Ashes of Creation has made no bones about the fact that it’s a PvP title and the latest livestream from the devs once more illustrates as much with a look at some fresh pre-alpha combat footage featuring two teams of devs and testers attacking or defending a caravan. It also features Steven Sharif absolutely getting bodied by the first alpha strike and going into dev mode to cheat. Boo, Steven.
The devs note that, while the spell effects are particularly flashy and distracting at larger scale engagements, they also are placeholder for now and will be tuned for less visual clutter as development progresses. Additionally, there will be colorblind support for the UI elements as well.
The devs also talked about attacking NPC-generated caravans that travel from castles to their supporting nodes, and further discussed how they are balancing PvP on a macro scale, taking in to account how larger groups operate instead of individual classes. This does mean that, by the devs’ own admission, certain classes will blow others out of the water in terms of single engagement, but this leaves the team to balance with party compositions in mind, since most PvP will be meant for groups of players.
The stream then goes on to showcase some environment art and character art, as well as discuss how node spawning has transformed into something more procedural with more layout variety than there has been up to this point. You can get a rundown of the stream in text format at Ashes Post, or take in the full broadcast after the cut.
