You have all heard by now the new developer updates. Sharing with you a recap and gameplay footage including PVP duels.
UPDATES
Team is working on a “True Raid Boss” with multiple phases for the upcoming alpha. The New Studio move is slated for July however depending on pandemic status as plans are continuously changing due to that. This week we have 35 minutes of brand new gameplay, this was the bulk of the new livestream thus there’s not much info. We’ll talk about the gameplay, 2v2 and quests.
Studio update of the 35 new positions that they opened up, 9 of which are filled so far.
Design team update – second test was conducted last week and did hit some snags. They’ve spent a lot of time deep diving into the snags and target spot testing is early next week. Spot test is when they specifically test certain areas of the game. It is important that they figure this out early in development. They cannot stress enough how grateful they are to have testers to iron out the issues early on. Hope this does not cause delay to the timeline of the alpha.
They have been working on some world bosses, two party-sized bosses and a True raid boss with true raid boss mechanics that is slated for the alpha. They are also working on putting the new iterative changes in quick so they can test them immediately to have them ready for the upcoming tests. We are all excited to see new bosses and what they’ve come up with because that is going to be a big part of the game. Also, March is the timeline for the new prototype of the combat. We hope to see the new combat with the new bosses or at least before them. In the 35 minute gameplay video, they do talk about the combat and they said we will be seeing iterative changes and we’ll see more during the non-nda testing.
Q&A
Thoughts on 35 minute gameplay video:
With Ashes of Creation, the game world looks really nice! The questing not having massive yellow exclamation marks over npc’s heads, having to actually read quests to figure out what you’re doing and completing them is something some, if not most, would like a lot. Not everyone’s cup of tea especially those who are coming from newer MMOs and have not experienced old school MMOs before.
The performance seems to be, at least for now, really good for such an early version of the game. It looks real smooth. However, when they were doing group duels (2v2) Steven with someone versus 2 other developers, the combat looked like a mess. It’s hard to get a feel for if the combat has any redeeming qualities right now, with how it was presented in this. They were having fun and at this stage we know that combat is the weak point. And hopefully they put a lot of time into addressing so it will change and this is just how it is for now. It’s nice to see that they’ve worked on the fire ball, you are not floating in the air stuck in place anymore.
The main thing we should take note of is that the game looks like it’s really coming together. We can be sure they have a lot of work done at this stage and hope in a month or two, we are talking about how good the combat is coming along as well.
Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFA4g…
Full Live Stream VoD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGQWE…
Ashes post: https://ashespost.com/2-26-21-livestr…
Ashes site: https://ashesofcreation.com/