Talk:2020-08-28 Livestream
Raw transcript
[Music] hello everyone welcome to our development update for august 2020 or august september i don't remember what month it is no we're in august yeah we're in august how are y'all doing i hope you guys have been good i feel like i just talked to you moments ago so it's weird how are you guys doing we're doing great i think doing very very good excited to be on another monthly live stream got a lot of stuff to show doing some recording yesterday yeah so we have i'll kind of go over what we'll be covering today and then we'll get right into it um so we have lower thirds now because people kept asking who we are so there you go but it's not about us it's about Ashes of Creation so here we go uh today's update we'll have a studio update from stephen we did announce some stuff with uh my games so we'll talk a little bit about that we do also have a design update we have some in-game footage actually two videos for you this time around and environment our update as well there's some cool assets on that end and a character update with another video as well and then we'll go into our q a which we've got quite a few questions um we'll probably get through 10 of them but maybe we'll try for more if we can uh we did get a lot of questions in the forum thread so thank you so much for for putting those in there i know toast is going to try her darndest to answer as many as possible because there were a lot of repeat questions in there as well um so for quick updates i'm just going to quick show those we have our next step discussion so our next dev discussion is coming up in september stay tuned for it all i'm going to give you is a sneak preview of immersion is going to be the the topic get ready for that we are compiling the dev discussion from the previous one so i think i actually think that report already went out to the design team correct jeff i sure did we also have a sweet coloring book for you guys if you check out our Ashes of Creation dot com news which also is a great place to get all of our news everything's always there even our live streams i've now started uploading those as well um so everything's up there uh we will be getting a fresh new look to that page too someday so stay tuned i'm really excited by the way i just wanted to chime in the participation that you guys out in the community have had in the dev discussions is very appreciated it's really great to see different you know opinions and and comments and experiences and all of those things kind of go to further reinforce you know a lot of the design decisions that we've made uh with Ashes of Creation and um it's it's very beneficial for the team to kind of get that very eclectic you know view uh from a lot of you guys as players and uh please don't stop participating in those discussions it's very very helpful yeah and those i mean toast does a great job of like thoroughly going through every single comment so don't worry like you're you're getting hurt and sometimes like the example ones that she provides for the links for the dev team are like it gets really long because there's been so many uh conversations happening with that yeah it's one of those things that you know you sometimes think you understand what the audience wants but actually hearing it you know directly in an organized way really helps to you know laser focus us and get us on the right track um so so yeah keep it coming yeah awesome um and of course those are up on the page for the uh coloring book if you want to participate we've seen a lot of folks posting those so that it's been really awesome seeing that and we have our next cosmetic we always tell you whatever the swap over is on the news post so definitely stay tuned for that but our swap over will be september 2nd 2020 at 11 a.m pacific as noted in the articles so do keep a note of that if you're interested in the boons of the wave born goodies and we also have oh sorry go ahead i was just saying i wanted this nail yeah we're also gonna say we uh i i leaked a little bit of the uh next month's stuff too so she even got a little excited and shared them people people are really funny because they're uh they're messaging me like oh no margaret don't get mad at steven for sharing them i've never mad at stephen don't worry guys that's true she beats me that's true don't say that people are gonna really think i do that i'm blinking twice um i really had fun with that next set that's coming up if you're interested in like fire elemental goodies and stuff like that um so yeah um and then the last thing on there i believe is the pandemic statue which is this bad boy it looks amazing um so as long as you've registered before that date i believe it was uh in september i'll have to double check that date but um yeah register now if you're already registered you're good so without further ado i think we're just going to go right into the studio update if you want to take that away stephen absolutely am i too quiet sorry oh i don't know am i too quiet you sound fine everyone's level for me okay sorry i keep saying seeing them saying people have to turn up their um i can i can't just though all right just to give a little studio update we are uh a good ways through our hiring um our current hiring phase we had listed 24 positions but i believe as of yesterday we are at 16 of those 24 positions have been filled uh over the past five weeks so um we're very appreciative of you guys helping to kind of spread the word for the studio uh for our hiring uh goals uh it's been very helpful we've had a a tremendous flow of very very very talented developers applying to the studio very passionate and excited about the project and that's always you know great for us as a company as a team to get that influx of passionate very talented developers we're very appreciative of that so we will have additional rounds of hiring uh in the future uh in the near future actually um and uh if you did not you know make it through to the final um uh stage of the process uh for those of you who have applied uh keep your chin up there will be additional opportunities uh in the future so we're we're very very happy about that yeah just uh the design candidates have been just amazing um and so it's been really hard to kind of really separate the the top tier guys from from below so you know if you if you haven't gotten an offer you haven't talked to steven yet like hold on tight because there's just so many of you yeah yes yeah i haven't done anything with audio so i think you guys just need to project oh i'm sorry i can project i don't want to blow people's everyone was like it's better i'm like i didn't do anything um um okay so then to further elaborate on the studio update um as was announced previously due to covid we're still working from home um the hopes were that we would be in the new office by this month and or next month unfortunately as i've announced previously it's likely not going to be until the beginning of the new year there was an opportunity perhaps for us to move into the new studio come november or december time frame however um with the release of the uh initial alpha one uh being at the end of this year i figured that would just be too much uh potential uh for disruption within the studio to orchestrate not only the release of the alpha one client but also um studio move so we're going to be postponing that until the start of the next year we also made an announcement with regards to the uh publishing of Ashes of Creation Intrepid Studios has opened uh a entity within the netherlands within amsterdam we are hiring currently for the office that will be in amsterdam those positions at the moment are going to be remote uh so if you know any good european um community management and or marketing teams or uh developers that you like take a look at the uh the positions that are open for the eu region and spread the word for that we're very excited about that new adventure um and uh it's gonna be fun to see how that turns out yeah it'll be fun for me too because a lot of that uh is handled on my team's died so we'll have we'll have fun doing a lot of cool stuff on that front absolutely so that's the development otherwise uh is moving along rapidly as usual we did in the studio just update from 4.23 unreal engine 4 to 4.25 it did introduce some bugs but we are in the middle of uh squashing them the team's doing a great job in doing that we'd like to obviously stay up to date as much as possible with the new engine versions that come out and that's always a little bit of a process when we do that when we do that migration so um things are things are looking good things are going did you want to talk more on that migration front at all um i gotta say like it's fun to like always play with the new tools that we get uh in in the the new releases and since we skipped kind of two releases in one go um there's a lot of cool stuff that we gotta learn about and integrate and figure out how to take advantage of so um that is something that we really enjoy what's in my mouth uh-oh something in your mouth i don't think i can't i don't know it's like something something in my mouth yeah the lower thirds it's because your camera's zoomed in like real close to your face compared to everybody else but um to kind of further a little bit elaborate on that 4.25 did have a lot of um changes from an art perspective as well and a lot of our artists are very very happy uh with what's come along uh in the latest updates so um that's always great to see too and by the way i know margaret announced but we do have um i believe we have three videos not just two right yeah i said two for the design and one for character cool yeah um so if you don't have anything else to add for studio update stuff um we'll move on to our next thing but obviously if um if you have any questions about the the my game stuff definitely check out our faq it's on our website on the news section it's also in our form links from our forums too so we've also linked to all our social medias so definitely go check that out if you have any questions we'll have further information on the migration front um coming out soon so stay tuned to that and um yeah we're excited for all the new folks that are joining our team so moving on we're going to play a video because we're going to move on to our design section we're first going to play a video that's going to talk about the hybrid combat we know that folks have been asking a lot about this um obviously a reminder that we're in like early stages of things on this front but it should give you kind of like a good feel for it and then we'll grab a couple questions and we'll answer those and then we'll move into our next step our next segment just just to preface this video uh guys again i always want to uh um emphasize that uh the ui that you're going to see here is placeholder not a lot you know there's still a lot of polish that's necessary in optimization this is a very initial implementation of the hybrid combat but just wanted to give you an idea of what's going to be experienced in alpha one uh and you know how we'll iterate from there so yeah and of course taking feedback will always take feedback and assess things as we go forward too all right so i'm gonna toss that video over we'll see you in about 10 minutes hey everybody welcome to another video in Ashes of Creation i'm going to be talking a little bit about the hybrid combat system that's currently kind of first pass early early iteration of integrating the action components along with the tab targeting type component so before we kind of take a look at this stuff i just want to reiterate that this is the early look at alpha one it is the preview and um you know a lot of the systems are our very first pass and uh you know it's up to the testers that we're going to have present in the different phases of alpha and beta kind of helping us to fine-tune and iterate upon these implementations so um you know one of the most important things to keep in mind as you're watching this stuff is that you know a lot of the art uh while it looks you know great we have an amazing artist team um but a lot of the art is first pass including especially the ui so keep that in mind a lot of this ui placeholder uh and will be further fleshed out as we get more along in the project so talking a little bit about uh the hybrid combat system let's take a look at the skill skill system so this is where players allocate skill points into their different either active skills their passive abilities which can augment their usage of weapons and armors and their health regeneration and passive stats and stuff like that on the weapon side of things you know that's where you will spec into certain types of procs based off of weapon groupings so you've talked a little bit about this in the past if you have a dagger doctors might have a chance to proc a bleed on your weapon attack and that would synergize with an active skills ability like let's say backstab that does additional damage if the target is under a bleed effect now we've said in the past that players will be able to allocate skill points into their active skills that are more geared towards either action combat or tab targeting and you know as an example you can kind of see you know these skills can have additional points allocated to them to unlock further features some of them can be tabbed to start and become action if you allocate additional additional uh skill points and this is one of the ways that we kind of balance the skills between action and tab targeting um you know requiring additional skill points in order to unlock certain certain features of that skill and then it becomes a tab or an action type skill so what i'd like to show you is let's see if we can find um some monsters we can look for something nearby okay here we go we got some macaws oh my cause and a raptor um so let me let's mount here uh one of the things i'm going to show you uh is essentially the weapon attack so you see on the q down here we have a oh it's a silver guardian weapon that's cool okay so this is a rare like level 10 weapon um it's not too bad uh but these guys i think are low or like level one as you can see i'm currently in the tab the tap mode essentially oh look at the poor little thing fly it's going to be sad if i have to kill it wow he's really moving this thing's pathing all over the place um i can click and i can target i can tab target if i want to so tab between that um so this is the traditional kind of tab targeting i can you know my camera movement is not tied to my cursor um i can kind of look around and do kind of stuff like that um i can look at my my cool silver sword um yeah but players can very easily transition between tab targeting and action combat by pressing z i now tie my cursor movement to my camera and additionally a reticle has spawned now like i said previously the ui here is is relatively rudimentary and very early but essentially as i hover over targets with this reticle i will get indicators through color and and highlights on the reticle that will tell me essentially either distance to the target whether or not a skill that i might have prepped could hit the target from this distance i can left click and tab target a target currently um now we'll change that uh to be right click right now it's left click but it should be right click um and additionally uh i can when targeting an enemy this way i can utilize my tab targeting skills so i'll try to hook this dude come on over little buddy and my left click will attack and i can use my kind of movements here another important thing to note um let's see if we can get a few of these guys is that all weapons have a forward cone to some degree based on the weapon type it'll change um pole arms for example will have a much wider arc and much further out daggers will have a more fine-tuned arc uh so you have to be more precise in that regard so if i pull this sword if i pull a few of these macaws let's see if we can grab a few of them come on over buddies so we have a few macaws here little buddies i feel horrible but you'll see as i attack i'm hitting multiple uh numbers of these opponents and that's important because all weapons regardless of if you're in reticle mode or tab targeting mode you will be able to uh have a action-based type weapon attack not active skill but weapon attack [Music] let me pull this guy um so that's an important note weapons each have their own unique and individual um forward arcs and distance that they uh deal damage to a target let's see if we can go over here and um grab this little plant what's up buddy give me your goods um should be some stuff here now um obviously as i've said in the past uh action combat and tab are two very different tempos and you know if we had to go through and rework kind of combat not to be hybrid i would lean more in favor of of tab targeting with high mobility and a lot of template type attacks to kind of represent that more skill-oriented combat but i think that through testing in alpha and beta but especially alphas that we will be able to fine-tune this so that it sits comfortably uh between the two different types of of speeds essentially um we got some mushrooms kill these mushrooms there we go another thing that's important about um kind of these action combats is the ability to kind of dodge and kind of moving out of the way of certain uh skill shots and oh that's a death cap i don't think we want to do that one yeah that's done um [Music] yeah so um it's gonna be interesting to see players oh here we go it's gonna be interesting to see essentially players kind of testing out this hybrid combat seeing how it feels um uh getting an idea for essentially the balancing that's gonna be required and hosting different types of cc effects across the the different uh targeting methods and uh iterating on this and you guys are going to be a part of that every step of the way giving great feedback as all of you do normally which we appreciate on our discord or forums or reddit um it's uh it's always always great to to get kind of player feedback go back to this crap you know bacon made this crap yeah so i hope you guys enjoyed uh taking a look at the um hybrid combat system and feel free to leave some comments and i will see you guys back on stream here momentarily later all right so um with that i feel like there's a lot of questions in the chat that we've already answered quite a bit of um in regards to blocking are there going to be more abilities than just the abilities that obviously they saw there um so i don't know if you want to kind of like touch base on some of those other things that you might have seen in chat um but again i think a lot of those questions we've answered before and this is early implementation um again so keep that in mind everybody i think you know one of one of the most important things is you guys are seeing that you know i i obviously the team loves to see the excitement the uh you know the feedback about how great the game looks and all that kind of stuff um that's very important to us but really what the purpose is of you know going into these alpha phases is going to be is getting data getting logs getting um the actual feeling feedback from the players and there's a long way to go in making combat what it needs to be i've said this in the past you know the design team knows us we all know this combat is the most is the most tactile system in the game it's the thing you will experience most often um and outside of the systems and mechanics that are going to be present for kind of the overarching core gameplay loop combat needs to feel uh responsive it needs to not feel floaty it needs to feel uh mobile it needs to be fluid it needs to give a feeling of satisfaction uh the audio components the effects components the animations themselves the types of skills and um uh you know those types of things all of those are are really kind of our objective in fine-tuning the approach for um for our combat and Ashes of Creation and i just want to make sure that you guys are aware you know as we go through these alphas it's going to be rapidly changing there might be several prototypes we attempt to play with with the live audience you know that's the best way i think that we as a development team can yield a successful system in combat is that type of iteration that type of player involvement jeff yeah just getting getting that feedback from the players immediately like that's one of the reasons why we've chosen to kind of expose ourselves this way rather than kind of waiting until we're about to launch to kind of let everybody know what we're planning on doing right like these are systems that combat specifically where feel and flow is so important to how the game feels overall and getting that feedback from you guys as you're playing it you know early on before we've really committed so far that we can't change it easily um it's super important so so that's again like why we try to give you guys the the inside baseball and everything that's going on with our studio so that we can make those decisions and change direction as rapidly as we need to yes yeah my lawnmower person just got here so people might be hearing my gardener going off did you call him your lawnmower person i don't know i don't know uh just like i just heard it go up but i'm like oh no the lawnmower is going off it's like a transformer yeah it does [Laughter] i don't know um but there were some questions regarding add-ons obviously we've already talked about that we're not going to allow add-ons uh we've talked about blocking before the other one that i saw consistently was um in regards to skills and abilities and how many people will have access to yeah so uh the goal is not to overwhelm people um with hot bars right um and to to make sure that we're making good decisions about like how many buttons you actually need to press to accomplish a thing um but with that being said this is also a build based game so how many buttons you are using kind of depends on you um you're going to be choosing between passives and active skills um and how you feel your hotbar is kind of up to you so um yeah um one of the things we've said in the past you know is is the things that i've disliked at least personally about mmos that i've played before is that um you know as you go through different phases of leveling you have relevant skills and then eventually sometimes you end up with like a skill menu uh where you you have half of them available but none of them are relevant at your end game or or higher level stages um we are we're trying to mitigate that as much as possible by making active skills uh capable of receiving additional skill point allocations and unlocking additional features so that um from a player agency standpoint you know it's going to be up to you whether or not you want to be more diverse but less depth right wider and not taller in some of these skill choices or if you want to be very very tall you know that's going to be something that is is up to the player in that regard there will be multiple hop bars that you obviously have available because you're going to have consumables you're going to have you know active skills and whatnot um but the active skills but the number of active skills are not going to try to overwhelm necessarily the character and and be kind of you know irrelevant uh especially at certain stages and i know it seems like most people are happy about the no add-ons but in regards to ui elements and things like that we're really trying to make them be you know you can move them around you can adjust them and things like that so we'll try to you we want to give you those tools and make them be part of the system and if you have you know features that you'd like in the future obviously like those things will take time but you know when community managers are kind of taking in that feedback we'll toss those over to the design team and they'll take into account what things they want to add to the milestones as we progress so keeping that in mind we're we're definitely going to try our best to make sure that it's um you know very smooth for all yeah from a from a ui customization standpoint regardless of you know whether or not we open apis or you know add-ons that kind of we made had a stance against that but the ui implementation will be highly customizable uh whether it be from resizing a movement recoloring um you know different types of actual like uh ui flavors that will be presented and offered to players as well we want to have a very very uh robust ui system so we know that that's something that's kind of more personally oriented in people's kind of preferences rather than something that can be a one size fits all yeah all right if you want to move on to the next video which is going to talk about more castle siege oriented things um i do want to preface uh before we go to this video that you know obviously we've used we used some gm hacks you wouldn't be able to like run around like we were and like you know lose the mobs that easily yes and also i'd like to preface that um the castle you see here is is really intended for like what systems will be be able to have online by alpha one for certain castle siege testing we did yeah it's very small so it's like maybe one quarter of the size of an actual castle at launch um and there will be a lot more you know inner uh corridors and rooms and multiple uh uh portcullises and gates and stuff like that we have shown in the past a little bit of the destruction physics of castle so um you won't see that in this video we're just kind of taking you around and talking a little bit about the castle system for especially those of you who are new uh and might not have um you know received a lot of information about castle sieges uh that's kind of what this video goes over a little bit all right hello everybody welcome to another video uh we are recording here not live uh this is pre-recorded uh it is thursday uh august 27th at 5 53 p.m pacific uh standard time i am joined uh by tiny toast the tiniest of toasts uh currently and uh also by le perzo not le uh margaret crowe it changed my character and my other character's name was the prizes so here we are so we just wanted to um kind of showcase a little bit of the castle implementation we're just going to take you over near the castle and talk a little bit about it you are still on the alpha island but we are hoping to get castles online for some activity in alpha one um and um we're just gonna kind of run around and show off the the castle as at its current state which is owned by npcs because no players have taken it um and yeah wanna head over there yeah let's do it let's do it let's watch out for the mushrooms there's a few of them on the way oh are there some mushrooms yeah that's unfortunate can we like uh cook them saute them that'd be awesome you know we had stuffed mushrooms last night i put it in the food channel oh yeah i saw that that looked really good it was pretty yummy i like how you're going to players be able to create stuffed mushrooms the scale runner cracks me up well the my urine too is really funny yours looks so majestic with its long legs like a cassell oh yeah yeah meanwhile me [Laughter] your legs are so funny so up here you can see um one of the castles probably those of you guys who participated in the apocalypse testing recognize this castle in particular this this is a bacon constructed castle this is a little bit smaller than actually the size of the castles and how they'll actually be in the game at launch but this kind of will be more facilitating uh smaller battles i think in alpha one um but uh initially as probably most of you are aware before players do actually take castles they will be owned by monsters so this one is currently owned by monsters and basically how it's going to work is guilds will be capable of signing up to attack these castles and you know kind of talked a little bit about this in the past but um uh the guild that signs up to attack you know multiple guilds may do so um they're gonna initially be fighting these monsters and killing a raid boss that will be kind of in the center of the castle and the what we're thinking right now is that in order to initially take the castle from the npc control rather than using the normal ceiling mechanic that's cast on the center relic instead the raid boss will be essentially killed by the number of players out there and the highest contributing damage to the raid boss for the initial capture of the castle will be the determining factor for the guild we're going to test this obviously you know we have a couple of other ideas as well the whole purpose of alpha and and the betas is to test these ideas and and see how they how they play out now there's a lot of stuff outside of just killing you know the raid boss that's important to take a castle um uh there are objectives within in the interior of the castle uh specific um uh waypoints that you want to capture um and this will aid kind of in progressing to the raid boss eventually but let's dismount and see if we can head and i know we're only three but uh whoops i believe enough yeah i think we might be able to we'll do some gm hackery probably yeah i think the three of us combined with with the tiny mite of of tiny toast and the the strong staff of luperzo we could potentially do this let's see i mean you can see your reflection in my armor oh that's true i love that pretty majestic i like the uh the little plume on top actually let me take a look at that yeah that's pretty cool it's like waving in the window like the physics is a little messed up on the and the waiting yeah it's pretty cool all right let's see where all your ideas come from yeah so you can see they're kind of interior like i said this is smaller than what would normally be the castle size um but the the relic is kind of exposed there the raid boss isn't present at the moment these guys are um they are elite mobs so normally you would have a party a full party that would be fighting uh these dudes whoops yeah these guys are strong uh we are cheating a little bit by or at least i'm cheating you can see the other party members have a few hundred hit points and i bump myself up i'll give you some mana oh nice did you give him a man now i give you mana oh man the man of friendship there's a lot of smoke a lot of fire happening right now get too major than here oh no oh no i'll switch into uh action or actually let's see i'm gonna train i'm gonna train the room he's trying to kill us oh i have a lot of hit points you guys uh let's see oh no oh god someone's on my butt oh there's like little flowers in here wait for oh it he reset these guys are awesome i kind of ran into the center i was seeing whether or not the uh i'll follow you the boss had spawned yet where's the uh here i come yeah let's come with me um another important thing to note by the way i know we i think we need a full group for this stuff but another important thing to note is um uh you know during the siege these gates will be closed the pork calluses will be closed all of the walls are destructible you guys have seen some of the destruction videos in the past kind of how this stuff happens but players will be able to come prepared with siege weaponry they'll have trebuchets they'll have um uh the the latter things what are those things called i can't remember now to towers the siege towers uh that they can utilize um i'm just kind of running around out here we're trying to kill this thing oh no you guys are gonna die for sure um but yeah there's a we're aiming to have some of the basic uh castle functionality present for alpha one um those of you guys who pro i don't know if we showed actually any of the castle siege testing in apocalypse but uh he froze me oh how do you freeze him i've been blocked oh he's an occultist he is he's got some of the same moves i do throwing them back at me probably gonna make them leash it's a good thing i cheated and put my uh health up a little bit yeah what are some of the favorite sieges you guys have participated in in the games you played i've really loved uh warhammer online's pvp and dark age of camelot like both of those were probably my favorite experiences for me i think this may actually be the first time where i'm participating in large scale siege pvp personally so i am super excited to jump in and test and try out all this stuff with you guys oh that's kind of cool back in like if we're thinking of um ragnarok online i think had some sieges but that's probably the last time i did just kicking it back old school we're in a circle around this thing um ragnarok online yeah that's pretty cool i uh i also enjoyed um warhammer online that was a great game yeah i didn't care so much for the pvp content but the pvp content i really liked and i enjoyed it a lot yeah it was i liked the arenas that they had in warhammer online yeah that was a lot of fun to me and um some of the way that the their abilities worked and stuff like that um as a tank i thought it was really cool how i could like take the damage for somebody else and stuff like that it's really neat yeah um another important thing to note about uh castles in ashes is that um they actually you know we should be facing the camera there you go okay there you another thing note about the castles is they do too close have a lot of a lot of trophies uh for the guilds that manage to to take them and keep them as a matter of fact the benefits for holding a castle actually get greater the longer a guild holds on to its castle so each cycle which is a 30-day cycle before it gets sieged again these the benefits of the castle get stronger they exert control and pressure over the region one of the five main economic regions they exert control over they can levy taxes against the nodes under them they can establish um essentially the the quote-unquote king's presence or queen's presence within the uh node system that grants benefits to the citizens that are under its rule and the can they can have special relationships established with the mayors as well to help participate in kind of building up the nodes that spawn around the castle these castle dedicated nodes they're not tied into the structure of the general world node structure but they're kind of dedicated to helping to build up um the castle's defenses and the economic benefits that come along with uh uh owning the castle so yeah i hope you guys um enjoyed this little uh insight to one of the castles that is going to be present in alpha 1 and we'll see you guys back on stream thanks everybody thanks thank you all right so hope it seems like y'all liked that and enjoyed it and you got a little toast cameo in there she always cracks me up um i know there were a few comments and concerns uh in regards to obviously the difficulty of that because um as steven said you're going to have to like break down gates you're going to have to like kind of progress and push it's not going to be that easy we're just kind of showing like yeah yeah just to be clear uh when we were running in there so when the castle sieges occurs um it'll be different than what you saw there that's just kind of in its unknown state if there's no owner there'll be little monsters and and you can kind of go in and fight on the off siege time when it's not siege time then when siege time occurs you know guilds will have a weak period of time where they can kind of register and come and attack and during the two-hour long siege that's when everything changes the poor calluses go down the gates go down you'll need siege weaponry there's going to be specific objectives within the castles that you'll have to conquer and then there'll be if it's an unknown castle it'll need to have a raid boss at the center that kind of gets fought for attackers can fight each other during that experience it's going to be a contesting thing once the castle is owned by a guild that's when the supporting castle nodes start to come online and spawn each uh each week prior to the fourth week castle siege um and uh they'll have to form alliances they'll have to get support they'll have to get resources um they'll be able to allocate uh funds that have been collected through taxation in order to strengthen the defenses as well as hiring additional npc mercenaries um you know that type of thing so there's a lot of systems that go into um uh into the castle sieges really we were just kind of showing off the castle itself and kind of running around in the little monsters that are present there so yeah and the ai is not just finalized it is yeah it's it's all kind of populated for the level ranges that we're going for right now and only really populated for group content these will actually be raid level stuff so you're going to need really large raids in order to kind of take these things from the npc's who live there and then also contest with other guilds that are also trying to do the same thing so so it's not exactly representative it's it's a it's a good approximation maybe but um certainly it's not going to be what the final thing is going to look like 100 and i i um there may something that might not have been um revealed previously but um each week leading up to the siege week right so there's a as a four week uh uh period of time that the castle is owned um each week is uh a week that's dedicated to one of the three castle dedicated nodes so around the castle there are three nodes they represent week one two and three and then the fourth week is the siege against the castle those can only be elevated up to stage three we've discussed this you know in the past and there's definitely uh uh information out there on the on the community ran wiki and other stuff but what we haven't expressed is that on the tax collection side castles do collect taxes from their region which encompasses uh you know one-fifth of the world territory and within those regions are nodes that spawn right naturally and um at the end of each week there is a period of time on the weekend where npc generated caravans from those nodes start moving towards one of the castle nodes and during that period of time it's incumbent on the owning guild and its allies or even the citizens of the nodes that fall under its purview to escort those caravans to the castles uh dedicated one of three nodes um those caravans carry the castle taxes so the incentive to essentially attack those caravans as they move to uh build the castle dedicated nodes uh on the enemies of that guild are very high not only because of the reward that you can reap in kind of sabotaging that tax collection uh but also in um in destabilizing or uh reducing the defensive capability of the castle itself because it depends on those uh dedicated nodes around the castle in order to to have strong uh strong uh defenses now citizens of nodes that fall under the purview of the castle may not participate in the attack of those caravans they are automatically uh registered as the defenders of those caravans um and that's important because certain benefits it's a reciprocal relationship between the castle and its its nodes uh essentially um there are benefits granted to citizens of uh the castle and the longer that the castle remains in the hands of its of its incumbent uh guild um the stronger the benefits become overall but at the same time that represents a greater incentive to attack the castle because the rewards will get greater over time also so just to give you a little bit more information um a little bit more information on it awesome and uh i did notice some folks commenting like steven really loves zooming all the way out with this camera you can totally zoom in uh with your camera you don't have to have it zoomed out that far true i'm one of the zoom out mmo players i know that there's a there's a spectrum of people and where they live on that from a zoom standpoint but i love seeing everything around me and that's usually because when i played mmos you know have i i used to have a large guild and we had large rages and i always had to kind of like know what was going on all over the place yeah i think for raids i always go max but like for uh when i'm just running around and stuff i kind of like give the cinematic zoom in you know um but i noticed some comments in regards to that uh so i just wanted to make a note of it that's actually a conversation me and steven have a lot where hey stephen is this camera distance okay no must have maximum zoom and there was a question regarding like first person like if you can zoom in and like see things first person i'm assuming we'll allow that as well you could you could zoom in but you will not have the traditional first person type animations where you see like your arms yeah you know what i mean so like yeah you could zoom all the way into your character and get that kind of camera perspective from the eyes but you're not going to get any of the correlating uh typical first-person animations uh with arms and and stuff like that yeah so like similar to a lot of other mmos out there all right i think we've covered both of those because we still have a lot more to go through and uh we don't have a lot of time so i'm gonna swap us over so there's gonna be a weird screen situation for a moment if y'all give me a moment for that are we going to show the uh the other one and have the audio with it too or are we going to show it while we oh that will be later that will be during the character are you run a show homie i'm sorry i didn't have time he's just excited i know i know i know i want people to see the little turtle all right so our first thing here is and i know that all of the cameras because i have to have their cameras are so tiny their cameras are actually better quality than that it's just because we're i'm screen sharing with them we're gonna find a better solution for this for our next stream promise uh hold me to it i know jalon will i'm just kidding um i just like trolling um so first and foremost uh we're gonna talk a little bit about the junior city gate that you see here um and there's also a lot of little intricacies that we're gonna show off in some other assets as well um and this first one is kind of like giving you the feel of what that gate is going to look like this isn't even the whole city itself but i don't know if you guys want to talk a little bit about that and then i can show as well the lamps and some of the props as well and how those integrate with nodes as they progress like level one two all the way to level six jeff why is everybody telling you to put as much water in your mouth i don't know it's because when you drink spaghetti so i don't know maybe oh it's because they can see like all the water swishing around in your mouth it's weird i don't know is it like a trench do you have like translucent lips or something i don't know i think when he like laughs and stuff okay uh yeah so that's probably hard to see because it's kind of blurry this is a concept piece um showing kind of the architectural designs for the junior stage 5 city this and this piece in particular is really focused on the outer walls one important thing to note about the way that nodes essentially get established is we're now utilizing a platform system as these nodes kind of get constructed in real time and it's semi-procedural obviously there's parameters that we set and um you know those for those parameters dictate the placement of specific buildings that adhere to the designs for both sieges as well as the roads that exist and the location of specific services and or merchants but what that ensures is that every node um will have a unique appearance it will be distinct uh to itself and even if it gets leveled up multiple times uh there's an opportunity there where the node platform design gets changed for each progression so to speak and this is this is great from an immersion standpoint obviously because you're not going to see cookie cutter type nodes uh with the with excuse me you're not going to see cookie cutter type city layouts and no designs it's going to be fresh kind of each time and they're not going to be like oh this is a you know every node's a rectangle uh kind of thing they're they're going to be natural immersive you know looking like uh normal uh cities and stuff yeah and so this next one is kind of the lamps and you can kind of see the progression as you know it goes from you know town all the way up to i think this is like metropolis-ish it depends and there might be another stage in there but um kind of gives you you can you can kind of see the node three and four is like village and uh town node four to five is like town to city and then node five to six is city to um metropolis so you can kind of get a sense there and then uh the next one we have here is also some junior razors not braziers razor i know it's like a weird words man english um but yeah it's really cool seeing like the different progression and like the style and how fancier things get as we go up this is a this is really kind of a testament to not just the concept artists on the team and their their great job kind of you know showing off these ideas but also um to the environment team and and just the the the sheer realm of possibilities that we're going to include in the game from not just a you know architecture and building standpoint but also reflected in the prop designs as well so a lot of these props are going to uh you know not necessarily be reused you know you're not going to see the same razor present in the metropolis stage as you would in the village stage it's all going to be immersive and make sense visually as players see progression because these are the central hubs of really the game this is where pretty much every system ties into the node so we want to make sure that as players are you know present in those nodes that um that it's not only visually aesthetic but it also is it visually makes sense as well it's one of those things that um you know the detail work really matters uh when you're trying to tell a story and trying to provide like a cohesive look to things right the details are really important and so that's why we share these things it's like it's not we're not just thinking about the overall big gigantic walls but like we get down to like the real detailed stuff and think about like what does a denier brazier look like what does a duneer cup look like what does a denier table look like so we're thinking about all these things you know on a really micro level in order to tell this story and make the story make sense at a glance yeah yeah it's awesome and then the next one we have here are kind of like a bunch of different bookshelf options we are you know putting a lot of effort into like even the smaller little pieces that you're going to see on that front as well so these are i believe the smaller bookshelves version a little shorter you can see their little dwarf there next to them as well for scale gotta make sure the doors can reach those books yeah you have to reach the books very important i don't know if they'll be able to get to the top shelf there maybe if you get like a little step a little stool yeah that's my life tiptoes like my life is i always have to carry around one of those little step ladders all right oh someone's like maggie to scale pretty much yeah uh or toast we're both shorties uh and then the taller bookshelf is this one so pretty even like the little details on like where uh the shelves interlock with the sides of the whatever you call it the boards is really pretty too yeah i will say you know one thing that's that's very important you know to me when kind of setting out um to make Ashes of Creation is not just keeping this high level perspective of you know these grand systems but making sure that at the at the most my new detail point um that really this this product this project is created to a certain level of of um of detail that is representative of the quality we want you as players to experience and immersion is a very important factor you know for myself and for the team and we want to um we want to make sure that that experience is is whole is is really from the from the bottom to the top um you know players are going to be immersed in this world and and a lot of that immersion really can stem from these these finer details uh that might in other games be overlooked but um uh you know all of them are part of that equation in creating an immersive experience yeah you're you might not notice it but your brain does [Music] moving on to our character art do you want me to just go straight to the video i was gonna have it last straight to the video i was going to do it last um but we can go first if you want we'll ask chat what does chat want video oh they're going to want the video right well you never know i always like to encounter i'll give you a hint it has to do with turtles all right we'll swap to the video and we'll see y'all in a moment then [Music] um user left your channel user was moved out of your channel [Music] huh [Music] oops oh that's cool we have very pretty little backgrounds yeah that's what my background is a star background because obviously i love space and stuff so that's what they were looking at before switch to the wrong scene um but i love turtles so i loved i love that um yeah and just so you guys are where that is the uh um shell of the ancient shell of the ancients yeah show of the ancients um that was something that was uh limited to last year i think it was last year in one of the months um but it's always nice for you guys to take a look at you know as these things kind of come online you see you know from the modeling perspective to the animation to the sounds to the eventually in-game not the teamspeak sounds i know oh my gosh yeah there's you guys heard the team speak something um but uh yeah so you guys get to see kind of that and and really kind of understand the the process and quality that goes into to creating these uh these um these assets yeah and we'll have other turtles and other different rounds that are coming out we're just kind of we don't want to show off too much of the stuff that you haven't necessarily seen in that realm um because we you know you know we want stuff to be some some semblance of a surprise some surprises yeah yeah some creature we have some cool creatures that are in the works that we haven't quite shared but i think it'll be cool when people get to experience that in you know alpha 2 when we swap over to the new uh creatures and things like that hey i see people in chat hating on teamspeak i will have you know teamspeak is uh teamspeak's a very good app and um it has it's very mature it's very mature it has a lot of uh administrative functions that aren't present i love discord but it has a lot of administrative functions from a professional standpoint um that are our best in kind of utilizing from a virtual office standpoint uh and it's been very beneficial we have obviously we have discord as well that we do um you know activities and as a company uh and then uh teamspeak we kind of use as our virtual office space in addition to slack so just keep going we do on-camera stuff too we have a whole slew of things that we use on our end for for goodies um and communication and whatnot but moving on to our next thing here uh we have some bayloon leather that is made by carson it's not completely done yet but i kind of want to show you the progress of things um you can kind of see that i really love the style oh yeah absolutely you know they don't have a heavy um um kind of middle eastern influence uh in their in their culture uh and you can see that kind of represented here in the leather set that carson's working on and then we have the the kayla robes here i think we might have shown uh before of this previously but now you get to see it with all the textures obviously this isn't a t-pose but you can just see how amazing it is and you saw my armor when we were in game earlier and how like the metal pieces like reflect and stuff it's it's pretty crazy yeah i think this i think this set is a level 20 uh set and this is not this is not a uh cosmetic this is an in-game achievable armor set i believe yeah it's a basic and then our next one here is a made by ali or eli uh the aegis of vigilance and some of you might recognize this one i think we had a fan that created this as well which was cool like in our fan art oh yeah you know one thing i love about these types of shields is just the sheer length that kind of tower shield look um you know i don't often see that in mmorpgs they're kind of a large you know uh piece for the for usually for characters but i think the way we have set up the character animations um helps different this is this is not made by a fan i was saying like a fan made fan art of this shield yeah but this is this is the completed uh art excuse me this is the completed um official official piece in game so um what was the name of this shield what was it called uh the aegis of vigilance aegis of vigilance got it i believe that's how you pronounce that right yep yeah the aegis of vigilance yeah it was more that aegis part is like a weird it's a it's like aggies i don't know it's like a weird word sometimes i look at words and i'm like why are you spelled that way and then stephen gave a little sneak peek of our male dwarf here but now you get to see the armor on the female dwarf you can see how a little bit of the couture months are adjusted for the feminine form and yeah let's check it out it looks great this one is made by ginsee well i liking it we have amazing artists so we just kind of like love having them all share you know a couple pieces of art that they're really proud of from the month um and obviously there's some stuff that we don't want to show yet so stay tuned for some things as we progress but um yeah i think that's going to be it for our dev update we're going to move over to our q a next and i think do we want to like have some of those like videos playing in the background stephen maybe sure um i have i have 20 minutes before i have to do a hard stop so we'll try to get through try to get through at least 10 of them so our first question here is from archie mcqueen and um just so you guys know we do post a week before our live stream we always let you know in advance when the live stream is going to happen uh so stay tuned on our social follow us there they're right below me right here um and we always let you know whenever you can submit questions um so gotta get in there fast but i know toast uh kind of randomizes it so that you know no matter where you are in the thread you might see your question here so archie mcqueen wants to know in the aftermath of a node siege when freeholds can be attacked are these attacks only allowed for participants of the siege or can other players come as raiders to lay waste to freeholds as well in its current design it is possible for anyone to attack the freeholds not just the attackers that might be changed we'll see how testing goes but at the moment essentially what happens is the freehold becomes vulnerable for a period of time and then after that period of time there is a grace period extended for the freehold if it survives that that vulnerable period and that grace period could last up to one week where if another node spawns at stage three or above and it falls under that node zone of influence the owner of the freehold can choose to undergo a quest process by which the freehold would then be adopted by the new node all right our next question is from nixa which is does gear held in your bags not equipped lose durability when you die no no our next question is from king yosi i don't know i'm saying your name right sorry um our artisan cr our artisan crafts and their progression affected in any way by race religion class or archetype artisan classes and their professions are not affected that that system is wholly independent of other character choices and then yorkie wants to know are there plans for level 50 to be a soft cap when you can still level beyond it i'll bite it might air it at a very low a slow rate requiring lots of experience so like i guess if you can like have overload experience no yeah there's not infinite progression in those systems that would be a difficult thing to essentially balance yeah exactly um so uh you know there's gonna be also when we had expansions people would just like auto level it would be weird well there's ways that you could restrict the progression to specific skill you know components but um uh yeah there's there's not a progression but we we do have a lot of systems where there's still progression to be made right where you hit level 50 that's not it like there's a lot of other systems that you can engage with and progressions um you know religions and organizations and all sorts of other things that give you augments which can change the way your skills work and change the way your character kind of functions so so there's still a lot of stuff to chase after after you hit 5050 is not the end of anything awesome thanks jeff uh and then van therian wants to know when stephen mentioned flight paths in his interview with asthma and gold was he referring to the scientific metropolis airship system or something else no the metropolis airship system is really a connector between other metropolises and or different regions so to speak um that kind of helps to facilitate a faster travel point uh the the air the travel system i was talking about with asthma gold that's more uh geared towards within a specific region so you can move from node a to node c node c within region one right and those are people have built those exactly correct yes all right and then our next question here is from aunt victis and i think this is specifically i'm going to preface it a little bit for you stephen as well is because you had mentioned that in pvp you'll be able to identify a user by our user's class by an icon so their question is will each of the 64 classes have their own specific icons yes each class will have its own icon and you not only will be able to identify by their icon but um you'll be able to hover over the user's name plate and it will give information such as level um there you'll be able to see the the quick uh buff icon for their gear grade and type and then uh hovering over the nameplate will give you their class name as well and it will show you the next to that the combination uh in case you don't know the class name all right yeah the goal is to kind of communicate the archetype real fast right so you can kind of get a sense of at a glance what you are and then more detail will give you the specific subclass and then if you really want to dig in you can go and get all that other information too awesome zim zam wants to know how do you plan to keep Ashes of Creation feeling and looking modern uh 10 to 15 years down the road with its realistic graphics as compared to a more stylized look a good question um one of the great things about using unreal engine um is that it has a lot of support from epic uh the creators of unreal and um usually when they you know progress the engine to different updates or an example you know moving to unreal engine 5 right they do so while keeping in mind that there are development studios such as intrepid that are always trying to keep as up to date as possible now obviously it's not as simple as just progressing you know engine versions i mean art itself is is is created specifically for the game so it would undertake some uh effort on on behalf of the studio during that time period uh to make changes uh to the art to utilize um different third-party tools to help in that regard as well so it's always a desire of ours to make sure that the game is is relevant and updated and expansions and and chapters are introduced that um you know will add additional quality i mean if you take a look at other franchises and their games at start and to where they are 10 years later there's there's subtle and and sometimes significant changes that are made um to the game in order to uh to update it's its visuals and or mechanics and ashes will be doing the same thing and our next question is from warth who wants to know how will you ensure that explorative professions like animal husbandry bree and breeding won't be completely explored during alphas and betas and i think we've kind of shown that in the way that we're doing alpha one it's a little island it's not necessarily uh the content that you're going to see in the game game but jeff and steven if you want to talk a little bit further about that yeah so part of it is that we um i don't think there will be enough time to fully explore everything right um a lot of our testing especially in the early phases are going to be really directed specific tests um i don't know that we'll ever have i mean i guess when we get to beta things will be open for longer and people will be able to explore more um but like there will be a limited set of content that will be available for that um and that stuff will come online as we get closer and closer to to launch um so i mean it's it's not gonna be you're not gonna get the full game in beta um there will be things that are locked out um and that will come online as we you know move toward launch right and to expand just slightly on that like a lot of the components that go into creating the animal husbandry system are based kind of off of these data tables and in order to facilitate the appropriate testing for certain mechanics that exist within systems you don't have to have the entire variety of options available to just let's say for the animal husbandry system to see every type of combination in order for us to test whether or not that system is working as intended right um so as jeff was saying we can disable a lot of those uh selections that'll be a universal theme across some of the uh systems um in order to protect against that uh guard against that like i've experienced everything in this game is now you know essentially launched in beta um you know our desire is is to test you know everything as much as possible but we can do so while limiting and mitigating as much as possible the uh the exposure experience and then captain ducky wants to know will different archetypes and classes have different quests connected to node sieges playing into their strengths example a rogue stealing battle plans that is a thing we've talked about i'm not entirely sure because we kind of need to have those quests be equitable um but it's a thing that we've talked about and we think would be really cool to to kind of give you that sense of like oh i am infiltrating this node oh i am trying to gather you know intelligence on this note oh i'm trying whatever it is you end up doing ends up unlocking the siege um but at the same time that does need to be an equitable thing across all classes so kind of how we how we do that is up up in the air right now all right and our next question is from scent which is a funny thing uh they sent us a question um can i keep a house cat in my freehold i guess we haven't really talked about like pets in your house and you're like freehold i know we've talked about animal husbandry and like stables and things of that sort it's definitely not something that's outside of the realm of possibility it's an easy thing we could potentially implement i'm not sure if that's necessarily um i know i remember talked about having children on a household that would just like and do chores no stephen and then if the household gets burned down they get sent to an orphanage and you can reclaim your child but um oh my gosh oh it's totally possible you have pets on the on the freehold that's just something we have to scope out but it's it shouldn't be too difficult to set up an npc that pass on the freehold if you know there's a slot available yeah we can we'll figure it out um do you have time for any more or can i get i think we can do one more and then we'll probably do the sign up stuff all right um our next question then will be from jalon which is do freeholds since we're talking about freeholds uh do freeholds take on the appearance of the predominant racial architecture of the node like in node housing does or are they based on the owner's racial appearance or choice they are based off of the blueprints appearance of choice and then the uh the blueprint uh the building itself can also have cosmetics applied to it based on the type of building and the available cosmetics the character has um yeah and you'll probably i mean you'll have different buildings on your freehold and be able to put different cosmetics on them based on what type of building they are yeah the way we look at it is the freehold is your space so we want you to be able to make it look the way you want it to yeah awesome well i think that's going to wrap it up for us today i just lost yep switching us back big big screen so um thank you all so much for joining us we hope that you enjoyed all of the content we tried to cram into into these dev dev updates just as quick reminders um we have a new dev discussion coming up so definitely uh take part in those again these help the dev team extremely again you know we do put reports together on the forums in general but in regards to specific things they're looking for feedback on these are the things so if you really want to have a say and and you know provide your suggestions