The time has come at long, long, long last for ravenous fans of Ashes of Creation as the PvP MMORPG officially kicked off weekend testing rounds for its much-referenced Alpha Two, albeit after a slight delay, and it all began with a live play among the game’s developers for the studio’s October livestream.
The devs primarily busied themselves with attacking a PvE POI full of goblins and loot, discussing the game along the way including its visuals, combat feel, and the focus of testing, which is primarily stability and performance.
The devs also talked about how systems work in the alpha right now, like PKers getting corruption; right now it’s not cumulative or doesn’t take into account level disparity, but the hope is that there are enough opt-in PvP activities that will lessen open ganking and griefing. There were also promises about continued leveling and endgame content, discussions about avoiding crunch, and talks on roughly how long adding a new biome can take.
As for the alpha’s more immediate news, players are openly talking about their impressions and thoughts both good and bad, while the latest update made last weekend introduced a secondary starting zone, tweaked the tank archetype, and made several adjustments gathering nodes, corruption rules related to healing, and visuals, among other matters.
Meanwhile, Intrepid boss Steven Sharif has been actively causing chaos within the test by running around as a nearly unkillable target blowing up players in FFA PvP. Eventually the self-styled raid boss was taken down himself during this random bit of GM silliness, after which he isolated an influencer, stuffed him into a room full of ducklings, and asked what his deepest wish would be, to which the player answered with in-game ferrets. All in all it’s quite a tale for those who care to read through.
