Talk:2021-08-27 Livestream
Raw transcript
- 0:04
[Music]
- 0:20
hello glorious Ashes of Creation community welcome to our august development update we hope that you have
- 0:26
been having a wonderful month i still can't believe it's august i keep forgetting oh yeah we just had our awful
- 0:32
one stuff it's just madness how are you doing steven
- 0:37
i am a bit mad at my recording this morning i'm sorry that's totally my
- 0:42
fault that we were late i wanted to of course record something um and when i
- 0:48
jumped in my recording failed to record four different times and i was like oh i mean
- 0:55
each time it was successively like more angry god until finally it worked on like the
- 1:01
fifth try and i just had to calm and collect myself and just like goose frog you know like just let it go
- 1:09
so you can you can try to hear it in his voice when you when the video comes out um but this is why i remind you a
- 1:16
million times before oh i tried i tried last night and i tried to fit it i tried
- 1:21
to fit it in and uh then this i was waiting on something else this morning and then something broke and so i
- 1:27
couldn't record what i wanted to record uh in the dev branch i was at like seven in the morning in
- 1:33
the engineering channel i'm like this is broken and this is broken like how did this go over one night right i know
- 1:39
everyone knows just so many challenges um but of course uh thank you all for
- 1:45
hanging out with us um we hope that you enjoy the fan art and actually we have a little bit of the fan art playing in the bottom here but if you join us early in
- 1:51
the stream uh we usually always have that playing um just so if we people can see it
- 1:56
uh well i'll get right into it of course i'm margaret crone i'm our community marketing lead here at Ashes of Creation
- 2:02
and with me as always is stephen sharif our creative director um today we we are going to be going
- 2:07
over some of our reminders we have a studio update design update environment art update and character
- 2:13
update as per usual we like to show everything off from all of our teams and we will do a little q a as well um so
- 2:20
thank you guys for putting in your questions in advance we always enjoy that and if your question doesn't get
- 2:26
answered here our community team is amazing and uh actually we have wagner who's a new community member um a
- 2:32
community manager on our team along with lieutenant toast we'll be answering your questions over there on the forums as
- 2:39
well so even if it's not answered here you probably might see the answer over there because a lot of the questions are repeat questions usually um i i see a
- 2:47
lot of people by the way asking if we're in the studio yet we are primarily in the studio but from a recording
- 2:54
standpoint we don't yet have our recording room um set up which we'll talk a little bit
- 3:00
about that in the studio update but yeah our conference rooms aren't completely ready to rock and roll yet so uh once
- 3:06
those are good to go i will be reusing and repurposing one or like multi-using it for live stream stuff and
- 3:13
we actually just hired on a video editor as well who will be assisting with that stuff um he's awesome as well
- 3:21
i say i see z says we need the fan art wall oh we do we definitely are planning on
- 3:27
having one in the community area so don't worry um or maybe we'll put it in the like
- 3:33
the game room area so people can see it when they walk or in that area cool yeah so we'll figure it out but i mean
- 3:39
you guys have sent us so much fan art we probably will have multiple walls with fan art we'll have the wall of fame and
- 3:45
the wall of shame [Laughter] we have talked about a wall of shame we
- 3:50
get some like crazy messages sometimes too um to say the least but i'll get right into
- 3:57
the reminders um first i wanted to talk a little bit about web updates if you didn't notice we did have down time last month uh this
Intro & Reminders
- 4:04
allowed us to put in paypal we did a couple bug fixes as well but primarily uh paypal was the main thing that we
- 4:09
were fixing as a payment processor we know there's a couple different issues in regards to that as well we're working
- 4:15
to resolve those and on top of that we have web design for our support section of our site that's going to kind of
- 4:22
incorporate matching it to the rest of our website if you haven't noticed that hasn't really transitioned over as well
- 4:28
as the forums but we're going to start with the the support because forums requires a lot more back-end stuff to to
- 4:34
happen beyond that we're also doing back and work that touches accounts and our sso
- 4:40
this is going to help us provide more options for 2fa account security and also providing better login integration
- 4:46
solutions cross-platform so that means you know you'll be able to log in and um it'll work with our
- 4:53
from web which includes forms and support and then the launcher in the future as well as our phone app in the
- 4:59
future as well so kind of like integrating all of those things so you have like one profile that attaches to all of those right now you probably
- 5:05
notice you have to like log in and then you log into forums and you log into the support separately
- 5:10
it'll all be like one conglomerate thing so that is my goal eventually it just takes a lot of back end for us to do and
- 5:16
if you hear my cats yelling in the background i apologize um
- 5:21
yeah they're like so one of them chucks the mouse in the air and then the other one goes and chases it and then the
- 5:26
other one checks it it's the beauty of having two cats is they will play with each other but yeah are these living mice or toy
- 5:33
mice toy toy oh okay got it they have like this little worm thing that they check
- 5:38
around too i don't know um but yeah so i think that those are kind of the main things uh and this will
- 5:44
also allow us to provide you better user messaging in regards to like anytime an
- 5:49
account a change is made on your account as well so like if a password is updated or things like that um we know that some
- 5:55
of that stuff is not completely in the right state uh so we want to we want to
- 6:01
bring it all up to date i know not not fun stuff so we'll move into more fun stuff um we've got our alpha one
- 6:09
uh this one does not include our alpha one stuff uh but our monthly cosmetic swap over is going to be happening on
- 6:15
september 1st 2021 and which is the series of the black root so if you would
- 6:20
like these make sure you snag them up before our next set is uh released
- 6:26
we've got our uh dub discussion that we put out this month which was what are some of the key
- 6:32
elements you should be introduced to as a new player and how much hand-holding do you generally like to see in-game
- 6:41
i'm sorry they're like being really loud what is this mouse what is this mechanical toy mouse it's not a
- 6:47
mechanical toy it's just one of those little tiny like toys they're just going crazy
- 6:55
i'm sorry um it's distracting but we really do want to know what your opinions are on new
- 7:01
player experience obviously that's the most important thing i know there's some people in our community who have said this is going to be the first mmorpg
- 7:07
that they've ever played and um you know that is amazing for us to be part of
- 7:13
that experience for you i remember my first mmo i don't know if steven remembers his but it's definitely i
- 7:18
remember yeah like i we really do want to make sure that we're making the experience great for you and also
- 7:25
for everybody so if you have um opinions please share those uh i believe the community team is going to be making a
- 7:31
report here shortly uh so make sure you get those questions or those answers and i remember my first death in an mmo
- 7:37
actually it was uh it was never winter nights on aol and i was i had just gotten a quest to go like
- 7:44
seek out some uh dragon egg or something and then i walked into this room and boom the
- 7:50
combat started and a poison cloud got cast on me which was like a ninth level spell or something from this dracolich
- 7:57
and i was like a level three rogue and uh it killed me instantly and i was just like oh that's unfortunate
- 8:05
i didn't even know you could die because i was like seven years old i could definitely see that uh and then
- 8:12
you're like now what do i do yeah pretty much um and of course next month for um our
- 8:20
september dub discussion we're gonna be asking you about the much anticipated character creation so we would love love
- 8:27
love you to get your your thoughts in on that we know that a lot of people have opinions so if you have opinions
- 8:34
send them over to our way in regards to our guild discussion we had a question for you which is what
- 8:40
characteristics make an ideal member for your guild how do you set and communicate those expectations and keep
- 8:46
track of a member's performance against them now this will help us a ton in regards to some of the systems we're
- 8:52
building for guilds so um definitely go over there toss your answers in because that is going to assist us in making
- 8:58
that and to tie that in we have app integration stuff that we're going to be talking about next month um
- 9:05
so we'd love for you to give us your feedback beyond that
- 9:11
um we know that people have been asking about the content creator program um
- 9:17
remember that we are still hiring for a position we had so many people interested in uh wanting to be part of this program
- 9:24
we want as many people to be in this program as possible uh but what that means is that we need more we need
- 9:30
somebody to help manage the program if it was a couple hundred people i think i could manage it on top of my other stuff
- 9:35
but it is a couple plus thousands of people so um we do want you guys all to be part of our our
- 9:41
journey here and to you know help build our community and help build your communities and
- 9:47
our goal is to create a content creator program that is like nothing else that you have experienced at any other studio
- 9:53
it's really going to be something where we help build a community together not only yours but ours as a whole
- 9:59
um beyond that once we do hire on a person uh we are in our second round of interviews in regards to that uh we have
- 10:06
a couple candidates who look promising so we'll see what happens in regards to those and we'll be sending them over to
- 10:11
stephen i think a couple are already um and once we do hire on that staff member
- 10:16
not only are we going to have a content creator program but we are building out a content creator training academy where
- 10:21
uh people can kind of go into that first to kind of train you to get up to a speed where we think that you should be
- 10:28
if you're if you're not quite at the point where we would want to give you an invite to the content creator program um
- 10:34
and of course there will be some people who just don't get into the program but we'll always email you and let you know
- 10:39
um you know what you can do to improve yeah it's usually people who have no content
- 10:45
like they literally have no content on their website like if you apply and you have no youtube
- 10:50
content or no twitch content that's hard for us to look at your content and tell if you're you know
- 10:57
streaming regularly or if you're making content regularly or like i have like your content what if it's like myspace
- 11:03
content or something i mean you can be a content creator i mean look at we have some people who make comics
- 11:09
and stuff like that that's still content creation to some extent right i think it just depends on the consistency of your
- 11:15
content and like the quality is more so you know the two the two things we're looking at we're
- 11:20
not looking at following and things like that that's not i know people have asked like how many followers do i need that's
- 11:26
not what we're looking for we want we want we want quality and consistency
- 11:32
all right with that i'm going to toss it over to steven to talk a little bit about stuff
Studio Update
- 11:40
studio updates absolutely so i think we have
- 11:46
about what 70 of our team back into the studio right now
- 11:54
um so things are going very well on that front i gotta give a huge shout out because oftentimes in a development
- 12:01
scene you don't hear about the it guys or the system administrator
- 12:09
and we have a very awesome uh sis admin a gentleman by the
- 12:15
name of jason zimmerman who has been doing a lot of work helping get everybody back into the studio and he
- 12:21
has been shouldering a lot of that responsibility himself and he's done an amazing job so
- 12:27
zim if you're watching the community sends you hearts and love you are put a lot of hearts in chat for him a lot a
- 12:34
lot of hearts and pogs for jason for chase or as we call him zim um so things are going really well on
- 12:40
that front um additionally we've had some great hires over the past like
- 12:46
month i think we've had uh six or seven just this last 30 days
- 12:52
which uh these very talented individuals who are joining the team you'll probably see
- 12:58
more of as we you know get into the dev diaries again and and do future streams
- 13:03
and whatnot but very excited for the talent uh that is joining the intrepid family um it's exciting to see obviously
- 13:11
growth uh but it's it's also very exciting just to see the the sheer talent amongst the pool of candidates
- 13:16
that we are now getting um as i think has been aided by in part you guys out
- 13:22
in the community helping to spread awareness for the studio and for the project and for um helping to kind of
- 13:28
retweet or you know share our uh job postings that we have available we still have
- 13:35
many more positions to fill uh obviously while the the team size is large now we
- 13:41
are going to be getting ever so larger and we have space to grow now that we're in our new studio um still waiting on um
- 13:48
some of the ancillary furniture our conference room furnitures our cafeteria furniture um a lot of the seating uh
- 13:56
kind of lounge area stuff once that stuff gets in you guys margaret is like literally foaming at
- 14:02
the mouth to record footage inside the studio i just wanted to do like a little water cooler like vibe i was gonna do
- 14:10
kind of like an instagram story snapchat thing that's like we ask a different developer every day like a question and
- 14:16
it doesn't always have to be like development oriented but kind of like behind the scenes getting to know the devs um steven's like no margaret not
- 14:23
yet not yet which is funny it's usually the other way around let's make sure everything is is tip top
- 14:30
and and in place prior to doing any sneak peeks in the studio but yes no
- 14:35
there's a lot of great a lot of great content that's planned you guys are going to enjoy getting to meet the team again you know
- 14:42
obviously there's still some concern with regards to to covet and this delta variant stuff and kind of the
- 14:48
you know the issues we've been having here in the states um hopefully that that uh doesn't continue to get worse
- 14:55
but we're keeping an eye on it and obviously our first priority is safety of our team um but with that being said
- 15:01
um we are super excited to to get the videos rolling again and and and move from out of this at home a stream
- 15:08
location to the in the office because that's going to be fun again as well
- 15:14
we're like building out um now that we have our video our new video editor um him and i are kind of
- 15:20
working out the news like in studio what that's going to look like and what kind of equipment we're
- 15:27
going to have so when we do come back it's going to be a much higher quality visual for you all um because some
- 15:33
people were like i actually think this is higher quality from home which makes sense to some extent because we were kind of using like a webcam from
- 15:40
the office but we're gonna have like proper cameras and stuff uh so we'll be excited we'll be setting up some cool
- 15:46
exciting stuff super exciting by the way you know what somebody reminded me of the other day um
- 15:52
and i don't know if i mentioned it to you but like do you know we're only like two months away from Extra Life again i
- 15:57
know enough yeah oh yeah i know i'm planning for it i alright you better get those vocal
- 16:02
cords ready are we doing some disney songs again oh the disney's like oh i was so nervous like my heart was gonna
- 16:09
be so great jump out of my chest i need to practice if we're gonna do that again oh yes we need it we need to start doing
- 16:15
we should practice i know we need to practice a duet that's what we need to do tell us community
- 16:21
what disney song would you want oh yeah we should do something like we should do some yeah some like pre-engagements and
- 16:26
see what like the desires are on the community side for us maybe we'll have uh lieutenant toast and vaknar put together
- 16:33
some uh some questions like that previous for you guys yeah
- 16:38
yes um so that's all that's all exciting i'm super excited for that we have
- 16:44
gloria's gourd coming up too because october is coming oh halloween one of my favorite uh uh
- 16:51
uh holidays halloween i love it i can't i can't wait to see the pumpkins again and all the jack-o'-lanterns the
- 16:57
community's crazy y'all create some amazing stuff yes
- 17:03
so that's all going good hiring is going well um uh so we have our huge um kind
- 17:09
of uh retrospective that we've been doing since august 15th
- 17:15
and now design is moving off to um documentation and pitch phase for some
- 17:20
of the changes on on on some of the systems that we represented in alpha one and some of the things that we
- 17:26
want to change going forward engineering is looking at well i guess we can get into those when we get into the sections
- 17:31
but anyways um we're going through retrospective at the studio it's been very very good to to obviously have all
- 17:37
of our team members go through the feedback and the forum commentary the reddit posts all of your social media
- 17:42
commentary uh which community has done an amazing job summarizing that into a report uh that is just
- 17:49
multi i was going to say multiple reports that are uh very in-depth and in detail and it's a huge help so big props
- 17:56
that community team not just during the live ops service of actual alpha one but um also uh in the post alpha one uh
- 18:04
duties that you guys have been fulfilling a really amazing job um sarah margaret
- 18:09
um and uh cody yeah adam um adam exactly peter yeah
- 18:15
favorite so you got it thank you once you start naming one you got to name them all right yeah they they all
- 18:21
did an amazing job putting together uh the reporting uh in regards to their fields and um we didn't we tried to go
- 18:28
as quickly as we could not as quickly as we could but be as thorough and get you guys data as quickly as possible and
- 18:35
then on top of that we are doing some sub city area reports uh pending what development is looking for so if design
- 18:41
needs reports on something a little bit more in depth we are going to do we are going to be doing those um production's
- 18:47
going to be sending that that list to us soon um but and if if they want feedback on
- 18:53
something that you guys didn't really talk about we may put out some little mini dev discussions uh just to the
- 18:59
alpha one testers in regards to that or maybe just broad we could do them broader as well maybe uh we'll just
- 19:05
discuss that because i think it will depend on if it's like something that's experienced versus something that could
- 19:11
be visually um feedback does that make sense yeah like if you were watching something and being
- 19:17
able to get feedback uh versus like actually the feel of something yeah for sure lots of reporting going on
- 19:24
and um we'll talk a little bit more and i guess we can kind of move into design do you want to play the video first or
Design/Engineering Update
- 19:30
do you want to talk a little bit about something sure yeah we can play the video first this is a super short video
- 19:36
i had i wanted to do something else but there was a little bit of a bug in the development uh build which is fine so
- 19:45
yeah there's a combat bug and there's like a zoom issue and it's okay it'll
- 19:50
get fixed um but like one day i know it's unfortunate but uh this i i
- 19:58
so last month i gave a description of what i felt was a really accurate
- 20:03
description of the terror bird and someone did clip it for me so thank you
- 20:09
it was so funny i was i laughed out loud it was great yes so i wanted to actually
- 20:15
uh just kind of show you the terror bird in the game and also you know show you i
- 20:20
don't know if you guys remember the thundering bolt beast and show you some the new flower monsters and some of the
- 20:27
vfx changes that we're doing based on feedback from the alpha one so um it's just a quick little five
- 20:33
minute video um but of course i know you guys enjoy that stuff so yeah we can start with that and
- 20:39
then we can go into design after all right i'm just remembering when i designed the thundering vault beast steven's like margaret
- 20:45
what are you doing i was like oh my gosh that tail margaret like you're gonna give one of the animators a heart attack how many joints are needed for each of
- 20:51
those little wings this is when we just this is one we transitioned over to like we have to use
- 20:56
the base models for everything all right well video is gonna be playing here and we'll see you right after
- 21:05
hello glorious Ashes of Creation community welcome to another stream day inside of
- 21:10
Ashes of Creation the world's a little lonely right now our month-long alpha one test has
- 21:16
finished and there are no testers to be seen near me which is probably good for them because i just wanted to take a
- 21:22
second i know last uh stream i gave a a masterful
- 21:29
description of a new mount that had been introduced called the terror bird
- 21:35
and i wanted to actually you know complement that very well done description
- 21:40
with actually seeing the the terror bird in game
- 21:45
um and so yeah like i said it's good there's probably no testers around because this guy is hungry very hungry
- 21:51
uh but i just just wanted to show you guys uh it in game we have a lot of work ahead of us
- 21:58
towards alpha 2. part of that work is of course introducing content into the game and and uh the different creatures and
- 22:04
mounts and all the quest lines and fleshing out the core systems that we demonstrated in in alpha one and and
- 22:10
this guy's this guy's part of that work and uh that stuff's making it into the game we have a long road ahead of us of
- 22:16
course but um we got a great amount of feedback um from alpha one across our
- 22:22
our forums reddit uh social medias discord um even if you weren't a tester
- 22:28
and we love our testers but even if you weren't a tester you know participating in that conversation and giving your
- 22:33
feedback is a super important part as i've said many many times um but yeah
- 22:38
take a look at this guy he's pretty cool we're gonna have some variants of him in soon as well um you may remember
- 22:44
actually i think i have one more amount i can show as well you might remember in the past we showed off
- 22:50
um some of the model work under the thundering bolt beast and now his
- 22:56
animations are complete our masterful animator uh bradford constantine i think did the
- 23:01
animations for this guy um i like to call him the chicken runner because when he's on land he kind of runs to me like
- 23:09
a chicken a little bit he's just kind of strident you know enjoying life doing what you do
- 23:14
in the world of vera and uh he can sprint on land as well i believe is one of his initial abilities
- 23:21
let's see oh yeah he just takes longer strides but something that's cool about these
- 23:26
guys is particularly these types of mounts that have the ability to glide is of course you have to
- 23:32
level up the mount for it to get a greater glide distance so initially it might not be
- 23:37
super super capable of gliding let's see hold on let's see if i how far i can glide all right here we go wait wait for it
- 23:43
wait for it and oh look at that okay not too bad not too
- 23:50
bad that glide i mean for not having been leveled up at all the glide's pretty good
- 23:55
um but as you level him up he'll be able to glide further and further and further and further um if you manage of course
- 24:02
as you know if you manage to become a mayor of a metropolis or the king or queen of a castle or if you get this guy as like a limited time drop off of a
- 24:08
world boss then you'll have the ability to be amongst the very few who can fly him
- 24:14
and when he flies he is majestic oh i love the cool tail and all the the wings
- 24:21
on him it is pretty awesome this guy um so yeah just wanted to jump in give you take a
- 24:28
look uh give you a look at some of these some of these creatures of course you guys saw some of the combat changes that
- 24:34
we did um oh we've got some flowers down there hold on one second we're going to be continuing moving
- 24:39
forward with those combat changes one cool thing you might see as well is some of the adjustments to our visual effects and just art overall right as we move
- 24:47
forward for example this radium burst we get a lot of feedback about the sparkles
- 24:53
and in the first pass of course sparkles are easy to do but now that we've had some time initially to kind of look at
- 24:58
that feedback you'll see the radium burst effect has changed to something a little bit more indicative of what
- 25:04
effects are going to look like going forward um i love this little plank creature
- 25:11
guys when they die their pedals just go flying but yes so a little short update uh in
- 25:18
the empty game world of Ashes of Creation right now as we continue development towards alpha two uh but i
- 25:24
will see you guys back on stream here in just a little bit
- 25:31
and we're back oh my gosh the petals falling off that death animation is so
- 25:36
cool i feel bad every time that things dies it's so beautiful and then um when i was
- 25:42
watching the bird of the thundering bald bees fly i was like oh okay maybe it's a little weird
- 25:48
why did i design that i don't know i know i think it looks great it's a it's a cool beast you guys will notice
- 25:54
in the also in the footage that there's some heavy clipping that's some just general touch excuse me touch-ups after
- 26:02
excuse me after a mount is added to a game you know you're going to have those types of clipping issues but those will be touched up
- 26:09
and you know it's cool uh with the thundering bulk beast actually you know a lot of people have always asked like well what's going to be the degree by
- 26:15
which you can actually glide with these types of gliding mounts right and that's
- 26:20
something that has to be built up over time for the mount itself as as as it
- 26:25
levels up essentially and i think we might even include this is some design discussions we've been
- 26:31
having um you know there's variance among the speeds that mounts can have
- 26:36
based on how those mounts get introduced into the world whether it be through the animal husbandry system or whether it be
- 26:42
through merchant tables or through rare drops or granted by title
- 26:49
requirements they'll have varying degrees of abilities like speed and they might also
- 26:56
have uh modifiers to their glide distance as well um so that when i just
- 27:01
jumped off it was very very little glide like there was no glide at all almost but as you level it up or you get higher
- 27:08
uh training for the mount the um abilities to glide will be much further and further and further um so that was
- 27:15
something that was cool but yeah no i love i love the way it looked when it was flying i thought it was cool though all little wings on so many wings
- 27:22
um all right well let's talk a little bit about um you know what design has been doing um we'll we'll step back a little
- 27:30
bit and talk a little bit about alpha one um what data did you guys gather and
- 27:35
how do you think it's going to be helping us as we move forward towards alpha 2's milestone
- 27:41
sure so a lot of really what design has been focusing on as part of these last since
- 27:49
august 15th has been kind of drilling into
- 27:55
the existing documentation around our core mechanics and systems and applying
- 28:00
what we visually observe during alpha one for example one of the big systems obviously is combat right combat is a
- 28:07
very integral component of any mmorpg it's the most tactile um interfaced with
- 28:12
system in the game and and you guys saw some of the initial combat changes that we um
- 28:18
were able to roll out during alpha one but now as we move forward towards alpha two we're really gonna start expanding
- 28:24
fleshing that out further adding additional polish for those because there's a lot of subtleties that go into
- 28:31
uh combat right and um many of those subtleties have to do with ui and how we
- 28:36
present information to the player they go into you know specific timings
- 28:42
with with our frames in the attacks um for weapons they go into kind of the
- 28:48
ability design and and what we learned from that so so as design kind of observed uh feedback both from players
- 28:54
as well as collected the data from alpha one we're using that to kind of um
- 29:00
re-analyze and actually we have about i think we have after this retrospective i think it's probably gonna be at least i would say
- 29:07
two to three weeks of many hours that will be taking up my uh daily schedule
- 29:13
with the design team as we go through what we call the pitch phase where each designer is assigned essentially a
- 29:21
particular system that they go through the documentation for and based on observations from alpha one or based on
- 29:28
the discussions that we've had with the community they start identifying components of a particular system and
- 29:35
presenting pitches for how we might change uh those particular systems in anticipation for alpha two and then
- 29:41
though that pitch gets presented to myself and to our design quorum um and to the other designers where it's then
- 29:48
open for conversation and discussion and uh obviously it's very helpful to have
- 29:53
the documents that community provides the developers so that we can get a good summary of
- 30:00
what's out there from a discussion standpoint amongst the community and we can incorporate that as part of our internal
- 30:06
reviews of these systems and those pitches um so that's that's generally what um design
- 30:12
has been up to uh thus far um from an actual implementation standpoint um
- 30:18
there are some additional uh components such as a tool request to engineering um
- 30:23
helping to flesh out additional uh parts of the world map as we're moving towards alpha two obviously it's a significant
- 30:29
expansion of the world so that's going to incorporate um you know everything across the board from design from
- 30:36
narrative to world pop to level design to um fleshing out itemization and additional
- 30:43
resource components like there's a lot of stuff that's on the on the plate for alpha 2. that design is now
- 30:50
essentially going to be helping to guide the other departments as part of what our desires
- 30:56
are for alpha 2. cool cool and you know obviously we put together a lot of the feedback reports
- 31:02
um compiling that from like social media to you know our forums every platform that you guys
- 31:09
have ever spoken on um as well as even like data that we pulled from other places um how is design incorporating
- 31:17
those as they're going through these design docks that you guys are talking about for these pitches yeah generally so
- 31:23
um the first thing that we do is obviously we get an assessment of the the original dock and the system um and its
- 31:30
components and then in the pitch phase um when we are taking into account observations under feedback from the
- 31:36
community we are citing essentially uh topic discussions and community sentiment
- 31:42
across different social mediums whether it be our forums or reddit that you guys have provided as part of your summary
- 31:48
from the community right twitter for everywhere right yeah and and when we have discussions as as the
- 31:54
design team on how we want to move forward with either changes adaptations to particular things
- 32:00
we are referencing community sentiment how does that sentiment stay in line with what our uh core philosophies are
- 32:07
right our core pillars um now you know a lot of people have said we've got to be careful you can't listen to obviously
- 32:12
everything that the community says because there's differing opinions out there and i think that that's that's not lost
- 32:19
on us like you know we're not looking to fundamentally change the identity of Ashes of Creation through community
- 32:24
feedback i think we've kind of laid out what those pillars are you know we have gotten by on from the community with
- 32:30
regards to does that resonate with you guys and then um now we look to increase
- 32:35
uh essentially the the positive reception on these core pillars uh without changing fundamentally the idea
- 32:41
or the the the design of the game like this is this is what we're creating and the product that we're creating but if
- 32:47
we can resolve some of these problems and these issues that you all are worried about or encountering um with
- 32:53
the design that we have and still keeping to what we're trying to achieve i think that's totally you know obviously oh for sure we want 100 to do
- 33:00
that um cool um you talked a little bit already about what the design team is doing but in
- 33:06
regards to the engineering team obviously until they get those design docs uh to be able to start you know
- 33:12
going deep into those systems what are they doing in the interim
- 33:18
um in the interim i'm sorry i said when the last one time i had an emergency test
- 33:24
you talked a lot about or quite a bit about what the design team is doing specifically but you know obviously the
- 33:29
the engineering team is kind of waiting a little bit on some of those design docs what are they doing in the interim will they absolutely for those well
- 33:42
so they have their tasks uh for alpha 2 as well and and that relates kind of to the
- 33:47
outstanding feature work that's required and present still for the systems that we'll be bringing online in alpha 2
- 33:52
right so as we've said in alpha 1 and what a lot of people saw as you were watching alpha 1 you know these are
- 33:57
those are core systems those are the core functionality of those systems but there's additionally outside of that core functionality
- 34:03
there's obviously bells and whistles there's expanded functionality that we want to have present there's optimization work that needs to be done
- 34:10
um there's some tech debt that gets accrued as we as part of any milestone right you know you kind of you you
- 34:16
um for those of you guys who may not understand like tech debt as a reference but essentially as you're working
- 34:21
towards a particular milestone obviously you have the best of intentions with regards to doing things the right way as
- 34:26
you're moving through but sometimes as time dwindles away and you're getting up across the deadline um certain things
- 34:34
require a little bit more work than you have time to do and that's when we do in kind of stop gap measures and kind of
- 34:39
shortcuts on on some of those things which is okay to have a little bit of tech debt um and part of that process is
- 34:46
identifying what those two do tasks are in part of the code base going back taking out what was put in temporarily
- 34:52
and implementing the correct uh process as well so that's a little bit of what engineering is doing as well but they're
- 34:58
also participating in in the retrospective and and also identifying
- 35:03
um some of the uh uh core features and what technical implementation was utilized in order to present those core
- 35:09
features and how we should rethink some of those things um you know obviously it's not as good
- 35:14
excuse me it's not going to be sorry about that um it's not going to be
- 35:20
as intensive um as actually writing the the system over again or having to re-author it obviously but it is
- 35:27
identifying where certain areas can be changed um as part of of of writing a particular um
- 35:34
mechanic um and how that interacts even with other mechanics as well he doesn't have covered you guys he's
- 35:41
just no no i'm just had a cuff i'm sorry ever like yeah you just kind of have that right
- 35:46
like i said sometimes i just talk too much honestly i think it's just a dry i just get a dry throat and the more i'm
- 35:52
like talking the worse it gets and yes it's not wine in his glass it's water yes the water helps
- 35:58
you always drink it out of like what looks like a wine glass so people are like is he drinking goblin goblet
- 36:04
he's just fancy af okay um in regards to engineering they also were
- 36:11
working a little bit more on some of the things for security that came up um and
- 36:16
obviously some things that we're looking forward to doing in alpha 2 do you want to talk a little bit about that as well
- 36:21
sure absolutely yeah so you know for alpha one and those you guys who kind of
- 36:27
observed we actually had a relatively stable uh environment for alpha one i mean there were a few times where we
- 36:32
have to bring up the servers you know back up again and there were some security attacks that we had
- 36:37
um that we had to address it wasn't really our primary focus at least on the ancillary security components of the
- 36:44
game obviously in the game code itself you know there though there is um uh
- 36:49
there was a focus on making sure that things were secure there but like login and authentication and ddos protections
- 36:56
and dos protections like that wasn't really at the forefront of our mind for alpha one which is fine
- 37:01
because when they came up during alpha one i was actually very impressed with our team's responsiveness and the
- 37:06
ability to deploy countermeasures um as part of that process and i don't hold
- 37:12
anything against you know people who come and probe you know the security protections like in a way that actually
- 37:18
helps i mean i would prefer they come to us and tell us directly but in a way it helps our investigative process it helps
- 37:25
the way that we're able to deploy hot fixes you know those are the things that we want to get out of the way in alpha
- 37:30
one and you know i know at the end of the day even if malicious actors are are targeting us it's like you know they're
- 37:36
targeting us because they want to play a great game hopefully ideally if you encounter an exploit or a
- 37:42
bug or something security oriented uh we would prefer you reach out to us privately you can dm me
- 37:55
but if you dm one of the community team members like the community managers or me uh we will get on it right away like
- 38:01
those things are things that you know we're working with engineering on all the time um so and we have had people
- 38:07
reach out to us in the past i like somebody said hacked out of love copium
- 38:13
okay maybe a little bit of copium but regardless it was great to see the team's response to that because um you
- 38:19
know we had issues i felt so bad i'd be like calling somebody up at 3am i don't know
- 38:24
i know but um we i thought we performed very well in that so without regard going forward obviously alpha 2 is where
- 38:31
we're going to employ more stringent security measures especially around those ancillary systems and as part of
- 38:37
the game code even further because you know from our perspective obviously mmorpgs when you have a large amount of
- 38:43
players that are participating across many different systems and in a single environment you know there's always
- 38:48
going to be opportunities for certain individuals to do things that are a little bit unsavory
- 38:54
and um in that regard that's going to be a focus for us going
- 39:00
forward f2 all right um speaking of alpha 2 i know that people
- 39:05
are wanting a date we don't have a date for you so we will not be announcing that on this stream um you know when we
- 39:11
do have a date we will let you know but obviously right now our main thing is kind of going through making sure that
- 39:16
we have all the systems in you know ready or getting those things ready and prepared um and figuring out the time
- 39:23
frames that those things are going to take tasks things like that so it's going to be a little while
- 39:28
uh but we will we will let you guys know when we are ready uh to let you know um when alpha 2 is coming
- 39:34
in regards to alpha 2 can we talk a little bit about what the users can expect in alpha 2 i know you won't be
- 39:40
able to go through everything because it's a lot but yeah the highlights maybe
- 39:45
yeah honestly alpha 2 is really taking alpha 1 and
- 39:50
fleshing out all of those systems much much further right
- 39:56
so one of the main things is going to be obviously node progression outside of just stage three
- 40:02
perhaps up to um city if not metropolis stage for alpha two um
- 40:09
another component is going to be uh drastically increasing the world size
- 40:14
and that incorporates obviously a significant amount of other work such as all the quest lines the level of
- 40:20
progression you know incorporating secondary archetype choices having augment
- 40:25
capabilities as part of the combat system and the skill trees um incorporating the weapon skill trees as
- 40:31
part of that um having a vast array of diverse creatures to select from having some more of the
- 40:39
uh um spawner influence and changes that get adjusted in the world based on node
- 40:44
progression uh incorporating more of the parent vassal system and how nodes
- 40:50
interact with each other expanding out the uh the gills guild
- 40:55
skill trees um really doing a significant revamp on um gathering and
- 41:01
the way that we're actually gonna start demonstrating the real gathering systems the itemization and crafting components just
- 41:08
general artisanship tree um you know those are those are big big portions
- 41:14
of what needs to be done but also dialing in on you know things like diminishing returns
- 41:20
and the way that buffs get applied and or debuffs get applied um the types of
- 41:25
um the types of um status effects and status conditions and
- 41:30
how they're represented to the players uh there's a lot of a lot of stuff that goes into moving from alpha one to alpha
- 41:36
two and just to make sure you know you guys as you're as you're viewing and you're tuning in and and this gets
- 41:42
viewed on youtube or or the vod later um there's a lot of work that's necessary
- 41:48
for alpha 2. and with that regard of course we're going to be keeping you up to date and margaret and her team are
- 41:53
going to be keeping everybody up to date and interfacing with you guys as we move forward but from a amount of work standpoint there's
- 42:02
going to be some time here where there's a little bit of down time you know we had a lot of of kind of showing of
- 42:08
what's happening behind the scenes and and alpha one itself and you know there was no nda attached and you got to see
- 42:13
players in the world and that's all great but now we really need to heads down focus on alpha 2 we have a
- 42:20
lot of work ahead of us a lot all the teams have a lot of work ahead of us and there's going to be some down period
- 42:25
between alpha 1 and alpha 2 there will still be some spot tests we'll still invite some of the testers from alpha one back to um to participate as part of
- 42:33
the spot test become necessary dictated by our developers um but um
- 42:39
you know there's gonna be some patience to be had um and uh you know as we as we spend the
- 42:46
time that's necessary to make sure we're getting things right and they're incorporating the right feedback that we receive during alpha one and stuff yeah
- 42:52
we just really want to set expectations um and when we are ready to tell you the alpha 2 date we will but in the interim
- 42:59
uh we will be continuing to do our monthly updates you guys will get to see the progress i think you know i'm even
- 43:05
looking back and seeing a lot of what you guys say already is like you've watched the journey and it's been
- 43:10
pretty cool to see that it's gonna it's gonna be even crazier because we're gonna have some really cool stuff come
- 43:15
online and so you're still gonna see those systems as they come online and um piece by piece um and of course new art
- 43:22
and like just basically everything from our teams i think you'll actually see more stuff from design especially as we move
- 43:28
forward because now alpha 2 is really where a lot of those other systems are going to be starting to come online that
- 43:34
you know we're very much in engineering's field and so we can't really show you what
- 43:39
engineering is doing uh although uh mcp has offered to show me code i was like
- 43:45
probably shouldn't show that on the stream um but yeah we do have lots of cool things for you guys planned a lot of dev diary
- 43:52
stuff will be coming back online once the studio's ready and stephen approves that i can start recording in there
- 43:58
and yeah we just got a lot of cool things planned so even in the interim we we will continue to share updates with you all
- 44:04
and even some more behind the scenes stuff once the office is ready for that so with that i think we're ready to move
Environment Art Update
- 44:11
on to environment if you are i am ready okay
- 44:18
um the first thing we want to discuss actually with in regards to the environment update is that they are
- 44:23
currently working on terrain and node r d um before i even show you guys some of
- 44:28
the art stuff that they have they've got for me to showcase do you want to talk a little bit about what that research and
- 44:34
development is and um how that's going to be incorporated in the game
- 44:39
the r and d4 i'm sorry kind of terrain and node oh node yeah absolutely so um
- 44:45
you know as you guys saw in alpha one the nodes weren't super visually aesthetic right
- 44:53
they were they were functional they had the buildings placement they had npcs
- 44:58
that spawned they would grow in size the territory of collection for experience would change
- 45:04
um you know the the base functionality of the platform technology and how they're procedurally generated that was
- 45:12
functioning as well but from a terrain perspective essentially the plug of terrain and how
- 45:17
the terrain changes when a node advances making sure that it's seamless at level
- 45:22
zero making sure that it has um you know foliage that's properly placed and when
- 45:29
you get into the layout having some height changes having uh different
- 45:35
materials for the roads and and just kind of spending time on prettying up the nodes
- 45:41
part of the r d component is obviously going to be examining how much
- 45:46
we can change the terrain and and make it very seamless when it's set in the
- 45:51
world for for the node itself but also extrapolating out from just stage three
- 45:57
into stage four into a town into a uh a city and eventually a metropolis a lot
- 46:03
of r d is going to be placed in not just how we achieve those
- 46:08
larger footprints of the node itself but the location and placement and what
- 46:14
parameters design has to set as part of the platform tech for particular buildings uh specifically i saw a
- 46:21
prototype that one of them did and that was pretty cool they were like prototyping the
- 46:27
yeah the um yeah bucky collins did a great amazing great job using um a very
- 46:33
uh um i think he was using java uh to create this
- 46:39
this uh so on the world map of vera right he has these locations set for every single of
- 46:45
the 103 node locations and then we've incorporated he's incorporated a um a
- 46:52
point system to determine the value of each uh essentially district each parent node as it absorbs other nodes and and
- 46:59
through that kind of we can run simulations over and over and over and over again um to
- 47:06
to play out the way that nodes are going to um to move like for example one of
- 47:12
yeah well i guess i really shouldn't give that information but um this this stuff in the back end which is
- 47:19
predetermines essentially how nodes progress from a territory standpoint
- 47:24
that's a very uh important component but from the environment side on the r d stuff you know that's really going to be
- 47:30
like you know how can we make sure that node placements are equitable when it
- 47:35
comes to sieging and defenses of those particular nodes the types of number of gates you have to make it through in
- 47:41
order to reach the town center um you know not having too much terrain around
- 47:46
a node that just makes it so easy like if a node's in a basin and like you can have trebuchets on the top of terrain
- 47:52
like raining down fire out of the range or fire for you know attack back from the from the node itself like that's
- 47:59
that's part of the r d the research and development aspect of of determining the right type of layouts that need to be
- 48:06
preset from a parameter standpoint as part of this procedural generation because we also want nodes to look very
- 48:11
different we don't want nodes to look the same right so for alpha one it was just about standing
- 48:17
up the tech making sure the tech is working correctly that we're collecting the experience that we're surfacing the stuff to the player and now as we move
- 48:24
towards alpha 2 we really need to to dial in on the r d aspect of okay we
- 48:30
need to define these parameters accurately we need to theory craft out each of these parameters and each of
- 48:35
these node locations as they progress what impact is that going to have on things like sieges what impact is it
- 48:42
going to have on things like you know having those buildings and npcs present and what number um of of available plots
- 48:50
are possible at a maximum stage node so there's just a lot of stuff that goes into it
- 48:55
yeah sorry i can ramble so just cut me off when i'm talking no you're good you're good um all right i'm gonna swap over and i'm going to show you guys some
- 49:02
concept art so first thing i have here is the volcano landscape that they're working on
- 49:07
i love seeing the concept art because you know you you guys have seen some of the concept art in the past of the
- 49:13
different terrains and then we show you the screenshot of ingame and it's like it looks exactly the same it's so hard
- 49:20
to tell sometimes because our artists are just so amazing but can you talk a little bit about what this area is
- 49:26
other than obviously volcanic so this is uh lava and you can tell it's lava because it's bright and glowing a little
- 49:33
bit um you know i'm just just kidding okay uh no this is uh obviously there's
- 49:38
a feeling control me there's a wide array of different types of biomes that's present and one of
- 49:45
these components is obviously how do we portray landscapes that are not just beautiful
- 49:51
but are also dangerous um and you know there's obviously environmental hazards and effects that can be part of these
- 49:57
types of terrains and we want to not just show always the prettiest side of vera but also show the the more
- 50:04
you know um i don't say vulgar but like the more um antagonistic aspects gritty the
- 50:11
gritty dark yeah exactly so that that includes stuff like corruption and how it kind of perverts the land or these
- 50:18
more kind of apocalyptic scenes uh where you have these you know large flowing
- 50:23
rivers of lavas you know emanating from a giant volcano and because we're able
- 50:29
to like significantly increase the draw call distance that you can see the world around you it's cool because you may see
- 50:36
this volcano from you know a 30 minute trek across the realm but once you reach
- 50:43
it you know not just because of the surrounding area that you see here that's concepted out but that there is
- 50:48
something deep in that volcano that's compelling like you want to go inside you know
- 50:56
in one of the concept arts it's like a double rainbow of lava yeah absolutely and i think i think the
- 51:02
great thing about these types of concepts is they're not just identifying the specific biome but they're
- 51:09
incorporating the type of perspective you want to have with those long draw calls right with being able to see that
- 51:16
mountain at a distance or having the you know the world lighting break through the clouds
- 51:22
that's present there and and i think that gives the environment team a good direction on you know not encapsulating
- 51:28
every trek across the world because a lot of mmos we've played you know those zones are super encapsulated like oh you
- 51:35
know i'm always blocked because there's some tall mountain that doesn't let me see beyond it and it's like right next
- 51:40
to me um or you know i have a very curated path that i have to follow and that that can just be a super boring
- 51:46
thing yeah if there's a waterfall there better be something hidden behind it
- 51:52
that's right um and of course uh steven talked a little bit about the
- 51:57
different nodes the first thing here i'm going to show you is actually a bunch of props for the duneer we're building out more things so we
- 52:04
have uh this is actually a fireplace it's work in progress one so maybe next month you'll get to see the final of it
- 52:10
um we've been showing a lot of the different stuff that's going to be in houses and in nodes this is a podium
- 52:16
uh that you'll probably see in a town um and then we also have
- 52:22
some bridges you can see a couple different variants of bridges here and i think we have an image for scale
- 52:28
in game with one of the bridges popped into the game obviously that's not where it's going to be but
- 52:33
they just popped it in there so you can see for scale yeah and these are important because as nodes advance again they
- 52:41
don't just reflect changes within the node's footprint but actually structures
- 52:46
will form like harbors and bridges that help to provide trade related resources more
- 52:54
world development components um and these are the types of of
- 53:01
structures you're going to see develop alongside the nodes in the world and then we have signs and then as well as a
- 53:07
defensive barrier one of the defensive barriers that they're working on
- 53:12
and then i will show you that i think that's the back side of it
- 53:18
it's because you'll be able to like set up defenses and stuff whenever your freehold is or your
- 53:24
your node is attacked um empyrean ones here are the next ones
- 53:30
so you can kind of see a very different version of these so these are some of the fencing
- 53:37
that you'll see very pretty very pretty yeah empyrean are
- 53:44
like their art is so interesting because it's still very refined but then it's got the
- 53:49
alvin and look to it which is really cool oh yeah
- 53:55
another fence um i believe this is a gate
- 54:01
yeah for defense you could open it yeah it looks great environment team always does such a great job
- 54:08
bringing to life these cultures you know it might not seem much as you view individual like fences
- 54:14
or fountains and these kind of props that are present across the world but when you start putting all of these
- 54:20
things together to represent you know an entire town village or whatever you know
- 54:25
they they do a great job um making these things all um
- 54:31
um exist in together it doesn't yeah cohesive doesn't make it feel like it's standing out or a part or
- 54:38
a sore thumb so to speak yeah and then these are some of the lighting like the sconces that go on the wall versus the
- 54:43
ground um versus just general ones that you'll be seeing that will help
- 54:48
light up the areas and then a weapon rack because you know you gotta have weapon racks
- 54:53
um and i think that's all of the imperium props yeah they are working on
- 54:59
you know uh flushing out a lot of those things creating more uh pieces that are going to make the world feel a little
- 55:05
bit more lively and also some of the things that you guys will be able to utilize in your freeholds you know like fencing for your
- 55:12
um your stables and your creatures keep them in you know so like we need a lot of those pieces so you're going to see a
- 55:17
lot of like furniture pieces for all of the um different races uh coming in
- 55:24
as you've seen each month progressively next up we've got character art
Character Art Update
- 55:30
uh i guess we'll start with this one this is actually where i was gonna leave off but um this is paula's cat
- 55:37
which is oh just oh my gosh the coolest thing ever
- 55:43
uh i was actually gonna end on this one but oh yeah i'll go backwards instead yeah that's
- 55:49
good look at him or her is it him or her i don't know ginseng will have to let us know this is
- 55:55
a ginseng creation it is so this is an in-game achievable mount is that correct
- 56:00
correct this is not a cosmetic one so this is not cosmetic this is achievable in game
- 56:06
now i'm pretty sure that this particular mount is probably going to be achieved through some of the animal husbandry
- 56:13
system um and that's likely going to be through the cross breeding of a of a normal
- 56:19
domesticated house cat and a bear a wild bear um i'm just
- 56:26
i'm just kidding i'm just imagining a house cat in a bear and i'm like stephen
- 56:34
i'm just joking people in chat were saying it should be making the same sounds that my cat was made
- 56:41
why are the cats making those noises no i'm just kidding um i can record some audio for you you
- 56:47
can use it perfect just have that playing on the freehold as like the sounds when you're
- 56:52
trying to make that would be so good no but this isn't in-game achievable uh it will be derived
- 56:59
through some method of exploring the animal husbandry system and then you can see it with the mount and the um armor
- 57:05
as well versus alone by itself next up i'm gonna go backwards so i gotta go we've got the black sight
- 57:13
watcher um so this is a cosmetic one this is from a halloween set previously
- 57:19
i helped design it's got like six eyes it's very cool and it's based off of some of the ravens
- 57:26
that were created so we built out some ravens i love the like albino vibe raven
- 57:32
it needs a red eye the the graven the graven the gray raven
- 57:37
[Laughter] maybe we make a really like really really pal one that has that
- 57:43
red eye for the yeah ooh i like the graven idea um and then we have the car the car mean
- 57:49
chameleon looks so cute this turned out so good this is part of the valentine's day uh set
- 57:56
very neat now is that's a pet it is a mount oh my gosh yeah
- 58:04
that i mean if you didn't have a saddle that would be really uncomfortable we could make him a pet too though
- 58:10
i'm just saying like if you didn't if you were riding that thing without a saddle like oh it would hurt that
- 58:15
crystal wasn't meant to be there you know what i mean like that would be unfortunate
- 58:20
don't bear back the carbine chameleon
- 58:26
oh no but yeah these are meant to be my
- 58:31
thought process is that i would love to have these be like in um like a cavern
- 58:36
and then like you don't realize that it's a creature and you go to like mine it and then it like comes out and attacks you
- 58:42
oh yeah yeah and what if he just like poops crystals and you can like harvest it [Music]
- 58:48
like that's one of his actions like his top tier action stephen 24 well oh that's true no it
- 58:55
would have to be a part of the base value yeah the basis yeah we could make a base creature that is coops resources
- 59:01
yeah i'm just kidding i mean it's probably gonna happen it's
- 59:07
fine uh the next thing we have here is the greaves of pride so you can kind of see like the final version and then
- 59:13
we'll also show you kind of the work in progress and how these work so sometimes you get to see the gray
- 59:19
scale versions of each of these things um like you did with the fireplace but this
- 59:25
is one where you get to kind of see the whole process of it i love i love the detail and i would say that um you know
- 59:32
partly obviously outside of the fact that we have very talented artists uh but partly the reason for these types of
- 59:39
detail on the armor sets and the weapons is that as part of your as part of our
- 59:44
home system you'll be able to have certain types of furnitures that allow you to place armor sets as display
- 59:52
uh and having those armors be intricately detailed like this one i think is going to be a really cool added
- 59:58
bonus to how each of the players customizes their homes and stuff oh yeah like housing decor people love to have
- 1:00:05
the models of the items put in their house i've seen people do that kind of stuff all the time or have like a room
- 1:00:10
like a dressing room with like a bunch of uh mannequins lined up oh yeah yeah with all like the armor that you're really
- 1:00:17
proud of from raiding and stuff um but yeah this is really cool uh i'm
- 1:00:22
still in shock of how amazing our artists are like it looks like the concept it's crazy
- 1:00:28
um next up we've got the fuming tincture which you can see this work in progress so this is actually a cosmetic accessory
- 1:00:35
item that goes on to like a bottle on your belt or that goes on a bottle that's on your backpack
- 1:00:43
that dangles from it so you can actually swap those things out and make like different looks and vibes and this is uh
- 1:00:50
yeah that means that a few years very cool a couple years ago i helped design this one yay
- 1:00:56
uh the next thing is the coil of crackling skies this is actually part of the set with the thundering vault beast
- 1:01:03
um this is one of the rings that you could get to see and yes you will have rings in game and look at that oh my
- 1:01:10
gosh i love that it looks great really great i want to see how like
- 1:01:17
rings like reflect you know how they're like shiny yeah i'd love to have like um jewelry
- 1:01:23
boxes as part of like furniture as well and like let you put jewelry in the box
- 1:01:29
you can propose to somebody with a little drawer oh that would be so cool because we are gonna have weddings oh
- 1:01:34
i'm so excited i'm so excited for like just community stuff like this
- 1:01:40
oh yeah we will definitely 100 percent have to have like a varan interior decorating show series on like oh easily
- 1:01:49
we will make that happen because i love that i'm sure there's going to be like also you know varying companies out in
- 1:01:55
the game world that sell their in-house decor services and like you can add them
- 1:02:00
to your family and then give the permission to deploy based on that right
- 1:02:05
uh uh for the for the property or whatever the past you had said that people we wouldn't provide permissions
- 1:02:11
like that uh for somebody else to come in and and like change oh pick up yeah they can access
- 1:02:18
like inventories and stuff but yeah that's something we have to talk about because in the past at other
- 1:02:24
places that i have um worked as well we've we've allowed people to do that and it's been pretty cool you can like
- 1:02:29
hire somebody to like help interior decorate because people would like make a hot tub out of like crazy weird stuff
- 1:02:37
like putting them together it was that's true um we should let i like somebody said um
- 1:02:43
magisto as he said how about cleaning them we should have houses get dirty
- 1:02:48
over time and like if you don't clean them like you take a approaches and stuff
- 1:02:54
yeah you get like a negative on like the house uh decor functionalities um and
- 1:03:00
you could hire cleaning services
- 1:03:05
good luck with that but uh some games do that like animal crossing has it after if you don't come back for a while
- 1:03:11
there's like little bugs and you have to go stop right yeah yeah it doesn't have to be too crazy you could have it you got to make your bed
- 1:03:17
in the morning that would be funny we're going into sims now which i love
- 1:03:22
so um this is the lorica vindicta set um which was our march set for this year
- 1:03:30
uh cosmetic set really cool
- 1:03:36
and we have a turntable yeah that looks great
- 1:03:41
sparta i was going for kind of that you know
- 1:03:47
uh march ives vibe you know oh the ides of march march
- 1:03:54
this is vera this is not so much spartan
- 1:03:59
per se but true don't have to have no chest plate if it was spartan yeah
- 1:04:06
uh there'd be no breastplate there
- 1:04:11
sandals nice sandals yeah of course steven we'll have to get stephen a pair of these sandals
- 1:04:17
oh yeah actually i'm not allowed to wear sandals anymore i know it's very sad how can you be sandalore
- 1:04:23
without wearing sandals i don't know i don't know it's so sad
- 1:04:28
all right well next up we have threads of fate which looks amazing
- 1:04:35
bless you they didn't hear me but you didn't bless you uh my allergies are going crazy so
- 1:04:41
that's why i'm keep coughing and sneezing yeah eli did this set i believe and we even made he even made the
- 1:04:47
weapons which aren't part of the the cosmetic that you get um we'll find somewhere to put them but we will yeah
- 1:04:53
we will find somewhere to use them and we have a turntable of this as well
- 1:04:58
so you can kind of see that oh i love it it looks so good
- 1:05:05
great job eli looks very good we did a little zoom in
- 1:05:11
yeah we got really high oh nice got a little zoom in going yeah we have really
- 1:05:16
high quality assets for this so thank you for i always love when artists send us the the high quality stuff because we can we
- 1:05:23
can do more fun with it you should put these guys on like top of a ziggurat and like have the instead of the light
- 1:05:29
in the hand just like a pulsating heart and they're just like eating it
- 1:05:35
yeah i'm sure the design team is gonna find some fun places to put these uh but yeah just so you guys know any
- 1:05:42
any all of the creatures and npcs that we create for these monthly cosmetics you
- 1:05:47
are helping us develop the world these are going to be in the game as fds as creature variants etc um i mean you
- 1:05:55
probably already have seen them through alpha one um but yeah you're helping us really like build it out
- 1:06:02
next up we've got junior plate set there's two different versions of this
- 1:06:07
so this is the first one and this one's in-game achievable yes yes correct and you get to see the
- 1:06:13
progression path oh cool the armor set as well little horns on that one
- 1:06:19
this one has like a little mohawk yep so just again to give you context in
- 1:06:25
comparison uh between armor sets that are achievable in game and the cosmetic skins that players that people can
- 1:06:32
purchase obviously again our primary objective is that we keep those equitable that you
- 1:06:38
are not you know a lot of games probably as many of us have played you're forced to
- 1:06:44
to consider the purchase of cosmetic sets if you want to look good at all uh that will not be the case in ashes uh
- 1:06:51
there is both a path towards achieving really cool looking in-game items uh
- 1:06:56
based on your efforts and then also an alternative option in the cosmetic shop
- 1:07:01
and of course all of the cosmetics you have to own an item to put that item on correct so you can't just like
- 1:07:07
immediately went here and have the coolest armor um cool all right what is that what is that
- 1:07:14
have you seen that mean or meme where they're like um it's king theoden and ganos walking is
- 1:07:19
like there's no pay to win here gandalf stormcrow
- 1:07:26
and it's like i told you to take the wizard's credit card
- 1:07:31
oh my god i'm sorry you're fine it's funny all right let's move on to our q a
Outro & Q&A
- 1:07:38
um so we've got questions here from the community and if we don't answer your question here definitely go check the
- 1:07:43
forums uh toast and vacnar will be adding answers to your lovely questions
- 1:07:49
over there after this so even if you don't get answered here you may get answered there or they'll let you know
- 1:07:54
if you should um you know put them in for next time so half tilt gamer uh and pick a pick
- 1:08:03
pick a dollar for pick a dollar pick a dollar pick a
- 1:08:09
want to know about alpha one what were some of the team's biggest takeaways from alpha one testing i mean we talked
- 1:08:15
a little bit about that but yeah we did talk a little bit if you could pick one thing what's your biggest your like one
- 1:08:21
thing that you think you took away from apple one just one just one my gosh
- 1:08:29
um wow that's super tough there's so many
- 1:08:35
so many different things like uh i guess the biggest takeaway probably would be
- 1:08:42
the direction of combat and the fluid nature we want to have
- 1:08:48
uh between tab and action the direction on the melee combat the
- 1:08:55
great amount of work that the new ability system team did [Music]
- 1:09:00
especially on the back end side of things but the biggest takeaway i would say is
- 1:09:06
uh that we're heading in the right direction now we just need to add some further polish some bells and whistles
- 1:09:12
um and continue down the path of that morph referral melee component and the
- 1:09:19
really responsive fast type of feedback from combat in the
- 1:09:24
ability usage as well i think from mine my perspective it's definitely the user flow process
- 1:09:32
from uh you know downloading to um oh yeah you know patching
- 1:09:38
and getting in the game client i think we still have some improvements that we need to
- 1:09:43
make in regards to that um and obviously internally i think there's some live operations communications that we need
- 1:09:50
to work out and get those kinks uh set up but i think those those to me would be big takeaways from the perspective of
- 1:09:57
like what we were trying to test in this alpha one for sure um feedback from audenix wants to know
- 1:10:04
and i'm or adenix wants to know about feedback i went dyslexic there for a moment uh what is one thing you wish us
- 1:10:12
testers and community members better understood about the development process in order to give more valuable feedback
- 1:10:18
ooh can i answer this one sure i think for feedback the best things
- 1:10:23
that you can do are a brief sentence on what the issue is that you're encountering repro steps on how to uh
- 1:10:30
reproduce the counter uh what you what results you had and then the expected results i think that to me
- 1:10:37
is the most confined way to provide like bug feedback in regards to feedback feedback i think being concise and like
- 1:10:44
giving us like what your problem is uh and then kind of what you expect to be happening
- 1:10:51
versus what you think is actually happening i think to me allows us to really understand like what you're
- 1:10:56
trying to get to because for instance um i worked on a previous game where you know sometimes you are
- 1:11:02
you find out that the issue that somebody has isn't the issue that they're saying for instance we had like a weapon and someone was like oh it
- 1:11:08
feels like it's not doing as much damage as the other weapons but then i went in and looked at data and i was like oh they're doing exactly the same amount of
- 1:11:14
f or you know dps so it's not a damage problem problem on the data side it's actually an animation problem that's
- 1:11:20
making it feel like it's not doing as much damage and all we did was alter the animation and
- 1:11:25
everyone's like oh this change is so good it does so much more damage and more like it doesn't really do any more damage it just feels better because we
- 1:11:33
understood like oh the problem is that people feel like it's not doing enough damage
- 1:11:38
yeah um i this is a hard question to answer just because
- 1:11:44
you know what's to be expected with transparent development is that players won't know the difference on a lot of
- 1:11:51
development related you know things of course that's why as you said it's important to give good context behind
- 1:11:57
any of the feedback right because then it allows the developers obviously to read into what you're
- 1:12:02
saying specifically and and know with their development because sometimes the issue you're encountering isn't actually happening right so we'll go in and we'll
- 1:12:08
test it we're like oh that's not happening and then if you don't we don't have context we're like well it's not broken so yeah
- 1:12:14
what i would what i would say um that's helpful to me in addition to what you described margaret is um
- 1:12:20
i think one of the things that's important about being a tester in an environment like ashes where you're
- 1:12:27
where you're fundamentally testing a true alpha system um is
- 1:12:32
be willing to spend some time outside of gameplay to read through forums and what
- 1:12:39
other testers are have said and are saying as well because that will better help contextualize your feedback also
- 1:12:47
and it'll give you insight to what others have been saying uh maybe may have you think a little bit differently about your experiences i think that's an
- 1:12:53
important thing i also think one important thing and it's not really something that testers or or non-developer audiences can do per
- 1:13:02
se um but i would say an important part is is
- 1:13:07
understanding the stage at which the development is supposed to be at um
- 1:13:13
meaning for example like when i say hey we don't have much of the ui implemented
- 1:13:18
at all a lot of this is placeholder and then if a response or feedback is like you know i hate this ui well you know if
- 1:13:25
i read that and i'm thinking yes me too i hate the ui as well at this stage and
- 1:13:31
it needs to be more functional but that's something for a future testing period so becoming familiar with what
- 1:13:38
you're testing and why you're testing what you are testing um i would say that's an important thing but let me
- 1:13:43
just say without with that question being answered because we do provide you a list of what we are properly testing but with that
- 1:13:50
with that question being answered i will say our community has performed amazingly when it comes to feedback and
- 1:13:57
when it comes to testing because true testing is a is is a difficult task
- 1:14:03
i mean it is it is a very redundant slash repetitive slash monotonous slash you know
- 1:14:12
you're not playing a game and that's something that we've tried to say many times in the past about alphas uh with
- 1:14:17
at least with regards to people don't buy unless you want to help the development process right yeah but i think which is really funny from a
- 1:14:23
marketing perspective don't buy this it is funny but i think we saw super positive response from the community
- 1:14:29
regardless of that right and even amongst our testers i mean um we had we had great response from our
- 1:14:35
testers from our community the feedback was and even if the feedback is redundant or not necessarily applicable
- 1:14:41
to the testing period itself at least reading what the players are saying gives us confirmation that our
- 1:14:49
intentions are down the right road of what players want to see and that's always a good thing as well
- 1:14:54
all right we took a long answer for that i'm so sorry no i think it's great i i think both of
- 1:15:00
us it was an important question because it because it references the community specifically yeah i know i love that you were telling people kind of like read up
- 1:15:07
i think a lot of the times even on the community side from our perspective our community managers are basically
- 1:15:13
like broken records they get very used to answering the same question over and over again we do supply a lot of answers for you on our
- 1:15:20
support site like literally there's a kb articles for almost everything uh the community has an amazing wiki with a lot
- 1:15:26
of answers like if you just take a moment to do a little research on the question that you have you might find
- 1:15:31
the answer pretty quickly um because everyone in your community is just amazing otherwise we are helpful we will
- 1:15:38
answer the question that we've answered a million times uh cronus wants to know about split body versus root motion
- 1:15:44
based on recent feedback what direction are you leaning towards in regards to split body versus root motion i think
- 1:15:50
we're leaning towards split body well i don't think we are leaning towards split body i do think i think very often and a
- 1:15:56
lot sometimes too much but in this regard split body he thinks a lot and he makes decisions
- 1:16:04
george black wants to know action versus tab targeting are you still considering whether the
- 1:16:10
combined action slash tab targeting combat will be replaced by either tab only or action only
- 1:16:17
um no i think that we will find a healthy medium between the two i think that really
- 1:16:23
what it comes down to is the definition of of action and i think that there is a varying degree
- 1:16:28
of of opinions on what action targeting means um so to speak but as i've clearly
- 1:16:34
defined in the past and as you can research in on wiki our opinion on at least my opinion on
- 1:16:40
action action combat um is i think well represented in the way we want to hybridize
- 1:16:49
that combat in Ashes of Creation and i think that there is going to be a
- 1:16:55
good balance between those two and it should be a seamless transition between the two as well
- 1:17:02
and you know we're going to be fleshing that out further as we move forward and i'll answer this next one which is
- 1:17:08
from imperial slash pyreal you want to know about dwarves will the junior be seeing an update on their appearance yes
- 1:17:14
you all have sent us a lot of feedback we are going to be showcasing a lot of the those changes next month probably
- 1:17:20
i've been working with production to try to make sure that that kind of gets pushed a little bit forward so that we can at least show you guys some work in
- 1:17:26
progress changes next month on our development update so stay tuned uh we heard you uh a lot of us love dwarves we
- 1:17:33
agree um so you'll be seeing some changes coming up i've been working with um ryan richman who's our lead concept
- 1:17:39
artist um on some of those um uh changes that we'll be making to the junior
- 1:17:45
dwarves to make them more um traditional fantasy stout looking
- 1:17:51
dwarves right boys thick boys and girls um but yeah that's uh i don't know if
- 1:17:58
it'll make it by next month because there's some revisions that we're here are going back i think we're going to show some work in progress not okay it
- 1:18:04
won't be final stuff um obviously it's going to take more than a month to to finalize those bad
- 1:18:10
boys because bait like the base of the models that they create like are going to you know
- 1:18:16
affect everything going forward and the dwarves that you saw in alpha 1 actually
- 1:18:21
will be more similar to the nikua as well so
- 1:18:27
something to be said about that oh nice um all right and then we have from seth
- 1:18:32
rago wants to know about orcs will the more goblin-esque vec be as
- 1:18:38
short as dwarves or just slightly shorter than their renkai brethren
- 1:18:44
no i believe they are slightly shorter than the value but slightly taller than
- 1:18:50
the uh duneer so they're in between the two and angelicia
- 1:18:57
wants to know about stats are our stat points strength sex and granted statistically as we level based
- 1:19:04
on our class or can we re allocate them as we wish kind of like adjust them so
- 1:19:10
as of right now definitively there is going to be a tattooed system which will allow certain slots for you to apply
- 1:19:18
um stat migration uh but it's a give and take relationship there will be higher quality
- 1:19:23
um uh magical tattoos that can be applied to the character uh in order to
- 1:19:29
to um adjust stats uh but for the most part exactly
- 1:19:35
yes yes tattoo system i think we've talked about that in the past too so if something's like what um
- 1:19:42
yeah so one one uproad wants to know about nodes will the type of nodes of each
- 1:19:48
location be shuffled before launch so that beta testing doesn't reveal their
- 1:19:53
secrets unfortunately no beta testing will require that the node types be definitive and that's because of how
- 1:20:00
node types are integrated into the relating and corresponding neighboring points of interest uh and those quest
- 1:20:06
lines so it's not something we can swap very easily right and each wants to know
- 1:20:12
about corruption will there be any large-scale consequences when many players in a
- 1:20:18
group guild region religion etc become corrupted frequently or for an extended
- 1:20:25
period of time oh interesting question it is an interesting question but no there are not group dynamics or
- 1:20:31
mechanics that revolve around mass murdering people in the world
- 1:20:37
i've the corruption system is intended to deter mass murdering uh not to
- 1:20:43
provide incentives by which players can go out and gain corruption so
- 1:20:49
so that would be a little bit uh anti-uh i think they're wondering if there's gonna be consequences
- 1:20:55
large-scale consulate so for instance i think the question is more along the lines of like if our if my guild has no
- 1:21:01
one corrupted and your guild is like 80 always killing people and always corrupted will your guild have
- 1:21:07
repercussions because they're corrupted versus my guild no i don't think so either and the reason why is you know we
- 1:21:13
want to deter it but we don't want to make the system meaningless and if the deterrent becomes too heavy-handed then
- 1:21:20
it's a system without a purpose um and you know i think that the intent behind
- 1:21:26
the corruption is that like during of you know a rise in passion and like anger and whatever you want to make this
- 1:21:32
decision and do something and you'll suffer the repercussions later but if those repercussions are
- 1:21:39
just overwhelmingly bad and even anti-social in the sense that like your guild is like hey man you went corrupted
- 1:21:44
and this gives us like corruption points on the guild and like you know you're out of here like then then people just
- 1:21:50
aren't going to choose to use it and then at which point might as well just take it out so i think there's a healthy balance
- 1:21:55
between the type of deterrent used as you know keeping players not performing this corrupt activity very often yeah
- 1:22:02
people would just group up and not like being a guild basically there's there would be a way around that right like
- 1:22:07
yeah um next question is from hakaiju and they want to know about
- 1:22:14
careers will there be development or design related jobs available at the amsterdam office as well and
- 1:22:21
i don't think well we have development like design related jobs um not design
- 1:22:27
but there might be there's like live streams oh i see okay uh yeah no not design related like live operations and
- 1:22:32
publishing so that's like uh community team marketing and marketing production exactly yes
- 1:22:39
um but probably not so much on the like development design side design art slash
- 1:22:45
correct engineering cool all right um do we have time for a couple bonus
- 1:22:52
questions or should we wrap things up here we can take one more the best question you can find okay romeo 1d3 no
- 1:22:59
i'm just kidding all right oh wait hold on ready all right it's a four so two okay so
- 1:23:08
brain dances question um there was three questions that were on here as bonus ones uh this one is in regards to
- 1:23:14
caravans based on risk versus reward and pvp flagging not applying to caravans
- 1:23:20
what does a player risk when they attack a caravan versus defending their caravan
- 1:23:27
got it what do i what do what do i risk when i'm like gonna go attacking a caravan
- 1:23:34
well um there's going to be gear degradation that occurs on death um in
- 1:23:40
addition uh obviously there's a time component and also um you know there's
- 1:23:45
going to be a associated quest system that determines when you're participating in a assault
- 1:23:52
or a defense of a caravan that it's going to track your record of
- 1:23:58
successful defenses or successful attacks and if you have failed attacks or you've opted in to participate and
- 1:24:04
you have a failed attack essentially you did not achieve your achieve your objective that's going to count against
- 1:24:09
your record in the quest system so these are progressive quest systems where you are you are achieving
- 1:24:15
something as either a highway robber or defender of caravans and your successes in each of those categories is going to
- 1:24:22
determine the types of rewards that you're going to scale up over time based on that record
- 1:24:28
and that's the incentive slash disincentive not to um uh participate in something you don't think you will have
- 1:24:34
the ability to achieve interesting all right well with that
- 1:24:40
that's our august development update so thank you all for joining us we really appreciate it of course final reminders
- 1:24:46
we do have dev discussion and guild gathering up right now please get your answers in as our community team will be
- 1:24:52
compiling those and we will have our new ones coming up here in september we would love for you
- 1:24:58
to get involved in those so that we can gather your feedback and make changes that you are interested in seeing and
- 1:25:04
being part of our development of course the august cosmetics are going to be swapping over on september 1st so if you
- 1:25:11
want those snag them up now and with that we will have the vod of this will be up on twitch right away and we will
- 1:25:17
be uploading it over onto youtube along with our website and all of that jazz afterwards and on twitter and facebook
- 1:25:24
and instagram give us a good follow we're in all the places at Ashes of Creation we try to keep you up to date
- 1:25:30
almost like daily um with new content and new engagement um and new fun things
- 1:25:36
for you guys to help us out with and all of those things get reported to our development team so please do so we love
- 1:25:42
it and we love seeing all of the amazing fan art and fan creations that you have so keep sending them our way we love
- 1:25:47
seeing them and we will keep you guys update updated on all of the things as we move forward oh and everybody needs
- 1:25:54
to wish margaret luck tonight because she's going to get her butt kicked on some talisman [Music]
- 1:25:59
[Laughter] savage we're going to be playing some board games so yeah he thinks he's going
- 1:26:04
to win i think wow all right we'll see you guys next month
- 1:26:11
bye everybody [Music]
- 1:26:26
[Music]