So a funny thing happened during a Summit1g livestream on Saturday. The streamer was checking out a recent LazyPeon breakdown video for Ashes of Creation, when who showed up but Steven Sharif himself.
The stream then went from a look at another person’s video to a sort of impromptu interview, where Sharif talked about a variety of Ashes of Creation’s mechanics like inter-node and inter-guild warfare, how open PvP works and how it encourages players to fight back by having less raw materials and processed goods drop if they fight back and die, the Corruption mechanic and how it’s meant to punish griefing, the node system, and character progression systems among other things.
Sharif also talked about the negative reaction to Apocalypse battle royale mode, once more explaining how the mode was ultimately used to test and refine combat for the full MMORPG. “If we had not done Apocalypse as a testing ground for many of the background systems and the architectures that we’re building in the MMORPG, we would not have discovered a significant issue that we did which we had to re-architect a lot of the backend systems for,” explains Sharif. “And if we had continued development of the MMORPG until alpha and then discovered that issue, it would have been a whole different beast to fix.”
