Like clockwork, Ashes of Creation is striding into August with its July development update livestream, and also like clockwork, the stream has plenty of things for followers of the sandbox MMORPG to take in.
At the start of the broadcast, creative director Steven Sharif talked about what would be happening next once the game’s Alpha One playtest wraps up. Spot testing for certain tiers of backers will still be happening once Alpha One ends on August 13th, but Sharif notes that there will be “significant downtime” between tests as the devs take lessons and feedback from alpha and iterate on the game. Timelines weren’t specified, but Sharif did mention that there would be “several months’ worth” of this downtime.
Before that, however, there’s a little something new coming to the Alpha One test this week: a slightly adjusted melee combat feature that will change the “rooted” melee combat movement — where basic attacks saw the player character slide forward slightly with every weapon swing — with a more directionally controlled series of melee swings similar to the combat that was experienced in the Apocalypse standalone battle royale testing game. Players will be able to switch between these two styles by hitting the comma key by default, and the devs hope that they’ve struck the right balance between player input feedback and weapon impact and weight.
The rest of the stream provided the usual peeks at a variety of concept artworks and design pieces featuring Sharif’s deeply involved description of the Terror Bird mount (“This is a bird. And he’s definitely a terror.”) along with a round of player Q&A. The full stream can be found below, while a usual list of all the questions asked in the forums that weren’t touched on in the broadcast has already been collated.
