Talk:2021-03-26 Livestream

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Nyers átirat

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[Music]

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so hello everyone welcome to our march

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development live stream for Ashes of Creation i apologize i have a lawnmower

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earlier stephen had uh that was so funny margaret when you came on and said hello the lawn mower just started picking up

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and then it was like the perfect timing and earlier stephen had like vacuuming

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happening when we were recording other stuff so it's just you know it's one of those days when you're working from home and it's affecting everything so welcome to

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our glorious development update if you've never seen one of these before we kind of go over all of the things that all of our

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departments are going doing and making and it's fabulous um

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but of course i'm margaret crone i'm your community marketing lead and with me as always is the one the only our lead

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game designer jeffrey bard how you feeling today hi everybody doing really good got some

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good sleep last night that's good so it's hard to find those moments of good sleep

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it's rare with the toddler but i got it last night and i'm super stoked nice did she just like sleep through it

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all is that why she did the whole night all by herself no potty breaks no nothing

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it was wonderful what and of course our lovely sandal lord and

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what do you call you are we king king duck i

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yeah our creative director steven treve how are you doing how are the ducks we need to know

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i'm doing good the ducks are just doing duck street you know i'm going to post some pictures on the

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discord later today they're they're nesting in their little house that we got them with some straw we put in it

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and they're keeping warm at night in that house so it's it's going good it just got constructed uh on wednesday that's awesome i love it

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it's been interesting seeing all of his little duck updates we have a pet photos channel but it kind of has

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turned into just animals all the time um and everyone at the company posts stuff in there and

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it's great i think we even had a weird bug that someone found what was that bug it was it was a whip

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coconut oh i thought it was a coconut scorpion whip scorpion oh or camel spider

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anyways it was terrifying but if you haven't joined us before uh

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today we will be going over our reminders our studio update our design update our environment art update and character

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update and then we will be doing a q a segment where we will be answering some of your questions our lovely community manager

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lieutenant toast uh put together um those and of course if your question doesn't get answered here she's amazing

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and goes through and answers a lot of them on the forums so definitely go check there even if you don't see

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your question answered here but with that we will go through our quick updates i'll try to make it quick um so first and foremost we have

- Reminders

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our monthly cosmetic swap over for the route of conquest and that will be april 7 2021 at 11 a.m

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pacific it's up in our news post we always let you know whenever the swap over is happening in advance as well

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so you can go check that out and of course we've had our hype oh sorry go ahead i

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just love that ramp oh yeah the rams my chunky boy ram i love it um and of course we had last month our

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dev discussion was in terms of ash's hybrid combat where do you think you'll be speccing your character a

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majority action-based skilled or a majority tab-based guild an even mix of both and why and you all

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gave us some wonderful answers we've already compiled that and sent it over to the design team i know that's

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gonna have a lot of discussions already i saw one of the programmers saying like i'm going to try to break the system

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so we'll see what happens in regards to all of that and we'll be taking in all of your feedback i know that's something that

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jeff's team will be reading over thoroughly and of course we have our dev discussion

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for april which will be on mentoring so get your mind in that headspace and we'll share that with you

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and with that we also are now adding these guild gathering discussions because we are building out some of our

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guild systems and social systems of sorts and last month's question was what guild

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hall features would you like to see in Ashes of Creation what features have you liked from other games what

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features do you think have been missed opportunities and you have already been providing us

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wonderful answers for that so thank you all so much and of course we will have another one coming up

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in april and it's going to be about measuring success and i think this is one of the things that is super important for guilds right we

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want to be able to feel like we've accomplished things and that we're competitive with other guilds so i'm definitely curious to see what

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the community has on that end and of course we have announced our play test dates

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that we have changed up a bit and our next one will be may 14th through may 21st

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and of course if you are already part of our preview testing we will be doing spot testing with you we

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have already been doing that but that is all under nda so yeah just to

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touch on this a little bit um you know those of you who didn't see the announcement uh for the changes in the dates you know

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this this was something that was definitely possible obviously we can't predict the unknowns

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that uh come out of our testing and the testing is very important it does provide us that data and our alpha one testers have done a

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tremendous amazing job in kind of um you know putting up with all of the uh the um

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you know the bug tests and spot tests that they've had to kind of endure uh but we did see some significant

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improvements that uh even you know our testers are very happy about um with regards to stability and uh we did

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solve some issues that we found in february um and now are moving back and and forward again so

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um you know there's always a potential possibility when you're in active development that timelines are going to

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change we try to you know make that commitment that we only give you dates when we're very very very confident 100 confident

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that they're going to happen but obviously at the end of the day things come up um we want we're trying to make the best possible game and

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that's going to take time to address um and that's what we're here to do and we'll talk a little bit more about

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that and then obviously the development um update stuff but yeah it

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you know we're going to find things along the way that's the beauty of development

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and it's always good to find that stuff earlier than it is to find it later um and that's why you know we

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we are doing this thing in a transparent you know process we're showing you guys monthly updates we're giving you

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monthly game footage um and you can see that progress in real time happening as as you're part of this

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process with us you know being able to give us feedback uh you know and you see those little changes get made because of the

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feedback that the community has given us such as the the fireball animation the um uh uh the combat uh reworking that's

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gonna be uh showed off like this is this is a cool experience to have you know not just as a team developing

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the game but shared with our community you guys um because it ensures the quality of the

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product when it comes to market is going to be up to all of our standards it's going to make all of us proud so

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um we appreciate the patience appreciate the understanding um it's a process and you guys are with us every step of the way and we love it

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yeah like we're doing some really cutting-edge stuff like we're kind of at the bleeding edge

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of what technology allows for um and so yeah that's that's one of the reasons why you know stuff

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keeps changing so fast we're kind of learning as we go because we are pushing boundaries

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really really far so it's pretty exciting we have we have a very ambitious project

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we know that we know you all have been telling us that too and with that also comes great

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responsibility right um y'all putting a lot of pressure on us but it's pressure we're putting on ourselves too i think

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we all are mmo gamers at least you know the three of us are massive uh mmo we love

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pressure we've been doing this for years since we were little kids and you know also some of us have worked

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on projects that we've been really part of and being able to be part of a part project where this is the game that we've all dreamed

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of is just you know something that you can't can't replace but

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it also takes time um so i'm going to toss it over to you stephen to first give us our studio update

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anything you want to talk about on that front um yeah absolutely so um we have

- Studio Update

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continued our hiring and we are continuing to hire so the more you guys help us get that word out the better

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thank you guys for that you've been doing a great job on social media you know tagging dev people you know and

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pointing them to Intrepid Studios we need to you know grow considerably more and we'll probably be announcing a next

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hiring phase i would say around the start of summer may even have some type of

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job fair that's virtual and physical when we get back into the new studio very excited for that as well we might

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be accelerating that timeline um originally it was planned for july 1st but it might be happening a little bit

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sooner um so can't we excited for the news i know also to see everybody i miss you all

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it's gonna be it's gonna be fun to get back in and actually talk to people in person again i'm excited

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i don't know if i'm like i'm gonna be awkward even more than i already am yeah i haven't seen people in ages it's

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gonna be it's gonna be weird but it's gonna be a great weird because it has been far too long that we have

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not seen each other in person um so with that being said um we also

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you know have con finished a considerable amount of testing around problems that we saw as i said earlier

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in february we've addressed those and we have fixes in place for them that have been now tested with the

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alpha one testers and feel very confident on that front um development is is moving forward we have

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a lot of automation testing that's being coupled with our nda testers and um we are running a lot

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of spot testing right now we are actually moving from unreal engine version 4.25 to 4.26

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um i believe that was completed today and then the rest of the studio is going to sync up starting next week um so

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that's a big uh a big update to the uh to the project um and i think that's the gist of our

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studio update awesome yeah we've got a lot going on and

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you know we're just trucking along getting everything going um so moving on from our studio update we also have our

- Design Update which includes Alpha One progress, and 4K gameplay segment

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design update i think before because i know we're going to play a video we're going to show off some things

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as well as a little bit of the automation stuff that stephen was talking about but um i don't know if you want to

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preface it or if we want to talk about some of the alpha one testing that has been happening so far and maybe go into what happened

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in february and why we have changed some of the dates and things and that sort on that end yeah absolutely um so i

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won't get too technical on you know what happened in february but essentially um you know the the means of

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this testing is to determine kind of uh both the foundational networking structure that's present in the game to

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facilitate high concurrencies that we want on uh individual world charts as well as in kind of dense locale

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areas within the map we did experience some some issues that were deep in code that

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had to kind of get routed out and fixed and we were able to do so obviously with the help of our alpha 1 testers

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the video we're going to show you here in just a second it's a short little video we recorded it about an hour ago

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but so it's not edited right as usual um but you know we just kind of take you across to some of the areas uh that have

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been uh kind of reworked introduced uh show you some of the corruption stuff um you know uh we show you some of the

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new starting area changes the environment team has been doing a great job in kind of updating these places

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kind of stuff that hasn't been touched on the alpha zero island that's also incorporated in the alpha one map

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so starting area changes uh i think look very good lighting changes great uh the corruption areas are really

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cool and then also we kind of ended off by by spawning a bunch of bears you know those of you who follow kind of on

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reddit or see uh you know tweets about this um i accidentally fat fingered spawning

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some npcs that we test with right to kind of test server stability and performance

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uh and instead of spawning 500 bears at once for um all the testers to fight i spawned 5 000 bears

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these are fully um operational npcs they have behavior trees they have ai

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blackboards you know they are they are functioning as an npc would and to my surprise to

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everyone's surprise actually uh the server handled it quite well 5000 entities all within a very dense

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area and uh you'll see kind of a little bit of that uh here in this video but we can discuss

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i think more of the video after after everybody has an opportunity to watch it it is in 4k um keeping in mind i am rendering it on

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a i think a 1080 ti uh on a 4k wide screen monitor so you know my fps when i spawn all those bears

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my rendering fps goes down a little bit but as you can see the the the bears are operating quite well um

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but we can chat a little bit afterwards i think keep in mind this is all work in progress this is pretest of alpha 1

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this is vera in its current state so um things will only get better from here

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yeah and if you haven't seen the photo that uh the screenshot that stephen shared on twitter it's

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retweeted on our official Ashes of Creation twitter too you have to see it just toast in the middle of like 5 000 bears

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we lost the toast um all right well we'll be right back after we play a short video for you all

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hello everyone and welcome to another 4k video inside the world of vera

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with our alpha 1 pre-testing i'm joined by our amazing luperza

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margaret crone hey margaret how you doing hi i'm excited yay yeah i noticed you're

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rocking the the hairdo i know this hairstyle is so cool

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i can't wait to see more of it we also have toast hello everyone happy friday happy friday

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it's just on the front of my face oh yeah you got the the beard going on i like the little beads i noticed you're

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not tiny toast right now yeah apparently i already had a character called tiny toast here so i

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switched it up oh sam just regular-sized just regular pint-sized toast and then over here in

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the cool robes we have mr jeffers i'll be your mage for today oh yeah plain to me very nice you know

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we fixed that black hole i don't know if you know that did we really fix it well not really we just removed the pull

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effect until we can actually fix it what the viewers missed earlier was jeffers porting himself into the

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wall oh yeah that's true i i merged with the wall

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but um i know and you didn't make it it's so sad

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but as you guys can see we're here in this in the starting area for the uh alpha one um

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uh map and uh we're just gonna kind of take you through and show you some some of the updates that are being made

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i know that um you know we announced the delay in alpha one's uh nda release um

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and there's good reason for that you know some stuff that we found back in february uh that in february's testing that was

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problematic and you know you don't know you're gonna find that stuff until you find it so we took the better part of february and

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march and we've actually fixed those things you might have seen some updates about that um on reddit or uh in discord

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and we'll show off some stuff as we kind of run around but let's take a look at the new starting area i know it got some some tender love and care from the

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environment team um let's run around up here oh you know what don't we have mounts

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i have a mound do you have a mountain i do i have a fox oh you guys have foxes too where'd you

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guys get your foxes from you guys are all too close to me

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we should lie oh you know what these fox have a really cool effect on the uh on the sitting we should line up and sit

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together at the same time yeah where are you yeah we're just totally oh we lose toast i see toast

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no i lost it oh okay all right line up wait for it wait for it

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and sit oh

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yeah these are this is a great matter i think uh ginseng worked on this one right yeah it doesn't have any of the effects

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yet though so it's gonna be something like the vfx pass on this but it should be pretty rad yeah it's gonna be like fire and stuff

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so what you're saying is it'll look even more adorable than it does now pretty much when we were designing this

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um i was like catkins myers please can i have two tails

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put that in the design yeah that's pretty cool i can you can walk with yours i press saying period

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i love its little walk it's just like what's going on but as you guys can see there's been some significant lighting changes here

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in this area there's been some work on the on the foliage on the trees that are available toned down some of the

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ruins um rearranged some of the tents uh and it's starting to look

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pretty good in this area oh there's sergeant landry

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that's just like how we're walking quest for us sergeant laundry he will always have a question mr

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laundry i call him sergeant laundry he was our first quest giver ever so i think he'll

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always have a spot oh yeah it's like an easter egg throwback to the original

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into this quest ah we've made it to the other side of

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vera thank goodness we've arrived i need to put to work immediately what is your

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specialty i am a channeler of life and death what are you guys i'm a tank

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no nice is that what it says yeah it says you're you are a tank since i'm a channeler of

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life and death hey don't judge me ours is much more

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flavorful here i'll do this

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uh let's see okay it says head down this old road take a left and you can't miss them i will fight against

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these what are they animated armors you guys have seen this quest before yep

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why don't we you know we should take them and show them um one of the new areas look at jeff's just strong yeah i think

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that would be awesome which one you want to look at jeff um let's see there's this cool corrupted

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area we've been working on finish but it's looking really good right now okay so like corrupted

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by corruption you mean that um essentially like some of the areas in vera obviously have significantly more

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influence of corruption and you can kind of see that in the environment itself right right it kind of wants to reach out and

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take control of things that are around it so it slowly grows over time and i think there's an area here where it's

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kind of made a really good purchase oh no oh i'm so sorry i don't even know

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how i attacked you oh no yeah i know i could say oh it's

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because my push to talk is alt and that's also the force attack jeff

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was saying earlier that his push attack is his dodge roll so if you keep seeing him yeah if you see me dodging around that's

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because it's on control well i apologize toast yeah jeff take us there we'll we'll port to you

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all right let's go hang on

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i'm almost there and hang on

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that was not a good place are you i've got to fall through the

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world a few times i love the lighting as i'm just waiting

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for you to get to where you need to be i'm kind of running uh but she's cheating she's pushing me

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we need some jj abram's lens flare in this i'm just gonna all right now oh really okay oh yeah the

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lens flare yeah it is kind of cool all right i'm gonna pour it to you don't look into the light

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all right moving to jeffers on my way

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oh no oh no oh not like this

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oh no it's okay hold on uh let me try it again

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ah i made it i made it i made it i made it i made it so ladies and gentlemen what you just

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saw there was under the world of vera there is a deep dark

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place filled with water [Laughter]

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toast is a tea post on her box i might want to i want to dismount you

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guys okay there you go all right uh where are we going this doesn't look very corrupt this looks

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this looks nice yeah i feel lied too jungle i'd build a house over here you might

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not the property values are going to go down pretty quick oh i guess it depends on the value in your

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home so where are we going follow jeffers

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huh some of these plants are looking a little sad the tail movement

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the tail animation is very hypnotic oh whoa what is this the perfect

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oh uh oh no she does not like you should probably

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be in a party oh yeah is she dead oh yeah we should be in a party

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oh let me invite you guys all right i got jeff i got toast

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and i've got luparza yes it is a mia

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all right where are we going oh it looks like it's getting a little oh look at that this area here yeah

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so now as things progress in the world these corrupted areas

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dynamically evolve with the progression of nodes yeah yeah all of our rpis and kind of just

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the world in general can react to the node we don't have to but we can um and this is one of those places where

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as civilization grows this will grow kind of in contest with it oh my gosh

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so this is cool are you over there killing stuff oh why are you oh you're green i thought

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you're right um so i'm just protecting you all the corruption on the on these tree

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assets is really cool you can see it's kind of has some crystalline formations but it's also

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like affecting the the ground yeah that's interesting

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oh okay it's getting a little darker as we move in oh yeah this is creepy

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i like the creepy vibe now this is this area is still in develop i mean still being actively worked on though

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yeah yeah actively work done we just had to check in with mia who was doing this area um

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last monday and she checked all this stuff in so we're kind of looking at it and giving her feedback

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turn that looks like a few more passes and then i think we'll be done with this relatively soon

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yeah this is creepy and then once it's done we'll do a population pass and then that's kind of how we work

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towards getting stuff like this complete oh it looks great i love the lighting and the effects around the base of the

• 24:22

tree over here that's kind of cool it'd be fun as like if you were in proximity

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to see some of the other progress towards this so it'll be interesting to see it in game versus um yeah some of

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the screenshots we have if you like had some proximity check on this like tree for example and like as players walked into the to

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the area and it started spawning like corrupt creatures that'd be cool that'd be very cool a little like whips

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and chains come off the tree like attack you and restrain you oh what's that noise

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oh my no no the corruption oh we have an untextured we have another

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creature there was like a whopping like a whooping as you guys will see as we said this area is an active development so you see a little untextured rock here

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[Laughter] the gray box texture yeah one of the

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things i love about this area is that like the whole like geometry of everything is off kilter right so it's like

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not only do things get creepier but they also just start feeling wrong it's pretty cool very torn earth-esque

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like the earth is trying to eat itself oh my god walking on

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sunshine [Laughter]

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oh it looks great oh look at that there's some dungeon up here pulsate and pulse

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oh it's getting redder the deeper we go in another and textured rock a big boss

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over here oh there's like some creepy gate over here oh okay

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wow look at that i love the rocks and the lighting the real question is what was this

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before oh there's some weird creature

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there's a suffering wanderer we should kill it i don't know if we can turn my head back

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on well it's suffering we should put it out of its misery you know oh let me see if i can

• 26:22

oh it walks all weird no get it what does it do

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oh yeah i thought you meant the big one over there oh yeah look at that

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feels good what do we got okay what about this dude can we

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he looks harder he's definitely harder i'm trying to pull just i mean we should

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if it started it well let's see hold on

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get off our world

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okay you guys have seen this one though let's let's let's run let's run let's go over let's go outside

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again you know something that was cool um that players you know outside of alpha one

• 27:29

testers i surprised myself no no i would just run okay jump on the fox

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something that was cool that we did a few couple weeks ago and i posted on it on um on twitter and then

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uh i think somebody put it on reddit as well uh but we i accidentally i accidentally summoned

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five it was really an accident honestly i summoned five thousand bears but the cool thing that happened was

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this is that our server didn't crash which is you know these are actual npcs

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uh with you know behavior trees and a blackboard ai component and even though it wasn't

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good on the rendering side the cool test was that the server was still operating at you know above 10 fps

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which is good um and those are processing frames not rendering frames but um let me find an open little area over

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here we can summon some of these just to show you guys another 5 000 no no no i don't know oh somebody's flying 50

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000. how'd you do that oh my god you're all flying that's cool now you're not that's why i mean

• 28:32

no one's flying oh okay that was look it looked like you guys like flew over like yeah all right let me

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let me show you guys so big part of odd you know obviously of our testing is automation you know we have bots that we

• 28:47

play with we have um uh actual testers that jump in the alpha one testers and then we also can

• 28:53

summon bears we summon bears

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it was pretty funny though toast got lost in all the bears

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such a good screenshot and i took another screenshot and you can just see bears for like miles up a

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hill it's crazy there you go i summoned some bears 10 10 of them hi bears ready so

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you get 5 000. no no no just 10. i just wanted to show how the the 10 of them appear

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and now let me summon some yeah you can go on here go ahead yeah they have behaviors so oh that guy

• 29:32

was easy to kill i think they're all there you go really easy

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yeah we're level 10 and these are just little one boys all right here let me sum it a few more

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to find a few i'm gonna summon 100 now oh no oh i don't know if we could

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actually they're hacking

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okay wait let me summon a few more some of the few

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oh my wait they're loading in they're loading it oh no i summoned a thousand i said

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a thousand ah i can't even get out of here so you're seeing uh you know there's a

• 30:16

thousand bears that my computer's rendering right now at 4k uh my frames are dropping a little

• 30:22

bit but uh on the server they're all still acting and reacting oh my gosh

• 30:30

and i'm dead oh no i'll respawn for respawn

• 30:38

let me come back and i'll summon a few more thousand oh my goodness jeff it looks like you're dying i'm

• 30:45

taking care of the bears yeah we're just no they're coming i'm trying to stay in your protect the toast oh jeff oh no

• 30:53

i spawned pretty far away from you guys though but uh you know i think we could talk a

• 30:59

little bit more obviously about this on stream it's getting what time is it oh no we have the stream in 45 minutes

• 31:05

so so we'll talk a little bit more about testing automation hope you guys enjoyed a little look again inside of vera

• 31:11

obviously we're going to be showing a lot more as testing continues forward and you know leading up to the nda release

• 31:17

um but we will see you guys back on stream see ya everybody bye

• 31:22

[Music] and we're back we'll just play the video

• 31:28

on the side we'll switch

• 31:39

yeah i love the bear puns um but as you guys saw uh at the end there you know those are actual npcs npcs

• 31:46

a thousand plus of them and you know we can even get it higher at you know at the stage that we're at right now

• 31:52

that is a very significant achievement um particularly in unreal engine 4 for an

• 31:58

mmorpg um you know that's that's that's a pretty big big achievement so big kudos to the

• 32:05

intrepid team on uh getting uh getting the server able to handle that

• 32:10

uh especially in the testing at you know when we had the 5 000 bears we also had hundreds of players

• 32:16

as well in the area and we were still operating at a performant server side um so

• 32:23

that was that was very cool to see yeah um is there anything else you guys

• 32:29

want to talk about on that front but of course i know we also want to go talk a little bit more about our

• 32:34

progress towards alpha one on other guns i know jeff your team has definitely been working on different systems

• 32:40

and all kinds of combat i know combat is one of the things that people are most curious about because i know there's

• 32:45

going to be um some massive changes coming to combat yeah um combat's a big push for us right

• 32:52

now um what will actually be shown in alpha one is a little bit in flux we're trying to

• 32:59

um we basically have gotten a brand new tool um that allows us to author um abilities both faster and then

• 33:06

also have those abilities um act uh more responsibly than the

• 33:11

the system that we're using right now so the the connection between your character and what your character is doing is gonna feel a lot better once we make

• 33:18

this conversion um especially when it comes to all the abilities then on on top of that we've got

• 33:23

a whole separate branch of combat prototype things that we're trying um and we're

• 33:29

going to be playtesting those internally to see how they feel and kind of get a sense of what we want to bring over to the live game so there's a bunch of like

• 33:36

weird stuff cool stuff awesome stuff that we're all just trying out throwing on the wall to see if it works

• 33:41

um and for the things that do work and that the the people who are playtesting it give like hey this is really fun i

• 33:46

really like this we'll incorporate that into what's going on with the live game and then that'll kind of kind of make it live and sort of

• 33:52

as that feedback rolls through that's going to be kind of gauge like the rate at which we get it into the

• 33:58

test um so not entirely sure exactly how much of that um we'll make it in it's possible that

• 34:03

everybody hates everything we've done and then none of it goes through so um it just depends on kind of where

• 34:08

we're at um and kind of the feedback that we get so that's kind of where we're at on the combat side um yeah

• 34:14

and it's important to note you know as we kind of introduce these new combat um you know components all of that's

• 34:22

going to be tested and collecting feedback for that and as jeff said some might make through some might not might not but the important thing is you

• 34:28

know we understand the absolute importance of combat

• 34:34

because it is the most tactile and interfaced thing that you do as a player in the game right it is

• 34:40

it is relevant and everywhere um so the great thing that what we're you know what we're doing is we're incorporating

• 34:46

you guys as the community as part of that feedback system so that we can continue to cater and

• 34:53

and adjust what needs to be adjusted so you're not going to see just a a full like you know thrown combat system oh

• 35:00

this is a brand new combat system everything's there it's going to be rolled out little by little you're going to see these things get implemented

• 35:05

little by little you're going to have an opportunity to kind of um provide feedback on that front

• 35:11

yeah it's it's like like steven said like this is the thing most people touch the most often and and it really needs

• 35:16

to feel good and so it's a big thing that i care a lot about um so we're gonna spend a lot of time doing it um it's not gonna come out of

• 35:22

the box perfect um but um it should be a pretty big improvement um and then we'll continue to make you know

• 35:28

continual refinements as we move forward we've got a long way to go there um and then there's a lot of other things that

• 35:33

kind of depend on that too so um the quicker we find those answers the better for our project

• 35:39

absolutely um and then some other stuff that you guys saw in here obviously you know the world is is constantly

• 35:44

being updated it is constantly being moved forward um you can just see that and looking back you know in the

• 35:50

videos we've had over the last couple of years of of the game that things are always

• 35:56

changing so um you're going to continue to see that even you know as soon as next month um was next month was april

• 36:04

there's still a market yeah so you're going to see that you know as we continue to show footage next month and in may when we drop the

• 36:11

nda um you're going to see a lot of these areas get some get some cool updates um and some changes incorporated

• 36:19

and then we're also just working on a ton of content like you saw in the video there's a kind of redone that whole starting area

• 36:25

where where that portal is um and the entire population of that area was going to shift a little bit

• 36:30

it's going to be kind of similar but we're adding a bunch of new quests and probably some internal

• 36:36

dungeon spaces in that area and so it should be there there's gonna

• 36:41

be a lot more content for folks to kind of participate in on that that part of it um we want that first experience to

• 36:46

to be a little bit better than what it is right now um and get people their feet wet we've had a lot of people who've been playing the game kind of understand how it works

• 36:52

but there's going to be a lot of new people who haven't ever touched it so we want to make sure that their experience is pretty smooth

• 36:58

um but do keep in mind it's still an alpha and there's a lot going to be a lot of rough edges to a lot of things so yeah

• 37:03

and just to give even a little bit more context real quick kind of last point here um with regards to the bears

• 37:08

um you know those those bears and what they're doing kind of on the server that's a lot of traffic and processes

• 37:16

that are being um you know computed like these bears they have behavior state changes they have

• 37:22

hate lists they have aggros they need to replicate their position they need to understand all the player positions they

• 37:27

have ability cast that they do with their attacks they're doing damage that's going to set back forth i mean this is a lot of information

• 37:34

that is is being had on the server side so while what you're seeing now you know it

• 37:40

looked a little bit rough there's a considerable amount of time for us to fine-tune and optimize that

• 37:45

even further the fact though that uh at this stage the numbers we're seeing and

• 37:50

are able to accomplish uh that bodes very well for the types of battles that we want to have

• 37:56

in the future the types of concurrencies the types of you know just putting that massive back

• 38:02

into massively multiplayer um you know these are these are the things that we strive for on

• 38:09

a technical side uh because from a design point of view you know these are the types of

• 38:14

encounters we want players to be able to experience and not have to be segregated out into

• 38:19

just 100 player chunks right um that's that i think is going to be a very fun uh

• 38:25

fun aspect of ashes yeah i mean it's it's it's pretty awesome to see that like from from my

• 38:32

perspective right i don't think i've ever been a part of a game that has been able to do something like that you know it's not just server

• 38:37

optimization but it's network optimization as well right like there's a lot of stuff that goes into making a thousand characters on the

• 38:44

screen work work like that in an mmo contest it's a little bit different when it's just a client-side single-player game but when

• 38:50

you're talking about you know a game that is you know server authoritative and all that stuff is running on the server

• 38:56

like that's really cool to see happen like to see it live it's when i saw that when i saw the bear event like my mind

• 39:02

was blown i did not think that we'd be able to do something like that especially at the stage of the game um so it's pretty awesome um and

• 39:09

there have been people asking questions in regards to the content that you're talking about will there be

• 39:14

dungeons and raids and things of that sort for them to test in alpha as well i mean there'll be some right don't

• 39:21

don't it's not going to be a full you know world experience we have i think uh something on the order of like

• 39:28

uh six or seven dungeons um one of them is is what i would call like semi-raid

• 39:33

level you could probably roll through with less than that just given the tuning on it

• 39:39

we've got one world boss that is going to be raid level so it's a true true 40 person raid boss um

• 39:47

and and it's probably going to be pretty challenging to defeat i'm not sure if it will be defeated during this alpha

• 39:54

but we'll see um there's a couple of world bosses which are kind of party

• 39:59

level um uh so there there will be there will be a dungeon experience that will be

• 40:05

um kind of a raid-ish experience but all that stuff takes a lot of time to really tune out and make

• 40:11

um and so we've got a handful of those things but not like not like a full world of that yet yeah

• 40:16

and just to touch on that a little bit further you know um i know that in the past uh

• 40:22

you know i said i was going to be considering opening up alpha one sales again once if we hit a certain uh level of

• 40:29

achievement that i was waiting for it is looking very good that that's going to be the case here over the next month um we're going to

• 40:36

evaluate internally but with the the testing that was done over the past couple of weeks i am very

• 40:41

very uh happy to see uh where we've gotten to overcome those february obstacles

• 40:47

um and we'll be considering opening alpha one sales again and and essentially uh you know we talk

• 40:53

about what this experience for alpha one is going to be that month-long experience it is not intended to be a content

• 41:00

experience you know i just want to make sure we have prefaces for anybody who's considering right if when we do open up alpha one

• 41:06

again um participating you know you essentially are a tester you're you're like a qa

• 41:13

tester you're jumping in here you're giving us the data that we need you're providing us

• 41:18

with warm bodies to kind of run through and give us a um you know a a look at our

• 41:25

technical underside making sure that you know we're hitting the beats we need to hit it is not intended to be a game

• 41:31

experience it is not intended to be a you know fully fledged content experience so keep that in mind

• 41:37

you know you are you really the alpha testers we have now are putting up with a lot and we are super appreciative

• 41:44

of them i mean as a studio as a project as a game you guys as a community should be really appreciative of the

• 41:49

work that they're doing too because it is instrumental in in us being able to fine-tune what needs

• 41:54

to be fine-tuned and finding the issues earlier rather than later uh that's a very important piece of the

• 42:00

puzzle so um just keep that in mind a fair uh consumer warning

• 42:06

yeah it's like we're putting enough content to like at least have stuff that's interesting for you guys to do while you're testing

• 42:11

but it's not a focus it's not it's not we don't expect you to be testing the content outside of like does the content

• 42:17

function right right and that's sort of kind of what it's there for it's it's there to give you guys something to do to occupy

• 42:23

yourselves while you are doing that testing um but not too many steps further than that absolutely and i think the other

• 42:30

question that i see often in regards to alpha one is about like artisan stuff and think and

• 42:36

like harvesting and then things on the crafting end um what kind of things they'll get to experience

• 42:41

in alpha one in regards to that so that's that's super rudimentary um the crafting system is a huge

• 42:48

system it's usually i mean incorporates more just crafting right it's like it's a economic and resource and

• 42:55

gathering the processing systems that touch all the building components and the freehold systems and

• 43:00

um you know those blueprints and then there's the crafting recipes and the crafting stations that

• 43:06

are tied into the node system that's a very large system probably 90 percent of that is not online

• 43:12

in alpha one the core basics of what crafting represents as a gameplay loop

• 43:17

that is represented so that means that there are gatherables out there you will have to have tools in order to to service those gatherables there will

• 43:23

be processing um that's necessary and then there's crafting stations that are available and can be constructed by

• 43:29

the players this is an alpha one um you have to collect the recipes you have to collect the materials and you have to refine the materials and then

• 43:35

you have to create the reagents uh and then use those to kind of create the final crafting component or that you're trying to

• 43:40

create so that in and of itself is present but it is a very very

• 43:47

small piece of really what will be the larger crafting puzzle for alpha 2 and betas

• 43:55

anything else you want to add on that front jeff um i would say like kind of similarly like the economy is not really

• 44:01

ready to go yet right like we have an economy but it's not really going to be reflective of the final

• 44:08

like how how the economy is going to work it'll work for alpha one and there'll be plenty of things to

• 44:13

trade and buy and exchange but it's not going to be really super representative what the final state is

• 44:18

so so keep that in mind as well it's it's a stubbed in system um it's not it's not a complete or uh really finalized system at all yeah

• 44:25

speaking of economy kind of bringing that into like the node system i know we've

• 44:30

also had a lot of questions in regards to alpha one and how far they'll be able to progress a node

• 44:36

and the process of that like how far along that's going to be for them when they're testing that

• 44:42

yeah so nodes during alpha one will be capable of advancing to stage three that's the village stage that's when the

• 44:48

government government systems come online it's when the building capabilities are now available

• 44:53

and people can purchase homes and there's some societies and all the quest hooks are available through the different stages

• 45:00

these are actively collecting experience currently from players they're going to represent the right culture when they do

• 45:05

propagate um you know all those systems are are available and i think there's i don't know between like 12 and 14

• 45:12

maybe nodes and or maybe we cut that down at nine i'm not sure but there's around or nine okay there's nine nodes that are gonna be

• 45:18

available across across the alpha one um experience um

• 45:23

and each of them are going to be you know relevant for the different pois that are placed across the world uh

• 45:29

there's a there's a basic vassal system that's in place for those node systems um that's kind of the experience behind

• 45:36

alpha one now as we move forward right that core tech does facilitate uh going up additional

• 45:43

stages you know to stage four five six um and really that becomes just an asset game um you know how in a content

• 45:51

game really um how we service those additional node structures with uh uh additional pois with additional

• 45:58

content quest lines with additional quest hooks um you know how we propagate the town

• 46:03

uh city and metropolis style buildings and additional uh plots of land and whatnot but in

• 46:09

alpha one it's delegated just to the to up to stage three is there anything else y'all want to

• 46:16

talk about i know we could talk forever but we do have some other segments we need to get to as well

• 46:22

yeah i think that uh that about covers it right um there's yeah all right it's going to be a big

• 46:27

area moving i always said that there's not it's not content focused but there's a ton of content out there so

• 46:32

yeah that's true and the design team's doing a great job um bucky i me chang um

• 46:41

uh taylor trad um chris brian jeff all of you guys are doing an

• 46:48

awesome job on the content front so keep up the great work oh no steven you started saying the names and you got to see them all

• 46:54

i know i forgot doug doug just joined as well yeah uh and corey and corey as well i gotta

• 47:01

like grab them all um all right from there obviously we've been showing off a lot of the

• 47:07

environment stuff but we are going to show off some of the environment things that they sent my way that there they wanted to share with you

• 47:13

all so first up we have a couple different objects that they have been working on got a

- Environment Art Update

• 47:19

nice pile of bones there oh wow that's dark

• 47:26

with a i don't know if the first thing was a cage it kind of looked like a cage yeah and then we have bones

• 47:34

i know there's a couple different building structures and some of these you've seen in the concept art that i showed

• 47:40

in previous months um so you might recognize them they've been

• 47:45

doing a really great job of making i think jeff mentioned this in our previous um dev update was

• 47:51

that when you look at the concept art versus the actual in-game it's almost a replica crazy yeah yeah um so these

• 48:00

are all um examples of slayborn architecture those are the um corrupted

• 48:06

bird people um i think we've referenced a long time ago in some of our older live streams

• 48:11

um and that's one of the tribes uh called the satari and then we're going into these like

• 48:16

wrecked ship pieces yeah i'm hoping next next month we'll show off some of the

• 48:23

um shipwreck slash pirate cove slash water areas um after it gets after it

• 48:29

gets the touch up from the water everybody's excited about the pirate gun right now he's really cool

• 48:35

speaking of which we do have some pirate stuff that are going to show off um moving on over here we have some

• 48:42

location updates you can see some of the terrain that they've been working on

• 48:48

and some different plants grassy lands you can see those are all

• 48:53

uh the portal revamp area so this is all um if you could picture the the ruins it might

• 48:59

uh oh that's different now yeah now i'm like 15 seconds yeah now it's going to the cove stuff yeah

• 49:10

and we'll actually have a fly-through video of the pirate dock poi

• 49:20

but you can see the light signing shining through the trees some of these buildings a little a little town a little village

• 49:32

yeah i love it i love the work environment does it's just you know just keeps getting better

• 49:39

yeah it's awesome i can't wait to see when we have

• 49:44

different festivals and stuff too decorating all the the towns and obviously this is one that we saw which is a work in progress

• 49:51

um this is the area that we saw in-game

• 49:59

yeah the corruption um so that's a cool component uh obviously of you know how the world kind

• 50:04

of reacts and changes to to the nodes you kind of see these intrusions of corruption

• 50:11

beginning to pervert and infest the lands and these are obviously going to be

• 50:16

sources by which npc events kind of are driven based on player progression within the world and

• 50:25

you know these sources of of of evil um need to be addressed by the players

• 50:30

or else they'll grow out of hand yep as the world levels up the or as the players level up the world levels up

• 50:36

around them and this is a little fly through from the engine

• 50:42

[Music] of the pirate pui dock poi

• 50:48

area not the caves i think that's the part that jeff is excited to show you

• 50:53

this is actually um dynamic poi this one will evolve as players of all the node that says it's attached to so this is

• 50:59

kind of its final state but yeah i mean that's that's one of the cool

• 51:04

you know core functions of these points of interest across the world is that dynamic level up right as the as the

• 51:12

world grows these points of interest grow you know additional uh additional buildings will spawn additional

• 51:18

monsters and and leaders and quest hooks you know all of these things

• 51:24

start to grow with the world um and that's part of you know our trying to achieve that that

• 51:29

living breathing you know buzz words that have been used in the past but really haven't quite been

• 51:34

i think realized in a lot of our experiences as players um and uh you know it's it creates

• 51:41

obviously a lot of content um and it's hard it's very hard

• 51:47

but um you know the philosophy i think that that we hold is the more sandbox elements you provide

• 51:53

players the more choice the more impact they have over the world really that is a direct correlation to the

• 52:00

amount of content that has to be then presented back to the player because there's no point in opening a door

• 52:06

if there's nothing behind the door you have to have if you're going to provide multiple doors to the players you got to have multiple things behind the doors

• 52:13

so um you know that's that's obviously part of our big task our big job a lot of a lot of a lot of pressure on the design

• 52:20

team on the art teams um you know to to surface that content but i think what it creates is a

• 52:26

is a very compelling um immersive and reactive world that that many of us

• 52:33

can lose a lot of time in and i think sometimes you guys uh see a lot of art um and you don't get to see a lot of the

• 52:39

behind the scenes stuff that like the design team is working on the engineering team is working on i feel bad because the engineering team

• 52:45

sent me some stuff that they wanted to share but i'm like that's not really stuff we want to show people because you know we have to think about security

• 52:51

too um so i think like that's the other side of it too is that you know

• 52:56

you don't get to see the behind the scenes of how the systems are created and and like necessarily the little tiny bits on that

• 53:03

front for security purposes you know we try to show it once once it's in a more dev like a

• 53:10

user-facing way is the best way to explain it i don't know if you know what i'm just talking about

• 53:16

yeah i mean it's important to note that uh from a visual standpoint everything you ever see that we show you

• 53:22

in game has code and engineers behind the screen

• 53:27

and i think someone in chat had asked about like optimization and that goes into everything that we're doing right like

• 53:33

that's constantly something that we're worrying about is optimization and performance um yeah this game will live or die based

• 53:39

on its optimization absolutely and we are making great strides on that already and that's

• 53:44

obviously the purpose of us incorporating you guys into the testing you know as early as possible even when

• 53:50

it's not in that state that is representative of what people might be accustomed to from other projects

• 53:56

with alpha it's because uh that optimization that vetting of of our technology is

• 54:04

is very integral to our design philosophy as well right we want to have those massive engagements we need to

• 54:11

start optimizing and testing as early as possible all right i'm going to move on to our character stuff unless you guys have

• 54:17

anything else you want to add on environment our environment team we love you you're amazing all of you we really do

• 54:24

um all right moving on to character so you may have seen the harvest guard before this was our

- Character Art Update

• 54:29

november 2019 uh costume and then the still soul plate which was december 2020

• 54:38

i think and we have some foot balloon plate oh my gosh that's the first time

• 54:43

i'm stealing the uh this is what did you show me this steel cell what was it it's in the run of show too if you guys

• 54:49

oh i put all the images there so you don't have to watch them live got it i feel like we just ran past it

• 54:56

though like it was up for a second it's a it's like a what do you call it free free spin

• 55:02

yeah a slideshow oh there we go wow that's looking good mm-hmm it's not even

• 55:09

done so these are all right that's a work in progress yeah it looks looks good very cool and

• 55:15

then we have a turntable of the veylune uh plates as well

• 55:22

nice i feel like he's wearing a shield in his

• 55:29

belly now this is an in-game achievable um uh armor set this was this one

• 55:37

this here this is a progression plate so this was not a cosmetic this is in game um level 10 through 20 i believe

• 55:44

right jeff 10 15 i think we'll tell you 15 yeah level 10 to 15 this is an example of some plate armor

• 55:51

uh that players can achieve inside the game um just to give you guys comparisons um

• 55:58

uh at those tiers all right and we have some creatures from our lovely

• 56:04

character team got this little eyeball beholder the little tiny eyeballs on the back

• 56:11

anybody who doesn't like eyeballs is not going to enjoy this yeah don't don't say the b don't say the b word he's that's a d and

• 56:17

d thing i know he's he he's a he's a different thing

• 56:23

right he's like uh he's like a weird tadpole seer um a watcher

• 56:31

yeah creepy and then we've got this one which i don't even

• 56:37

know what this thing is but i love it so that's a big dude

• 56:42

and the idea it's a really big dude and the idea behind him

• 56:48

is you're gonna see you know big monsters i think that i think the character comes

• 56:53

up to like his elbow maybe or just beneath the elbow um i'm not sure but uh you're going to

• 56:58

see these big elites kind of just roaming and wandering through the world right they're not

• 57:04

assigned any to to any particular hunting ground they just kind of you know they just kind of roam and um

• 57:12

i think that that component is pretty cool especially when you have an open world right where you can see

• 57:17

um you know something unique that's not that's not matching kind of the the monsters you're

• 57:22

you're hunting in a certain area but just strolls by and you're like gotta call your friends and like oh my god

• 57:27

let's get this thing you know and then you don't and then it's sick

• 57:34

i'm excited to be able to use this uh body structure too it's cool

• 57:40

very neat i can't wait till we fight it i'm sure jeff's team is the most excited

• 57:47

because you guys get to make the bi for all of them pretty much yeah the whole process of making an npc

• 57:54

is a lot of fun there's a there's a lot of fun design work that goes into it maybe we could show this is like stage

• 57:59

one maybe we can show like the progress do like a video on that like of the creation it would

• 58:06

we could try yeah the problem is a lot of that stuff happens like on on in a word document right so you know

• 58:12

we kind of like go back and forth like oh this would be cool oh we can't do that because it's going to cost too much and like

• 58:17

so there's a lot of back and forth in that um it might be fun to do that once we get back in the office we could have like a

• 58:23

conversation about like the whole design process of an mpc on paper and that would be yeah maybe

• 58:29

i know we want to do the dev diary series again but that kind of required us to all be together um so

• 58:35

that would definitely be something that would be part of a dev diary series so um when we're back in the office we'll we'll try to bring those back

• 58:41

because i definitely think they let you have a better understanding of how things are created

• 58:46

in the world and if you haven't seen those definitely go check them out they're over on our youtube channel there's actually a playlist with all of

• 58:52

the dev diaries currently um even including our node system and buildings

• 58:58

how we create weapons and all kinds of stuff so go check that out um all right and now i think we're gonna

• 59:03

move on to our q a unless you all have something else you want to mention

- Q&A

• 59:10

no no no q a all right our first question is from

• 59:16

leolani or liolani i apologize if i say anyone's names wrong

• 59:21

this is from the forums and this is about cameras how do you plan to balance the action

• 59:27

camera to make it as viable as tab which often offers more control over visibility such

• 59:34

as looking behind you um that's a tough one uh i think

• 59:42

the way we tackle that is the the easiness of switching back and forth

• 59:49

but essentially i mean the definition of an action camera is that it's it's tied to the to the directional of

• 59:54

your reticle right so so um you know there's there's components that we have

• 1:00:00

applied like such as how to deploy templated aoe attacks and and having that work off of your cursor or your

• 1:00:06

reticle um for ease uh you can you can vary out the zoom distance even when you're in action

• 1:00:13

mode and that'll give you a broader you know surveillance of the area around you

• 1:00:20

but essentially that camera movement in action mode is going to be tied to the to the reticle center screen and

• 1:00:27

if you if you want to be able to kind of look in different areas there's going to be two options either you can switch

• 1:00:33

back to a tab target camera position or there'll likely be a hotkey that you

• 1:00:40

can hold and when release it'll snap back to the to the action camera but when you hold

• 1:00:45

it down it'll it'll give you free camera movement camera movement that we might employ i don't know jeffy you have other thoughts on that

• 1:00:51

i know i was actually just going to say that the um in planetside we did something really similar where um you had that reverse look camera

• 1:00:59

and and that was something that you could do also just the way in which i mean tab targeted stuff and action

• 1:01:05

stuff will play a little bit differently and they'll have different strengths and weaknesses right it's probably not going to be a one-to-one like the all the advantages

• 1:01:12

of tab are going to be all the advantages that an action person has right they'll be a little bit different they'll be a little bit asynchronous and

• 1:01:18

um the hope is that those two things together we can balance in and that kind of people can play their

• 1:01:24

own way um and with those strengths and weaknesses they kind of even out that's the hope at the end of the day

• 1:01:32

all right moving on to our next question we have from mick macmuk on the forums wants to

• 1:01:39

know about apartments what happens to the stuff i have in storage in my apartment if the mayor decides to destroy the apartment

• 1:01:45

building all that stuff should get mailed to you

• 1:01:51

um and you can save your layout too so um that should all be relatively

• 1:01:56

seamless and not super painful be a little bit painful you should probably be mad at your mayor for that but maybe you should vote them

• 1:02:03

out vote for a new mayor um all right our next question is from talents and

• 1:02:08

chaos factor and they want to know about legendary equipment roughly how much stronger might we

• 1:02:14

expect legendary equipment to be over the rarity tier beneath it

• 1:02:20

that's a thing we still have to answer right um uh once we start playing with the the

• 1:02:25

actual numbers we'll we'll get to something it probably won't be they will they will function as best in

• 1:02:31

slot or they might do things that other weapons just don't right you can't roll that on any other thing

• 1:02:37

it might give you an advantage that way um there's a lot of different ways we want to play with it um but at the end of the day we still

• 1:02:43

there still needs to be because it's a pvp game a little bit of parody or uh a parody

• 1:02:48

but um it's not going to be explosive right um it'll give you an advantage but it's not

• 1:02:54

going to be shouldn't necessarily be a game changer yeah i would say generally and you know

• 1:03:01

we don't want to hold to these numbers because it's it's highly dependent on testing and balance passes that will be done due

• 1:03:07

to testing but traditionally if you see uh progress from one rarity step to the

• 1:03:13

next up um you're gonna you can expect anywhere probably from you know six to twelve percent uh

• 1:03:19

increase just on base stat values um so uh you know that that's something

• 1:03:25

again that's going to be kind of tested and balanced out um but generally around that area yeah it's

• 1:03:30

like we want legendaries to feel feel unique right they're not just going to be stat bars right they're not

• 1:03:35

going to just be a chunk of stats that you get we really want them to feel different than than items they want them to feel

• 1:03:41

legendary so um so just keep that in mind oh i think this next question is a life

• 1:03:48

in symmetry and they wanted to know about taming will i be unable to tame a monster in the wild that has the same appearance as

• 1:03:54

a cosmetic mount pet so i mean there's going to be a wide

• 1:04:01

arcing range of tameable uh animals that exist in the

• 1:04:06

wild some of those variants [Music] from at least a cosmetic perspective uh

• 1:04:13

maybe tameable um uh but uh essentially when you kind of look at that taming

• 1:04:19

system this is gonna be again another progression system that players are going to have to excel in in order to have the ability to

• 1:04:26

tame certain um exotic creatures of which might be those those variants and when you're talking

• 1:04:32

about cosmetics you're not talking about the monthly cosmetics you're talking that are exclusive you're talking about just general cosmetics

• 1:04:38

mark marketplace cosmetics correct okay cool just want to clarify because i know people will

• 1:04:44

ask about that um all right our next question is from nostra about node advancement when a

• 1:04:51

node advances to stage three village and enters the 21 day stage uh

• 1:04:56

21 day siege lockout period what happens if it gains enough xp to advance further i think

• 1:05:03

during the siege period stuff would lock down right so you wouldn't no so this is uh

• 1:05:09

i think in regards to um when a node advances it's given a 21-day

• 1:05:15

uh protection against declared sieges so if it were to advance within that same

• 1:05:20

period of time then that protection then that protection

• 1:05:26

would likely uh apply uh to the second stage advancement as well

• 1:05:31

i don't think that's likely to happen though yeah well from from village to town maybe but

• 1:05:38

definitely not from town to city or city to metropolis right right um but i mean the idea just to

• 1:05:45

give context the idea behind that is right there are new functionalities and mechanisms that

• 1:05:50

come online when a node advances and you want to provide both time for elected governments to

• 1:05:57

take place which then have direct consequences and choices to be made over defensive capabilities

• 1:06:03

um and also gives provides time for that node to collect and receive resources

• 1:06:10

through taxation and or quests for its citizens to participate in

• 1:06:16

so that it has available treasury funds and or resources to allocate towards defensive structures and

• 1:06:22

and other types of defensive systems um so it would make sense that if there were

• 1:06:27

to be an occurrence where node advances within that window that that window is reset again

• 1:06:33

for the new stage because there are new correlating services and functions available

• 1:06:41

all right and then we have big doof or bdoof baidu

• 1:06:47

and they want to know about gear will there uh will there be gear for artisans that

• 1:06:52

boost their ability to craft slash gather stronger items yes yes quick answer

• 1:07:00

uh stealth reborn wants to know about currency will there be a currency cap limit or are we free to hoard as much as we

• 1:07:07

like i think generally there should not be a cap on a currency all

• 1:07:15

right it might well i mean it might be an actually yeah there's only so many so many numbers we

• 1:07:21

can hold in the in a right variable but like that we're not gonna have an artificial one

• 1:07:26

yeah i mean from a practical standpoint on what characters are legitimately capable of achieving there

• 1:07:32

won't be a cap in that regard okay wants to know about looting if i die as

• 1:07:39

a green example from a mob or by fall damage is my tombstone immediately lootable by

• 1:07:45

other players or will i have a window to recover it

• 1:07:50

ah it would be immediately lootable it's hardcore man don't don't die i mean

• 1:07:57

you're not going to drop your completed gear unless you're corrupt right it's going to be a portion of your

• 1:08:02

collected uh gatherables but um speaking of of dying um did you have an

• 1:08:09

opportunity to take a look at the uh the direction of the those effects the or maybe we'll show that next month

• 1:08:15

they look awesome i wonder if there's a way i can send it to you margaret we can

• 1:08:21

show it just as like an impromptu yeah if you toss it to me i don't know which jeff do you know where the channel

• 1:08:26

that i'm i think it's in design let me check yeah see if you can find it and just throw her the link and she can grab it but um

• 1:08:33

to give you give you guys an idea right behind death and kind of the reason for why

• 1:08:38

respawning occurs right as you guys know the avatar of the goddess of creation is the phoenix right and the phoenix

• 1:08:44

obviously has some some very stable mythological um

• 1:08:51

lore to it with regards to you know uh the cycle of life and death and rebirth and

• 1:08:56

and that type of thing um you know as you as you enter into the world of vera you are

• 1:09:02

in a way empowered with the spark of life that comes from the goddess of creation herself uh and in that sense you you're

• 1:09:08

able to um you know house a portion of what that that that represents in in your soul and your

• 1:09:16

in the conduit to the essence um and uh we're now jim and the awesome effects

• 1:09:22

team right now are working on um actually putting in place the real death effects and rebirth uh animation and

• 1:09:30

effects and part of that is on death your body disintegrates into ash

• 1:09:35

and leaves behind a pile of ash which which will incorporate some of that

• 1:09:42

material loss that people are talking about but that will be the interactable as that is that pile of ash and then

• 1:09:47

when you're reborn um oh so you're like shifting through people's ashes

• 1:09:53

you have to have like stuff sticking out of the ashes then oh no it's it's already the first pass is looking

• 1:09:59

great um it's gonna start looking better i just linked it to you all right i'll take it

• 1:10:04

and prep it but yeah it's it's gonna be fun i think on the battlefield

• 1:10:10

as like people are are you know if you're engaged in some type of like giant raid against a boss or in some pvp

• 1:10:17

fight or whatever you're just going to see people as they take their final hit point damage just start to fall to the ground and

• 1:10:24

disintegrate and smoke will just fly away oh that's like the yeah right through

• 1:10:30

the kind of thanos and that smoke that smoke effect is going to be touched up but the

• 1:10:36

the disintegration and the pile of ash that's left behind is just going to be yeah it's going to it's going to look

• 1:10:41

really good this is first this is literally jim

• 1:10:47

he's like no i didn't put it in the folder for a reason

• 1:10:53

yeah i try not to uh obviously like we let the artist kind of decide what

• 1:10:59

they they think is ready to to share with people and you can see that the level he's in is his

• 1:11:04

special effects level so so ignore everything that's happening behind him you should we should have a little chat

• 1:11:09

box that comes above the the head of the um character upon death that says i don't feel so good

• 1:11:16

[Music] oh god it looks great that looks awesome good job jim um

• 1:11:23

all right i'm gonna move on to the next question here which is from uh taku takualian or takalian

• 1:11:31

i don't know what i'm saying right back attacks are there plans to plans for back attacks to deal bonus

• 1:11:37

damage like for rogues or anything like that and i think we might have talked about something similar to this in the past

• 1:11:44

some abilities will uh rogues generally will have more of these than others um but we're going to be playing around with that we

• 1:11:50

can pretty much do contextual positional abilities uh from any direction so

• 1:11:56

so they'll probably you'll probably see some flanking stuff you'll see some back stuff you might see some even even frontal attack stuff maybe for

• 1:12:02

the tank or something along those lines cool and of course we have another

• 1:12:08

question here from nixle which is about player stats will there be a limit soft cap for stats or could i

• 1:12:15

theoretically achieve something like 100 critical hit or block chance there will for sure

• 1:12:21

be diminishing returns on certain stats um yeah go ahead

• 1:12:27

and most dots are contested which means you're kind of testing your rating versus other people's ratings

• 1:12:32

um so so you kind of figure out what the what the end result is that but we're not going to go for like hard caps for

• 1:12:38

sure all right um do we have time for some bonus questions or

• 1:12:44

you use yeah we can take some bonus questions okay we've got a few here is lovely and added some more here for

• 1:12:51

me so we have neurotoxin who wants to know about questing will all quest uh quests given by npcs

• 1:12:57

stay static as long as the node remains to at the same level or will there be other conditions that

• 1:13:03

might change their quests um

• 1:13:10

there will be a can be yeah it kind of depends right like so for example like if a particular node

• 1:13:18

stays at a certain stage but neighboring nodes begin to advance those can have interactables with

• 1:13:24

certain quest lines that i want that one node if it stays the same level might change certain location

• 1:13:30

destinations might have add additional quest hooks you might see population changes that occur around some of the points of

• 1:13:36

interest that are you know being delegated to it um additionally there might be even longer more seasonal components

• 1:13:44

that take into account kind of community direction in more organizational quest lines right

• 1:13:50

um and that could change uh you know some of those as well you might see achievements like downing

• 1:13:56

certain world bosses affect um you know quest lines uh that aren't necessarily tied to the

• 1:14:01

advancement of the node so there's a lot that goes into kind of making these quests quote-unquote

• 1:14:07

dynamic and responsive to kind of what happens in the world and not

• 1:14:12

the vast majority of it is tied to quest to no progression but there are certain elements that are tied to other types of events and

• 1:14:18

achievements in the world yeah there's there's a ton of interaction in in the game and so

• 1:14:25

like a question like that's almost um almost hard to answer because the answer is probably going to be yes and it's going

• 1:14:31

to be like to talk about it would have to be like more specific of a kind of question like what kind of interaction are you

• 1:14:36

speaking of like what kind of behavior are you talking about because it's kind of it can be hard to nail down like

• 1:14:42

what that means in that context because the answer is almost always yes

• 1:14:47

all right um so it's a combination of depends yes in some cases in other cases it

• 1:14:53

might not yeah um i love it i like a good combination of you know quests that kind

• 1:14:58

of can spawn and then other ones where it's like you know that you know the project projection path for it so we have a duck

• 1:15:05

frog wanting to know about auction houses well in-depth auction data be available

• 1:15:11

such as volume moving averages price history etc

• 1:15:16

um there will be some elements of that data available it'll be presented through probably the economic nodes um there'll probably have

• 1:15:23

to be some advancement that's made in the economic node for its auctions to kind of show that data um but

• 1:15:30

generally uh yeah at a final stage some some of the auction houses will be able to kind of

• 1:15:35

show that data i'm not sure if someone's gonna make a spreadsheet and yeah we talked about putting that data behind a couple of different um

• 1:15:42

service buildings so that's like that's that's probably how it's going to be surfaced it's an opt-in not necessarily it

• 1:15:48

doesn't come with the system you your mayor is going to have to build it for you all right so trust have faith in your mayor that

• 1:15:54

they will build the right buildings for you um our next question is from uh hakaiju

• 1:16:00

and it is about gear will i be able to raise the level of requirement for my gear example upgrading a level 45 weapon to a

• 1:16:07

level 50 weapon no there isn't itemization progression

• 1:16:13

in that manner items are very much crafted on an individual basis and don't really have

• 1:16:18

upgrade potential there's a deconstruction system that can aid in crafting additional items in the future i guess in that sense

• 1:16:26

perhaps but really you're destroying that item for its components and parts in order to incorporate in

• 1:16:31

another recipe so you don't really push a particular

• 1:16:36

item's uh level requirement or um the identity of that item you can

• 1:16:42

enhance it you can add enchantments to it but it's still the item it is

• 1:16:47

but if you like the look of that item would you be able to put that look on another one oh like like transmogging yeah i mean we

• 1:16:54

have um we're going to have um appearance systems in place that are similar to that where you can apply the appearance of certain

• 1:17:01

items uh on top of um on top of the items you're using

• 1:17:06

so maybe that'll still get you what you wanted there i was just trying to help them like for sure get to what it seemed like they

• 1:17:12

wanted like maybe they really liked the level 45 look of the weapon but they obviously want the level 50

• 1:17:18

weapon because it's more powerful um okay cool and xylis or zilus or axillus

• 1:17:24

xls wants to know about node government actually our next two questions are both about node government will

• 1:17:30

the winner of a military nodes arena combat uh nodes arena combat automatically

• 1:17:36

become a mayor or will they be able to designate another player as mayor like so they win

• 1:17:42

the combat but they're like the champion for somebody else that's kind of cool it is pretty good that would be that

• 1:17:50

would be a change of direction um we kind of wanted the people who like again this is this is

• 1:17:55

not a political kind of node this is a note of power and and um kind of brute force right and

• 1:18:01

so we wanted to represent that in in the government so somebody um you know having a champion

• 1:18:07

is kind of a political move right um and and it's about who your friends are and who you know

• 1:18:12

and how much you can pay somebody and we really wanted it to be like who the most powerful person that that

• 1:18:18

person's the person on top okay anything else you want to add on that front stephen

• 1:18:24

no that sounds right all right our last question here is from hicks hexson and they want to know will the

• 1:18:30

service-oriented quest that determine a defined node's leadership be more group focused or

• 1:18:35

solo-focused this is just service organization yes

• 1:18:42

yeah this would be individual focused because again remember it's the points that you get um because you are the one

• 1:18:50

who is running for mayor it's not a council which is not to say you couldn't necessarily i guess you could maybe

• 1:18:56

employ somebody to help you out in some weird circumstances but but it's meant to be so long yeah i mean i guess technically you can

• 1:19:04

invite friends to assist you right um in like i guess kill content

• 1:19:12

related devotion tasks but generally most of those devotion oriented tasks in

• 1:19:18

the divine node are going to be on an individual basis and and couldn't utilize outside support

• 1:19:24

but um you know like jeff said the focus on that is your personal contribution

• 1:19:30

perfect and that's going to wrap it up for our march development update we hope that you all enjoyed hanging out with us

• 1:19:36

we definitely love sharing all of the amazing work that our team has been working on and our interpret staff has been amazing

• 1:19:43

everyone's kicking major butt doing lots of work it's been exciting seeing our team grow and like steven said we're going to be

• 1:19:50

doing another hiring phase in the summer and we we definitely need need some more folks to be able to

• 1:19:56

complete this ambitious project that we have going on um but as a final reminders reminder that we do have a new dev discussion and

• 1:20:03

guild gathering coming up in april please please partake in these these help us decide on a lot of our systems

• 1:20:08

and it's going to help our design team immensely understanding what the community wants obviously we have inter internal things that we

• 1:20:16

want to create but we want to ensure that those things align with what you guys want as well and sometimes you come up with some

• 1:20:22

other ideas that we didn't think about um beyond that we also have our march cosmetics swapping over on april 7th

• 1:20:28

so definitely snag those up if you'd like them and our next alpha one preview play test is scheduled for may

• 1:20:34

14th through may 21st if you're eligible expect an email from us closer as we get closer to

• 1:20:40

the date and of course if you are part of our current testing we'll keep you we'll keep letting you know about spot

• 1:20:45

testing but it's under nda and of course as always we will have

• 1:20:51

this up on our um youtube channel afterwards so definitely go check it out

• 1:20:56

and right after we end the stream it'll be over on our twitch channel and follow us on all of our social

• 1:21:01

channels twitter facebook instagram snapchat every all the things at Ashes of Creation we want to keep you informed

• 1:21:07

and let you know what what we've got going on we post stuff almost every day so if you're needing your Ashes of Creation

• 1:21:14

fix definitely send that our way and of course if you create any fan art please please share it with us on our

• 1:21:19

forums over on our creation section because we love seeing those we have so many amazingly talented

• 1:21:26

community members and we love showcasing those yes and and those of you guys who aren't connected into our

• 1:21:32

social media or aren't on discord or aren't on the forums please consider doing so go in there post your opinions um post

• 1:21:39

commentary on our monthly updates uh it is it is incredibly important we do read

• 1:21:44

all of that community puts together a great report on that so that our all of our developers get an opportunity to read

• 1:21:49

that as well uh your words do matter so get engaged uh it's an important part you know this

• 1:21:54

is obviously making an mmorpg and one as ambitious as as ambitious as Ashes of Creation is a

• 1:22:01

long um is a long process um but it's a great opportunity for all of you

• 1:22:06

to be a part of that process if you choose if you don't want to be that's fine too if you just want to wait for you know when the game comes out that's

• 1:22:12

that's totally cool um but we we definitely encourage those of you who do have things to say to come

• 1:22:17

and participate in the discussion it's a very important one to have we appreciate 100 all of the patients

• 1:22:24

you guys show that you guys tune in to our updates the supportive messages you send it is

• 1:22:30

it is a great source of morale for our team um because you know it's hard work

• 1:22:35

making an mmo it's a hard work making an mmo of this size and um uh you know it's it gives us

• 1:22:41

great great uh motivation to to come and give our best as we see the

• 1:22:46

kind of excitement from the community from our players people who want to be part of this project it makes all of us

• 1:22:52

that much more worthwhile to to work on things so um we love you guys in the community we

• 1:22:57

appreciate your support we appreciate your patience we appreciate you guys tuning in faithfully um and we'll continue to give you guys

• 1:23:03

updates and show you guys all the fun progression that we're making with um Ashes of Creation

• 1:23:10

anything else you want to add jeff no just i think you guys uh nailed it uh it's it's this is we're

• 1:23:16

getting to the fun part now um and the more people participate the more voices that get heard

• 1:23:21

the better right this is a game about community it's a game about you know massive amounts of people and

• 1:23:26

when we're just a few of them right now and and the more more your voice is heard the more likely it is that we'll

• 1:23:32

integrate something that you're saying yeah thank you to our community for welcome being welcoming of new folks

• 1:23:37

i see a lot of people answering questions and helping other people and uh are peeing together and i know

• 1:23:44

toast is always sharing stuff too and um you know like steven said we're reporting on social we're reporting on

• 1:23:49

customer service we're reporting on um all of the community things so anything any place where you're talking

• 1:23:55

about us we're grabbing that information and sharing it to our team yep and just uh just one last thing that

• 1:24:01

what you guys can do out there those of you who are remaining right now watching us still um to help

• 1:24:06

us grow right we're moving into this now medium-sized territory as a company you know uh wanting to get over uh

• 1:24:14

probably about 150 we want to get here in the next few months on the team um you guys helping us spread the word

• 1:24:20

continuing to help spread the word about the hiring opportunities that are available at action creation to your favorite devs to your favorite studios

• 1:24:26

to the projects that you've seen going on social media and tagging people and doing all that stuff it is a huge help

• 1:24:32

to us i know i'm unabashed in saying this um but uh i i think the more you guys go

• 1:24:37

out there and help us spread the word uh the better it is because we have a lot of additional seats to hire

• 1:24:44

as we as we move into significant content production you know we need as many people as

• 1:24:49

possible so get out there and help spread the word it is it is very helpful all right and with that we are going to

• 1:24:56

bid uh we will see you next month for our next development update we'll let you

• 1:25:01

know when that's coming up and of course we thank you all for joining us we will see you

• 1:25:07

see you on the flip side bye everybody have a good one

• 1:25:14

[Music]