Talk:2019-11-22 Livestream
Nyers átirat
[Music] hello everyone welcome to our ashes of creation livestream this is our monthly development update livestream right now I'm trying to get the bear oh yeah as you saw here we lovely background that we're that we're using that kind of gives you a little sneak peek of a video that's coming out maybe next week or so so get excited excited but if you can see the lovely blue bear behind I keep you in their own direction yeah that will be that's one of our items on our month because maddoxes yeah so you're seeing some of those coming at you in a little bit quicker now that we're getting yeah so just to quickly introduce who we are and what we're doing what we do for Ashes of creation and interpret studios we'll do that and we'll talk about what we're gonna be going over today on this live stream and then we'll get right to it so quickly introduce yourself hello steven cherrier credit director a jeffrey bard lead designer and I'm Margaret Crone your community marketing lead so today we are going to be going over a quick studio update design engineering character and environment art as well as doing a Q you all have submitted wonderful questions and our lovely community manager toast will be coming on over here and she'll be asking all the questions to these guys I'm gonna give you all the answers or she'll bring bring them out of four quick updates like I said the multi Cosmetics are up so you can check out these ones we will be something that's over for the December one soon so stay tuned for those and then also we wanted to make a note about the creative director Center for quarter three we won't be having one for 2 3 but quarter 4 we will be having one in December so stay tuned for what then so we're going to be moving the quarter 3 update into the quarter 4 update and that'll be at the end of December yes because there's some stuff that we want to talk about yes yes so quickly let's just talk a little do you update your rats because we are moving yes we are moving soon things are going very good we you know we're moving towards the castle siege playable that people will be able to participate in and we are also on the road towards alpha one and we are you know building up our preparations for getting you guys into experiencing Ashes of Creation I'm pretty excited about that there's a lot of work that still has to be done yes trying to contain it so we're gonna quickly go over design and today Jeff is actually going to be representing do that yep I am I don't have you know my streams can be scary so you know okay yeah next next week next month I hope to have a special guests we'll see if we can convince yeah so let's talk a little bit about what you have going on in the design side I know that you guys have been working on Castle siege and you wanted to talk a little bit about the progress on that yeah so we've been doing some internal play tests here trying to get a feel for what the game is actually like when we play it live and not just in our heads we've got our final piece of the puzzle given to us not too long ago I'm the destruction side of things so we've been setting all that stuff up and getting it ready to go kind of the main thing that was holding back on us we were we were waiting to see what the chaos system was gonna bring us with unreal so we've integrated a little bit of that it's not quite ready for prime time so we're we're gonna be still looking at it as we go forward right now we're going with our own rolled system which is kind of what we expected we've been able to play around with it and see what the how the match has changed when we get that stuff in so it's been pretty exciting you know trying to figure out the right balance of destructibility versus you know when people could actually get past those walls absolutely I remember there is a discussion that actually we were having last week about destruction and something that came up in that discussion from one of the participants was you know obviously when you have destruction components you want to take a look at the you know the aesthetic of the destruction as well as a performance of detection right it's really important and that's really important and obviously we want to because of our large battles that we intend to have we want to make sure that it's as performant as possible and there was a you know concern about you know if we give up some of the fidelity of the you know these the aesthetic itself or performance you know how will it hold up in a few years times or something when against other competitors on the market and you know one of the things that I've experienced a probably many of you have experienced is that you know the destruction mechanics and or visuals that are present and other MMORPGs that I've played that you guys have played really what I'm seeing in the testing today blows that away it's pretty cool even if we you know are prioritizing as we should performance above all else still it is very visually aesthetic so are effects guys are environment guys they know what they're doing we have shown some of that in our previous live stream we took some screenshots and we showed you guys so definitely check out those images and I think we have some more images today - really hard on that yes all the playtesting what has been the most useful piece of information that you guys have received um well usually in this kind of first stage where we're doing an internal is kind of usually a numbers game you know we do a bunch of Excel documents kind of mapping out what we want things to do and kind of how we picture them you know we figure out how long it takes to kill somebody we figure out you know the average lifespan of a player and we kind of kind of map that out but you know those things don't capture what real play is like and so these internal tests give us an opportunity to actually see what happens and how well those those numbers align and so that's kind of where we're going right now is kind of tightening up those those numbers making sure that the time to kill is where we want it to be it will be a little bit longer time to kill in castles agents for me in the ER so it's it's a little bit different the way that we apply since of what you think they mmm Oh it'll be a lot closer you know it's still it's still a session-based thing and we don't want people to you know there's a limited set of abilities and so we need to make sure that the action keeps moving and you're not just you know people are just not just helps but yes right it'll definitely be definitely be much much closer but it's still a good ways off from I think what that time to kill will be in the MMORPG I mean one of the main deviations from let's say you know a puck in the BR to the castle siege is that now your health and armor are predicated on your class alignment as well so there's more relevance to you know choosing a tank type class when it comes to damage mitigation and overall health pool than there is let's say DPS and that kind of gives that semblance of the Trinity that right this will exist and each class will have its own special role and you'll feel that pretty we really wanted to lean into that class identity to make sure that you guys when you're playing as a tank feel like am this beefy dude who's preventing other people from killing my backline so we have a question from the chat which is not relevant to this discussion per se but it is to the background that you're seeing back here which is from cryo-em who wants to know maybe possible for a mayor to organize city festivals where residents will also have to collect and provide goods and resources to make the city more interesting make careers more meaningful promote the cohesiveness of a city and bring players together to achieve common goals so part of part of the job of a government is not just to you know establish relationships between other nodes and to start specific build projects within the city but also to organize certain events that allow for the citizenship to participate and determine the success or failure of said event you know whether or not that takes the form of a festival you know maybe not specifically but there are going to be opportunities in which the government the mayor gets to determine hey we need a event that you all citizens need to participate in and perhaps non-citizens as well yes first of all I don't know what sort of part of the job of the mayor's keep their citizens happy so that they can get elected again and so there will be opportunities like that in order to make that happen mm-hmm yeah anything else that you want to share with us in regards to the progress that you guys are making yeah so one of the things we're working on right now pretty hard is the lower side of things trying to architect out kind of the kind of flow of where everything that's going to go the engineering is kind of we we need this specific tool to make the quest kind of work the way they're going to they're pretty complex in in this game in terms of you know how predict its work and how one quest leads to another because people are going to be making real choices in the game and that's really different from any other MMO that's been out there so we need to architect that all out in order to make sure that we give engineering the the kind of examples that we need to get those tools ready to go and we have a unique you know in something that you know you as players will see in the alpha-1 that people participate in is you know we have to make sure that we structure the quest lines in a way that don't predetermine we're the largest focal point of activity will be in order that we do not cede the structure across all servers the whole aspect of you know something that's unique about ashes of creation is that the world developments from the world development standpoint you know these NPCs the towns that arise the quest lines that become available of players is something that's based on the player agency the player choice the community's direction as a whole and and while that that sort of direction can be determined differently under different servers based on what let's say racial populations and our starting points that players may begin and one additional component as Jeff was describing with regards to the questing is that there needs to be a variable of variance of questing that doesn't always take you to point a B but rather you know could be time session-based could be additive number of players at a party participate in certain quest lines and then you'll see some adaptive changes in those quests based on those things yeah so in order to do that we have to kind of figure out where we're going with the story and what options we want to present to you so that's kind of what we've been working on right now it's been a lot of fun it's my wheelhouse so it's been it's been a lot of really exciting thing to work on so making some tools internally to try to make sure that those things work properly and kind of playing through the storylines and there's a lot of story many many many tech yes if there's a lot of stuff to write yeah we're from the higher level first and then we get that down to the nitty-gritty as time goes on and if you watched our Extra Life livestream we did kind of show off some of the story bear I think we're thinking about how we want to show the last end a part of that story so we might do like a whole video that incorporates all of those things so stay tuned for that down the line that's me which is gonna talk quite a bit about some other Castle siege elements as well what you do on the team for anybody who's new are just tuning in for the first time hi my name is Alex I'm a programmer I've been with a company almost three years now I basically do system design system programming basically developing them cover different like know sign also covering a box I'd yeah that's pretty much now which takes a lot of the the systems that are meant to be available in the MMORPG from a gameplay standpoint and actually codes them well there are more specific engineers right like network engineers graphical engineer its platform engineers but then from a gameplay standpoint you know you're in the nitty gritty of these systems and mechanics that kind of perfection you work really closely with the design team yeah and if you listen to our previous live streams which you definitely should go check them out so we kind of show you all kinds of different things in the progress of development they also talk to a little bit about how you guys met which is really funny so let's go into the stuff for this week I think you wanted to give a little platform information as well as the platform team has been working on I mean yeah there's a short update they basically we're working on the authentication improving it basically it's performance flow so I think I'm actually going to be deploying it pretty soon I think this week next week so that's good stuff and then mostly the date time I'm renewing science to the engineering side which you do have quite a few things that you want to talk about so the first thing that you want to talk about was wall destruction yeah so yeah we've been heavily working on basic SOC systems and part of it is of all destruction so we already had a system design for a park to do a basic a component destruction and like like our houses where like individual pieces can be blown up and then as number of pieces get blown up the whole structure disappears this was a little bit different challenge because as Jeff was mentioning the kind of system was not yet on par of production yet so we were not able to heavily rely on it so we had to kind of create our own system which basically in a sense takes an object and like a castle siege wall and as you damage it it goes through stages and possibly different randomizations think of stages so like you start hitting it let's say chomp chips away and then you get it more like what so below 50% and then like now the path that opens up smaller paths and then you destroyed it completely becomes the woods now those paths be specific to the location that you're hitting them at or so they'll be most designed to decide for us is mostly functionality then right so as they design the ways and I grumbo and variations of the combo that's basically going to they're based in their choice right and then additionally you know the destruction system that has been created has to be able to facilitate kind of a building destruction that we might see and note sieges and in the destruction per se of free colt perhaps if of nodes each losses right those for you know that become susceptible and part of this destruction system that's you know becoming available now with the castle siege is to facilitate those different state changes between once it hits a hit point threshold to being inaccessible and a partially destructed to say or being a fully destructed site and the
Steven: Ramifications that that has on gameplay for let's say citizens of a node is you know as the attackers are sieging a city you know they have obviously a win condition- a win objective- but additionally there can be casualties from a structural standpoint during that process. So let's say if the you know attackers were to not succeed in completely destroying the node they could still affect damage across multiple types of buildings that are present within the node, which disables services for that those citizens and also will require some type of reconstruction effort on behalf of the citizens. So making sure that the destruction system is capable of presenting those partially destructed states of those buildings is also one of the components of the future.
Alex: Correct. Yeah as we design all these systems we need to make sure that multi-purpose: It's not only affects one. I especially like this system also could be potentially used for construction right, so like the same similar mechanics is used for construction where you build out it becomes the full thing.
Steven: And that also you know the from a design standpoint you know that makes city sieges more relevant not just towards the goal of destroying per-se the city. You might not be capable of doing that as an attacker. You know because that's a significant undertaking. You have significant resources and population to do that; but rather you could be more precision oriented in the decision to attack a city. Let's it's a rival node that's trying to reach you know a node stage five or something and you want to disable their ability for the religious system to progress so you target the temple during the attack, or you want to disable their scholars academy from reaching a higher level so that your nodes can; or you want to disable multiple buildings that allow for experience and quests to be undertaken by its citizenship, which prevents them from keeping up in pace of experience gained with your node. These can be more precision oriented and don't have to effectualize an actual takeover of the node.
Margaret: So how would that technically work from the player standpoint if like there you're like okay I will I want to attack like a specific type of building or progress?
Steven: Right so those buildings are present during the assault and they take damage just like you know any other structure. Not all buildings will because not all buildings will be a service-oriented building where it has questing or organizational importance. You know you might have just random houses that can necessarily take damage and be destroyed because they have no significance; but there will be multiple buildings that are within the the node's layout that do offer quests and services and interactions and merchants; and those can be targeted with trebuchets, with siege weaponry: They can be targeted by players. There can be placed destruction and bombs that are put there to kind of destroy those buildings; and you can either destroy it down to as Alex is saying a partially distructed state, in which obviously that'd be visually represented through the destruction mechanics that are being developed now for castle siege. You'll see the building take damage and then you'll see its mesh change to that partial destruction state: You'll know that you've affected you know this effectively disabled that building; and then when the when the siege is over if the node still exists there will be a repair undertaking by players to gather the resources - similar to when it was first constructed - gather the resources to basically rebuild them
Margaret: You lose the resources that you that were used to create that the building and now
Steven: Absolutely
interesting okay well moving on from that because that was a lot but I think I know that basically you're building that back end of a lot of those things and then that doesn't even just like you said it's not only going to hit just to kind of recap that it's not only going to affect destruction but it can affect a lot of the armed systems in place speaking of another system we have the siege weapon systems so yes yes as you have seen we've had some criminally like siege videos where you can kind of enter the siege vehicle and drive around so the big system of that we had to build is visibly put you like kind of a seat that like so when you enter itself just become one with the trebuchet become one ballista you can actually yeah you have a you can see basically a character and the ability for other players to potentially damage it so for example you can have a person on ballista and then let's say a sniper snaps you off and then basically you die you'll detach and then someone else can get on so you kind of like instead of like destroying the actual siege weapon you can prevent them from attacking but just move it so yeah that system was very interesting to design it was a lot of interesting things we learned about how the possession happens an attachment happens between the moral and technical cycle yeah yeah and on those siege weapons there's also some of them have secondary weapons that you can have a secondary player sitting in your vehicle yeah and they can kind of help protect you from those snipers so their job is to be like ok I'm protecting them the ballista or whatever that vehicle is and then your job is to kill please with this powerful vehicle it's kind of an interesting system and then the next thing that you're working on was the siege weapon boxes so yeah our team also like worked on so that laying items yeah so like basically for Trevor Shay's we were thinking and as I was requesting basic and interactable system where you can interact with an item like a pick it up carry it and then carried for example towards the trebuchet and we fill the ammo I want to build a higher a troll to carry the other thing could be also potentially is the similar similar Teta functionality for interactable which as you pick up the box and then as you pick up you have this layout of deployable trebuchet and then as you carry it you one like for example go to a specific spot and then say like okay I'm gonna deploy this trebuchet here and then we're gonna have a cast time of production time and then it will appear and then you other people can use it or you can use it and as any I mean these boxes represent so as as objectives are taken these boxes will spawn these ammo crates will spawn good to kind of simulate what would be supply lines as you make progress in your objective you know you are now creating these supply lines to support your war effort at that location so these boxes spawn when players pick them up they entered into an encumbrance state where they kind of move a little bit slower they're easier to pick off and you have to kind of strategically move these supplies across the battlefield whether they be siege weapons whether the ammunition for siege weapons but is it is a perilous venture on behalf of the players to move these supplies across the battlefield and then Steven how do you first see like this system being utilized in the MMORPG beyond just procedures yeah absolutely I mean it's so I mean one thing we want to accomplish you know with these types of you know high combat oriented engagements such as castle sieges or node sieges is that there is a place for individuals across the tactical map here it's not just about you know focusing a giant raid or a zerg into a into a choke point but rather it is you know more strategic in the sense of of putting in precision focus on where these supplies need to be a sort of support structure that individuals or smaller groups can participate in in order to effectuate change on the battlefield and that's part of really what the system accomplishes in the MMORPG not just the only system that targets that type of effect but this in particular allows for groups of people to be instrumental in supporting the the larger overall strategy of the engagement and then we have a question from the chat which is from a KOCO 954 who wants to know how will the destruction mechanics work with the custom building tool do they work together and play nice so the custom building tool is a tool that we had showcased before which is kind of showing how the note buildings pop up and are created as well as the creation of buildings and how they're like kind of dynamic we can kind of different types of building I was totally distracted by reading somebody say that it would be the tolerance job to take these crates I think patrollers should take them because it shows patrols like
Steven: I need to clarify that but the Tulnar- this is a question that was asked to me last week: Were the Tulnar a result of corruption in their creation, or was it purely a kind of you know crossbreeding between the multiple minor and major races that existed in the Underrealm during the after the apocalypse? They are not a result of corruption. So there is no corruption that was that was taken into account during their creation. So I noticed in discord and other parts of our community that they've somewhat become a pariah of the other players, but they are very unique and don't deserve to be that pariah, so.
Margaret: He's just saying this because it got turned into one.
okay if you watched our extra life I was a taller box so I'll ask the question again which is how will destruction mechanics work with the custom building tool do they work together and play nice so this was the creation of buildings that made dynamic tool that we have so so the dynamic tool is meant to answer you know the bigger content problem that is in creating you know a diverse landscape of these types of structures across the nodes so that nodes don't look too similar or the same as you come across them throughout the world right we want a way for our environment artists to you know have a large disposal in front of them of unique buildings and that's what that tool really accommodates does that mean that we're not going to have you know one offs and you know more curated required buildings no we absolutely will but this kind of answers the bulk of it and then the question really is how does destruction incorporate with that or do it do those two things work together oh absolutely yeah so you know these these sets are created in a modular fashion so you know environment kind of creates the method that they want to employ destruction within these modular sets whether that's brought down to the base piece of the modular set and there's a destructed state for that piece or whether or not they fuse those those finished pieces together into one building and then create a destructed state of that building really that I think they're going to be testing I think they're testing currently both methods right now to see how that's going to play out absolutely so either one works it's like well why is it yeah and and right now and what Apoc really allowed us to do is you know a POC was kind of the epitome of the least performant aspect of how that can be the case because each individual piece was destructible in those buildings so it was you know a collection of multiple actors whereas you know the way we're going to address it in the MMORPG is fusing that into one actor that has multiple states based on a threshold of hit points and that's really going to be able to accomplish I think a more performance setting in the MMORPG yeah correct and we are and that's the kind of stuff that you're already working on so peasant or be seen is I read that as one word be seen is wondering will there be friendly fire from explosions and caps and sieges will be friendly fire from explosions there will not be friendly fire on teams from specific projectiles that might emanate from siege weapons or other players however there could be occurrences where a siege projectile hits a wall and there's an X there as a debris AoE that maybe occurs around that wall and that could damage all players not necessarily from the projectile but from the state change there could be like an explosion that's an AoE you know that that if you're around that area you could be damaged yes but not specifically from players or projectiles up there players all right and I want to move on to the next topic for you because I know you still have a lot more to go through we still have a lot of questions to answer to its control points and fast travel functionality yes so one of the design requests we had is for example we have respond points but if the map is pretty large and there is let's say five to eight control points there then you have an ability to fast travel between them so that let's say you just respond and you want to go back into the battlefield as soon as possible and stuff walking you know for five minutes then you know interacting with enemy and then dying and then repeating we allow you the a sense of basically able to move between one point to another obviously there's caveats to that but they're like let's say control point will be contested or not those always still under design but the base functionality for it is yeah being developed in pretty much done we actually also almost finished with the UI elements for that so that if the big map brings up showing you where all the control points are and whether you can teleport it out or not that's also in part of the board our UI artists artists engineer yeah and this type of you know control point fast travel you know this is something we're going to test with C just to see how it impacts the overall flow of combat whether or not it's too powerful to allow you know groups to quickly traverse large expanses in the in the siege map but I mean it does place an emphasis on just how important control points are because not only do they provide those supply routes that we've discussed in addition to certain buffs and respawn timers but now they also provide a significant amount of mobility across the battlefield and that as we know many of us who participated in these types of large combat is probably the most important tool that could be associated with the control points correct yeah its plays in very heavily the way you play castle siege and then moving on to our leaderboard system and stat tracking so I know players have been asking about this in the VR mode for apocalypse but also it is something that we're gonna need for the MMO and for a lot of other elements of all of our games so yeah so fewer engineers been working on leaderboards which is basically a stat tracking from gameplay we've been integrating different back-end services to basically collected data and aggregated and present it to the player which basically let the front end of UI yeah i mean it's it's we've pretty much done with it I think we potentially gonna have it roll out very very soon it does have a different type of aggregations for example promote per region a region and that's important to be able to segment that because let's say once we have our MMO and our arena instance scene for example comes up we'll be able to say hey who's like top kill death ratio who who's the best in the region for this class who's the best deal killer that's not try so yeah that lets the whole system is I think very important to gamers especially who enjoy but yeah so now let's say like yeah it's not a surgeon gonna be limited to PvP if we have like sort of achievements or achievement conference it's gonna be great to have a leader boards of I mean achievement points in however if we have a those we partition based on you know part of that regionality and the base functionality that's being presented now and the leaderboard implementation is establishing the foundation for how we will implement that in the MMORPG having it segmented by server having it segmented by even potentially race you know whatever type of partitions we want to put in there that give granularity when play players can see kind of their position and the overall population of the of their server and how they perform against other players yeah and the collection of that data that we're pulling on the backend which is a whole other thank you and then it basically stew like lost and Jane point about how this whole services that we have to like because they basically live in aa main engine services that are very services that we create basically we optimizing and installing those services as was very heavy effort in that part a specialization or because collecting all the data and transferring it to the service could potentially affect the gameplay on the server and then we want to make sure that our server is you know taking pretty fast and like doesn't great like or have issues with incoming on building traffic so that's was very important question I mean a lot of so much of what the engineering team has ahead of them you know from a problem-solving standpoint is you know MMORPGs as you guys know is a very very very difficult game to make because there's a lot of unique problems that exists within MMOs that don't exist within other games and there's a lot of you know core functionality that doesn't come out of the box with a you know commercial engine like Unreal Engine 4 although it's an amazing engine and has amazing tools and support you know there are custom solutions that have to be created in order to make sure that I'm an optimization standpoint you know we are able to facilitate a large number of players on single servers and able to play with one another in a open-world environment yeah engineering team is working very hard on doing a lot of things for us but I want to wrap this up with one last question from our chat which is scooter Peter who wants to know will you migrate to the chaos system when it's ready or will you be going forward with your custom direction or destruction system and what is special about chaos well I mean we can talk about it I mean current system I think so then the biggest problem is it's it's a physics based system and physics back system is very very hard to implement MMORPGs because large yeah because it's it's a lot of that but it's a lot of polygons so not only yeah but like hundreds of people in your screen now you have to also display all those destructible polygons and the way it's you know generates and it also needs to be synchronized at ground my basic among other players so yeah the biggest challenge is basically you know those points and I mean we obviously we're gonna be continued looking at account system and seeing how far it goes but right now it's it's very unlikely it's baby state just like a baby or betta unless I think when it comes to you know chaos I don't think it was created to be specifically for massively multiplayer games you know it's something that's that's more related to creating this really cool looking procedural kind of destructive destruction that's good in a single player or a very you know small small group game you know whether or not that it can be up to the spec of performance that we need it to be for an MMORPG that's something that needs to be determined later as it gets fleshed out more like Alec said it's in a baby state right now it's or beta state you know it was just rolled out with the most recent engine from unreal so you know we're not gonna we're not gonna move forward specifically with that right now we have our own kind of custom solution we're going to to do but obviously we'll be keeping tabs on how it develops and potentially even if it doesn't fit our needs we could potentially have small pieces to like to demonstrate or highlight certain features okay but on our front we're always looking at all the TAC and seeing how we can integrate things in that sword and obviously we need to move quickly so you know sometimes we're like okay well this is an in a state where we're ready to use it yet so that's why we've moved on and we've designed our own system so thank you so much thank you so much we're gonna move on to our games and we actually have Chris joining us for character and environment so he'll be covering both of those topics and we have a fancy new overlay for this one but first of all I am kind of interested I did it's been our winners on that six months ago because like that some kind of told the audience who maybe is if they're new to our livestream they have a check I am the Chris Atkins I'm the lead character artist basically just kind of flailing on the creatures and a little doodads that run around and all but now doodads yeah all of them and yet helping out an animation where I can and stuff the world the animation character teams someday we'll get Chris yeah he'll never I know I just amazing but he's just like he's not yeah we got it like Keith comes on a lot of things agencia I know they do but Keith sounds like a low resting pulse so he can come on here no problem everybody else is like yeah and I don't want to force people on camera who don't want to but I know our community really wants to do so maybe you'll see them in videos because I think that's a little bit yeah definitely like I've seen Carson probably before on a couple videos his favorite dry mouth video he's like if I could talk to future me I would give myself a glass of water so we're gonna go over all of the wonderful things that you have brought us today and the first thing is talking a little bit about the servant of the soil and you actually worked on this yeah yeah this is something so this is a monthly cosmetic item that you guys have seen before so if we could go ahead and swap over to that asset that'd be great yes actually I had a ton of fun doing this uh I've really been in a lot of like player-character stuff in armor sets for the last wild Avella yeah yeah yeah I mean we've been sneaking creatures in here and there I just haven't got to do that many so yeah I had a really nice time sculpting this and it was fun again jinn see and the whole team Carson Keith everyone really collaborative so everyone gave me a ton of feedback during the whole skull process I had a really fun time designing this this month because this month is very like clerical and like nature or yeah so it was really fun to to do and you guys made it come to fruition and it's amazing no I appreciate it yeah a lot of the design stuff that's been coming in for the cosmetics is awesome there's a lot of really cool stuff and yet we're just kind of hammering it out I mean our main focus right now is been like that he has defined butt cheeks he does those are called mark mark cheats yes there's been a lot with this guy with moss placement and other things yeah it was really fun though we have a lot of great artists here and you know driving style so it's pretty easy when you get stuff like this to just sculpt someone said he missed log day he did miss log day look at him look at his little stones he even has the little stuff coming on yeah I still try to follow it kind of human anatomy from one mountain creature so you still try to hit all those muscle groups and parts but yeah is really fun to do yeah I think my team actually approves of something I did for once it's good it's good I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about this creature and all Stephen yeah I think it's you know one of the things that is really cool about this little guy is like all of our cosmetic pets that we've had available you know he's just gonna follow around you know your character and kind of hang out with you and it's gonna be interesting to see what type of you know ancillary effects like this he sprouted little flowers off of him yeah one of the lightning bugs come on ambien you know it's gonna be fun to see effects kind of get a hold of this and play around with that and I think animation has got it and they're gonna start working yeah yeah they have it now and uh speaking of modularity just I think we've been talking about a lot on all the teams yeah basically this was constructed as like a torso and all those parts the head arms and legs could all be swap so we're really trying to think about the variation going forward especially you know mmm oh I mean exactly as you know because you you know having having that reusability in a way that you know answers the question of a lot of different types of creatures that we want to have and making sure that this can branch out no pun intended to a lot of different the different uses yeah well hopefully you all are doing that we'll probably show off some of the animations maybe next months livestream or so and so forth depending on how far along they are yeah they're starting to rig it right now so let's move to the war beasts which this is another gin secret yeah which is fantastic out of her head right yes what I want to live in her head yeah she makes so many amazing things probably small yeah it's very tired because she's small yes again with reusability we basically have a lot of like Rhino type skeleton or anything's coming up so this was one where she's sort of been living off of a lot of concepts because we had so many and then she sort of had an idea about see each watches Lord of the Rings and if we have issues a cod loved to make this big B so she was showing it to me I was like oh you literally call about what was great because that's what she was going for I know yeah it's really nice to see her there has been a lot of discussion about how think this is because she was envisioning it like bigger than an l a-- once the keep scaling it up yeah she wants a person the size of a toenail well I don't know per se I just said that it could only be the scale she wanted it to be in a specific setting yes yeah which is okay but obviously you know part of what character goes through is is you know creating these kind of master segments of parameters in which these different mounts and/or creatures can exist in that makes sense from an environment standpoint like going through doors or you know mr. kool-aid yes so right now I think you on the screen you can see kind of just going through her speed sculpt of everything but yeah just gave her a little direction on basically keep a rhino proportions so we can reuse the skeleton and then have fun with it and that's exactly what she did so it's really nice to see her go off concept I mean she's a great artist she made like the saddle or settled with like the reins oh yeah all the yolk and the barding and everything like that yeah because Chris Myers the lead animator you'd wanted to make sure it had sort of attachment points so if we can hook it up because it's gonna be used to kind of like pull siege weaponry yeah I think our plane is sort of ambient for now but yeah it could definitely be used in multiple facets someday we will get her on I keep asking you're the one that's gonna have to talk her into it she likes you I feel like or maybe maybe it'll be a video I was just bawling told her I don't know get on there and then we have another dragon that we were initially so you guys have seemed kind of warm link dragons this is an elder dragon that is being worked on and this is another creation from Kiki's head yep which Keys is you know you've seen him on the stream here before he's very chill but he is great yeah we're very lucky all the character artists are very creature oriented and they love it I mean Jesse knows so much about everything you know partnered she's of life birds I have this pan I have this so she knows so much about everything and he's exactly the same way where he's he loves characters he loves creatures and he loves just design he likes concept to kind of give him you know a little direction but he loves making up stuff and yeah this thing's great now this guy is massive yes a I mean a character would likely come up about maybe a toe size on him yes yeah we want us to be a magic elders right yes exactly and seeing I I remember when I used to play lineage to and the first boss I fought in lineage 2 was an Tharus and an Tharus was this huge boss in like juice car I mean huge boss and I thought that was so cool because you would see a hundred plus people running around in that and he just workin every it was a really fun experience so having something that's super you know big like this guy is very cool yeah I think you did a really nice job and it's got a lot of like the quality of like Elder Scrolls dragons and stuff yeah if that is way it would be one guy running at that with a sword that's the game he wants to live so fun story fun story back in Linnaeus to that fight that with em Faris you know would take upwards of like six hours back in the original like you know see two days and I was playing a bishop and we had an enemy alliance that went to go fight in Paris and there was a I was in the raid with them and I left the raid and it took like six hours like I said but you would in lineage it took like I would say six hours to get a percent at like max level right so it was a significant time and when he died he would lose like four percent it was never as my healer well I was playing a bishop and I was kind of a spy in that and after about five hours of fighting the boss and it was down to like three percent I left the raid and cast a restore life on the boss and brought it back up drops from I flagged and died though experience they did change the experience now moving on to the troll creature which you have seen a lot of progression I think we've got to see him in the modeling phase you've seen him in the concept phase and now you're getting to see kind of like the meshes yeah is texturing and getting the materials on like you can see the light kind of passing through the ears like it's all it's called subsurface scattering it's all looking stuff but yeah yeah car Carson this was perfect for him I mean he's a funny silly guy and I think his Pinterest board was just the most ridiculous thing oh it's a reference because we kept telling them like you know make a kind of grow lesions and boils and stuff looks like he's seen some just delighted every time like whenever we grab the models from the model thing like their eyes aren't like moving around so all of the models always look like yes we have a lot of dead faces living because we have to tear a pose and just start so animation can rig everything without your singles when you're seeing those things like that's the reason why because so it's more comedic on this guy but no it is because his eyes are huge in like yeah Carson had originally modeled this huge smirk and I'm like no you have to neutralize it and then animal bring it back so he's he's so excited to see it walking around I don't think we threw in hands in but he is he's got quite the swagger when I got the concept art for this originally he didn't have a smile on his face and he was I was like he looks like he's gonna go like murder people yeah yeah yeah and so like they added a smile to him like okay maybe now he looks like oh yes you think um I say to take a smile away and then we look scary like you have a nighttime version where he doesn't smile oh we can definitely do but in the days we should just give him the balloon and we should also have a cosmetic animation where when you're fighting a monster he just runs up and goes psycho and like starts stabbing oh yeah I have a lot of thoughts come upstairs let's deliver our thoughts to me oh my gosh she's supposed to be bringing me fireworks and joins me nothing but joy all the time oh my gosh moving on we have our tied snapper yes you probably seen concept art of but this thing is so good I love turtles yeah yeah and this is another one of Carson and he's sort of rounder now right now he's working on the saddle and adding hair and stuff so this these shots are sort of in progress but this was yeah closer to the end of him getting to texturing yeah this is the first one on old aquatic mouth that you guys have seen right others are not yeah this one's only in the water so you can summon him when you're in the water and he will go underwater and be above water for you but not on land yeah we're just starting to wait and imagine going on land with this good maybe when you summon him on land he can't move and he just kind of flaps by the guard thought is that yeah once you dive into some body of water for those underwater quests this is what you know whatever if you're riding a horse on land and then you have this right in your inventory then I'll just swap yeah oh oh is it not no you have to summon them differently so like you you'll have your mounts in your inventory and then you'll activate the mount to bring it up and you only maybe you can bring this up on land but if he's on land he disclosed [Laughter] maybe he lays some eggs on land on land I know we have that animal husbandry yeah that's doing Christmas when he was thinking about that because we've been talking about like to Lennar and it's husbandry and like how those systems are gonna work in like house creatures are gonna be created and I can't just you know it'll be fine we'll get it work and don't worry it's getting there so I think that's all we're gonna move on to environment art which Chris is gonna kind of take over because bacon is not his little ones not feeling good so no so we were planning on having it in here but Chris is valiantly offered to take on the task of talking over these things so the first one is the junior node concepts you've been seeing some of the concept art for all of the nodes that we were creating and the different tiers of them so I don't know so this is kind of giving you guys you know a look at the mood pieces for these dunia architectural standpoints in what will be dinner nodes you know obviously you know these are being created in the same fashion using you know that design tool for environment as well as a modular you know set set for creating these but it gives you an idea of what that node kind of architectural influences will look like from a denier standpoint so this is the secondary one you can even see some some boards in there yeah you're looking close enough yeah and the idea here is to kind of you know represent that industrial nature in the you know components of these buildings but also you know keeping them agrarian in in the aspect that you know they have to still manage livestock and you know we're crops and stuff like that are these um posted up for they can they look at these and click and zoom you know yeah but we will be it would just be neat because these pieces are so amazing my Stephan saying like if you just focus and look at them your kids just to notice all these little details you post a lot of things to our Instagram leaders so definitely check those things out and then also we kind of more pieces and things of that sort that will incorporate some of these so stay tuned yeah it's always amaze right right right now actually yeah right which would make these great great examples of just kind of setting the mood and composition for how these these nose will look yeah he's got great looking how the buildings will sit on them it's just wonderful yeah its composition stuff is it was really strong mm-hmm I think is that the last one on that one yes so now we're going to move on to the torpid castle siege map so you have been seeing some images of the castle siege map where you saw some destruction now you're gonna get a few more shots of like different areas in the environment that they're creating I mean I don't know Stephen wants to talk a little bit about like the design direction in some of these as well yeah absolutely so you know as you guys know in the MMORPG there are five castles that will be present on the map and one of these castles will be a an original dunes and Cowell castle we caught the junior castle map but really these castles are remnants of the old world you know pre-apocalypse that as you re-enter Vera you'll be you'll be taking back so you know this particular siege map that will be present in our siege testing in apocalypse will be representative of the set that's used to create the the castle in the MMORPG so the idea here is to have you know a composition that blends into the side of a mountain because you know traditionally that's where the dunes and killed dwarves originated from before they split off into the dunya mana kueh but what you see here is that that more traditional type stone facing mountain esque incorporated a castle structure so these look very very good yeah mm-hmm and we're going to be battling in this so that would be very exciting I know they did start out with a little bit of some basically on the design front - they did some like white boxing or gray boxing area so they were like here's how we want the design to look and then they were taking all the pieces and elements that they have created from the Dwarven raised structure and then placing those in those places of making sure those catwalks are where they need to be and making sure that those walls are where they need to be placed in order to make the combat get really good and we were testing all of those things out and you know there might be places there might be some structure sexual issues that might need to be moved in those play testing phases pill obviously we do want spaces where you know you can kind of snipe down from or snipe from above or jump from above that sort so another important aspect about you know this particular map that you're seeing is as you guys have are probably aware in the MMORPG you know each castle each of the five castles will have three support nodes around them that are not integrated into the traditional node structure of the world from a development standpoint but rather exist twos to serve the defenses and abilities of that particular castle in the MMORPG they can only reach stage level three and the guild that occupies the the castle is going to be responsible for ensuring that they grow during the prerequisite weeks to the siege so three of those you know if there's four week intervals between sieges in the MMORPG week one will see node a need to be developed week two will see no B week three will see note C and then you'll have the fourth week with the castle siege and based on the success of that occupying guild in order to forge alliances and partnerships with other communities within the game they can lead trade goods and resources into those nodes to build them up and each week that that node needs to be built up enemies of the guild who can participate in attempting to destroy those support nodes in order to reduce the defense capabilities of the castle during the siege all right and that's gonna kind of wrap up our environment that's right gonna be something out as well we're gonna welcome on your community manager which is the wonderful lieutenant toaster hanging out and chat with some people earlier we're having a pre-party we were enjoying all of the creatures and environments we were looking at we love parties people were really loving that dragon we have some amateur 3d printers in the office I believe Roy and grat are they oftentimes bring in kind of stuff that they like salvo arm or whatever that he's creating for a robot that he's making and it's really cool when he brings a man he also brings in some some fun like Sisulu yeah he made a statue and I think you did but Curtis is moving 3d prints also 3d printed a version of the staff a you know you design something in the game and then you're able to make a cool 3d version will be like look I made this both physically and somebody said I thought it's a hard scene Cthulhu Cthulhu well nobody can pronounce it anyway who knows how they say it in the deep right right yeah I'm sure there's no actual letters that correct anyways I'm here like I am every month with awesome questions from our community thank you guys for submitting your questions usually the week before the live stream we open up a forum thread let you know we're going to be doing the live stream and ask you guys to submit your questions for our live Q&A; so thank you guys for doing that we asked you to only submit one question please so that we can make sure to get questions for more of the community so if you did put more than one question in your unfortunately we've skipped over it for this time so just keep that in mind for the future in case you don't hear an answer we got spread out the love exactly we're sharing in the love with everyone who foods what is it it is I think I ordered urban plates delicious okay so without further ado we're going to start with a Venn therians question who asks what abilities or early versions of abilities will be usable for the classes in castle siege will it be the same as the BR ability is tied to the weapons those classes could use so like a halberd lifesteal for right you'll see some of the abilities from the VR make their way over to siege they'll change form a little bit change numbers change effectiveness but by and large all the abilities for the classes are new and you know VR was kind of we needed useful abilities that were useful all the time and here in the class system they are tailored specifically to classes and they are not tied specifically to a weapon that you request rather than more traditional MMO hotbar type skills that you can use okay next up Magic Man asks well we have to go through specific quests just to be able to progress or unlock something as it is the only way to obtain that specific thing so I eat content or ability to progress that is locked behind quests or will they have that sandbox freedom in which case we can do as we please and don't Mitch miss much without doing quests so like is there certain content or items behind yes you will not be able to do everything if you don't do the quests right and not only that but you won't be able to do everything if the world composition and development doesn't progress so if other people are choosing not to do the quest right right yeah some things some things are getting behind quests some things are getting no levels some things are getting behind you know unlocking a dungeon like there's all sorts of things that gate and change sort of how the world works based on how you do them and what the population is doing and that doesn't mean just because something is is gated that you cannot do something the idea is that if something is gated there's always a predicated activity or something you can do to help unlock and I'm getting that thing alright sigh max I love this question by the way asks as a healer will I have quests that involved me healing her NPCs stopping an epidemic from spreading or other healer type things or will I just be another damage dealer when I'm not in a group um yeah so there are there's a concept of class quest lines and things like that and once we start exploring those things and you know the little puppy organizations and things like that there will be options to complete quests that are you know not killing things you know we want to have optional objectives where you can complete one question yeah the goal is to make sure that like your class feels relevant than what you're doing and that your choices that matter and how you decide to play whatever that woody you can be that friendly neighborhood cleric to everyone all right son frog asks will castle siege be integrated into the VR and in this case I assume that it means apocalypse or will it be a separate downloadable game no it would be integrated into yes so you will choose an apocalypse castle see each of the artists will see a balcony Koresh Koresh asks it was mentioned before that you plan to provide API access for game information will it be a REST API covering common public stuff like items region info auctions and will it be protected to manage character and account settings so they were just asking for more details on the API yes I know it's gonna be very limited in terms of what you're gonna be able to grab right you know we don't want you grabbing quests data beforehand we don't want you grabbing you know node information or dungeon information so I mean it's still quite a long ways from from getting all that stuff implemented so we don't have answers for that quite yet Hyrum asks what type of gold things not necessarily just items things but gold sinks in general have you planned for the game to keep the economy in check because I know you guys have talked about some items that's before in terms of durability and loss yeah so in addition to that I mean we have this idea of a dynamic economy right so that quest rewards and NPC shopkeepers and things of that nature change the prices both on the bike and selling side dynamically based on what the economy is doing so that we have you know a throttle that we can use their try think of some other you know the thing is that generally as we implement resource cost based systems they will have a gold component cost associated with those as well yeah so the construction of let's say buildings the deployment of buildings the taxation of nodes and citizenship you know the taxation of particular organizations and or even tithing in the religious systems the you know there's a lot the idea behind you know the the kind of closed economic system that we want to have in the game is to incorporate a significant amount of sync so that there is a reliance built upon the crafting organizations of the world of crafting players and and players who can sustain that economy so to speak yeah all right Shay's asks we've seen early iterations of the ping system and apocalypse with the ability to place markers using the middle mouse button are there any plans to expand on this system to add additional functionality such as a pain wheel so I guess you know director or raid leader pings and more absolutely so I mean anytime you see kind of you know implementation of you know gameplay systems through either apocalypse or in the alpha ones and end or two you're going to see those from a core feature set a core functionality standpoint and many of those systems get expanded upon for their you know end goal type feature set one of which is absolutely the thing system and directional commands which doesn't we want grouping to be easy and we want you know leaders to be able to organize and communicate quickly with with their parties so that's that's something that we're still exploring and we're still developing more tools to help people do that Damocles asks will secondary classes still influence their staff growth and what happens if you change your secondary cause so secondary classes and cleansing static rose yes I surely don't yeah justice I don't it would be through like sort of how the augments like integrate with like passives yeah they might do some things but they certainly aren't planning to directly influence that growth I know originally very early on we did have plans to incorporate stat stat changes based on your secondary class choice I remember when we were originally talking about how your you know primary archetype would influence whether or not your mental stats and our physical stats get into certain bonuses and leveling and then that can change and you can get on mine is that but I think we moved away from that recently you know the past you know half year or so when when implementing the waterfall stats for alpha one yeah they're already so complex and they're already so they do what we want them to do that I don't it's not really necessary there's so many options with with regards to you know armor and equipment and passives and all that stuff to sort of customize your stats that that adding that on top of it is kind of almost another level of chaos it doesn't and but I mean keeping in mind however that alpha is intended to test them easy decisions so it's entirely possible as everything we discussed can change every plant no wait no plan survives contact with the enemy [Laughter] my quotes okay Griffith asks will there be dangerous flora such as cactus that can be planted and used as a strategic advantage in battle so like a floor has a siege weapon in Tokyo your we certainly have a plan for that not not in that sort of way like there will almost certainty right the way it doesn't really be like okay already so that might be something you can do but not sort of on that global scale where where would effective so you can already see and you know some of the skills we put in a pot for an alpha zero that there are kind of control/command skills that obstruct the battlefield with the you know wall right with fire line with kind of being able to direct the route of your enemy in a direction you want from an advantage standpoint whether or not they'll be plants probably not it's certainly not like I'm not going to be a farmer and I'm not going to go plant some seeds particular plant based class like an arborist all right a Nixon asks will we be able to toggle off cosmetics for other people so viewing cosmetics further yes so we could see only their original here there yes part of the default player appearance that we want to make sure is available to players in order to increase performance during large battles will incorporate reducing other players down to a base poly set that is less taxing on your rendering ku means all right Diggs asks other than augments and stats how does secondary secondary archetype affect a player character for example if a guardian and warden used the exact same religious augments instead of subclass augments would they be functionally the same so in demand it demands specific example yeah well well it would depend on your skill choice in your master class so as you build out and assign your skill points to adopt either passives or active skills if you were to follow the same path with regards to your skill tree yes they would be effectively the same but there are there are other ways in which your secondary class affects your player character it's not just reduced to two your men choices they're also going to be other availabilities from a from a from a adventuring class development standpoint that you will be able to select from based on your choices in your secondary class all right wellö asks it has been said before that animation cancelling will not be a thing in combat but what about cancelling channeling for example if I'm casting a high-value skill and I know it's not going to hit and what effect might that have on the cool you can currently cancel channel abilities all right soul one two three asks are there going to be the secret vendors in the MMO whether they're like rare limited time spawn or hidden in a secret location and if so what kinds of items might we expect to buy from them well there will be limited vendors but the types of items that you know you might be able to to buy from these limited vendors might be specific to organizations that you're part of the guild that you might have specific events that might be available reagents and crafting components exactly you know these these these tie-in to kind of the more immersive and dynamic aspect of how we want players to interact with the game those types of NPCs that facilitate that type of interaction the Lea asks will there be an over-the-top RTS style spectator mode for Castle sieges so a top-down SOC there will not be an over-the-top perspective for Castle sieges there's something we discussed in the past about having you know spectator ability where players can plug into watching those but it won't be a top-down type of view of we want to make sure that people don't get information that they shouldn't have and feed that to whatever team they're they're looking right on so it's important that we may know is this probably war yeah as well as we can but battle maps however will provide a top-down strategic view not of real time player count or positioning but rather the raid leaders having the end or under squad leaders having the ability to place down markers objectives and weight points for other players kind of tying back into shayla's question earlier as well or for raid tools for communication and pain stuff this next question is from every hole who asks oh my god I didn't read the full name per reason I did it's written on a piece of paper they can both read it when deciding what and how to balance a feature or a skill how much does community opinion come into play as compared to raw data as compared to rob a yeah well I mean raw data is kind of like our touch point right like that is the thing that we use to justify a lot of our decisions but that doesn't mean that we don't listen to community it's it's I mean it's it's a tough balance right because data is going to tell you one thing and Claire opinion is going to tell you another thing and you know those things do need to come into an alignment if players feel like something's wrong there's likely something wrong the data is not showing right so you know usually that's the balance between subjective and objective right you know the benefit of the data that we collect is that it doesn't come with an opinion or an anecdote of its use it's just kind of bland in that sense and you can derive certain points of information from it without having to take account the source that it comes from but the benefit of having the ability to you know give the community the mouthpiece to participate in our development is that you know we can analyze it from a feeling standpoint you know from an enjoyable 'ti standpoint it's just not this this raw metric per se but rather takes into account the you know the feelings of the players that were catering to you know which is our player base so there is definitely a level of discernment when it comes to taking into account the anecdotal information we received from community members because we want to make sure they're out listening to a vocal minority but rather you know taking into account their kind of feeling of the community as a whole both have their place one of the greatest examples of how we utilize the player feedback as a data point for us is the community discussions that that's Erin you know those are we're very surprised with the with the kind of well-thought-out discussions that are being had and you know obviously there's a saying about too many cooks in a kitchen but at the same time there is the ability to grant a voice to like-minded you know players and to not miss out on potential points of information from those many voices that exist so those are very helpful make sure you guys participate in those there's a specific discussion one more thing I wanted to say is that how ever useful data is data will never tell you what something's fun right yeah and so you know that's kind of where the community comes into play at that point yeah and us two sitting and playing I'm
Toast: Like all right Craig grim asks will we be able to give NPCs orders in a castle or node siege or will we only fight as players so can I command NPCs in a castle mercenaries
Steven: There are mercenary NPCs that can be assigned to players. We've discussed about that before and those will follow generically kind of I think we're system yeah all right a kind of pet system even you know adopted majority of the pet system with the added bonus of kind of objective based points of interest that you can assign them to right so you don't micromanage them yeah all right but we don't want to inundate the field with these mercenaries they'll be kind of few and far between there'll be assigned specifically like let's say for example you know as the mayor of a node during a siege you'll be able to assign these two specific players that are citizens within your node and then they'll have those they'll spawn during the during the node siege or vice versa and the castle siege you know guild leaders can assign mercenaries that are available based on the progress of those subsidiary nodes around the castle siege whether or not you have those available to your defense or your attack
all right not the stink bomb asks will dwarves have a resistance to magic you know is one thing I loved about fantasy Warhammer is the kind of room Lords and the the Dwarven anti-magic you know innate anti magic it sucked that in eighth edition they didn't have like a spell you know spell compendium to utilize a wizards but it was really cool that it was very hard news magic against them however and Ashes of Creation no they do not have an innate resistance to magic they may have some racial passives and a racial skills they can spec into exactly okay Alisa asks to what extent can players hide in plain sight for the MMO like if you turning your nameplates off yeah I mean outside of stealth skills and abilities there is not really a default stealth mechanic yeah they're cool eyes I think we're specifically like when I when I used Oh invisibility skill yes you will not have a nameplate right there talking about like if you don't write like if I'm just like trying to be hiding in it cannot turn off your nameplate replication to other players unless you're using a specific skill that allows for that all right private asks will vertical combat in Apocalypse like when I select someone in midair when they might be vulnerable because they're mid jumping be a thing in the MMO as well I don't I mean positioning would be important there's two ways I can interpret that question is that if somebody is jumping over me and I whack them in the feet they will take more damage than if I just whack them in the face which which I don't think we're gonna be that complex with our with our positioning however I'm with action combat there's no flat plane right there's a three dimensional combat so yes you will be able to hit people aboard midair there might be you know there might be like accuracy penalty for shooting upwards against a player or somebody's in the air right there could be even lifted states right where let's say you know a mage wizard has the ability to kind of do a CC effect on a player and it kind of lifts them up or something that might have lifted state might have certain detriment right Deimos yeah all right Narus asks will there be levels of bonding between writer and mount for example writing amount for longer will increase its stamina health etc there's Emily progression for mounts right yeah that we want to have you know skills unlock during that progression right so they like charge through abilities that was something I really loved about our cage was that you know different mounts would have different types of abilities and and part of our design process for amounts within Ashes of Creation is to incorporate that and that could we've gated behind a depression system which one might say is a bonding with your mount right I mean how you interpret it would be you know basically the lore that we write around it but yeah one of the things we'll probably try to avoid is is time based things like that where you know the incentive is just to like leave your computer on for a while have your horse run around circles for hours but but I mean yes there is a progression system in that progression system may include bonding right like or that problem there was that in that specific example was that they granted experience to the mount via travel distance if you if you make sure to incorporate it only to having your mount out during like XP sessions then you kind of avoid those or quest specific mount questing there's just like 20 horses running around the nodes just getting experience I used to own I used to hide in my house and just run it standing there jumping gotta get my jump up jumping okay adorable a squeeze in many games that require months of grind just to be remotely competitive in PvP in ashes will one have to play hardcore in order to be effective slash competitive in PvP or well more casual players have a chance at it as well so we definitely want okay so as a general you know issue that's present obviously and you know mmo's that we've all played in the past which relate to the ability to cater to more casual players because obviously a more populated server is more funding for the harp or individuals right you want to have you know players who do things like crafting and participate in the questing and help build up the node because right because you're not helping me or even the balance is you want to make sure that your game design incorporates a relevant position for the more casual players who don't have the time to play hardcore but at the same time reward the more hardcore players who do spend an amount of time so that they feel they're spending that time achieving something and that's a delicate balance to have so one of the ways we've addressed that in Ashes of Creation is making sure that there's not just one relevant progression path which is your adventuring class right where PvP tends to reside in but rather that there's a multitude of progressions that you can participate in whether it comes to you know developing your freehold and participating in the economic systems and or the commerce systems and building up a node and helping to participate in the organizational structures and the guild structures participating in Castle sieges making sure that there are relevant positions within the battle systems of let's say a node sea to castle siege a caravan fight a guild war that are objective based and players might not need to necessarily be relevant as a toe-to-toe with a one-to-one right right but rather are incorporated in a grand strategic structure that has important objectives that they can achieve regardless of if they're a casual player or a hardcore player so those types of design elements are incorporated you know obviously I believe that other games have attempted to achieve that type of parity but have failed to do so I think will do you know a good job because we're placing things like PvP at the forefront of our design implementation and testing rather than leaving it to as an afterthought once you know the game is complete so to speak which feels like some of the games have right to do but yeah sorry all right no no why are you apologizing here before we wrap it up when we go get to your place I can't wait you all released you to go eat your food leave their stuff la Luna del Mar asks are you planning to use Unreal Engine 4 point 2 4 or the next stable version of it always we always keep us ourselves up to date with the you know engines as they progress there's obviously going to be a point in the future at which we're going to need to nail down our engine version and prepare for you know commercial launch but until that date comes we are regularly keeping updated and moving forward with the answer the way the engineering team has kind of constructed you know our sort of Lincoln's to the networking and all that is it allows us to upgrade relatively painlessly so we just went through an upgrade to four point two three not too long ago everybody in the studio was able to upgrade without difficulty and its props to them for for our connecting it out and making sure that that upgrades are as painless as possible for us so until we get to a point where we can't upgrade anymore we're going to keep upgrading way up and then really you know the upgrade process is comes down to you know a lot of alright these last couple of questions came from our Russian community actually so thank you guys for adding those as well these came from summer Jay who asks will we see other races and apocalypse yes definitely right now you know what I just said races but I was assuming playable races do you good yeah we'll have a mean the idea behind apocalypse is the ability to take things as they are ready to be implemented they're from the MMORPG and have it as a testbed and apocalypse as part of that as daily races there are some some questions that go into that in terms of like size get box this isn't something bad but you know we'll probably see well we'll definitely see and the last question here was will the quests I and levels I guess more specifically the quests for siege be the same as the BR or on a different yeah they will they will all take place in the same adventure path there won't be multiple adventure paths but there will be some quests that are probably aspected toward castle stage and some quests that our aspect toward VR and some that are agnostic and don't care about which mode you play again gotcha so like you get 200 kills one might be agnostic alright well thank you guys for for answering those questions and thank you all for submitting your questions you guys like I mentioned usually the week before our live stream we post up on the forums we also let you know on discord Twitter and Facebook that our live stream is coming up and we ask you to submit these questions so if we didn't cover your question today or if you have something you'd like us to answer in the future definitely keep an eye out for that so we can get your question and in the future as well and thank you guys for tuning in today no the stream ends we will be uploading this vaad you can see it as a highlight on Twitch but we will also be uploading it to our YouTube channel as well and as usual make sure to tune in to all of our channels we are at Ashes of Creation everywhere Facebook Twitter Instagram over on discord come join us come join in the conversation like seanwes mentoring earlier those deaf discussions are a lot of fun they're superb and I'm gonna say next month is similar to this month where we did our live stream a little bit earlier because of some holiday stuff it may be similar next speaking of holidays Happy Thanksgiving huh yes boo bear says it's time to get boo bear time drink your beer I would say Paula days everybody thank you bye everybody