We’ll give players the option to decide how clear they want it to be. We want you to be able to read what’s going on in the situation and understand it. Offering players easily visible threat assessment is incredibly important. So certain skills/weapons/armor will have recognizable assets to let the player make snap decisions.

Q: Will there be surprise encounters with epic beings in Verra where you have to just watch them and enjoy?
A: The concept that we’re going with is- This is a world that exists without you. There’s going to be content for players to just observe and be immersed in. 

Q: Will the healing archetypes suit a variety of playstyles like direct healing/HoT/Damage mitigation etc?
A: Yes. We’ve talked a lot about building your playstyle and how you want to play.

Q: What class has been your favourite to play and why?
A: I feel answering that will give an unfair disposition towards one class. However the ranger plays pretty fun and tactical.

Q: Will gathering involve simply clicking or holding down keys or be interactive?
A: We dont want to inundate that process with too many interactions. Sometimes people just want it to be simple and straightforward as players enjoy relaxed gathering. 

Q: Do you have any plans on keeping players interested in Apocalypse after lvl 50?
A: Apocalypse is something that was meant to gather information for the MMORPG and its definitely satisfied that purpose. We’re going to evaluate what we use it for, but right now, no definite answer.

Q: We know that legendary weapons exist, but what about legendary spells?
A: We’ve talked about ability augments in that category, but we have to check to see if its actually viable. In other games legendary weapons have a bonus activatable skill to add a different dimension to your class. But having a legendary scroll that drops from a Boss or as an augment, but I dont know if we’re going to implement it or not.

Q: Can a summoner summon a dragon or something similar if a proper class is picked?
A: Yes. Summoners will have access to dragon species. We’re thinking of a summoner creation suite to customize your summon. Since its being implemented with the Animal husbandry system, we could totally implement it with the summoners.

Q: How viable will PvP, arena or open world be for gearing up?
A: We’re definitely going to have PvP Arena rewards, but we dont want to overly incentivize or make it a one stop shop to dis-associate with the open world environment as it pulls players away from the economy and being a part of the crafting/gathering systems and more. So no, not direct gearing up, but definitely power ups.

Q: Will our weapon auto-attack have an actual use in game?
A: We dont have an auto attack, we have the combo system that you can spec into. Typically your other skills have cooldowns, but ours has a repeatable skill effect where you can continually attack with. It has components from an enhancement standpoint. Its not going to have the Quick Time Elements you saw back at PAX years ago. 

Q: You’ve mentioned open world battlegrounds, do open world dungeons count as open world battlegrounds?
A: When I say open world battlegrounds, our objective system is the ability for an event to take place in the open world and in that event will be spawned objectives and rulesets that players can utilize to have victory or failure. So those are like specific events in the world. Whereas the open world dungeon is a contested dungeon where battles will happen and guilds will fight over it. But its not an event that takes place with a specific ruleset. 

Q: If i have a camel or goat cosmetic, can I place it on anything besides a horse?
A: Cosmetics arent categorized as a type. They are classified by tier. So you have regular horses in the first tier, and pegasus for third tier.

Q: Can players cause disasters through actions they take?
A: If a public event occurs and it ends with a negative result, yes a natural disaster will occur but not as a direct effect of players, but as a reactive event.

Q: Can we be a straight fire mage or a pure frost mage?
A: Yes, you can take a large majority of your skills to be a fire mage. You might want other supportive skills though. But you could totally spec into skills of a certain energy type, you might be able to increase the potency of a particular energy type, However there’s a downside, so lets say fire is a predominant skillset on your server, players might spec into it to make you less viable.

Q: Will there be I-frames on dodges?
A: We’re leaning towards a yes, primarily via I-frame type skills that provide short immunity.

Q: With the PvE revolving around questing, are there any plans to ensure it doesnt take away the sandbox from the game?
A: The quests arent built around the linear model. Its built around a modular narrative that should reinforce the idea of a sandbox. The overarching questline directs how the world grows. 

Q: Will the adaptive AI be for all mobs or dungeon bosses only?
A: The goal is to keep it as adaptive as possible, but we’ll definitely leverage it on bosses more as they have the most rewards associated with it. Our behaviour trees are compartmentalized to different NPC’s. So you may have grunts with minimal behaviour, then a group leader, elite boss, world boss and more that represent the adaptive AI.

Q: Are class specific utility skills a strict requirement for certain content like rangers disabling traps?
A: Yes, there will be multiple solutions to solving environmental obstacles.

Q: Due to limited fast travel, can crafting stations be mobilized or moved?
A: Depends on the crafting station. Different tiered stations exist that are resigned to freeholds and specific node stages, so there’s a wide variety of things to factor in. 

Q: Will there be armor for specific crafting/gathering professions?
A: Yes, most certainly. This is something that provides an additional layer of expertise and devotion.

Q: What kinds of tools will we have to manage our friends list, organization, invisibility, favourites, etc.?
A: I would say we’re taking a standard approach to the friends list. But we’re definitely going above and beyond for our guild systems. 

Q: Regarding the PvP flagging, are players allowed to repeatedly attack players to low health and not kill them to avoid gaining corruption?
A: There’s definitely risk associated with that. As a higher level character, there’s a chance you could kill them by mistake for a much higher penalty. So no you wont be in corruption just for attacking. Yes you can be attacked by players while fighting a mob. You cannot see another player’s health, not their HP or percentage. Their nameplate will deteriorate, but unless in a party or raid with them, you wont see their status. 

Q: Will guild halls have parlour games and other tavern systems?
A: No, that ties into the business system which we want to keep in that building type. The guild hall is for guild member benefits and to provide additional systems. The tavern games will be kept to the tavern systems. We dont want guild people to just stay in their guild halls, but to actually go out and utilize the other systems. 

 

Google Doc Link

December 17th Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios shares Castle Siege progress and updates on the MMORPG.

Quick Updates:

• The Creative Director’s letter will be finalized around holiday break.
• We’ll be showing a video on Christmas Day.
• We’ve got a Castle Siege PI (Phoenix Initiative) test this Thursday.
• Got some announcements for Q1 2020 which we’ll share later.

 

Design Team Update: We are currently working on the balance side of Castle Sieges. The vehicles (Siege weapons) are being worked on and our engineering team will talk on that more. The lessons we learned building the siege weapons contributes to the caravan mechanic. We want to ensure that each role (Class) has a niche that it fits into. Thus ensuring a balanced party/raid is important. We had an early test phase where the tank was overpowered and unkillable, mages were a bit too squishy, so we’ve been balancing things out. The healer is a fun class which can both heal + DPS. The healer also has a mass AOE revive. On the MMORPG side of things, engineering has completed a lot of tools for us that helps speed up development (For example the building tool which we showcased in the past). This will contribute to the big content push before Alpha 1.

Character Team Updates: Chris Atkins (Lead Character Artist) is brought on stream. On the low end, developing an NPC takes 12-15 days. It usually starts with a concept which then leads to sculpting. After the sculpting is done, it’s viewed in low mesh, rigged, skeletoned and much more. As we complete more pieces, we can utilize meshes/animations/skeletons and more of completed models to speed up creation on future pieces that share similar traits. Currently we’re filling in the aquatic lifeforms. 

 

Engineering Team Updates: Kevin McPherson (Lead Programmer) is brought on stream. We usually work in a glorified text editor and compile it, which runs the game. A big part of what we do is to be a force multiplier for design to write tools so they can build content quickly in the shortest amount of time. We’re finalizing the implementation of the Leaderboards, it just needs to be enabled to track data. This is important for tracking guild statistics, crafting leaderboards and more – This is the first implementation of it for the MMORPG. The progress on siege has been going well, we’re now in the polish phase and require some additional play testing. The capture points are being tweaked to support the design, some bugs when exiting siege vehicles, notifications for Points of Interests during the match. We’re going to be looking at optimizing things during the PI playtests. We’ve been running 5000 player simulations to tweak things for our planned large scale battles. One of the features we plan to have for large battles is a ‘default player appearance’ to reduce the rendering load on your computers. Dont worry, your potato will be able to play the game.

Initially we were bruteforcing ability creation, but now we’re building our own tool to quickly create skills/abilities. As mentioned prior, we do not intend to provide our augment system for Alpha 1, it will just be the base archetypes. However the new system Engineering is building will help with rapid development of these abilities and include the broader augment system for those types of skills. Allowing drag and drop qualities/ability effects onto a parent ability. We’ve also begun working on the status effects system. Statuses such as poisoned/stuns/dizzy are being categorized, ensuring lower effects dont stack on higher effects, certain statuses wont stack but will refresh the stack. Including diminishing returns, where the first snare will slow you by 100% but subsequent ones wont be as effective. Players also need to be able to proc effects based on hit chance and more which is also part of this system.

Over 2 years ago during Alpha 0 we had the node system templates and how the node would level based on contribution. However this isnt sustainable to do manually for the total world size. There’s over a 100 nodes that have to be unique and look different. They cannot be cookie cutter designs at each stage. So our team came up with a system that has random placeholder spots for how buildings pop up which we showcased within our building tool video. But now we’ll be showing you a video in some time later that showcases a wide variety of nodes and buildings over different nodes. We’ve also been working on the quest branching system. The guild system is a big part of the game. The guilds are living/breathing systems that require a ton of base functionality which we are preparing for Alpha. Housing is an extremely large system with a host of functions like crafting and storage. The voting process is also key for node growth and needs some polish, same as the caravan system. The whole system is what we want ready for Alpha 1, including signing up as an attacker/defender for Caravans. Later on the caravan system will be on water for ships. The event systems are also key, attacking and defending nodes during sieges/hordes. We had a question in the PI meeting regarding whether nodes would develop as port cities. So as nodes develop there are points of interest hooks outside the node that develop with it. So as the node developers near the sea, the harbor hook would be generated and a kraken could attack the harbor and players would have to defend it. Back in Alpha 0 the event system was constrained to within the node, but now it will be tied to the areas around the node.

 

Community Team Updates: Lt. Toast (Community Manager) is brought on stream for the QnA.

 

QnA Session

Q: Will the main story quests treat us as the ‘one hero’?
A: We want the players to feel like they are the movers and shakers. We wont be treating it as a single player online RPG, we will be treating it as though you are part of the bigger picture.

Q: How is the move going, All settled in at the new studio?
A: Not yet.

Q: With the new back end infrastructure, does internal testing show that 10,000 player servers can still be achieved or will you need to dial that number back a bit?
A: We have not dialed that back yet. Based on internal stress testing, we have actually considered increasing it. Player movement positioning is 85% of the network traffic, spell effects all over the place are not that big of a deal. 

Q: Is it 64 classes or 8 basic classes with 8 subclasses each? Meaning that in the 2. case, that all those subclasses will have the same base abilities
A: The grouping is the same, but the active skills are from primary archetype. So the a Tank-Mage will have different skills from a Mage-Tank.

Q: In Apocalypse we saw the use of AWS (Amazon) servers to dynamically spin up game server instances based on player count. Moving forward with the MMO will you continue to use AWS or eventually invest in your own server racks?
A: We will be using AWS as of this moment until the plan changes. 

Q: You have told us before that gathering resources exist more as cluster such as mining from a vain of ore instead of a small rock. Could you give us another example of this; like how is that facilitated with woodcutting ?
A: It depends on the resource type. Some will have a pool that depletes over time until nothing exists until it respawns somewhere else. Obviously wood will respawn at a later time. There’s moving resources as well like wool (interactable animal herd).

Q: Have you considered or planing to add Treasure Hunting Events created by players?
A: No.

Q: Could we get and end of the year progress report stating the accomplishments of this year?
A: We will in our Creative Director’s letter.

Q: What is the plan to make questing immersive? It is hard to have an immersive questing experience if for instance you go into a tomb that hasn’t been opened in a millennium and there are ten people running around in there
A: We have some tech to do things to see what is relevant to you and only to you. 

Q: Will animations change depending on the race or subclass of the player?
A: Some animations will change. Race yes, subclass no.

Q: Will Intrepid begin to let us know what tier structures the skins they sell will replace?
A: Yes an article will go out soonTM. It’s being prepared and will go out eventually.

Q: If one adds an elemental affect to their weapon, either through a spell or permanent buff from enchanting, will affects be applied to the weapon to show this? Ex: I add fire damage to my sword and now my sword is on fire.
A: It’s something we can do and in certain circumstances. It may be a hit-effect and not a constantly glowy effect. Weapons with a glow are good for both aesthetics and from a threat assessment standpoint.

Q: Will mounts be auto dismounted or unsummoned on entering a closed area; like a cave or building, or will they be mountable in such places?
A: More than likely, they will be mountable. But generally in open world environment, you can take them  in. But for instances we might turn off mounts there. We have the system in place already. 

Q: As I recall there will be announcement once world boss or world event(or something pretty important) is appearing, how fast will the announcement appear after event?
A: It depends on the event. Some events we want to sneak up on you. Others we want you to plan ahead for. There’s the risk vs reward factor where you get a notice beforehand.

Q: UE4 4.24 has been released and there is one feature which is Hair and Fur Rendering and Simulation.Will AOC take advantage of this for hair rendering for character for more realistic look?
A: Our artists will be looking into it if our current solution should be replaced with it. Sometimes new features are not the best option to use, especially for a game like ours. They would fit for a singleplayer game but not for an MMORPG.

Q: Will Intrepid consider an incentivized bug bounty system after release for exploits / vulnerabilities, maybe with unique in-game cosmetics or titles as the rewards?
A: Absolutely. We have talked about this in the past, we want players to bring to light exploits in the game. 

Q: You’ve said the season will impact the gameplay for example: you need warm clothes in the winter and ice spells are stronger. Now Sieges will be at every 4th week. Does this mean, that sieges will always be in a fixed season of the (ingame) year? If so, are there plans to let sieges happen in different seasons to add a little more variety?
A: We have not thought about it yet. There’s 5 castles in game in different regions with different climates. What may be winter in the south may be summer elsewhere so they might have fixed climates.

Q: Mobs are going to change at every level of nodes, higher nodes lvl attract higher mod lvl. But how the change will occur? Will they just disappear and than the new one appear or you go for something else?
A: The existing mob base will live on until they are killed. As that population is removed, the new population will come in. 

Q: When leaderboards go up, are we able to see our season 1 stats like games played/wins?
A: No, the leaderboards have begun collecting data as of yesterday. They are not retroactive.

Q: What happens if a freehold is placed too near a village. When the village expands, the area of the metropolis might cover where the freehold was placed. Will the freehold be moved, or will it be that you cannot put a freehold in a place that is part of a later level?
A: It wont let you place the freehold within the blueprint of potential maximum growth of the node.

Q: Another off soul question. In a raid or party situation 40 man all the way down, if your main tank lets say is a tank/tank, gets sent to bed by his mother, could a mage / tank A. hold aggro and B. have the ability to live as tank for the group, by changing the ability’s they are using.
A: You will be able to do some tanking on some bosses for some time, but there’s a lot of variables that go into it.

Q: Will different timed/triggered events within a node be able to occur at the same time, such as siege, node-level change, mayoral caravan, mayoral change, or PvE attack; if so, how will that look?
A: A siege locks down a lot of features. The siege declaration window provides you available times, which will be different from the mayor election etc. So things would happen outside of the window.

Q: Are you going to implement a sandbox mod where the players could test out different skills and classes?
A: You’re playing it (Apocalypse). We have talked about Alpha 2 for player classes and mechanics. 

Q: Have their been any further iterations to combat since the last update on Apoc, if so what changes have you decided to make?
A: For the BR? No. But for Siege, yes. Mana and managing abilities is a lot more important in sieges, its a lot closer to the MMO. 

Q: Will summoners have the ability to equip their pets with items?
A: Summoners will not. But battle pets and mounts will be able to. Summoned pets will rely on Summoner skills, whereas pets and mounts will rely on items.

Google Doc Link

November 22nd Livestream Transcription

– Intrepid studios provides a development update on the MMORPG and Castle Sieges.

Quick Updates:

• Moving to the new studio soon.
• Getting closer to the playable castle siege mode.
• On the road to Alpha 1, lot of work to be done, but we’re making good progress.
• Creative Director’s letter at December end. Will be Q3+Q4 letter.

 

Castle Siege Update: We’ve got the final piece of the puzzle from the destruction side of things not too long ago. We were waiting on Unreal’s Chaos system, have decided to go with our old system for now – which is as expected. Destructability decides when people are able to get past walls that are being destroyed. Aesthetics and performance are key in destruction. Even if we were to go with our lowest setting, it still looks incredibly aesthetic by current standards. Currently testing is a numbers game with excel documents, how we picture fights panning out, TTK (Time to Kill other players), but individually they dont help us gauge actual playthroughs, hence why internal testing is so important.

TTK (Time to Kill) is higher than the BR. The TTK is intended to be similar to the MMORPG, but will be tweaked through testing. It will be more relevant to pick a tank class for higher health pool and damage mitigation. The trinity of Tank/Dps/Healer will exist. We’re also working on the lore side of things to ensure where everything is going to go. Engineering is building a tool on how the questing system will work – How quests branch out and each decision has different outcomes. Questing is different has many variables depending on race, starting gateway, players participating and more that decide how the quest system adapts.

 

Programming Team Updates: Alex Khudoliy (Programmer) is brought on stream. We’ve been working on authentication and its performance/flow. We’ve been working on the siege wall destruction systems. We had an existing system for Apocalypse for blowing up individual pieces, but for sieges it works differently. Damaging a wall makes it go through different phases, starting with a small gap and opening up to a larger gap in the wall. Structures need to go through variable destruction stages for freeholds and more. So if attackers fail at sieging a node, they can still destroy buildings to affect the node’s progress and more. Let’s say a rival node stage 5 wants to progress, but you want to prevent their religion system from progressing, you can siege a node with a targetted objective of taking down a specific building without taking over the node or destroying it completely. If a building is not fully destroyed, the node has to gather the resources to rebuild the affected buildings.

We’ve also been working on the vehicles for sieges, how you mount/dismount the siege weapons, how enemy players can destroy siege weapons or target just the players on a trebuchet and more. Trebuchet’s might require a box system where you pick it up and deliver it to the trebuchet to deliver ammo. Or picking up the box lets you deploy the trebuchet at a specific spot with a cast time. Carrying the boxes/supplies will hinder your movement speed but is vital to your supply line for the siege.

Another challenge we had was having fast travel between the various respawn points, especially if the map is large. We dont want you walking for 5 mins and dying immediately to lose interest. So the base functionality and UI elements for it are almost done. This also plays into control points around the map for buffs and mobility on the map. Leaderboards are also in the works, we’re pretty much done with it and we’re expecting it to roll out soon. The aggregates will be based on the mode, region and more.

 

Character + Environment Team Updates: Chris Atkins (Lead Character Artist) is brought on stream. We’ve been working on the creatures for the MMORPG. Treants, War Rhinos, Elder Dragons and the first Aquatic Mount. Additionally we’ve been working on the Dunir node concept art, where the objective is to showcase their technological base. Of the 5 castles in the MMORPG, one of them is the original Dunzenkell Castle (Dunir) which are remnants from the previous age. The 3 nodes around the castle that feed its defences are set apart from the regular nodes out in the world.

 

QnA Session

Q: May it be possible for a mayor to organize city festivals, where residents will also have to collect and provide goods and resources to make the city more interesting. Make careers more meaningful, promote the cohesion of a city and bring players together to achieve common goals.
A: We want to create those opportunities, they might be in the form of festivals, but part of the job of mayors is to keep citizens happy and events similar to that to make it happen.

Q: Are Tulnar a result of corruption or inter-breeding?
A: Tulnar are not a result of corruption in any way.

Q: How will destruction work with the Building tool you showcased?
A: The dynamic tool is the answer for larger scale content so that nodes are not similar/same looking across the world. We want our environment artists to have powerful tools available for these. We will still need one-off and curated buildings, but the tool answers our needs for general things. The destruction system is also built into this and we are testing both right now to see if individual piece destruction or full building destruction is the way to go. Apocalypse was the basic level of this, incredibly un-optimized.

Q: Is there friendly fire in castle sieges?
A: There will not be friendly fire from teams, however there could be occurrences where a siege projectile hits a wall, and the wall debris affects all players from both teams.

Q: Will you migrate to the Chaos system of UE when you are ready?
A: The biggest problem is that Chaos is a physics based system which isnt good for an MMORPG. There’s a lot of polygons in the chaos system, we’ll obviously keep looking at it as its still in its baby stages. Even if it doesnt fit our needs later on, we could use small parts of it. 

Q: What abilities (or early versions of abilities) will be usable for the classes in castle siege? Or are they just going to be the BR abilities tied to the weapons those classes can use? For example, the Weaponmaster having Lifestealing from the Halberd.
A: You’ll see some of the abilities from the BR that will be altered a bit. By the large most abilities for the siege are new. They are tailored specifically to classes and not weapons.

Q: Will we have to go through specific quests just to be able to progress/unlock something as it is the only way to obtain that specific thing (i.e content or ability to progress that is locked behind quests) or will we have that ‘sandbox’ freedom in which case we can do as we please and don’t miss much without doing quests?
A: Yes, certain things will be locked behind quest chains. It will also rely on world development and progress or nodes/dungeons and more. 

Q: As a Healer, will I have quests that involve me healing hurt NPCs, stopping an epidemic from spreading, and other Healer type things or will I be just another damage dealer when I am not in a group?
A: There’s a concept of class quest lines which will be explored, there will be organizations that play into it and we’ll have optional objectives and various types of quests.

Q: Will Castle Siege be integrated into the BR or will it be a separate downloadable game?
A: It will be integrated into Apocalypse. 

Q: It was mentioned before, that you plan to provide API access for game information. Will it be a REST API covering common public stuff like items, region information, auction house, etc. as well as protected to manage character and account settings?
A: We dont want you to be grabbing quest data and node information out beforehand, so no answer on that right now.

Q: Which type of “gold sinks” have you planned for the game to keep the economy in check?
A: We have this idea of a dynamic economy where quest rewards, NPC’s and shop keepers change their prices on the buying/selling side based on the economy. Crafting of all types will have both resource costs and gold costs as well, including being tied into the religious systems and more.

Q: We’ve seen the early iterations of the ping system in Apocalypse with the ability to place markers using the middle mouse button. Are there any plans to expand on this system to add additional functionality such as a ping wheel or raid leader pings and more?
A: Absolutely. Any time you see implementation of gameplay systems in Apoc or Alpha 1/Alpha 2, you will see them from the core feature set where they will be expanded on as we move through development. We want grouping to be easy and leaders to be able to organize and communicate quickly with their party. 

Q: Will secondary classes still influence your stat growth, and what happens if you change your secondary class?
A: Secondary class will not influence your stat growth. But it will be about how augments integrate with passives. We moved away from the stat influence when we built the waterfall stat system for Alpha 1. Keep in mind that alpha is intended to test things so it might change. 

Q: Will there be dangerous flora such as cactus that could be planted and used as a strategic advantage in battles?
A: We have not planned for it in that sort of way. There’s control and command skills like you’ve seen in Apoc with the walls and more. Probably not plants though. 

Q: Will we be able to toggle off cosmetics? So we could see only original gear and other items players have achieved?
A: Yes. Part of the default player appearance is to increase performance in large battles and reducing players to base poly sets. 

Q: Other than augments and stats, how does secondary archetype affect a player character? if a Guardian and a Warden use the exact same religious augments instead of sub-class augments, would they be functionally the same?
A: In that specific example, they would be. But it depends on your skill choice in your master class. As you assign points, if you followed the same paths in your skill tree, yes they would be the same. But there are other ways your secondary class affects your character besides just augments. 

Q: It has been sayd before that animation canceling will not be a thing in combat but what about canceling channeling; Like if you cast a high value skill and know it is not going to hit, will you be able to cancel the channel before the actual cast starts ? And what effect would this have on the cooldown ?
A: Currently you can cancel channelling. 

Q: Are there going to be secret vendors in the MMO? ( Vendors that spawn ever so often for a small amount of time or they are hidden in secret spot) If so, what kind of items might we expect to buy from them?
A: There will be limited vendors. As for the types of items, will be specific to organizations that you are part of. 

Q: Will there be an over the top RTS style spectator mode for Castle Sieges?
A: No. We discussed spectator ability in the past, but it wont be a top down thing. We want to make sure players dont have that kind of information advantage. Battle maps however will provide a top down strategic view – not of real time info, but for squad/raid leaders to place down markers/objectives. 

Q: When deciding what/how to balance a feature (e.g. skill), how much does community opinion come into play, than just raw data?
A: Its a tough decision as data might tell you one thing and players might say another. Its the balance between subjective and objective. Data doesnt come with an opinion, its just hard numbers that we use as a touchpoint. But the benefit of giving the community the mouthpiece is we can analyze it from a feeling/enjoyment standpoint and not just a raw metric. 

Q: Will we be able to give NPC’s orders in a castle / city siege or will we only fight as players?
A: Yes, there are mercenary NPC’s that can be assigned by players.

Q: Will Dwarves have a resistance to magic ?
A: No they do not have an innate resistance to it. They might have racial passives/skills that they can spec into, but not out of the gate.

Q: To what extent can players hide in plain sight for the MMO? Stuff like nameplates being always visible make it nigh impossible to.
A: Outside of stealth skills/abilities, no other mechanics. 

Q: Will vertical combat in APOC (e.g slicing someone midair when he/she might be more vulnerable) be a thing in the MMORPG?
A: If someone is jumping and you whack them on the feet, no they wont take more damage. But with action combat we do get to play around with things more. Might have accuracy penalties or lifted states, but we’ll have to see. 

Q: Will there be levels of bonding between the rider and the mount? E.g. riding a mount for longer will increase it’s stamina, health etc.
A: There’s definitely progression for mounts. We’ll try to avoid leaving your computer on and having the horse run around in circles. 

Q: We see many games that require months of grind just to be remotely competitive in PvP. In Ashes, will one have to play ‘hardcore’ in order to be effective/competitive in PvP or will casual players have a chance at it as well?
A: The balance is – You want to make sure your game design takes into consideration the casual players but also reward the more hardcore players that put in the time. We’ve addressed it by not having a single adventuring class, but to have a multitude of progressions to participate in. So freeholds, commerce, nodes, guild structures, castle sieges, ensuring relevant positions for all these objective based systems. 

Q: Do do have in mind use Unreal Engine 4.24 or the next stable version of it?
A: We always use the latest version. 

Q: Will we see other races in apocalypse?
A: Yes.

Q: Will the quests for siege be the same as the BR or different?
A: Same adventure path. But some quests that are for siege, some for BR, some are both.

 

Google Doc Link