Ashes of Creation is once again sitting creative director Steven Sharif in front of a comfy den and making him do a livestream. This time, however, it isn’t a monthly progress report but a community Q&A session with what we assume to be “influencers” of the not-released (and still not even past alpha) MMORPG asking about a variety of matters. Here are some of the highlights:
- Alpha 2 was once again the subject of a few questions: Zones for the build will be continually added as testing rolls on, the test is intended to “exist until launch” and will layer on content over testing periods, and there may be some secondary archetypes added along with primary archetypes.
- Development milestones were touched on with an overview of the amount of work needed for Intrepid Studio to hit; it was a long form way of saying that things are very fluid, very hard, and very long.
- Speaking of zones, the Underrealm that runs beneath the world map hasn’t increased in size too much, apparently. Sharif also repeats how the Underrealm and its use of overland travel works.
- What happens when a world event and a player freehold collide? Ideally, events will target and engage groups of players doing something out in the world instead of having an event just erupt on top of some poor person’s farm.
- Sharif doesn’t appear too concerned about servers following a meta in terms of node unlocking; the game takes several factors into account to determine the state of the world and what content comes out of nodes and POIs, and a node unlocking or leveling up does so in relation to what’s happening around it, so ideally servers shouldn’t be cookie-cutter.
- Finally, the biggest obstacle that’s stopping Alpha 2 from going live is content production – aka the size and complexity of gameplay systems and the time it’s taking to make those playable and suitable for testing.
source: YouTube
